Though Cowards Flinch

About a month to the day since I agreed to write the occasional piece on this blog, I’ve finally got round to writing someting.

With hindsight, recently convicted ex-Met commander Ali Dizaei can probably see where he went he went wrong.

In trying to intimidate an innocent member of the public who owed him money by threatening them with assault, then having them arrested and detained on trumped up charges he made a classic mistake; he wasn’t dressed for the occasion. If only he’d had the sense to put his police uniform on and hide his badge number!

Joking aside, it does sound like the Crown Prosecution Service has done a good job and got this odious individual bang to rights:

The officer was investigated after an incident in July 2008 when he arrested Waad al-Baghdadi, 23, who had built the website alidizaei.com to showcase Dizaei’s career and activism.
　
Mr al-Baghdadi believed that he was to receive £600 for his work but Dizaei repeatedly refused to pay him, and the two men confronted each other outside Yas, a Persian restaurant in Kensington, West London.

The designer said that Dizaei challenged him to a fight, then followed him into the restaurant and ordered him to leave. When he did so, Dizaei arrested and handcuffed him.

Much of the incident was recorded on CCTV and in a 999 call that Mr al-Baghdadi made to police. Dizaei also called 999 asking for “urgent assistance” and nine officers went to the scene. Witnesses were told by Dizaei to “back off”.

At Hammersmith police station, where Mr al-Baghdadi was detained overnight, Dizaei claimed that his wife had been threatened and he had been stabbed with a shisha pipe mouthpiece. However, a doctor concluded that his injuries were self-inflicted and the CCTV and 999 recordings supported Mr al-Baghdadi’s version of events.

He does have previous though. Mr Dizeai has had the kind of policing career that should have various studios bidding for the film rights.

Dizaei has been one of the Met’s most outspoken internal critics about police racism as a prominent spokesman of the National Black Police Association. This is something which may not be unconnected to the fact that 10 years ago he was the target of a lengthy and expensive surveillance operation, Operation Helios, that resulted in a lengthy and expensive trial with a whole array of lurid charges thrown at him. None of these charges, which ranged from being a threat to national security to bigamy, stuck and he was eventually cleared unanimously by the jury when he was brought to the Old Bailey on a minor charge in 2003.

To make things clearer, The Guardian has a useful timeline of events and a few weeks ago when the trial began JimJay elaborated on this rather extensive background to the current case.

The modest Mr Dizeai himself produced a book about the whole affair, describing it as:

[a] sensational story, told by the only man who knows the whole truth, of the rise and fall of the out-of-control coppers who tried to destroy him and how Dizaei refused to be beaten. Acquitted twice at the Old Bailey after a GBP 7 million investigation, he’s now back where he wants to be most: doing his job as a serving police officer.

(As an aside, the last sentence in this synopsis could probably do with an update for the new edition.)

If you were, say, an officer with a grudge against Dizaei because he was re-instated and received substantial compensation after a lengthy investigation now is the perfect time to get the boot in. A good time to imply that he was, in fact, guilty all along of everything he was previously accused of despite being found innocent at the time.

For example, someone appears to have leaked a fair amount of the material collected by Operation Helios to the Daily Mail (scroll down to the second article on this page) with the result looking like a copy and paste job from the prosecution’s case plus some jabs at silly liberals who imagined racism existed in the police at all.

This coupled with what looks like a retrospective justification for a huge waste of taxpayer’s money and police time between 1999 and 2003 on the grounds that a decade later the man has been found guilty of something else.

Similarly, the editorial in The Evening Standard suggests he was successful in avoiding misconduct charges by deploying the race card.

On the Today programme on Radio 4 yesterday Brian Paddick, a former Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Met, weighed in and basically said the same thing:

He was given compensation, he was welcomed back to the Met, he was even allowed to write a book about the way he was mistreated by Metropolitan police. I think that may have been a settlement driven by politics, driven by the Home Office who wanted to keep the black police association on side,” Paddick told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

All formal disciplinary procedures against him were dropped and my understanding is that it might have been the case that some of those disciplinary charges against him could have been proven. And I think all of that was politically driven.

See, the bloke was guilty all along and finally got his comeuppance.

Here’s an astounding idea that may not have been considered: Ali Dizaei is an unpleasant individual guilty as charged in this recent case and was nevertheless on the receiving end of an expensive witch-hunt several years earlier. A novel concept really, being guilty of one offence while being innocent of another.

The danger here should be obvious. It’s easy to work the conviction of Dizaei into a line of argument that runs ‘there’s no racism in the police, it’s just self-interested officers playing the race card to advance their careers/dodge allegations of misconduct’*. Expect a virtual re-print of the Daily Mail piece linked to above in the event of future rows in the police over racism arguing that race relations would be fine if it wasn’t for uppity ethnics like Dizaei.

A ‘violent bully and liar who abused his position of trust’ sounds like a fair description of Dizaei but he’s more than that. As a supposed principled opponent of racism through his role in the National Black Police Association his actions have undermined critics of police racism inside and outside the force by associating anti-racism with self-interested, petty bullying.

I’m only glad he’s been given an extended stint to reflect on his actions.

*(Note, even if certain officers are guilty of this kind of behaviour it doesn’t acquit the police of racism.)