“…..Zalikha Ahmed, director of the Apna Haq refuge, told the report’s researchers: ‘We don’t visit the station when certain Asian officers are on because some of them are perpetrators and one of them said that he would not arrest someone who used force on his wife.’ A worker in a women’s group in the north, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, added she had been ‘appalled’ by an Asian ‘chief inspector who had offered to help a family track a girl down’…….”

If anyone’s got a problem with evidence they should make a complaint.

There’s not even that many Asian police men and women.

I guess the Sufi Council will suffer from the same legitimacy issues as all these other (un)representative councils like the MCB. Which Sufis actually asked the people on the council to represent them?

Although I see no problem with promoting the mystical side which has long existed in Islam…

What do the NSS have to say about West Mids police, and is it just about that particular force?

This is just the sort of thing I mentioned on Rumbold’s post that blogs are well placed to cover.

The Centre For Social Cohesion (regardless of one’s view of their politics) published that info months ago, and because of the way everyone is conditioned to respond to that kind of report we will all probably have had a look at it and thought ‘that’s terrible, hope those things gets sorted’.

The MSM hasn’t got the time, space and (presently) the inclination to work on the problems identified in the report point-by-point. They can highlight the PUBLISHING of the report, and some key points (usually the most grotesque ones) but that’s it, and then it’s all quiet until the next report, or launch, or ‘honour’ killing.

That report and others like it (whatever happened to ‘A Choice By Right’?- Google it) basically provide a list of leads and partially answered questions which make perfect material for this kind of blogging.

Tackling cohesion and human rights issues by publishing reports and then looking at the problems as a whole tends to create a sense of helplessness. Where do you even start? Let’s look to the government to sort this out…

It’s a top-down approach.

But say more bloggers started to take a laser-like approach and target individual issues, as you are doing here… It will quickly begin to de-stabilise a lot of the blockages in the system, especially if authority figures in each small sphere are named and shamed on the net.

The MSM won’t do this off their own back. But you can be sure that once a couple changes are effected by bloggers, they would start to sit up and take notice in greater detail.

There is no good reason why nick Cohen shouldn’t be referencing yours or others’ original investigative reporting in these areas.

But apart from that it’s a very good article and I think you are absolutley right there is something wrong with WMP. I back the National Secular Society for a full public enquiry in to WMP, not just for this high profile case but WMP’s general attitude with regards to social cohesion.