Sunday 8 February 2009

Spot the common denominator

1. Dick Puddlecote highlighted some statistics he found:
Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows the police to stop and search people. In 2008:
Number of people stopped nationwide by British Transport Police using s. 44: 160,000
Number of people stopped in London by the Metropolitan Police using s. 44: 200,000
Number of people amongst the 360,000 stopped under s. 44 and found to have any terrorist material or links: 0


2. Leg-Iron at Old Holborn covered some snowboarder who'd been a bit daft, frankly, but the killer paragraph is this:

Sergeant Bone thinks that his duty to protect the public involves stopping the public doing things that involve any risk at all. He has made no mention of damage to vehicles, for which he could, perfectly correctly, arrest the driver and snowboarder. His focus is on preventing the public behaving in any odd way at all. His duty is to keep us in line.

3. The Penguin, also at Old Holborn covered the case of "an experienced foster mother being struck off the local authority's register and effectively made unemployed because a 16 year old girl in her care converted to Christianity"

4. Guthrum, also at Old Holborn covered the "PCSOs committing crimes" story, and added that the police now wanted it to be made illegal to photograph the police.

5. ... and we're all familiar with the nurse who was sacked (and subsequently reinstated) for offering to pray for a patient, which I posted over at National Death Service.

The common denominator here is that one sure-fire hallmark of an authoritarian or police state is that really big crimes (bankrupting the country, unjustifiable wars in Iraq of Afghanistan etc) go unpunished; violent crimes like murder, rape, mugging are relatively lightly punished; the police and MPs consider themselves above the law (fiddling expenses, taking bribes, 'forgetting' to declare donations etc) and they focus on punishing people for things that aren't really crimes at all in any normal sense of the word - like walking along the road, being a Christian, behaving like a prat (a bigger crime than criminal damage to parked vehicles, it seems), photographing the police, smoking in your own car (let alone smoking in a pub), not closing your dustbin lid properly, dropping litter etc.

It's all about creating a climate of fear, I suppose.

9 comments:

John B said...

"really big crimes (MPs fiddling expenses"

*boggles*.

Surely a bit of expense-dodginess is the *definition* of a petty crime, which more or less everyone has committed at some point and which doesn't really matter in the slightest?

Also, murder still carries a mandatory life sentence; and sentences for convicted sex offenders have been going up rather than down.

We're living in a society that's becoming more authoritarian at *all* levels - both by punishing serious criminals more harshly than before, *and* by punishing people for things which aren't or shouldn't be crimes.

Mark Wadsworth said...

OK, maybe I should have put MPs in a category "above the law", the same as police. Same difference.

Anonymous said...

What can we do? Practical measures to counter this are needed. There will be an election fairly soon (barring a declaration of national emergency for all you conspiracy theorists) so should we all be asking our prospective candidates (from all parties) what their views are, and trying to exert pressure in the democratic way, the ballot box?

Mark Wadsworth said...

S, yes of course. But most voters see elections as a straight choice between Nulabour and Blulabour, one may be worse than the other, but I don't trust Blulabour (who will probably walk it) to really do much about it.

Anonymous said...

"murder still carries a mandatory life sentence" - is that what's meant by a true lie?

Anonymous said...

dunno about you, but I find it hard not to view "subject to recall to prison indefinitely at any time for the rest of your life, even if not convicted of an offence" as a life sentence.

Snafu said...

What are the chances of the Police stopping four youths with backpacks at King's Cross?

banned said...

I posted recently on OH about something I saw at Guidos place some months ago. It was by a German who was describing how his Grandparents saw the rise of Nazism in retrospect.
They identified the beginings as the over-zealous enforcement of petty regulations ( often new ) by newly formed agents of enforcement ( cf PCSOs, Civil Enforcement Officers ) which were staffed by low grade no-bodies revelling in their power. In this way the state got the population used to being pushed around ( almost typo'd 'puched' ).

Some parallels ?

Mark Wadsworth said...

IEBOC, well spotted. That's not "a parallel", that is exactly the same thing.