How to stop a Riot: what does 2011 tell us?
For five days at the beginning of August 2011, it felt like we were on the brink of anarchy. In towns and cities across England, police...
News, analysis and commentary on crime, policing, justice, prisons, immigration - and the media
For five days at the beginning of August 2011, it felt like we were on the brink of anarchy. In towns and cities across England, police...
A year ago I wrote about a rape trial that had to be postponed because there was no judge available. The delay shocked me because the...
Boris Johnson started it. On 14 April 2022 he said that the deal struck with Rwanda meant that anyone entering the UK illegally may now...
"This Inquiry should serve as a loud wake-up call." Those words, directed at the leadership of the Metropolitan Police, are contained in...
Is the Ministry of Justice making excuses? The most shocking aspect of Daniel Khalife's escape from Wandsworth Prison on September 6 is...
Should police inform a suspect they've been charged with rape by post? I think most of us would expect that kind of news to be delivered...
When I started reporting on the crime statistics as a BBC correspondent about 25 years ago the headline figure was invariably the main...
In the next day or so, a prison officer at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes will deliver a brown envelope addressed to “Mr Charles...
“Hugely significant.” That was the description given by Antonia Romeo, the most senior civil servant at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), to...
Last November, when the Prisons Minister, Damian Hinds, told the House of Commons that up to 400 police cells would be used to hold...
The news that a man who died after being held for a week at the Manston migrant processing centre may have had the highly contagious...
Monday October 31 should have been the day. The day when a crown court jury was sworn in to try a man in his 30s accused of raping a girl...
The warning lights are flashing in our prisons - but has the new Justice Secretary, Brandon Lewis, noticed? This week, three respected...
“We have a haphazard system of recording missing persons…anxiety is growing over the way in which we handle the problem.” That was a...
The Metropolitan Police has eight days to make an important decision. Is it going to continue its legal fight to sack two officers who...
A mile away from the political storms at Westminster, away from the cameras and reporters, a legal squall has been blowing at the Royal...
A crisis in policing? You'd have thought so from the headlines last week after it emerged that six forces out of 43 in England and Wales...
The Home Office "loves a crisis" was perhaps not the smartest comment by its super smart Permanent Secretary Matthew Rycroft. What I...
Over and out. Three candidates to be Metropolitan Police Commissioner have been ejected from the contest after failing to make it through...
A Canadian was governor of the Bank of England; an Australian is in charge of England's rugby team; could we be about to have an overseas...