Council snooping for dummies...

It never ceases to amaze me how those of you who oppose council snooping powers all seem to think that both 'RIPA' and the 'Human Rights Act' should be repealed. Doing so would actually increase council snooping powers.

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Anti-snooping bloggers like that posh barrister bloke that runs 'Big Brother Watch' trot out reports like "The Grim Ripa" and make out they know a lot about council snooping. Believe me, they are completely clueless. If you really want to read some interesting public documents about council snooping you should just search google for this and this.

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Don't worry, MW will be back to entertain you all better than I can soon.

Julia Tomlinson

Updates From a JP Perspective

JP here. Not been posting on this blog for a while, just thought I'd give a run-down of my opinions on the news over the past few weeks and some other things that have popped up in general debates...

Let's do 'democracy' at work first shall we? The EU president - So Herman van Rompuy is the new president. I couldn't really care less to be honest. People seem to be of the opinion that Van Rompuy will hold the same sway over Europe as Obama does over America, which is a load of rubbish. He's little more than a puppet for the collective leaders of the EU member countries (the Council), and will have virtually no influence over policy. Hell, he already sits on the Council as PM of Belgium. Very little will change.

Global Morality Index of 2009 - An organisation has recently ranked countries based on their 'morality'. Apparently, "Over 70 sources were scoured for information on the attitudes of the public and legal standing against morally reprehensible actions viewed negatively by all civilized and honourable beings. Interviews were conducted through various media and adjustments made to reflect differing viewpoints on immorality in these regions." Want to see the list? The highest possible score is 10, the lowest is 1...

1. Saudi Arabia 9.03
2. Iran 9.01
3. Oman 8.99
4. Mauritania 8.98
5. Bahrain 8.81
6. Qatar 8.80
7. Brunei 8.75
8. Afghanistan 8. 75
9. Togo 8.70
10. Somalia 8.57
11. Guinea 8.43
12. Iraq 8.36
13. Sudan 8.23
14. Palestine 8.19
15. Bangladesh 8.15
16. United Arab Emirates 7.67
17. Kyrgyz Republic 7.43
18. Cameroon 7.25
19. Lebanon 7.11
20. Malaysia 7.03

Right. First of all, Palestine is not a country. Second of all, Saudia Arabia still mandate that women are not allowed to sit in the front seat of a car if a man is driving, amongst other things. But what is most interesting are the bottom 5... (Only 67 countries were in the survey)

63. United Kingdom 1.24
64. United States 1.06
65. Israel 0.32
66. Netherlands 0.15
67. Denmark 0.14

Notice anything? All of these countries have been attacked by Islamic extremists in the past decade! And the top 20 are all breeding grounds for terrorism! What a crock of shit, eh?

The police - I recently had to write an essay on the role of the state police in modern society. My opponents seemed to favour a powerful state police force, I do not. However the subject quickly ran onto on-the-spot fines. Now, I feel summary justice is simply wrong. There is no way of knowing if the person in question was even guilty of anything, let alone if the sentence is proportionate (eg. someone fined £100 for throwing away a letter they took to read on the way to a bus stop in a public bin). What's more, since levying these fines is increasingly being farmed out to contractors who are paid on commission, they represent a corrosive effect on society: these 'police' are no longer "only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence," but state mercenaries given special privileges and set against the public for their own enrichment.

As to the police themselves: I do not see how being an employee of the state can justly entitle someone to greater powers over others. Either arresting people in particular circumstances (or whatever) is moral and just, in which case anyone ought to be able to do it, or it is not, in which case no one should. The growth in such powers has gone hand-in-hand with the summary punishments and 'victimless crimes' for the enforcement of which they are necessary. To return to that great Peel quote: 
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

So it should be. So it was meant to be. But it isn't, at least, not any more.

Having conceded that, though, you could well ask what the purpose of a government police force is. People certainly did when the state police were first introduced in the mid 1800s. Since the government police have no special powers in my desired new libertarian world, it hardly seems fair to, eg. pay for the policing of property crimes against large businesses out of the public purse, since they can obviously afford it themselves. And similar logic can be applied to residential areas. Each person in the UK, for instance, pays about £200/year for policing. So my street (for instance) could, for the same money, afford to employ a constable on a full time basis just to guard our street. This may not even be the best use of the money, but it's hard to see how the present government solution would provide better protection. Decentralisation of police, and taking the powers out of the hands of the state, would be more beneficial to how crime is fought, I feel.

