The City of London police, undaunted and eager to retain their strange independence,

The reason the City police do a lot of the fraud investigations is because the City police are the experts at fraud investigations.

They might not be quite as expert as we’d like, this is true, but they’re more expert than, say, the Avon and Somerset force.

For example, as one little birdie has told me, they do get a few of those City accountats etc volunteering as Special Constables. Helps a bit when you get some of the industry professionals turning up to work for free, no?

A businessman accused of being the mastermind behind an alleged £100m ‘Ponzi’ scheme was warned he faced a jail sentence after admitting charges of fraud and deception.

OK, this was a big one but Ponzis are hardly unusual.

I’ve been invited into one or two even in my very limited business life.

But here’s the stupidity:

Pruthi is alleged to have creamed off £38m from the fund for his own use between 2005 and 2008 when he was running Business Consulting International.

If you’re running a Ponzi you’ve got to know that you are. Pulling £38 million out of £100 million isn’t something you do by chance or happenstance. And that does seem to be evidence that he didn’t fall into the trap (ie, promise great returns through real investment opportunities, fail to make them then turn to the fraud as the original Charles Ponzi did).

So, having snaffled that £38 million why was he hanging around? There are plenty of places in this world where you can disappear with such sums after all.

That’s the bit I never get with these things. The stupidity of not realising when to cut and run.

Manchester ‘mole gang’ escapes with just £6,000 after 100ft tunnel heist

Gang may have been left out of pocket by having to hire expensive drilling equipment, say police

OK, so they dug the tunnel, got to the target and then found that there wasn’t as much cash as they had thought. Diddums.

That’s not the stupidity. This is:

Police admit they are baffled at the target given the obvious expertise and determination possessed by the criminals. Even when fully stocked, the cash machine can only hold £20,000.

Even if it had “worked” they’d have been making minimum wage around and about. And risking jail for that is simply stupid.

Sarah McKinley, 18, shot and killed Justin Martin with a 12-gauge shotgun after calling police and asking in a near-whisper: “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes through the door?”

“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” a dispatcher replied. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you have to do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

The dispatcher then heard a gunshot over the telephone line.

Police found Martin’s body, knife in hand, slumped over McKinley’s sofa, and determined the mother of a three-month-old baby – whose cancer-stricken husband died on Christmas Day – had acted in self-defense.

“Our initial review of the case doesn’t indicate she violated the law in any way,” assistant district attorney James Walters told the Oklahoman newspaper. “He should have thought about it before he went into someone’s home.”

Young offenders jailed in the wake of the summer riots were attacked by fellow inmates who had seen their home towns targeted.

Criminals already in custody and worried about their families and friends being caught up in the disturbances turned on the perpetrators once behind bars, prison inspectors revealed.

And I would very definitely want to insist that the guards did their duty and made sure that no harm came to their charges.

But with that caveat, that no physical harm came to those in custody, it’s rather satisfying, isn’t it?

New York murders fell dramatically when hospitals were compelled to admit critical cases irrespective of insurance cover, cutting the lag before treatment and thus the chance of survival by a crucial 20 to 23 minutes.

And whether or not it’s an entirely true one is another matter.

Yet there is a truth in it: some part of the fall in murder rates is indeed as a result of medical treatment getting better.

People who would have died in previous decades, and thus been murder victims, now survive and are thus not.

All of which leads to an interesting question.

If we look specifically at cases still considered homicide at the end of the period (as the House of Commons Library did in 1999), then the change in the murder rate between 1967 (the earliest year for which data is available) and 1997 is more modest. In 1967 this rate stood at 7.3, and reached a peak of 12.8 in 1995, falling slightly to 12.4 in 1997. In this analysis therefore, the homicide rate did not quite double.

Given that, if the attempted murder rate had stayed static over this time period, we would have expected the murder rate to have fallen, what in buggery has been happening in the UK to the attempted murder rate?

In measuring human violence, Steven Pinker (Profile) appears, understandably, to favour a per capita rate of homicides over the centuries. A revealing alternative would be killings as measured against their time span, ie how many humans are actually slaughtered in the shortest-possible time. In this case, our era is by far the bloodiest and most innovatively violent ever.

