Sir Harry Smith QC

I’ve just been interviewing @Keir_Starmer for @BBCr4today who says he met the police officers who tasered the suspect in the Golders Green stabbing “I want everybody just to imagine what it might be like. You're trying to arrest someone who has already attacked two people and has no regard for life. We know that tasers were fired. I know from my own experience with the police, that there are only two shots in a taser, and once you've shot them, there's nothing left. There's a guy on the ground, he's got a rucksack on. And I don't know what was going through the mind of those officers, but if I was there, I'd be thinking, he's going to detonate something. He's going to blow me up and everybody around here. In those circumstances, I think you can quite see why what could have gone through their mind is, we need to do whatever we can to disable this guy." He added: "Now, when I then see Zak Polanski come out and retweet or support a criticism of that, I think it's disgraceful... He's not fit to lead any political party." Full interview on @bbcr4today tomorrow from 7am

SHE REPORTED 1,400 CHILDREN BEING RAPED. THEY INVESTIGATED HER. Jayne Senior @Jes123tia456 spent 14 years as manager of Risky Business, a Rotherham Council project for vulnerable young women. For 14 years she handed evidence of systematic child sexual exploitation to police and social services. Names. Dates. Patterns. A 42-page intelligence report. She built the jigsaw piece by piece. They shut down her programme. They told her the records were rubbish. They told her she was rocking the multicultural boat. They told her the children were consenting. Children. Ten years old. She risked prosecution to become the source for Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, whose 2012 investigations finally broke the story open to the nation. The Jay Report in 2014 confirmed what she had been screaming into the void since the late 1990s: at least 1,400 children had been abused in Rotherham. Jayne got an MBE in 2016. The council got reputational damage it spent years managing. The officers got their pensions. When she filed complaints with the IOPC about senior police officers who had done nothing, the watchdog warned her that if she kept going, she would be labelled a vexatious complainant and could face imprisonment. She kept going. Her complaint was eventually upheld in 2021. The report naming the officers was never published. South Yorkshire Police @SYPTweet rejected the watchdog's findings. No officers were named. No further action was taken. Someone did warn her the officers might sue her personally if she spoke about it publicly. She spoke about it publicly. This is what accountability looks like in Britain. A youth worker risks prison to protect children. The institutions that failed those children close ranks, bury the reports, and threaten the one person who kept records. The children were the problem, apparently. Not the men. Not the police. Not the council. The woman with the filing cabinet. Source: The Times @thetimes, @BBC, @guardian , @yorkshirepost, Jay Report 2014, IOPC Operation Amazon 2022