Welome to shootingcoppers.com, , a source of advice on police culture, criminal procedure and the UK courts system for the film maker, storyteller and the morbidly interested.  

Okay, so you've seen Silent Witness, Waking the Dead, The Bill, Life on Mars and many other brilliantly researched products. But can you imagine how difficult it would be to use knowledge gained from watching those products to create your own. Impossible, without running the real risk of plagiarism. Independent research is vital to all successful writing, and this is especially the case where the subject matter resides in the constantly evolving world of criminal investigation and trial procedure.

We at shootingcoppers are experienced police detectives. We know about villians, bent cops, ambitious senior officers, internal force politics, the Police Federation (bless its cotton socks) and the overpopulated legal profession with its shoals of solicitors, barristers, paralegals, clerks and runners, all chasing the money and waiting for their breaks.

We know about the Independent Police Complaints Commission and its unremitting quest for self-justification. We know about Professional Standards Departments and their scapegoating antics. We know about journalists, good and bad, who inhabit this murky world.

We know about the Crown Proecution Service, that body of underpaid, underqualified and badly motivated wage slaves who try their best but often fail to bring the criminal to justice. Except of course if the 'criminal' is a serving police officer, in which case the CPS will bend over backwards to avoid what they call 'perceptions of inwardness'. If you're a copper and some scumbag makes an allegation against you, you can count on gripping the rail when a civilian facing the same accusation would not have even been charged.

Mr Jack Fatherland, Solicitor-in-Chief of the Roystonshire Constabulary, has been at it again. When interviewed by our PSD reporter about his apparent right wing tendencies he said, ‘Look, our officers are not employees, they are servants and must not rock the boat because they do not wear life jacket.’ One can only assume that Mr Fatherland was referring to police officers’ lack of legal rights in the employment arena. This attitude was presumably the basis upon which he recently threatened one of his officers with zero support in a forthcoming civil action if he had the audacity to invoke his statutory right to a Chief Constable’s Review of his dismissal from the Force. Funny how the threat was promptly withdrawn when Police Federation lawyers politely pointed out to Fatherland that what he was doing was actually illegal. Our friends at the Indescribably Politically Correct Club have declared there was nothing untoward about some accounting glitches in the management of the Metaphysical Police Religious Sect Association, a charity. An un-invoiced payment of £6,000 for a spurious catering contract, the absence of any funds reaching the charity’s bank account during 2006 in spite of the fact that cheques had been written and sent to the MPRSA, and the absence of any ledgers showing the income and expenditure of the Association were said by the IPCC not to substantiate criminal or misconduct charges and were merely evidence of weak governance and accounting procedures, contributed to by possibly a lack of financial training. Funny how members of a serious crime investigation team are presently being made the subject of criminal and misconduct charges in respect of their alleged misuse of service issue credit cards. They did not have financial training either, yet were expected to run complex expense accounts whist engaged in intense and exhausting criminal investigation.

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