Dizaei Rascal… I Should Say So

Civitas, 9 February 2010

Yesterday at the end of a four week trial at Southwark Crown Court, a jury found Metropolitan Police Commander Ali Dizaei guilty of having abused his position as a police officer by wrongly arresting and falsifying the case he brought against a young Iraqi web-designer in July 2008.  Dizaei received a four year prison sentence.

The young man had apparently run into the police commander by chance in a London Iranian restaurant and had used the opportunity to take Dizaei to task for not paying him for work he had carried out for him. Not liking what he had heard, Dizaei had arrested the young man, claiming that he had been assaulted by him.

After the Crown Prosecution Service had the examined the matter and decided there was no case against the young man, he had gone on the offensive by accusing the police commander of assault, threatening behaviour, and of abusing his police powers in wrongfully arresting him.

At that point, the complaint was taken up by the Metropolitan Police Authority which initiated an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation of the matter in September 2008, during which time Dizaei was put under suspension from duty. It was that investigation which was to lead to the criminal charges against Dizaei.

At the time, Dizaei was President of the National Black Police Association, a position  from which he stepped down in August 2009 after criminal charges were brought against him.

At the earlier time of his suspension, chairman of the Metropolitan Black Police Association Arthur John had gone to the aid of his colleague by reportedly declaring:

‘We support Ali (Dizaei) 100 per cent and we are confident that these claims will turn out to be nothing. This disproportionate treatment flies in the face of the diverse communities in which we serve and we no longer possess any confidence in the leadership of the Metropolitan Police or MPA.’

After yesterday’s verdict, I for one no longer have any confidence in Mr John’s judgment. Nor do I have any confidence in the need for a pressure group like his or that of which Dizaei was  then president, the lack of whose proper accounts was the subject of a very astringent report published last year and which resulted in Home Office grants being withdrawn from it.

We owe the creation of these demonstrably very fallible bodies to Jack Straw during his time as Home Secretary.

They were created in the wake of the Macpherson Report into the Steven Lawrence murder and its police investigation, which had accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutional racism’. Running scared at the time, these bodies were set up to placate various constituencies and show that Macpherson’s charge against the police was being addressed.

We should remind ourselves of how Macpherson defined the term ‘institutional racism’—namely, as ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’.

Londoners and others are now arguably failing to be supplied with an appropriate professional police service on account of the existence of such pressure groups as the National Black Police Officers Association.

It is time they were seen for what they truly are— themselves manifestations of institutional racism   — and discontinued.

For too long they have been able to abuse due process and waste public money by playing the race card.

Along with Dizaei, they should be sent packing from the police force.

Whatever conceivable use they may once have been, they now only get in the way of proper policing.