Anyone who feels that the streets would descend into anarchy with private police, I ask, can you apply your same logic to your own side, and ask yourself: "Why don't the police, as they hold a very privileged position legally, and are by far the largest and best armed enforcement agency in this country, take over the government, shoot suspected criminals without trial, and ignore the law wherever it pleases them?"

To an extent I would say that they have done the latter two things. But that they do not do these things to the extent that society descends into anarchy as you describe, it is in the final analysis only because they either do not believe this personally to be just, fear the adverse reaction of their colleagues, or fear, in the last resort, the army suppressing such a coup. In the first and final case, the same applies to private policemen. They would still have their own moral code, and fear of the ultimate measures that may be taken to restore order. In the second case, however, and I think the dominant one in actually preventing the majority of potential police criminality, the private system is far stronger, because it invests in no particular organisation the powers of policing. A corrupt policeman or a 'vigilante' would have to fear not just the response of his friends and colleagues, but the response of other, possibly competing, organisations, the aggrieved man and his own guards, and even the response of private citizens.

Sorry to quote this again, but Peel has very elegantly summed up almost all my views on this into a single sentence (shame he founded the Met):
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

In other words, under a private system there is no dichotomy of "the police", who are above and beyond the citizen, and thereby owe him some sort of partial duty to not abuse the powers that he has claimed. There are merely individuals, some of whom are paid full time to do what is the equal right and duty of all.

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.

Scary!

From the BBC:

The chief constable of Strathclyde Police has said his officers deal with "too many" marches and parades.

Stephen House's comments came at a meeting of the force's management body which considered two reports on the social and financial impact of parades. Strathclyde Police Authority (SPA) heard that more than 1,000 events in the last financial year took up nearly 50,000 police hours at a cost of £1.7m...

Chief Constable House said the events were stretching police resources, with officers deployed to cover marches instead of dealing with other duties. He told the meeting: "It is not our role as the police to tell communities how many parades they are to hold. That is not our role and it's not this body's role but I think it is our job to flag up to you where we feel there is disproportionate use of police time and your budget and that's what we believe is happening at the moment. We believe the hundreds that exist are too many. It's out of balance. By discussion we believe that we could reach a more reasonable number and a more reasonable settlement for everybody."

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.

"Minister holds burglary summit"

As I may have mentioned before, as a self-respecting authoritarian government, one of Nulab's main tactics is whipping up a climate of fear. Here's today's episode:

The home secretary is holding a "burglary summit" for England and Wales later amid fears that attacks on homes will rise because of the recession. Jacqui Smith is meeting representatives from the police, insurance firms, DIY stores and charities like Age Concern to examine ways of improving security.

Jacqboots was interviewed on BBC Breakfast, and said in all seriousness, that as burglaries were now at half the rate they were during the 1991 - 1993 recession; and we were heading into a recession, that burglaries were thus likely to rise in the near future.

Bill Turnbull pointed out quite reasonably that remembering to lock your doors and windows was important, of course, but people also complained about the police not taking it seriously and the lenient sentences given to offenders.

Jacqboots regaled him with merry tales about giving people more 'help'. "That means give them government money, doesn't it?", interjected Bill. Jacqboots then prattled brightly about the police doing more to identify potential offenders. Sorry dear, this isn't Minority Report, the public would be happiest if the police targetted actual offenders.

But Jacqboots never got round to addressing the 'lenient sentences' point, that would be too reassuring. She'd already done her job - creating a bit of a climate of fear, and she didn't to spoil it by saying that the government was actually going to do something about the perceived problem.

Be careful what you wish for ...

Via Socialist Appeal:

URGENT: Two workers killed while defending the occupied Mitsubitshi factory

In the afternoon of Wednesday, January 29, two workers were killed by police ... The workers killed are Pedro Suarez from the Mitsubishi factory and José Marcano from nearby auto parts factory Macusa. They were killed when regional police of Anzoategui was attempting to evict hundreds of workers who had been occupying the Mitsubitshi (MMC) factory.

Now, guess in which hell-hole of a South American dictatorship this happened...

