Thursday, May 10, 2007

Support your local Sheriff pt1



And whilst on the subject of gun-toting security forces and criminality in my beloved Borough of Lambeth…

A few weeks ago I posted about a police raid on the Rasta Temple in St Agnes Place, round the corner from here.

Unusually, virtually everyone involved; including the police, local residents and even the Rastafarians who used the temple, were pretty much in agreement about what was going on there. Some unpleasant characters had taken the building over and turned it into a 24/7 hypermarket-style Class A drugs den.

However, in spite of the fact that…
  • the police were actually asked to raid the place by some of the occupants
  • had watched the building for six months
  • observed as many as 600 people a day visiting the building
  • finally got round to raiding it with 200+ stun-grenade tossing officers

…it now turns out they found pretty much fuck all in the way of any evidence that could be used in a prosecution. The police found precisely one crack pipe, some dope and half a dozen rounds of ammunition. You could find more in your average Lambeth toddler’s toy box.




This bungled drugs raid is what is known technically by academic criminologists as a complete and total fuck up and the media coverage given to the magistrates hearing last week was, mercifully for the police, several orders of magnitude lower than that given to the original raid...

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