Posted on 10/24/2010 8:24:16 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Scotland Yard's famous Vice Squad, which deals with prostitution and other aspects of London's underworld, has changed its title to the rather less dynamic "Serious Crime Directorate 9: Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command", or SCD9 for short.
The explanation is one that would draw a robust response from DCI Hunt, the old-school detective from BBC One's Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes.
Metropolitan Police sources said the switch had been ordered in part because the word "vice" was thought to have negative "connotations".
It reflects a growing trend by law enforcement agencies to treat prostitutes as victims rather than as offenders.
Over the decades the Vice Squad have led some of Met's most celebrated cases. Its detectives had dealings with Ronnie and Reggie Kray when the gangster twins moved into running nightclubs in the 1960s.
The Profumo affair, which threatened to topple Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, also involved officers from Vice.
After Christine Keeler, the London call girl, was exposed as having had affairs with both John Profumo, the war secretary, and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet attache, her friend Stephen Ward was charged by police with living off immoral earnings.
It was the Vice Squad that led the prosecution of Cynthia Payne, the "Luncheon Voucher Madam", whose south London brothel catering for older men was raided in 1978.
She was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, and her life inspired the 1987 feature film Personal Services, starring Julie Walters.
Alan Moss, a police historian and former Met chief superintendent, said: "The jargon of modern policing, with all the numbers and letters, is confusing for the public and probably for people in the police.
"I think the names of different squads should bear the name of what they do, and the crime they are trying to combat."
The Vice Squad
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I wonder is the incompetent inspector Lestrade is still working for them.
Political correctness is absurd. Yet it is such a strong force in today’s world.
Our own government does this too. So many Christmas parades and celebrations have deleted the word “Christmas” from the titles. The war on terror is an “overseas contingency operation”. We can’t talk about “Islamic terror” under this administration. There are endless pressures to change nicknames of sports teams which are named for Indian tribes.
I guess the point is that, in spite of how absurd some of these things sound, after an initial period of discussion of how stupid this gets, the changes demanded by political correctness stay, and politically correct names and descriptions become the only allowed expressions.
If their main occupation is now suppressing human trafficking and sex slavery (the real sort, not the BDSM role-play), rather than picking up what used to be called “women of easy virtue” willingly offering their “services” for remuneration, it’s not political correctness, but honesty, to change the name.
"Its detectives had dealings with Ronnie and Reggie Kray when the gangster twins moved into running nightclubs in the 1960s."
"The Profumo affair, which threatened to topple Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, also involved officers from Vice."
Unlike "homicide", "robbery", and all the other things the police deal with.
You can count on the UK to always be one step ahead of the USA
in becoming a destroyed nation.
Both, however, are about to reach their climax.
I guess "Stopping Commercial Sex Workers from Earning a Legitimate Living Squad" didn't lightly trip off the tongue.
sounds so much better....
"Those who control language, control minds." - - - - Ayn Rand
yitbos
“SCD9 Bite Me?”
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