Are we a Police State yet?

From The Metro:

A grandfather was arrested in a dawn raid and held in a police cell for six hours - for swearing once in front of a council official. Thomas Catcheside was woken at home by officers, marched to his bedroom - where his wife was still asleep - and ordered to get changed before being driven away in a police van.

The 67-year-old, who admits using the f-word in a row with the official, had his fingerprints and a DNA swab taken*, before being issued with an £80 fixed-penalty notice and released. 'I was frightened and angry. It was so heavy-handed,' said the former lorry driver.

His arrest followed a dispute a few days earlier over 'dangerously slippery' stairs in his communal block of flats in Cambridge. The grandfather-of-five, who is chairman of his local residents' group, has been campaigning for three years for safety improvements to the staircase. But when an official stopped him from following him downstairs to listen to a phone call to a supervisor, Mr Catcheside snapped: "Don't you tell me what I can and can't do in my own f***ing place."

A Cambridgeshire police spokeswoman said: 'We were responding to reports of an assault.'

1. As I've said before, one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is that the punishment is inversely proportional to the offence, until ultimately any and every form of behaviour can be punished ("ThoughtCrime") on the say-so of a council official, police office or CPSO. "Fixed penalty notices" take us yet further down this slippery slope, as Simon Jenkins explained in yesterday's Evening Standard.

2. There is a separate offence of "wasting police time". Shouldn't the officers concerned be punished for wasting their own time?

* Which they can now retain for six years.

Friday Funny

From The Metro:

DNA linked to seven murders and thought to belong to a female serial killer actually comes from a factory worker who makes forensic swabs.

Traces of the same DNA were found at 39 crime scenes in a 15-year hunt for the 'Phantom of Heilbronn'... Police claimed the 'noose was tightening' on the killer last year following the murder of a policewoman. But a review of the case was ordered after police failed to find the 'suspect' or any witnesses to the murders.

"Brothel users should give DNA"

Dennis MacShane MP (Lab, Rotherham) is, as previously mentioned, an evil piece of shit.

He wants to make it illegal for men to visit prostitutes and at the same time is asking men who visit brothels to give DNA samples (to whom, exactly?). Er, so, by giving a DNA sample, you are confessing to a crime? Not really much motivation to do so.

Yes, it is probably true that when a woman who works as a prostitute is murdered, it is usually by a man who visits prostitutes and/or who knows her - but of course it is women who 'work the streets' who are most at risk from these lunatics. As there is a clear link between the illegality of drugs and prostitution, the solution must be to legalise both. Then women who really need the money can work a shift in a relatively safe brothel, where of course the use of condoms would be strictly enforced, bingo, there's your DNA sample, all 10cc of it.