Cops found guilty of gross misconduct will automatically be sacked automatically under new rules to drive up standards
Policing minister says it is 'vital only those fit to wear uniform are serving public'
ROTTEN COPS AXE Cops found guilty of gross misconduct will automatically be sacked automatically under new rules to drive up standards
POLICE officers found guilty of gross misconduct will automatically be sacked under new rules to drive up standards.
It comes after 56 of the 563 cops judged to breached rules to that level last year were still allowed to keep their jobs.
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Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson
Credit: Alamy
The new legislation from May 28 will also make serious criminal offences such as rape and GBH automatically amount to gross misconduct under law.
Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said: 'We place a huge amount of faith and trust in the police officers we see in our communities.
'And it is vital that only those fit to wear the uniform are serving the public.
'We cannot let the majority of officers, who are brave and committed to keeping us safe, be tarnished by the few who commit serious criminality or gross misconduct.
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'They, and the public, deserve certainty those unfit to serve will be dismissed.'
The new laws follows last month's announcement that officers who fail background checks will be sacked automatically.
Victims' Commissioner Baroness Newlove said: 'Today's changes are a welcome and necessary step toward restoring public trust - and reaffirming the values policing must uphold.
'Too often and for far too long, red flags have been missed, minimised or ignored.'
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Isabelle Younane, of Women's Aid, also said it was 'essential' for women to be able to trust reporting their experiences of abuse to police officers, and that they are not speaking to someone accused of misconduct relating to violence against women and girls themselves.
She added: 'These reforms, alongside those announced previously, are positive first steps to improving women's trust in the police.
'We continue to urge for further action to ensure that no individuals with the misogynistic attitudes and beliefs that underpin VAWG (violence against women and girls) are eligible to join.'
Police officer has SEX with drunk stranger he helped home as To Catch a Copper lifts lid on the 'real' Line of Duty
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Police officers found guilty of gross misconduct will automatically be sacked under new rules (stock picture)
Credit: Getty
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
Scottish Sun
11 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Read Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner's sick letter in full – including chilling ‘no body' gloat
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A LETTER written by prime Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner has been exposed, with the sex fiend goading cops by saying: 'Is there a body? No, no no.' The German paedophile bragged in the bombshell letter that cops do not have the evidence to back their accusations against him in the Madeleine investigation. 12 Christian Brueckner letter in which he brags about police never being able to pin the case on him 12 Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner arrives in court in Braunschweig, Germany last year Credit: Dan Charity 12 Madeleine McCann who has been missing since 2007 Credit: Alamy He wrote: 'It is the important questions, the decisive questions that can never be answered. 'Was I or my vehicle clearly seen near the crime scene on the night of the crime? 'Is there DNA evidence of me at the crime scene? Are there DNA traces of the injured party in my vehicle? 'Are there other traces/DNA carriers of the injured party in my possession? Photos?" Brueckner - named as a Madeleine suspect for five years without charge — has also revealed a creepy knowledge in letters of how the German legal system works in his favour. He wrote: 'You know, of course, that in Germany you don't have to prove your innocence as a suspect, but that the public prosecutor's office has to prove that you are clearly guilty. 'Even the slightest doubt leads to an acquittal, if there is a court hearing at all.' Brueckner even claims the case against him is built on 'purchased witnesses' and reveals his awareness of his global notoriety. He wrote: 'Now, my path is paved with misjudgements, so to speak, but from now on the whole world is watching. 'Not even the Braunschweig regional court will now dare to make an obvious misjudgement. 