Reply With QuoteBack in 5.Originally Posted by Burney
If it is a verbal warning then the officer will make a note of the incident and then update the forces control room of the outcome in order for the incident to be closed on the record. This indicates that your name will appear on a computer record held by your local police force and this will appear on CRB checks (or DBS checks as they are now).
Back in 5.
Still sounds similar to an official caution to me.
I was cautioned as above around 1994 for possession of controlled substances and after being arrested, held and interrogated in Margate Police Station I was released without charge but officially cautioned, informed accordingly that said incident would remain on record, which it did.
As I understand it, you can refuse to accept a police caution and dare them to take it to the CPS. No such option exists with a verbal warning.
A caution is a criminal record. It effectively requires you to admit guilt to an offence that the police do not think is serious enough to prosecute.
A verbal warning is not this at all anddoes not require you to accept or admit guilt. You do not have to accept it (indeed you definitely should not unless you are clearly guilty) and it is not a criminal record. It would only show up in an enhanced DBS check as a note, notacriminal record. THis is at the discretion of a senior officer and can be appealed.
There are other similar stitch ups you need to be aware of. Community resolution is an innocent bit of paper, signedon the spot with a cheery faced copper. Unfortunately, it carries the legal effect of you having admitted guilt and, like a warning, will appear in an enhanced check.
That copper tried to get me to sign one. I said several times I was not accepting guilt. He acknowledged that and said this doesn't, it is just a community resolution, its nothing. I asked if he was sure- he said again, it doesnt admit guilt, its nothing. I asked a third time and saidI had been advised it admitted guilt, he assured me it didnt. I open my iPad and showed him the formal website of his own police force that explicitly states that it requires and constitutes an admission of guilt. I then told him I wasnt signing this or anything else and would be reporting our conversation to his Sergeant as he had clearly tried to mislead me.
Coppers are raging ****ers.
I was unaware of such nuances of the law and just wanted to get back to the hotel before the fúckers charged me for another day. Decent chance I was dying with the hangover also.
My mate was in the cell opposite on a separate charge of suspected arson so the entire affair was quite the giggle.
And this was before the ATS pricked up their ears as they had 3 young lads from Northern Ireland in custody.
Great fun. No charge for anybody in the end and we stopped for pints on the way back.
If you are bang to rights on possession these days you can refuse the caution. The chances of them doing anything further are virtually zero unless you seriously get under the copper's skin. You are very, very unlikely to even get hauled in for possession. 9 times outof 10 they just chuck it away or, if you have a decent copper, he may not even confiscate it and just tell you to take it home and not take the piss,
In your day, you may well have been charged. Caution was probably the best option.
Yes it was very obvious even to me that during the interview they were losing interest as their chance of finding the dealer was zero. They are in Margate and are being told about “a black man in the Queens Head in Turnpike Lane”. Total waste of everybody’s time and they only brought me in because of the fact they turned up at the hotel to search it because of having arrested my mate on the suspected arson thing.
When they searched my room they found things and then when they searched my car they found more things that I had not told them about as I had genuinely forgotten.
The NI link was the big thing, quite sensitive at that time, 93-94. Bishopsgate would not have been that long ago I suspect?
Was the arson thing *******s? I mean, your mate has dropped you all right in it there.
Was it just a bit of weed or anything heavier?
A mate of mine recently had two coppers arrive at his house because he had ordered some CBD stuff from abroad. THey asked if they could come in. He said yes (**** knows why). They smelt the weed, asked him if they could search the house and he just handed everything over- three ounces of weed, bongs, a few bits an bobs of bagged up weed.
He ended up with a caution..... they cant be ****ing arsed with it these days, they just dont have the resources.
This article from yesterday's Telegraph pretty much sums it up for me
I no longer trust the police. Hold the phone: I never thought I’d say that. It’s not quite as definitive as it sounds, however, because I would of course dial 999 if I heard someone mucking about downstairs in the middle of the night. I’m just not sure the police would actually turn up. Or that they wouldn’t charge me with a hate crime against burglars.
I was raised with the myth – it was always a myth – of the community bobby who kept the streets safe by being visible and authoritative. Nowadays the police seem to react to crime rather than prevent it, and there’s no guarantee even of that. It turns out that the West Yorkshire force has set a target for “screening out” 56 per cent of cases brought to their attention, in other words they won’t be investigating the equivalent of 145,000 offences per year. One academic speculates that it’s probably theft, criminal damage and vandalism that will be ignored.
This is the pinnacle and the greatest depth of the target culture: imagine schools setting a target for churning out illiterates or the NHS for cancers gone untreated. Perhaps the West Yorkshire coppers are just being realistic about what they can and can’t do, but that’s little comfort to the locals living with a recorded crime rate that’s gone up 11 per cent year on year.
It’s not all the fault of the police; the Government has cut funding. The kind of crime reported is also changing, becoming more complex and difficult to investigate (Dixon of Dock Green never had to deal with emails from generous Nigerian princes). In times past I’d call for more cash and sympathy for those who put their safety on the line to maintain law and order – and leave the column at that. But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of my mind that what the police have become isn’t a product of only necessity but also of choice. That the millions spent on historic sex abuse cases or the obsession with hate crime or the endless celebration of diversity and equality represent a conscious decision to do one thing rather than another, to crack down on abusive tweets rather than, say, vandalism. And it’s motivated by ideology.
A lot of white, middle-class people are learning something that everyone else has always known: the police are political. We like to imagine that British institutions are run by objective public servants. The reality is that schools, hospitals and police forces are all arms of the state, and they reflect the values of those at the top of the power pyramid. Remember that the original policemen, or Peelers, launched in 1829, were distrusted and feared as a war on the poor and the disorderly, which is ironic because the very first Metropolitan policeman was sacked after just four hours on the job – why? Because he was drunk. The Peelers were given blue uniforms rather than the red type worn by the army, but many minorities have always seen them as an occupying force. Ask Scargill’s miners or the parents of any black child that died in custody.
Most Britons, however, have long regarded the fuzz as their friends because the cultural values of those in power has broadly corresponded to their own. But a change to the establishment that began in the Sixties has percolated slowly through the liberal welfare state and increasingly public services don’t do what many long assumed they existed to do: schools care less about teaching, universities discourage intellectual inquiry, Conservatives don’t conserve and Labour has little to do with the working-class. The police haven’t stopped policing – that would be a ridiculous assertion – but they do it in a different way than they did, shaped by new priorities. For anyone who doesn’t share their contemporary world view they risk becoming, well, like an occupying force.
Haven’t you noticed how the police suddenly look like soldiers? Covered in tasers and sprays, the uniform hidden beneath a luminous vest, often in shirt-sleeves, they’re a confusing mix of the informal and the intimidating. One neither instinctively feels respect nor familiarity, and thanks to their well-advertised war on prejudice, I’m terrified that if I ask them for directions I’ll give myself away as a conservative and wind-up in prison. One of the real miseries of political correctness is that it forces us all to pretend to be what we’re not, to obsess about saying the “wrong thing” and lose our natural relationship with those who we ought to feel totally at ease with. If I were married to a police officer, I guess what I’d be thinking is: “I can’t talk to you anymore. You’ve changed.”
I want to believe that beneath the surface, the police force is still stuffed with old-fashioned coppers who simply want to keep the streets safe – and maybe that is the truth. But when on the one hand you see crime going up and on the other all you hear the police talking about is political correctness, one has to assume they’re no longer interested in doing the job as it was once defined, which is dangerous because if the public feels unprotected they will take the law into their own hands.
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