Sir Hugh was pipped at the post in 2011 as a candidate to be the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. Some suggest Sir Hugh’s blunt style may have cost him political support — though he is often labelled the police’s favourite police officer.

Sporting a pink striped tie against a blue striped shirt, Sir Hugh is welcoming, friendly and loquacious in his rather austere office just up the road from Scotland Yard in central London. And as we talk, he is indeed blunt. Some of his comments have a hard edge and he gives the impression of a man who takes no hostages but has a sharp political sense.

Sir Hugh describes ACPO as “the glue that holds national policing together”. From briefing newly elected police commissioners to coordinating national police responses to terrorist threats, it is a wide and demanding brief, not least as chief constables all volunteer, on top of their day job, to lead different areas for ACPO where national coordination is needed. As Sir Hugh told the Leveson Inquiry: “In the absence of a federal model of policing [ACPO] provides a voluntary structure to secure national agreements.”

Human rights and free speech

In the UK, the police are, in theory, part of a system that defends our individual and collective human rights — including the right to free speech, and the freedom of assembly and association. Yet the police’s commitments to human rights in practice is, inevitably questioned as real life events unfold. Meanwhile, parts of the British media and frequently suggest our human rights laws and commitments are undermining common sense policing and democratic decision-making, or risking our security.

Sir Hugh is clear and liberal-sounding on the overarching principle. Free expression and human rights are, he insists, “a function of good policing…human rights are not an impediment to effective policing.”

But there’s a hard underpinning to this view: “Those who want cheap tilts at the Human Rights Act paint it as an impediment; it’s the opposite. We use lethal force — compliant with article two — so it’s flawed to say it’s an impediment.” Article two sets out the right to life, but also allows police to use no more force than “absolutely necessary” to arrest someone or in tackling a riot. This can cover cases where deaths occur. Sir Hugh’s is not a soft defence of the Human Rights Act.

Nor does he see security and police openness in providing information necessarily as trade-offs: “The biggest national threats without question are cybercrime and terrorism” he says. But he thinks transparency, as far as possible, is part of tackling these threats “so you only don’t talk [about them] if you absolutely can’t.”

The harder challenge in policing free expression is where there may be calls to constrain free speech or the right to protest. There are a number of laws that give police the option or even the requirement to step in — some, such as section 5 of the Public Order Act are broadly phrased and mean the police have a lot of leeway (although ‘insulting’ language is now to be taken out of the Act).  Sir Hugh admits frankly that where and whether to constrain rights can be a “nightmare – the first default is to call the police”. He  underlines the importance of discretion in policing and argues “cops tolerate a lot”. He adds: “if we enforced everything, there would be no cops on the streets.”

Having faced the challenges in Northern Ireland of how to manage the right to protest in the face of major community tensions, Sir Hugh is clear that these rights are not absolute: “These are conditional rights not unconditional rights — you can’t just ride roughshod over others….you have to manage that very difficult territory.” When pushed he admits that the tactic of kettling “is pretty hard edged” but adds: “We have used containment in football stadium for decades, and no one complained.”

Public sensitivity to offence is, Sir Hugh thinks, on the rise not least in the context of some recent high profile prosecutions of ‘offensive’ speech on social media: “The expectation of citizens that the police will act if they are insulted has increased, especially if it’s personal and hurtful.” He thinks the interim guidelines issued last December by the Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer, which aim to rein in the number of such prosecutions, will be “helpful” and does not want police time taken up policing “every insulting comment.”

But laws, he insists, are the realm of government: “We don‘t lobby” he says. “We act on laws as the government creates them.”

He says frontline officers “have never been so well trained” and do understand their responsibilities in defending and protecting human rights, and using discretion and judgement. But he thinks “with 20 per cent cuts, training tends to go” – and describes the cuts facing the police as their “biggest challenge”.

Costs can be a key issue for free expression; if there’s a major protest against a play or an exhibition, the policing that may be needed isn’t necessarily provided free. But should we have to pay to have our human rights defended? “As a chief constable” says Sir Hugh “I’d be prepared to have a conversation about it. But it’s not necessarily wrong for someone dealing with a commercial event to make a contribution if others are put at risk because we shift resources.” We have to balance, he says, the human rights principles of the right to be protected with ever more limited resources.

Police and the Press

Sir Hugh is clearly pleased with the findings of Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry that there were some wrong judgements and decisions by police but no pervasive corruption or lack of integrity. He bristles slightly at the suggestion Leveson let the police off lightly, saying Leveson is a judge who “follows evidence and there is none to leap from individual actions to root and branch failure to police media relations.”