'Even if an attempt is currently being made to create a shocking overall picture of me through purchased witnesses, it is the important questions, the decisive questions that can never be answered with 'yes'. Madeleine McCann cops call off search as trawl of Brueckner's 'rat run' turns up nothing "And, not to forget, is there a body/corpse? All no, no no.' He adds: 'You don't have to be a realist like me to predict that the accusations made against me will not hold up and that the investigation will be dropped.' In another letter seen by The Sun, Brueckner described how he used his drifter lifestyle to avoid detection. He wrote: 'Do you know that I was a drug dealer at that time in 2007? Investigators know this. 'I bought marijuana in Spain and sold it on beaches in the Algarve. 'I was never caught by the police because I followed a few principles. 'If possible, only drive during the day so that my battered hippie bus doesn't attract so much attention, only drive the necessary and most importantly, never provoke the police.' He added: 'Together with my dog and a lover at the time I enjoyed the 'temporary hippie life'.' 12 The vile letter emerged as officers desperate to find a forensic link to him flew back to Germany after a new three-day search in Portugal 12 German prosecutors are convinced of the predator's guilt 12 Police searching various sites in and around the resort of Praia da Luz Credit: Dan Charity 12 A criminal police investigator inspects an abandoned home in the fresh Madeleine search Credit: Reuters He also whinges he has been framed so he can be scapegoated over the Madeleine case. He wrote: 'Right from the start they plotted a miscarriage of justice to make me vanish into thin air. And now half the world knows why.' And he adds: 'I am not exaggerating when I say that 80 per cent of what I have heard from the reports is not true. 'A large proportion of these lies are clearly being spread by the investigating authorities. My words are directed at those who are taking this seriously and are not laughing about it. 'Those who want to understand how brutal the German justice system is in its attempts to hammer through its own law, even if nothing is true.' The vile letters emerged as officers desperate to find a forensic link to him flew back to Germany after a new three-day search in Portugal this week. Scores of cops painstakingly combed scrubland near Praia da Luz with JCBs, radar and fingertip searches, believing the tot or her pyjamas could have been buried there. German prosecutors are convinced of Brueckner's guilt. It comes just weeks after a Sun investigation was broadcast on Channel 4 that revealed bombshell evidence found at the suspect's lair. The disturbing evidence demonstrated Brueckner's obsession with young kids. We revealed he wrote horrifying fantasies about abducting and abusing a blonde toddler — and how this would leave him 'in paradise'. He also boasted in online forums about his desire to 'capture something small and use it for days'. Brueckner remains in prison in Germany where he is serving a seven year term for rape. The 48-year-old convicted paedophile faces having his hopes of being released from jail in September scuppered after reportedly being accused of new offences against prison guards behind bars. 12 A recent image of the barn 12 The barn in 2007 appearing to have a tent set up The latest search to find DNA or forensic links on the case appeared to have ended without success on Thursday. Police were seen taking fibres by hand while a hole was dug at the site of an apparent tent from around the time of Madeleine's disappearance. However, it was unclear whether the search had found anything with enough potential value to the case to be sent back to Germany for testing. Brueckner had already moved out of his cottage in Praia da Luz when three-year-old Madeleine, from Rothley, Leics, arrived with parents Gerry and Kate and her two-year-old twin siblings. He was living in his car, or wild camping in areas including this week's search site. Brueckner's letters "It is the important questions, the decisive questions that can never be answered. 'Was I or my vehicle clearly seen near the crime scene on the night of the crime? 'Is there DNA evidence of me at the crime scene? Are there DNA traces of the injured party in my vehicle? 'Are there other traces/DNA carriers of the injured party in my possession? Photos? 'And, not to forget, is there a body/corpse? All no, no no. 'You don't have to be a realist like me to predict that the accusations made against me will not hold up and that the investigation will be dropped. "You know, of course, that in Germany you don't have to prove your innocence as a suspect, but that the public prosecutor's office has to prove that you are clearly guilty. 'Even the slightest doubt leads to an acquittal, if there is a court hearing at all.' 'Now, my path is paved with misjudgements, so to speak, but from now on the whole world is watching. 'Not even the Braunschweig regional court will now dare to make an obvious misjudgement. 