The Raoul Moat of Chelsea

Old and Busted: Barrister Mark Saunders was murdered by a police death squad for no reason at all.

The New Hotness: OK, maybe he was a violent drunk with a loaded weapon, but cops still suck

See, it's true - the rich are different. If this case had happened on a sink estate in Liverpool or Glasgow, he'd be 'Mark, who'? If only Raoul Moat had some blue blood, the press would be covering his musical choices too. 

Admittedly, there is a certain entertainment to be had in listening to the full range of chav scum clichés being trotted out by a bunch of pampered Metropolitan snobs, but screechy entitlement isn't attractive in any accent More to the point, after months of industrial-scale sliming by Saunder's charming family, we now find out that the Five-oh tried all but witch craft to avoid one of DI Drake's 'fatal outcomes'.

Then again, the rich might be different, but cop haters are all the same. They've got a new line of attack: they might not be able to actually prove the cops did anything wrong, but they should be allowed to slime individual officers anyway.

Actually, it's even better than that:

It's a cliche, but it is true: justice needs to be done and it needs to be seen to be done

Hello? We're having a whole inquest right here. We know exactly what everyone of the cops was doing during the siege.

It's precisely because the cop-hating freaks have come up empty that they now need to resort to trying to find out if Officer Brown is into the gay BDSM scene, Officer Smith has a cousin in jail or Officer Anderson's ex-wife thinks he's an absolute scumbag.

So for those of you keeping score at home: revealing the identities of convicted paedophiles in a given area leads to mob rule, but revealing the identities of police officers is a vital pillar of democracy.

Meanwhile, does this work both ways? In the spirit of openness, shouldn't activist weenies like Graef be forced to account for themselves? I don't have any solid 'evidence' that this guy has sex with farmyard animals, but I think his failure to account for his every waking minute over the last twenty years speaks for itself, right?

As it happens, it's a vital feature of not just British law, but all civilised jurisdictions, that you can only be charged with a specific crime, at a specific time. You can't be charged with being the type of dubious character who probably commits some kind of crime or other. To the point, Roger 'chicken shagger' Graef's sleazy suggestion that justice requires the personal lives of private citizens to be torn apart isn't just absurd, it's entirely lawless. The police officers concerned were either acting lawfully in this particular incident, or they were not, and no amount of shady sex games in their past will change that.

Still, I'm getting the hen humper's not really a guy for those tricky 'guilty/innocent' distinctions. In fact, I'm kind of seeing a theme running through his whole article:

These officers need to be held accountable - by name

Hey, isn't it strange how it's always the right-on libs who are ready to throw the whole 'due process' thing overboard when they want to victimise someone?

No, not really. Liberals are scum. What was I thinking?

Anyway, back to Rogering the livestock Graef:

The Government proposes to expand the use of restorative justice, in which offenders and victims meet to discuss the impact of the crime far beyond the rules of court....

In the case of this inquest, they should meet the friends and family of Mark Saunders and explain to them what they did and why they behaved as they did - and, most of all, hear first- hand the impact their actions have had.

Do you see what he did there? Not only have the officers concerned not been so much as charged with any offences, the repulsive Saunders clan are only victims in so far as one of their number suffered from the delusion that their power and privilege extended so far as to allow him to aim a loaded weapon at a police officer without consequences.

All of which means this is bunk:

Lawyers have always worried about such meetings, arguing that the police might feel obliged to apologise - and thereby open themselves up to litigation.

But I believe there should be qualified apologies, in which legal liability is set aside.

Apologise for what exactly? Exercising their common law right as citizens to use reasonable force to protect themselves? That's all they did - no magic police powers required. If a maniac points a loaded shotgun at you, you're quite within your rights to shoot them with your pistol - or, at least you could if you had a pistol, but somehow I don't see the left using this case to push 'concealed carry'.

Still and all, our friend from the hen house does a fine job of summing up the fraudulent nature of all the left's talk of justice. Their definition of justice is simply a vision of the courts as another venue to pursue class enemies. If the courts can't perform, then mob rule and smears will do just  fine.