BBC Gives Platform To Dodgy Copper's Musings

Remember Andy Hayman? He was the former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner who was criticised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission for misleading senior officers, by failing to tell them that Jean Charles de Menezes was not a wanted suicide bomber but an innocent man.

In 2006, Hayman was forced to apologise to two of my neighbours who were freed without charge after an anti-terror raid at Forest Gate led to one of them being shot. He was also found to have conducted an "unlawful" investigation into one of his own colleagues, Met police superintendent Ali Dizaei, included tapping Dizaei's phones. And then, in 2007, he was forced to resign after reports that he was facing an investigation into his expenses claims.

Hardly the ideal candidate to pronounce on the future of policing, you might think. And yet yesterday saw the first part of Hayman's three-part series on Policing Britain on BBC Radio 4. A article trailing the series appeared in yesterday's Times.

The programmes include a rogues gallery of current and former Met and ACPO grandees: Sir Hugh Orde, Denis O'Connor, Gloucestershire's Chief Constable Tim Brain - and the Met's Chris Allison, who lied to the BBC's Panorama programme in July by claiming that protesters were not prevented by police from leaving the Climate Camp protest on 1 April.

Whatever a former officer as tarnished as Hayman has to say policing in Britain should carry about as much weight as a the views of an irate cabbie. So why give him a BBC radio series?