Should British police be armed?

The call for British police officers to be armed has been renewed after the fatal shooting of a police woman in Bradford yesterday. Another female police officer was shot in the shoulder. Both were apparently wearing body armour.

Between 7,000 and 8,000 officers in England and Wales are already armed with 1 in 10 London Metropolitan police officers armed following the bombings in July. Most of those officers with weapons are part of special armed response units while the majority of British officers remain unarmed.

The last poll of police officers some four years ago then showed that 80% of them did not want to be armed. This reflects the fact that since 1975 only 89 officers have died in the line of duty and shootings are still very rare. The debate is now front page news again, but it remains unlikely that all officers will be armed anytime soon.

The police officer killed yesterday has been named as Sharon Beshenivsky. She was shot in the chest. Teresa Milburn is recovering from being shot in the shoulder and is under armed police guard in hospital.

Two people were arrested this morning in London in connection with the shooting.

This is the first fatal shooting of a female officer in the UK since 1984.

Tributes to shot women officers - BBC News

British Crims get their own Fan Site

It's all the same, only the names will change
Everyday it seems we're wasting away
Another place where the faces are so cold...

Little did 80s girl-wetter Jon Bon Jovi know when he penned those lines that they'd be used to sum up a new crappy UK website that allows us to laugh at the criminal element without them taking a workboot to our happysacks.

Crimestoppers Most Wanted is the straight-to-video version of the FBI's altogether classier big star version. No Bin Laden's on our list, but we do get the delightfully named SERIOUS ASSAULT from Hull. Nice girl.

They have gone all out for the launch and added a competition though:

To mark the launch of Crimestoppers' Most Wanted website, do your duty and test your detective skills by solving the clues in Crimestoppers' Most Wanted Quiz

I'm impressed that they've found a way to mimic the condescending tone you get from real British police officers.

The Beeb report that it's almost as popular as porn and throw up a couple of choice quotes:

The internet is used for all types of crime. This is one step back toward reclaiming that and making the internet work for us

That's right internet criminals - reclaiming the virtual night starts HERE.

Most Wanted - Crimestoppers

Users flood 'Most Wanted' website - BBC News

MS-13: America's Best Gang

Mara Salvatrucha 13 are the gang to belong to. You know you're bad ass when the arrest of one gang member merits a mention on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement web site.

PittsburghLIVE fills us in on some details:

Not only have the numbers of these "gangstas" exploded but so has their organizational ability.

Initially, a MS13 clique would not exceed 20 people -- a dozen younger hangers-on as messengers and a near-full complement of young women. A lot of work is done by these women: communications, computers, begging, soliciting and cooking.

That's right. Cooking. That shit is fucked up.

An interesting subtext here is the decline of urban crime. The cities are becoming nice places to live. All opera houses and poetry clubs. The suburbs? Crime-riddled hellholes. Obesity may save us, but only if it can outpace the burgeoning wave of amphetamine abuse that threatens to make a svelte killer of every suburban reject in the country.

And that is why now, more than ever, this internet needs good meth crime coverage. Stay tuned.

Also note the use of the term "gangstas". Their quotes, not mine.

Rape Apes

We don't take too many editorial stands around here but as observers of crime observers, we are disgusted by the whimsical treatment Gawker and Gothamist are giving the Peter Braunstein rape case. There are victims on the other end of these type of stories and the lack of sensitivity is appalling. Please let us know if we ever cross that line.

We will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming of campus bike cops making faceplants on fraternity row.

Related: LAW AND ORDER: F.U.C.K. Y.O.U.

What Not To Wear

We thought that most teenagers would want to be seen wearing electronic ankle tags in the same way that sticking warning labels on music saw sales go up. Not in Worcester though and for the very simple reason that they aren't fashionable.

18 year-old Natasha Hughes breached the terms of her bail (after being accused of a little GBH) when she failed to answer her door to the police. She claimed that she was at home but asleep while the police obviously thought otherwise. A solution was suggested in the form of an electronic tag, but Hughes objected and what's more the court agreed with her:

"I didn't want to wear a tag because they are really bulky and embarrassing... I like to wear skirts which means people can see it and it looks stupid. I am pleased at the decision and am glad I don't have to be tagged"

Ahh bless. Maybe the police should have had one made up for her with a nice Burberry design.

She's due back in court to answer the GBH charge early in December and until then has to stay home between 9pm and 7am and isn't allowed back into the local YMCA.

