Recent Book: The Supreme Sacrifice: Murdered on Duly
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X6103400511 |
| Date | 01 September 1961 |
| Published date | 01 September 1961 |
| Author | H. V. D. Halle-It |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
mechanic. Or, again, it scarcely clarifies the issue when Mr. Hails,
after referring somewhat tendentiously to police officers as having
"established" a practice of appearing as advocates, and as paying
lip-service to the law by being shown as informant, pretends to
explain this in terms of the inability of early police officersto read
or write. Despite the seven pages and a half which Mr. Hails devotes
to an attempt to persuade his readers that they are doing something
in some way wrong when they conduct prosecutions, he knows as
well as I do that he cannot succeed in qualifying the perfectly clear
and simple provisions of the Magistrates' Courts Act and Rules of
1952. Arguments such as these reduce what is an important and
serious subject to the farcical level of a shipyard dispute about who
should drill holes in what.
What has to be done, therefore, is to strike a reasonable, just and
proper balance between the confticting factors, in the interests of
justice. Perhaps one of the most important of these factors is the
flew of the magistrates themselves. Proflded that police ofticers
undertaking this interesting and challenging duty manage, by paying
attention to training and experience, to do it fairly and capably,
it
seems improbable that the courts will demand muchchange in a duty
permitted by law, and graced by practice.
CHRISTOPHER
WILLIAMS.
Beeent
Books
THE
SUPREME SACRIFICE
BELTON
CoBB: Murdered on Duty. W. H. Allen. 18s.
IT WAS
AN
unhappy coincidence
that
this
book
should appear at a time when
once again the murder of British police officers was in the news.
In an index, the
author
lists 95 policemen who have been killed on duty
between 1830
and
1960, and he has taken these figures from the files
of
T1uI
Times.
From
this total, he selects 26 and deals in some detail with
II.
The incidents related involve such well-known historical episodes as the
Cold
bath
Fields Riots, the Sidney Street Affair and among the murderers
dealt with are Browne and Kennedy, Craig and Bentley and, of course, Podola.
Whilst the risk
of
sudden death is one that is accepted by every police officer,
it is as well
that
the general public should be reminded of it. Each year since the
war the average has been one policeman murdered and this compares with a
total
of
eight in the 20 years between the wars. Strangely, this is a comparison
which does not appear to have occurred to Mr. Cobb and he is content to take
for comparison two periods of 65 years, before
and
after 1894. There were 61
killed in the first period and 34 in the latter.
From
this, he deduces
that"
the
number of killings have very noticeably
declined"
and ignores the more positive
post-war trend.
In a book obviously intended for the general reader, who is perhaps searching
for nothing more serious than a change from a diet of detective novels, it is
374 September-october
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