Psychic Detectives

Evening all. Two jolly queer stories this week from Dock Green.

Firstly, Police in Lampeter spent £20,000 following up tips from psychics in a murder investigation. The suicide verdict was questioned when mediums told the police that a lion, a horse and a man called Tony Fox were important. So off went the Boys In Blue round all the local pubs with Lion or Horse in the name.

The police were told that the dead man's ghost had been in touch to say he was strangled by gangsters and forced to drink petrol and bleach. Oddly enough, a second postmortem found no trace of either substance. Tip for mediums: don't make claims that can be disproved in five minutes with a scalpel.

The Dyfed-Powys police said they followed up the leads 'to reassure the family that the full circumstances of the death were as they appeared. Police have a responsibility to the deceased, their family and the public to investigate all deaths thoroughly'.

Up to a point, lads. Going against post mortem evidence does not say a great deal for their trust in forensics either. The men and women in white coats can't be exactly delighted.

The dead man had a row with his girlfriend and local news added that 'Their relationship had deteriorated since the birth of their son Luca in 2005, and Miss Edwards, 23, said her former partner had developed bouts of anger. She said Mr Assaf, who had spent six months in jail for assaulting her in 2006, was addicted to amphetamines'.

Does this make the police more or less gullible? Were they fooled by an alleged psychic or were they just doing their job? Could the mediums have been giving them a real tip-off based on facts they were trying to dress up as knowledge from Beyond the Veil for who knows what motive? The police said they had to be sure no third party was involved and someone decided this was worth twenty grand of police time.

We will never know at what point in the mystic revelations the police decided they'd been had or, in their terms, decided that no third party was involved.

A police source commented: 'We are becoming a laughing stock'.

Well, yes.

Then, a few days later, there was another story, this time about Alan Power, a police trainer with Greater Manchester Police, who is going to court after being sacked because he believes psychics can help in police investigations.

Judge Russell at the Manchester Employment Tribunal said 'I am satisfied that the claimant's beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society and have sufficient cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance to fall into the category of a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Regulations'.

He is referring to the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003. This is the same law used by Tim Nicholson when he argued that green beliefs are equal to religious beliefs recently.

There's respect for someone's right to believe any old nonsense and then there's taking that nonsense seriously in the workplace, which requires quite a leap especially in a job where lives and safety are at stake.

The judge said that a later hearing would have to establish whether Power was 'dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others'.

Power has belonged to a Spiritualist church for 30 years. He told the hearing that he believed in psychics and their 'usefulness to police investigations'. He is to call a psychic he has known since 1980 to testify that his association with the psychic has proved 'detrimental' to his police career.

Greater Manchester Police are going to argue at an appeal that Judge Russell 'erred in law' because Power did not originally claim to have a religious belief, only that he had a belief in psychics and their usefulness to the Force.

They must be aware that their public reputation is at stake - something Dyfed-Powys police might like to have considered.

On the one hand, is there really any difference between believing that the dead can be contacted and that (fill in any mainstream religious belief of your choice here). If the latter is 'worthy of respect in a democracy', why not the former? What is the difference between praying to a supernatural being to guide you in your investigation, solving the case and ascribing it to His Wisdom and bringing in a psychic? Both are world views based on faith not science, evidence or any testable claim. Both often involve post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, confirmation bias, seeing patterns where there are none and a whole gamut of logical fails, not to mention leaps of imagination.

On the other hand, Manchester police do appear to be showing a lot more common sense than the Dyfed-Powys police. The fact that Power wants to prove his beliefs have been detrimental to his career means that he has form, that they have known about him for a while and he went too far.

If Power wins his case, then the floodgates will be open for people with any kind of belief to refuse to do certain work because it is against those beliefs, to bring those beliefs into the workplace, demand concessions or privileges and to appeal if they get sacked. As long as they can prove they didn't just make up a belief on the spot because they fancied a day off, they could have a case.

Two incidents of psychics and police do not make a trend, but it would be interesting to know just how many members of the Force have some sort of supernatural belief that they bring to work with them. There is a Christian Police Association , a Muslim Police Association, a Sikh group and a Pagan Police group.

The pagans wanted to take the Solstices and Halloween off and Hertfordshire police have appointed two pagan police chaplains. A member of Staffordshire Police is a practising Wiccan who has offered to do spells to help his colleagues.

In the light of all this, does using the dead to grass up the living seem so extreme?