Tag 'too bulky' for bail woman - BBC News

Swaffham Chainsaw Massacre

Well not quite...

A similar story to the earlier Australian one in that friends have a couple of drinks and the next thing you know one of them is being hit around the head with a hammer.

And then dismembered by a chainsaw.

The chap just found guilty of the whack and hack claimed that it was all self defense although the prosecution suggest that it was perhaps in revenge for an alleged rape.

The upshot is that one of them ended up at the bottom of a lake in Norfolk for five months while the other will be sentenced tomorrow.

And if you need further evidence that dumping body parts into water is a bad thing, then look no further.

Killer guilty of murdering friend - BBC News

What happened to Merrian Carver?

If you watch too much TV it's easy to believe the fantasy that the cops and their sci-fi-esque technology can get to the bottom of any mystery, that perhaps real life private-eyes aren't quite as cute as Kristen Bell but maybe are just as dogged and that at the very least there's always one detective willing to play a hunch and turn around scratching his head to ask just one more thing.

Yeah, and somewhere in California there's a blonde girl staking vampires...

While taking a break from Blottered I stumbled across an article in today's Arizona Republic concerning a woman named Merrian Carver who boarded a cruise ship and never disembarked. It looks increasingly like Ms Carver committed suicide by throwing herself overboard, but doubts remain. Perhaps she was murdered. Perhaps she's alive and well. Perhap, perhaps, perhaps... More likely no one will ever know the truth.

Unlikely because the police were slow to act, unlikely because private detectives are expensive and unable to do the job that the police passed on and unlikely because the cruise line and its staff seemed to have done their best to ignore Ms Carver's disapearance and hope that no one asked too many questions.

After a lengthy and expensive investigation of their own Kendall and Carol Carver found that not only were several people aware that their daughter was missing and had done nothing, worse still they had simply disposed of her belongings and dismissed the disapearance as something that happens all the time.

Robert Anglen pulls all the known facts together for his article and after reading it it's difficult not to ask why the police didn't get more involved in this particular case.

In a sidebar to the story there's a list of eight other Americans who disapeared from cruise ships since July of last year.

Sadly this is the kind of thing that Hollywood are more likely to show an interest in than the authorities.

Strange disappearance of daughter on cruise - The Arizona Republic

"We'd all had quite a bit to drink,"

Australia - if the wildlife doesn't get you then the Celts will.

Oddly enough the same trip that had me rifling through someone else's email also saw me in a Perth emergency room - spider bite, best not to ask - as I sat there the police wheeled in a guy with a torn and bloody shirt and hands looking like they'd been dipped in red paint. "But I love her," he told the blue heelers. "Probably shouldn't have killed her then should you, mate?" was the reply. Story took an odder turn when I got back to the UK and found out I knew someone who was related to the murdered woman. Small. World.

But I digress... take a butchers at this latest slice of Aussie news:

A MAN who allegedly decapitated a 17-year-old boy with a tomahawk in a suburban back yard later was said to have played with the teenager's head, rolling it in a paddock as if it were a bowling ball.

An argument turned to head stomping which in turn led to literal back stabbing and the final flourish with the tomahawk.

"The c...'s psycho," Mr Jones told the two detectives. "He was just so calm about it. It was nothin' to him."

Mr Jones said that next morning, Mr Roughan hugged him, saying, "us Celts should stick together", a reference to their Celtic ancestry. Later that day, with the aid of two other men, Shepherd's body was bundled into the boot of a car and driven to a property at Dayboro, north of Brisbane.

Mr Roughan sat in the back of the car with Shepherd's head in a plastic bag on his lap, Mr Jones said. A shallow grave was dug on the property and the torso buried.

Mr Jones said Mr Roughan laughed as he "bowled the head up the hill, like it was a bowling ball". The hearing was told there were more than 100 knife wounds on Shepherd's body when it was found.

Strewth.

Accused 'used head as bowling ball' - The Advertiser

Lord Buckingham not inbred shock!

And not a lord either.

Erm... or a Buckingham.

Identity theft is a pretty big deal at the moment and about to get bigger if the nutjobs in various governments around the world force through plans to have us all carrying useless but expensive pieces of plastic stating our non-terrorist leanings. Wouldn't it be simpler to just stick a crystal in our palms and have a cull when we reach the age where we ask annoying questions?

Michael York and Jenny Agutter - damn.

Up until now the only interesting time that identity theft has been used has been on bad TV cop shows and that one time when someone left their email open and logged in on an internet cafe in Perth and I totally rocked it big time as Surfdude25 before copying all the naked chick pics from the temp folder.

