What would Gene Hunt say?
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 as well.
"I think the names of different squads should bear the name of what they do, and the crime they are trying to combat."
Read more at The Telegraph
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