PCs suspended over photos of murder scene

Whilst a shocking, utterly abhorrent act ... why is it in 'feminist chat'?

The police haven't had their gender identified. You're all looking for them to be male, what if they weren't?

This type of thing is why feminism is portrayed as hysterical and man-hating, and prevents normal women wanting to identify as feminists and explore feminism further. Thus damaging your cause.

I'm completely supportive of having a police force; none of the alternatives seem at all realistic to me. But the one time I really needed them - I was upstairs with my husband downstairs with a knife preoccupation and acutely psychotic - they decided I didnt need them. I do think chronic underfunding makes people uncaring; when you have to choose between 50 terrible needs you get used both to having to deal with leaving 48 unanswered and also to having the power to do that. It's the same in healthcare. But a culture like this - where do you even start.

What I find really awful about this story is how little coverage the murders had before this photo issue arrived. Two young women killed by a stranger in a park I'm very surprised it wasn't front page news.

It was New York and the officers inflamed the situation considerably.

A tweet passed my eyes a few weeks ago, about 3 police officers in an American city (I can't recall which one) who claimed they had been "intentionally" poisoned at a cafe. Let's call it "Joes Cafe".

The tweet said "The officers will have to wait until Joes Cafe have carried out a full internal investigation into the incident"....

Anyone comfortable with statistics will have already worked out that the chances of 2 randomly selected officers both being up for high jinks like this can only be as high as it is because most police officers are like this.

Indeed. And a culture in which that's considered OK is one in which it's going to be very difficult to get any sort of justice for women or for black people. The misogyny and the racism are endemic.

I imagine that hostility towards the police has been fuelled by their apathetic approach to this double murder case and info about the horrific abuse of power now in the public domain

This particular murder arose in the aftermath of a " illegal" gathering ( according to the Covid rules); and like any number of other similar " il egal" gatherings, which have now started to accelerate in number, around the country ( on beaches/street parties/raves /football celebrations/demonstrations/flares being used/stabbings, shootings, rapes........) the police have become stuck between a rock and hard place.

If they intervene to impose distancing measures they could further inflame already heated situations; if they back off things get out of hand anyway; if they do intervene they get attacked & injured.

Now obviously what is reported to have happened in the aftermath of this double murder sounds shocking and of deep concern.......let's wait and see what transpires. But feeding a very particular anti-police narrative is going to change nothing and is simply added fuel to an already flammable situation.

Whether the officers intended violation akin to the lynching photos or if they were just a pair of dickheads in a true crime fans whatsapp who have become insensitised to violent imagery and enjoyed the kudos of getting to a shocking crime first, who knows? They may well have taken violating photos of white women (or men of any ethnic origin) too but the fact that awful, historical racist imagery can be compared to this crime
at all is beyond horrible for their family and friends, and yes, horrible for the current politically charged climate too.

My friend was murdered 21 years ago and some years later I saw one of the crime scene photos whilst sorting paperwork for his mum. It was just a completely dispassionate depiction of him as he was found, necessary documentation for the investigation and subsequent trial, but still it haunts me. When ‘the body’ is that of a loved one, it’s almost impossible to see it as such - to you, it is still the person, especially as, in the case of murder, you rarely get the opportunity to say goodbye through funeral home visiting, the way you do when a loved one dies through illness.

The full details won't emerge though, will they?

I imagine that hostility towards the police has been fuelled by their apathetic approach to this double murder case and info about the horrific abuse of power now in the public domain.

Not a few comments on a parenting website.

Why not wait for the full details to emerge before constructing elaborate narratives? I do worry that the narratives are already being woven - such as a conspiratorial " no media coverage" ( not true!)

If you start ramping things up" x1000", then what you are going to get is a summer of destructive rioting or similar. That will solve nothing, and change nothing. Is it really necessary to replicate U.S scenarios recently witnessed in the media?

Anyone comfortable with statistics will have already worked out that the chances of 2 randomly selected officers both being up for high jinks like this can only be as high as it is because most police officers are like this.

Or, to use apples:

You have a barrel with (say) 22,000 apples in it. What are the odds that two successive and random selections of a single apple will result in your drawing the only two bad ones ?????????

Now if you have 11,000 "bad apples" then it becomes much easier.

