Labour and the Tories are both proposing to take a nice shiny axe to police "bureaucracy" so that officers can stop anyone they like and search them, without even having to show reasonable suspicion. They also won’t have to fill in those tricky little forms which, apparently, take a whole seven minutes to complete (assuming the said officer can read and write, of course).
I’m sorry, what was that? Safeguards against abuse? No, there won’t be any of that thank you very much, nor any principle of personal liberty and the right to go about your business without official interference. Instead us luckless inhabitants of this fair isle will be at the whim of the boys and girls in blue, so watch out if you are black Asian look a bit dodgy, freedom is no longer your own.
What gets me about the approach of both parties to this is their myopic focus solely on the efficiency of the police force, seemingly without any consideration whatsoever of the massive potential for abuse by unscrupulous individuals in the police force (and they exist there, as they exist everywhere), as well as the inevitable alienation that will be caused as the ordinary person is demoted to slave to be called out and checked at will by their masters in the police.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Tristan Mills // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:38 pm
They completely miss the point.
I’m sure there is some paperwork which is unnecessary, but we need to have records of stops and reasons for them.
What next? Do away with having to get warrants for searches? They take time away from the real business of
harassingpolicing.2 Lee Griffin // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I know that I would quake in fear at the thought of having to fill out a foot long piece of paper.
What, that’s A4 you say? Doh!
3 Sus-Plod Powers // Jan 31, 2008 at 11:26 am
[...] to yesterday’s post on police powers, Steve Bell of The Guardian hits the nail on the head with this [...]
4 Andrew Keogh // Jan 31, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Stop and search – which is often carried out with startling levels of aggression – does little good and causes huge resentment. Of course there should be some form of record. Anecdotal evidence shows that a lot of the time police don’t bother to comply with existing record making requirements anyway so there is a hidden 9/10ths of the iceberg of unrecorded stop and search going on aanyway.
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