For five years firearms enquiry officer Maurice Allen was able to trade in guns being handed in for destruction.
On Friday Allen and another officer who also traded guns were given suspended jail sentences, but the trial judge branded firearms control within Durham Police as "lax and chaotic".
With video:
A special BBC Inside Out programme reveals how customers regularly called in to police stations to buy unwanted weapons.
Wonderful, isn't it? When pinned down, the Durham police bigshot boils it all down to "Our procedures weren't as tight as they should have been." Nice excuse for illegally and openly dealing in firearms in police stations, isn't it?
2 comments:
OK,
Found the episode on I Player
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t7whh
but it won't play outside UK.
Now to find a Proxy server in the UK.
Still haven't found a UK proxy server that works.
That twat gave a couple of folk who I know sleepless nights when they were renewing their firearm certificates. perhaps he was looking for stock. I don't know.
The cops selling certainly gives them an incentive to press folks even harder than usual to "surrender" their property which they are at liberty to call a dealer to come collect and they get payed for it. The cops will hardly ever tell anyone that of course... Much rather destroy (or steal) valuable personal posessions.
There was something about the register going missing from the police station.
A now deceased dealer who I knew from a different county was burgled and his register stolen. The cops in his area had the attitude that it was up to him to prove it had been stolen rather than him disposing of it himself to hide possible misdeeds
(sort of, we don't know if you've done anything wrong; now prove your innocence).
Ahh, the joys of a registration scheme.
Post a Comment