On a serious point though, I think there is some value in purely investigative work by the police even when there's no prospect of a successful prosecution. Unusual cases might lead to better insights into things that affect many more people: revealing well-hidden criminal gangs for instance. Even if the police can't pin the guilt on a specific suspect or accidental cause, the result of an investigation might simply be better public awareness of a risk, which is a good thing.
Simply knowing that every 'mysterious' death will be thoroughly and exhaustively investigated is a massive deterrent to just wiping out your enemies as happens so commonly in many places that have no form of homicide / cold case department.
The job of the police is to preserve order and accord. That includes investigating, thorougly, mysteries, especially mysteries that involve people jumping off balconies. To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
Seems odd to suggest so firmly and decisively 'oh well too bad so sad, not a police matter, let's move on!' especially given the way the other relevant parties are described to have behaved.
I also think that it would be overreach for the police to do this kind of thing. The UK is not a police state (in theory at least). The police have no business investigating anyone who they don’t suspect of having committed a crime. In this case, of course, there were reasonable grounds for suspicion and so there was an initial investigation. However, once it became clear that there was no realistic prospect of proving that anyone in the apartment was legally responsible for the young man’s death, there was nothing for the police to do.
It's easy to get sucked in by the fascinating story told in the article and forget that legally speaking almost everything turns on the last few minutes before the man jumped – about which we know almost nothing. If he didn't jump in response to an imminent threat to his life, then good luck making any kind of criminal case.
>To avoid a scenario where 'clever people' wander around the country leaving a trail of bodies in their wake because they keep covering their tracks effectively.
In this case the only person who could realistically be guilty of murder or manslaughter (Sharma) is now dead. So we need not fear that he will kill again.
- misgendering tweets are more important than unexplained deaths
- police would be less starved if they allocated their priorities better
Using a software dev analogy. It's like each case is a feature ticket, and then constantly grooming the backlog so any feature related to say "GDPR" is marked as too-large and pushed to the bottom.
Rather, case-files should be completed FIFO with very clear rules and thresholds for when it can't be meaningfully resolved. Same goes for prosecutorial discretion.
In summation, commentary from my side: "WTF is wrong with these people, I'm surprised society hasn't fallen apart."
The UK is going to fall apart because the level of corruption has reached the scale that nobody who's competent and prepared to do a good job (i.e. moral people who see doing a good and thorough job as a core value) wants to put up with it any more. It's too visible.
I studied Computer Science in the UK and the very first job I got (in central London providing service to names you'd certainly recognise) was with this absolute cowboy outfit managed service provider that was providing about 1/4 of the services it claimed to provide. Backups? Yes, you're getting billed for them, no, they aren't happening. Hot spares? See above. Redundancy? See above. On call? See above. The lying was endemic and it was gross. I developed a chronic drinking problem while working there and I really do think working/being in an atmosphere of bullshit affects you in some sort of karmic way.
The UK is going to fail if they don't drastically change trajectory because everyone who isn't gross is going to leave, and the tap of infinite numbers of exploitable Poles has been turned off.
I think it’s fair to call your second bullet point a ‘hot take’. Police funding was hit hard by austerity and the effects of that are still with us. It’s not credible or evidence-based to attribute the overall shortage of resources to overpolicing of tweets (however annoying and stupid that may be considered in itself).
And while you're correct that the article you linked is a bullshit waste of time, it probably represents around .005% of the forces allotted time in a year.
There is no big gotcha here, other than the reality that politics is a part of policing.