He also argues that most police-media relations have been for the most part unproblematic: “A lot of cops gave evidence to Leveson and the vast majority described an utterly proper professional relationship with the press…and meeting to discuss over tea or a pint of beer is OK, proper and proportionate.” He is not concerned with Leveson’s suggestion that there shouldn’t be off the record briefings: “I think it [‘off the record’] became misunderstood as secret, clandestine, and Leveson was trying to take the heat out of it.” But he insists that there will be briefings that are not for the public or for background context.

He has some sharp words for the press too, emphasising the difference in public trust ratings for police compared to journalists. “If you look at the polls…you see the public feel quite powerless.” The police, he says, deal with victims, such as “people dealing with massive grief and utterly unused to the media” and if there is a public interest in intrusion that is, he thinks, for journalists to justify. But if media behaviour is “horrendous, unfair, then the public must have a right to complain.”

In the end, Sir Hugh thinks the United Kingdom is doing OK compared to other countries in the world: “If you walk outside and talk on the street corner you are very unlikely to get arrested —- isn’t that the point?” The British model, he believes, is built around tolerance, “though that’s not to say sometimes there is not a hard edge.”

Tolerance with a hard edge — perhaps a good summary of Sir Hugh’s approach to policing our rights. But where that hard edge is placed and how it is interpreted on the ground will continue to be a central question for whether free expression and other rights are adequately defended by the police.

 Kirsty Hughes is Chief Executive of Index on Censorship

The post “Human rights are not an impediment to effective policing” appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The UK has a press-controlled state rather than a state-controlled press. Phone hacking lawyer Mark Lewis reports on lessons from Leveson

Time and again, the criticism of the Leveson Inquiry is that it is another nail in the coffin of a free press. Who says so? The press themselves. Who are they kidding?

My answer to anyone who raises this argument to me is: “How sweet, you really believe that we have a free press!” Stop and look at the phone hacking scandal. Not the actions of those involved (one scandal), but all those newspapers that did not even report the story (another scandal). Post-Dowler, The Times ran an editorial apologising for not telling its readers. So many papers misled their readership by saying nothing. Absolute censorship. It does not suit us for our readers to know, so we will not tell them. Censorship backed up by the non-regulatory regulator: the Press Complaints Commission. We want it to stay and regulate us, say the press. It isn’t a regulator says the PCC’s new chairman, Lord Hunt. So there you have it, demands by the press for the preservation of non-regulation. A licence to print anything, a licence to ruin lives and, more sinister, a licence to cover up. Which journalist feels able to write an article that accuses his editor? That’s a problem Lord Justice Leveson won’t be addressing.

No matter how strong an advocate one is of freedom of speech, it does not equate with an unrestricted freedom of the press. It is often lost (although not on LJ Leveson) that “free speech” and a “free press” are not interchangeable concepts. Test the theory: a paedophile wishes to sell pornographic pictures of children. Should he be prevented from doing so? Of course. I doubt anyone would argue seriously that such abuse should be aggravated just because of freedom. I suspect the ubiquitous tabloid reader would (rightly) express moral outrage. Ironically, the same reader who would argue that we should stop that publication would baulk at the idea of any form of censorship.

So let’s see where we draw the line. We do need some form of censorship, even John Kampfner, former chief executive of Index on Censorship, would agree. There are times when the balance drops on the side of preventing publication. The press seems to be obsessed with exposing adulterous affairs of footballers and the medical treatment of celebrities, but is not keen at all on any issues regarding journalists. When did you last read of adultery by an editor? Speeding by a journalist? Or drug taking by an opinion writer? Are these the most moral, sober, narcotic-free role models? Or is it that the freedoms they cherish so much include the freedom not to write anything harmful about themselves or their colleagues.

We need to move away from hypocritical attempts to defend scurrilous story-writing by the sanctimonious utterances of those who should know better. The freedoms we want are not freedoms to ruin lives, to gossip or to distract. That is not the free press we strive for: what we want is the freedom to write on any subject about anyone within the confines of good taste. We do not want to have a press that is controlled by a state, but we also do not want to have a press controlled by a quasi-state such as a large corporation.

Leveson has put the ethics of the press in the spotlight. The relationship with the Metropolitan Police has been exposed. People must still ask why a crime was not investigated while the reviewer of that case,  John Yates (who described his six-hour review as a “bit crap”), did not re-open a case that subsequently led to Operations Weeting and Elveden. We know from Leveson that the News of the World thought it was entitled to a payback for the glasses of champagne that it had bought for Yates.

