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.