UPDATE: 25 NOVEMBER 2009

Power's case has now been heard and the judge found against him.

The tribunal heard that Power was playing the part of an arrested shoplifter during a police training exercise near Warrington in 2004. But, according to the report, 'he became visibly aroused during the frisking process'.

A sergeant from Merseyside police saw this and decided not to use him again. Cheshire Constabulary made the same decision because of his 'inappropriate behaviour'.

So the perp had form.

The information came to light in October 2008 after Power, who denied the allegations, got a job as a special trainer with Greater Manchester Police. He was sacked three weeks later with the force citing his 'current work in the psychic field' as a reason.

It was also alleged that he had handed out inappropriate research materials to Merseyside officers about the World Trade Centre attacks.

The GMP said "The matter has never been about Mr Power's beliefs and we vehemently deny any claims he was discriminated against on those or any other grounds".

So first time round he was sacked for a stiffy, then either for his psychic activity or for handing out leaflets. Or possibly his pony tail. The evidence is not exactly clear.

Either way, this particular psychic will no longer be using his invisible friends as police informants or copping a feel-up on the job.

More importantly perhaps, citing discrimination against your beliefs is becoming an increasingly tenuous response to being fired.

UPDATE 26 November

This post appeared on the Friends of the National Secular Society Facebook page:

I'm the sister of the man in this story. I'd love to say lots more, but then he'd take me to court too! All I can say is that I'm very very glad he lost!!!

Land of my fathers (and mothers)

Off to the West Country for a few days to paddle in my gene pool and catch up with friends. After years of exploring the area, we still manage to find oddness. We decided not to queue for hours to see the Banksy exhibition and headed towards Portishead. The picture above is from Oakham Teasures, a vast collection of retail and household memorabilia, mostly from the first half of the twentieth century - and tractors. We did a fair bit of pointing and laughing.

The Gorge was created by two giant brothers, Goram and Vincent, trying to impress a local girl called Avona. Or by millenia of water wearing away rock. I prefer the first version. The bridge was designed by Brunel, and may or may not have impressed local women although there is a story of one who jumped off and was saved when her enormous skirt ballooned out and she drifted gently down - presumably to get stuck in the mud.

The next day, we headed for Wales. Although my roots are almost all in the West Country (I am descended from an enormous bunch of yokels), my great grandfather George The Bigamist moved to South Wales from Bath between wives.

Raglan Castle was begun around 1435 by Sir William ap Thomas. In the Civil War, it was a Royalist stronghold until Sir Thomas Fairfax battered it into submission in 1646. In honour of this event, which took place almost to the day we were there (August 19), we bought some little wooden swords from the gift shop and re-enacted the battle on the tower and across the bridge. Our armour and weaponry were of course wholly authentic, as were our battle cries of 'Ouch' and 'I can't see where I'm going', although we didn't get round to deciding who was a Roundhead, who a Cavalier.

Then to the Brecon Beacons where we tried to find the way up the Sugarloaf but the whole area is very badly signposted, presumably to confuse English invaders. It worked, even though one of us is technically Welsh.

The local sheep are very timid things who ran away as soon as they caught sight of us, unlike the much feistier Quantock sheep who stand their ground and glare.

There is a lot of bracken in the Brecons and I did briefly think about snakes. The wood of rowan trees (pictured) was used for druids' staffs, dowsing rods and magic wands. Rowans also protect against witches and, judging by the number of them, the Brecons must be an entirely witch-free area. In among the bracken were wild bilberries, similar to blueberries. We ate a few, picking them from slopes the sheep were less likely to have peed on. The Raglan Castle gift shop had expensive paper made from recycled sheep poo, which raises questions such as - who came up with that idea, who collected enough of it to make paper and - why?

On Sunday we drove past the queue for Banksy, which was still enormous, and walked around the Bristol Docks.

A reproduction of the Matthew was sailing round. This was the boat on which Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) crossed the Atlantic in 1497 with just 18 crew. It's a dauntingly small boat for such a big ocean but he made it and landed in America by accident as he was looking for the North West Passage to India. In 2008 this epic journey was commemorated when the new shopping centre was named Cabot's Circus. Head into the unknown, risk life and limb, battle with scurvy and high seas and give your name to the home of a huge branch of Primark.

At my parents' house in a village outside Bristol, my mother announced that she had made eighty pounds of jam so far. The local economy revolves around people giving and receiving jam for favours and is a yokel equivalent of primate grooming rituals.