The point that Pinker is making is that what you have just described there is the conventional view.

Yes, lovely, now look at it Pinker’s way. What is the chance of your dying a violent death? From war, murder, violence of all kinds?

Vastly lower now than it was, which is very much Pinker’s point.

While there are those who still argue about it the average for certain tribal societies was 20-30% of men dying by being murdered. That’s actually higher than the death rate for Brits in WWII: might even be higher than that in WWI, not sure.

That’s the point that he’s making and it’s a good one too.

Fraud cost the British economy more £38 billion in the 2010/11 – just £2 billion less than the entire defence budget.

More than half of all fraud in Britain – around £21 billion – involves public sector money. Tax fraud accounts for £15 billion a year while around £1 billion in benefits are illegally claimed.

Central government lost around £2.6 billion to fraudsters last year compared to £2.1 billion lost by local authorities.

The most serious fraud cases are heavily dependant on forensic accounting to gather evidence. Last year, the Serious Fraud Office processed around 70 million documents – the equivalent to a paper stack 200 miles high.

Hiring out prisoners as labour to the local politicians?

Perhaps this is the second episode in the tragedy/farce circuit?

The 2010/2011 Home Office statistics show that the sanction detection rate for violence against the person was 44.5%, and for rape 29.9%.

The most obvious point here is that violence against the person is a fairly easy crime to prove the existence of.

“He hit me”.

Rape faces a different problem.

“He had sex with me” isn’t a crime.

So it’s necessary to prove both the sex and the denial of consent before we can even conclude that a crime has been committed: only then is it possible to go on to find out who did it.

Which is why the rape numbers are always going to be different from those for many other crimes.

The men became the first to be sentenced by crown court judges for their involvement in the mass civil disobedience that swept England.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were jailed for four years each for inciting the disorder on Facebook despite both being of previous good character.

Bailey, who earns £1,000 a month at Stockwell Primary School, south London, left court with a newspaper over his face. A headline about “copycat cretins” covering his eyes, he walked into a lamp-post.

We are told, endlessly, that only the rapist is to blame for rape. Nothing that the victim does, has done, where they go, how they’re dressed, nothing at all changes the fact that the rapist is solely and completely responsible, in and of themselves, for the crime.

So why isn’t this true for rioters?

Discuss.

The justice department is to accuse Edwards, once a rising star of the Democratic party as its 2004 vice-presidential candidate, of accepting substantial donations to his 2008 campaign from two wealthy supporters in order to cover up the relationship with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that they had a child together.

The charges come out of a grand jury investigation which heard from more than a dozen witnesses including Edwards’s former chief aide, Andrew Young, who at one time covered up for his boss by falsely claiming paternity of the child and then writing a book about it.

Last year, Young discovered a video tape of Edwards having sex with Hunter among a box of personal possessions left at his home by his former boss’s mistress. A judge ordered the tape to be turned over to the court as part of an investigation into whether cash given to Hunter by Edwards was in effect hush money.

Edwards is to be accused of using the campaign donations to support and seclude Hunter.

Edwards now faces the choice of attempting to reach a plea bargain which would result in him being struck off as a lawyer or taking his chances on a trial and the prospect of prison time.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer man.

A businessman arranged his wife’s murder on their honeymoon six months after telling a male prostitute he had been forced into marriage and “needed to find a way out”, a court heard yesterday.
….
Sources said the man willing to give evidence has claimed that Mr Dewani paid him for sexual intercourse on three occasions. He has given a statement to South African police. Mr Dewani denies any involvement in his wife’s death, and denied that he met the man.

One of those allegedly involved in South Africa has confessed, now this. Actually, Zola Tongo has already been convicted and jailed.

I wonder what else we’re going to hear before this is all over?

A leading actor granted a gagging order by a judge was trying to prevent the public discovering he had cheated on his wife with a prostitute, Helen Wood, whose clients include Wayne Rooney.

The murder was on 7 April 1964. The executions were on 13 August 1964.

Is there actually anything that works this quickly in our current legal system?

Landrigan’s father died of natural causes while awaiting execution for murder in Arkansas five years ago.