Remember Undercover Mosque, the investigation in Channel 4’s Dispatches strand? Ofcom’s decision in respect of Undercover Mosque throws the ball firmly back into the court of West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
This was their statement from back in August 2007:
[Assistant Chief Constable] Anil Patani for West Midlands Police said: “As a result of our initial findings, the investigation was then extended to include issues relating to the editing and portrayal of the documentary.
“The priority for West Midlands Police has been to investigate the documentary and it’s making with as much rigour as the extremism the programme sought to portray.”
The police investigation concentrated on three speakers and their comments in the programme. CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] reviewing lawyer Bethan David considered 56 hours of media footage of which only a small part was used in the programme.
She said: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.
“The CPS has demonstrated that it will not hesitate to prosecute those responsible for criminal incitement. But in this case we have been dealing with a heavily edited television programme, apparently taking out of context aspects of speeches, which, in their totality, could never provide a realistic prospect of any convictions.”
To give you some idea of the depths of competence plumbed by ACC Patani’s investigation, this is one of the sequences the West Midlands Police submitted to Ofcom:
Abdul Basit … criticises the Muslim who was a member of the British Army and was killed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. He denounces newspapers for calling him a hero and says that the real hero was the “one who separated his head from his shoulders”.
The Ofcom report notes [my italics]:
The WMP accepted that this section was broadcast as it appeared in the undercover footage.
WMP acknowledged this quote from Abdul Basit’s speech is an unedited and direct quote from the speech – despite including this sequence in its complaint to Ofcom. Having viewed the untransmitted footage, it is clear that this quote is unedited and in context.
In the light of the Ofcom findings, questions should surely be asked of Assistant Chief Constable Patani (and CPS reviewing lawyer Bethan David).
Among them – what exactly are policing priorities in the West Midlands? And given what anyone who listened to Undercover Mosque heard, just what has to be said for the police and the prosecutors to act?
The reason we have a jury system is to allow the sense of ordinary members of the public to be brought to bear on such issues.
Instead we have an extraordinary investigation led by a senior officer who chose to ignore the extremist bile spilling out of a community he was supposed to protect, and instead targeted the journalists who had brought the problem to the attention of the public.
Patani, of course, knows all about Dispatches. When he was involved in an industrial tribunal which documented racism in Nottinghamshire CID, the case was dramatised by Dispatches. He received £5,000 and was promoted to acting inspector.
He also knows all about the media. In 2001, Norman Tebbit described an action Patani brought ten years after that case:
Mr Anil Patani, the acting Chief Superintendent of Police in Nottingham, claims he is a victim of racial discrimination because his swift rise to such a senior position might cause his colleagues to think he had been favoured owing to his Asian origins.
Patani lost that action after being roundly condemned in the media. Doubtless that experience failed to dent the probity of this selfless public servant.
But if you ever wondered what price society pays for hatred (name your grounds – race, religion etc.), it isn’t measured only in the misery inflicted on its victims. It’s also weighed out in corporate cowardice in the face of mediocrity and appeasement in the face of extremism.
Time for the WMP and CPS to give public account of their conduct and restore some confidence.