Incidentally, that is almost exactly the "logic" the police use when they racially profile. But you need to be careful if you point that out to them - they don't like it up'em as Corporal Jones said.

I am fully aware that some "bad apples" might club together. But then we're going to get Dame Cressida Dick on TV telling us how "robust" police management is, so we can discount that, can't we ? (Again, they don't like it when you actually use what they say to rubbish them).

Interesting how we haven't had anyone claiming to be a police officer on here telling us what a hard job they do etc etc etc. I guess even they can sense the indefensible.

I heard their mother speak on the news last night.

She spoke domwell, and I am in awe of her eloquence.

The part of what she said that stuck with me the most, was that this was akin to the old, old photos that people used to take of smiling spectators standing next to a lynched black man still dangling.

How can anyone be so lacking in common human decency to do such a thing, let alone people who are there to uphold the law?

Police culture is toxic. The blue family consider themselves above the law and treat anyone who dares challenge them with contempt.

This won't be the first abuse of power by the officers concerned, or their colleagues. Two officers comfortable to behave like that in each other's presence and to share their behaviour more widely are not isolated "bad apples" or experiencing momentary lapses of judgement. They are a reflection of the institution and workforce to which they belong.

You can pretty much guarantee other people will have suffered at their hands, whether another person whose body was desecrated or a vulnerable person who would be ignored if they spoke up.

THiS

@truthisarevolutionaryact In which case there is the triple whammy of misogyny racism and classism.

They have to be named, shamed and sent to prison. Those lovely women, snuffed out by a monster and then degraded even in death by those trusted to seek justice. Their poor families

Sorry here is the link www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k9s0

Sorry I thought the link above was the whole interview but it isn't.

It was on PM - if you go to this link it starts at around 41:00 mins.

What Ratonastick said.

And although I also immediately thought of men diing this unimaginable thing of sharing those photos, I then remembered the woman in the Abu Ghraib photos. Women are not angels.

Certainly in the beginning there was very little coverage. Just a mention on London news. At that time there was must mentioned a family event, and I sort of wonder if the deaths were as a result of some dreadful family situtation.

And it is only recently that it has moved into the main stream, and the disgusting behaviour of the PCs getting almost more coverage.

Someone up thread said it might not be that odd not to here from someone after a night out. But this had obviously been a big family get together and usually family would be ringing each other up the next day to chat or say thanks.

And I think there is this police thing about waiting 24 hours, but where there is clear evidence that the two women had stayed on but family must have known it wasn't going to be all night. And as they had their separate lives why would they just disappear of together. And not answer their phones. Not to have even sent someone from the local police to check the area (ie there might have been an accident) is just terrible.

I hear their mother being interviewed on radio 4 and it was heart breaking.

And I sort of resented on her behalf that they had to put in that she was a former Archdeacon, as though to say this means she is someone to be taken notice of. She should have been listened to whatever her former work had been.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53198702

And if the man was wounded someone must know who it is.

My heart goes out to these women and their families. How two women can be murdered so viciously in the midst of BLM and it go so underreported is very disturbing to me.

See, this is what Crenshaw was actually talking about when she wrote that essay about intersectionality. When misogyny and racism combine you get an extra virulent form of prejudice that leads to things like this, the murder of two black women being treated as minor news during a news cycle in which BLM is the only thing really happening other than coronavirus.

Their mother, Mina Smallman, spoke so eloquently about her daughters and this awful act:
If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police

She claimed the police did not immediately respond to initial reports that the sisters were missing, adding that she co-ordinated a search operation on the weekend they died.

I knew instantly why they didn't care. They didn't care because they looked at my daughter's address and thought they knew who she was.
A black woman who lives on a council estate

So awful.

Her mum said the6 dehumanised her daughters

Why why I don’t understand why 2 men would do this to two dead women

It’s so far from anything I can understand.

I am feeling such rage right now. ENOUGH!

I just watched a bbc report on this and the focus was on the fact they were black. I can’t help thinking the fact that they were women might have been as relevant (or even more relevant) to the behaviour of the officers in question, and to their murders but the report didn’t even seem to consider that. It was being used to make a case about attitudes to black people by the police but no mention of the appalling misogyny.