The biggest lesson that we have learnt from the inquiry so far is that we have a press-controlled state rather than a state-controlled press. As Rupert Murdoch made clear, he never asked a prime minister for anything. Surely, the response should be: “Exactly, everyone else has to ask.”

Will Leveson deliver? I hope so. The issue is far more wide-reaching than the alleged criminal activities of a few, or even the ability to determine a complaints mechanism that avoids the “chilling effect” of disproportionately expensive legal cases — it concerns democracy itself. We need politicians who are able to represent the people even if our interests are opposed to those of the press; we need police who act against the press without fear of reprisals, and we need journalists who are prepared to tell us what their bosses don’t want us to read.

Mark Lewis is a partner at Taylor Hampton. He represents many clients whose privacy was invaded by the News of the World. He also acted for Dr Peter Wilmshurst and the Sheffield Wednesday fans who were sued for libel

Exclusive extracts from our magazine:

The Blogger | Guido Fawkes | Where will this all end?
The Journalist | Trevor Kavanagh | The Leveson effect
The Editor | Alan Rusbridger | Striking a balance
Hacked Off | Martin Moore | The danger of power

The post The Leveson Inquiry: Do we need a free press? appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Latest revelations on the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal puts the police under the spotlight, says Brian Cathcart. The Met should be taken off the case and the investigation reopened

We like to think that a good detective leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of truth. In the Met’s phone-hacking investigation of 2006 it now seems that, on the contrary, almost every stone was left unturned, no matter how suspicious it looked. Miller has now turned one over all on her own, and what it reveals looks very bad for Scotland Yard.

Her claim document states that when the Met arrested the NoW hacker Glen Mulcaire in 2006, among the documents they seized were the following:

— the number, account number, pin number and password for not just one but three successive mobile telephones she used

— the times and dates of a number of mobile phone calls she made

— the contents of two voicemail messages left on her mobile phone

— the mobile phone number, pin number and password of her friend Archie Keswick

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Jude Law and of his personal assistant

— the confidential mobile phone numbers of Miller’s publicist and the address and home telephone number of Miller’s mother

Just a reminder: voicemail hacking is illegal and all these materials were in the hands of a man employed full time by a national newspaper.

This impressive file should surely have been enough, you might think, to arouse the suspicions of even the least inquisitive of detectives. But no. No detective saw fit to phone or visit Miller either to alert her that she might have been a victim of a campaign of illegal intrusion or to inquire whether she had anything to say.

On the evidence of the claim document, if detectives had contacted her they would immediately have been presented with another impressive bundle of evidence. She could have told them about new messages that mysteriously appeared in her voicemail queue as messages already accessed, about messages that disappeared altogether, about her concerns in 2005-06 that her phone was being hacked, and about stories that appeared in the News of the World which she could not account for.

If detectives had then examined some back numbers of the News of the World, they would have found at least 11 articles relating to Miller whose origins they might have investigated in a phone-hacking inquiry.

But there was no investigation of Miller’s case at all. The Met contented themselves with a prosecution which implicated only one reporter at the News of the World — Clive Goodman — and left the rest of the organisation untouched. The offices of the paper for which Mulcaire did his hacking were never raided. No journalist other than Goodman was even questioned.

Worse, the Met sat on the Miller information. The claim document hints at the effect of hacking on Miller — her personal distress, her suspicions of close friends, her repeated changes of phone, her sense of being exposed. But the Met did not tell her what it knew.

She has had to go to court to secure documents giving her that information, and the Met released it with the greatest possible reluctance — just as it is currently employing every legal means to prevent many others from finding out whether they were hacked.

When the Commons select committee on the media looked at all this last year (and, to declare an interest, I was an adviser) it criticised in blunt terms the Met’s failure to even question three News of the World journalists — Neville Thurlbeck, Greg Miskiw and Ross Hindley aka Hall — in connection with a very simple paper trail of phone hacking evidence.

At that time, the Met’s position in this scandal appeared to be a secondary one, though very serious — it had conducted a bad investigation and failed to get to the bottom of the affair. The picture is now much darker than that.

Much fuller disclosure of the Mulcaire documents is now required, so that everyone who was targeted knows about it. And the Met needs to answer a lot of questions about why it failed to investigate the News of the World in a proper and timely fashion. At the very least, the force should be removed from all contact with the case and with the evidence, and a reinvestigation should be undertaken by outsiders.

Finally, it is worth noting that Miller’s claim document contains the strong suggestion that at least three more people associated with her have a case to sue the News of the World. About 20 people are already suing or are about to sue. For the newspaper too, it’s definitely not over.

Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here and here

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on twitter at @BrianCathcart

The post Phone hacking: Questions to answer appeared first on Index on Censorship.