Highlight between the dotted lines for the answer:
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Yup, that Socialist Paradise Venezuela.
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Readers' letters of the day

From The FT:

Sir,

On a recent visit to the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum my elderly mother and I were stopped by a Metropolitan Police community support officer, who demanded my identity, home address and other personal details. The officer warned that I could not refuse to provide this information, according to section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

I asked the reason for this "stop and account". She told me it was to deter potential terrorists near an “iconic target”. I wonder how the names and addresses of middle-aged males accompanying their mothers to the museum would help the west win the war on terror.

Prof. Alfredo Saad Filho, University of London, London, UK.

And from The Metro:

Would it be possible to provide free sick bags with future copies of Metro? Mainly because if I have to endure yet another grovelling, adoring and sycophantic article or letter concerning how supremely wonderful, handsome, awe-inspiring and all round God-like Barack Obama is, I will be in real danger of emptying my breakfast on to the good people riding my train.

It's time to get a grip, everyone.

Oliver, London, UK.

Life in a police state

From The Telegraph: "Police watchdog investigates claims that three officers attacked war veteran"

Also from The Telegraph: "Police shoot man dead outside Guildford Cathedral"

Er, also from The Telegraph: "Damian Green accused of 'grooming' Whitehall mole, claim police"

Ah ... another one from The Telegraph: "Ian Blair poised to publish a book about his years at Scotland Yard" ...Sir Ian Blair is negotiating a book deal worth an estimated £150,000 to reveal all about his turbulent years as head of Scotland Yard.

Quote of the day

Spotted on BBC website by Christina Speight:

John O'Connor, former head of the London police unit, the flying squad, told BBC Radio 5Live he found it difficult to believe the government didn't know about the investigation [into Damian Green].

He said: "If the prime minister and the home secretary were unaware of this police activity - then they must be utterly incompetent.

"And if they were aware of it then that makes them really quite dangerous. So I think whatever way, whatever path they choose it doesn't put them in a good light."*

* I suppose that's a polite way of saying "pathological liars"

Here's hoping ...

Now that Damian Green knows what it's like to be the victim of politically motivated police-state thuggery of questionable legality, should we expect him to ask the Home Secretary to relinquish these powers once the Tories are in government?

"Wife of 21 July plotter convicted"

When the EU's anti-money laundering regulations were gold-plated into UK law back in 2003, a wise and experienced VAT barrister told me that the definition of a police state was a state in which "it is a crime not to report a crime".

Under the anti-money laundering regulations, if the authorities are too lazy or incompetent to actually catch the baddies, they can simply imprison any accountant, solicitor or banker who had anything to do with the 'proceeds of crime'. So they want to turn us all into informants; anybody who "knows or suspects or has reasonable grounds for knowing or suspecting that a person is engaged in money laundering must, as soon as is practicable after the information or other matter comes to him, disclose it to the nominated officer or a person authorised for the purposes of these Regulations by the Director General of the National Criminal Intelligence Service" (para. 7(1)(b)

I only did one or two units of criminal law, but I do remember that even if you are not directly involved in a crime, under the rules on inchoate offences (i.e. aiding and abetting; incitement; conspiracy; or attempt) you can be punished just as severely as if you had committed the actual crime. This all seemed perfectly fair to me. And we've also always had the offences of perverting the course of justice and concealment for payment under s5 Criminal Law Act 1967.

Failing to report that somebody else was about to, or had committed a crime was not an offence IIRC*.

In the post 9/11 hysteria, the gummint's "Anti terror laws" included a rule that said that failing to report knowledge that somebody was planning an atrocity was also a crime, thus leading us one step closer to being a proper Police State.

The law had its first proper outing today.

Now, I despise Islam and terrorism as much as the next man, but it seems that under the old law, she couldn't have been punished for "assisting with the escape plan"** or even for the fact that she "removed and destroyed evidence".

Just saying, is all.

* It appears that the right to remain silent does not necessarily extend to a spouse in England & Wales, but that's by-the-by.

** I assume that she only helped with the escape plan after the crime had taken place - as he was intending to blow himself up, it seems unlikely they had planned it beforehand. If they had planned the escape beforehand, then of course she would be an accomplice, but by the same token, that would prove that he was doing this as a stunt and not intending to kill anybody. So he clearly was intending to kill people, a rather chilling thought, but hey.