Things have now been taken to the next level by this guy who has been running around pretending to be Lord Buckingham for the last 23 years after stealing the ID of a dead kid.

The cops nabbed him at Dover after he took one ferry too many and get this:

"Further checks revealed he had assumed the name using the same method as the professional killer in the novel The Day Of The Jackal"

Makes you wonder how many kids are running around slapping embassy police in the chops and bedding hot European girls after watching The Bourne Identity a few too many times.

The police have admitted that they have no idea who this guy really is and have no way of getting to the truth as he flat out refuses to tell them anything... makes you wonder what he's trying to hide and how bad it could be if the alternative is to pretend to be one of the fox molesting classes...

Not to be confused with the Duke of Buckingham who was last seen on Blottered around 1626 when he had a hand in 'borrowing' some diamonds belong to the Queen of France.

Michael York and Oliver Reed - not quite as sexy, but still damn.

Man who assumed baby's ID jailed - BBC News

Pirates!

This kind of crap never happened on any of The Love Boat episodes that I saw:

A cruise ship sailing off Somalia has beaten back gunmen in speedboats who opened fire on it in an apparent pirate attack which terrified passengers. At least two boats closed in on the Seabourn Spirit, reportedly firing automatic weapons and a rocket-propelled grenade...

One crew member was injured, but not seriously and the RPG missed completely. The passengers were told what was happening as the crew repelled the pirates with "an on-board loud acoustic bang".

Sounds like the kind of device that Cory and the Boing Boingers will get all excited about. Look out for the step by step instructions on how to build your own Pirate defense system in the near future.

Now if I can only find a story about a modern day Ninja attack my weekend will be complete.

That's the actual ship doing its thing just round the corner from where I'm sat. Luckily, we have Bobbies to stop this kind of thing from happening on the Thames.

Cruise ship repels Somali pirates - BBC News

Local Man Confused By French Rioting

Ted O'Leary, a resident of the Lower East Side, expressed confusion over recent reports of rioting in France yesterday.

While sipping from his fourth pint of Brooklyn Lager at the Ludlow Street drinking den Local 138, Mr. O'Leary explained that he could not figure out why French youths were rioting in suburban neighborhoods populated by Muslims. "From the news reports, I gather these are football hooligans or something. But I cannot figure out why they are rioting in Muslim suburbs. Maybe they are racists, rioting because of high crime in those areas. Like the Ohio Nazis who rioted," Mr. O'Leary said.

The apparent source of Mr. O'Leary's confusion was news reports issued from the Associated Press and reprinted in many major newspapers. One recent report stated:

Rampaging youths shot at police and firefighters Thursday after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains, as eight days of riots over poor conditions in Paris-area housing projects spread to 20 towns.

Youths ignored an appeal for calm from President Jacques Chirac, whose government worked feverishly to fend off a political crisis amid criticism that it has ignored problems in neighborhoods heavily populated by first- and second-generation North African and Muslim immigrants."

Mr. O'Leary doubted claims that the African and Muslim immigrants populating the afflicted areas were themselves were rioting, telling a reporter, "I don't think that can be right. Wouldn't the press just tell us that?"

You May Feel A Little Prick

Russia: Gotta love that graphic.

That's DEATH, THE GRIM REAPER himself stalking the purple skied streets of Yekaterinburg in the form of a nutjob with a syringe full of christ-knows-what.

Over the past 10 days, five people have turned up at the local anti-AIDS centre asking for help. They all claimed to have been attacked in the street and stabbed with a syringe. The attacker, a tall young man dressed in black clothes, quickly stabs his victims and runs away.

MosNews dot com is crammed with crime stories at the moment. Here are a couple more of the better headlines that you can click into at the moment:

Russian Man Faces Jail for Sex on Neighbor'’s Phone / Russian Woman Jailed for 6 Years for Selling Daughter for Body Parts / Drug Dealing Suspect Eats Money to Avoid Arrest / Trophy Penis Gives Away Tramp Murderer / New-Born Baby Survives Stabbing, 8 Hours in Grave / Marriage Hostage Drama Kills 2 in Central Russia / Russian Villager Turns Milking Machine into Drug Factory

And one especially for Jackson:

F1, F2 Stolen From Monument to Computer Keyboard in Urals

Links to all those and more can be found after the Syringe story.

Russian Police Hunt Syringe Stalker - MosNews