Jackson: Cop-out allows Ali to scale Dizaei heights

Feb 18 2010

IT isn’t as exciting as it looks in the movies.

Becoming a police officer is not about being the ‘maverick’ who has to hand in his badge, then go it alone after his partner is shot down in a blaze of bullets.

In real police work, there is more likely to be a blaze of paperwork.

And becoming a Detective won’t turn you into Chief Inspector Morse, gliding through the Oxfordshire countryside, listening to Wagner, sipping real ale and solving the odd crime along the way.

Like most jobs, policing is often dull and disheartening, with few opportunities for heroism.

But there is one cop who might just have made a better world for all of us.

I like to think of him as the accidental hero – Ali Dizaei.

Not that he wanted to improve the lot of his fellow men.

Unlike John Thaw’s alter-ego, Dizaei doesn’t have a moral compass.

No Morse code of ethics for him.

Instead, he was one of the most dubious police officers you could ever have the misfortune to meet.

The Iranian-born cop got four years for “fitting up” a young Iraqi to whom he owed £600.

It was hardly a surprising conclusion to a controversial career.

For years Dodgy Diz wriggled out of one damning allegation after another.

At one point, Scotland Yard secretly assigned more than 100 officers to investigate fears that he was taking backhanders for visas, visiting call girls and abusing drugs.

The spying continued for 13 months.

That wasn’t all. Dizaei accused white colleagues of posting him hate mail, and lied about them vandalising his BMW.

The smashed car allegation led to him being charged. But in 2003 he was cleared at the Old Bailey.