'Even if an attempt is currently being made to create a shocking overall picture of me through purchased witnesses, it is the important questions, the decisive questions that can never be answered with 'yes'. 'Do you know that I was a drug dealer at that time in 2007? Investigators know this. 'I bought marijuana in Spain and sold it on beaches in the Algarve. 'I was never caught by the police because I followed a few principles. 'If possible, only drive during the day so that my battered hippie bus doesn't attract so much attention, only drive the necessary and most importantly, never provoke the police. 'Together with my dog and a lover at the time I enjoyed the 'temporary hippie life'. 'Right from the start they plotted a miscarriage of justice to make me vanish into thin air. And now half the world knows why. 'I am not exaggerating when I say that 80 per cent of what I have heard from the reports is not true. 'A large proportion of these lies are clearly being spread by the investigating authorities. My words are directed at those who are taking this seriously and are not laughing about it. 'Those who want to understand how brutal the German justice system is in its attempts to hammer through its own law, even if nothing is true.' The seeming failure of longshot searches for any traces of Madeleine this week is the latest in a string of blows for the case. German authorities who maintain Madeleine is dead are racing to find a way to keep highly dangerous Brueckner behind bars after he was cleared of rape claims last year. He told this week he plans to 'hide' when he is released, as soon as September 17, taking hopes for the Madeleine case with him. The drifter was jailed in 2019, convicted of the 2005 rape of an American pensioner just streets from the Ocean Club, where the McCanns stayed in Praia da Luz. The Sun investigation aired on Channel 4 revealed the existence of computer hard drives which were vital in to persuading investigators of Madeleine's death. Our findings placed Breuckner at key Madeleine search location the Arades Dam, in Portugal. And a document puts him at the location — where he allegedly said 'she did not scream' as he discussed her with an associate. In the online message where he brags to another sicko that he really wanted to 'capture something small' he adds it would not matter 'if the evidence is destroyed afterwards'. German investigators last night remained hopeful British police might rejoin the investigation as an active inquiry. 12 One of the derelict and abandoned properties close to Praia da Luz, Portugal Credit: PA 12 Police searching various sites in and around the resort Credit: Dan Charity
Metro
13 hours ago
- Metro
Retired vicar admits role in 'Eunuch Maker' extreme body modification ring
A retired vicar has admitted taking part in an extreme body modification ring run by a man calling himself the Eunuch Maker. Reverend Geoffrey Baulcomb, 79, pleaded guilty to GBH with intent after using a pair of scissors to carry out a surgical procedure on a man's penis in January 2020. He was captured in a nine-second video performing the makeshift op, which involved the enlarging the opening of a man's urethra. Baulcomb previously admitted to distributing an indecent photo of a child in March 2020 and three counts of making indecent images of children on or before December 2022. He also pleaded guilty to three counts of possessing extreme pornographic images, amounting to 195 images. The images are linked to the self-styled 'Eunuch Maker' Marius Gustavson, who mutilated paying customers and streamed it online. Norwegian Gustavson, who had his own penis cut off, a nipple removed and his leg frozen so it had to be amputated, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years. His penis was found in a drawer in his home almost four years after it had been amputated. Baulcomb was arrested in connection with the incident in December 2022. He was ordained as a priest in 1970 and worked in Chichester, West Sussex, according to the Church of England website. Judge Nigel Lickley KC granted Baulcomb conditional bail, ordering him not to attend any Church of England premises or functions and to have no contact with children under the age of 18. More Trending Prosecutor Caroline Carberry said: 'This defendant is not deemed a flight risk by the police in this case. 'He has been on bail for a really long period of time now.' The judge told the defendant the seriousness of the GBH offence meant he would receive 'a custodial sentence of some length'. Baulcomb will be sentenced at the same court on September 1. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Married teacher posed as boy, 14, to get young girls to send him explicit photos MORE: 'Stupid' Apple Pay prank plagues commuters on London Tube MORE: Three men appear in court accused of arson attacks on properties linked to Keir Starmer
