Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid

posted by k

Is she mad or am I?

The Home Secretary is supporting a new policy: the police are encouraged to harass and hound persistent offenders and give them "a taste of their own medicine." The police have been practising already. Persistent offenders are repeatedly stopped and searched and the police visit their homes again and again.

I expect the police find this very satisfying. I can see that it may amuse members of the public. But surely the Home Secretary is supposed to address questions of "crime and the causes of crime". That needs more than a joke and a headline.

I suppose there's no point in suggesting that the Home Secretary should protect human rights and civil liberties. She's not very keen on those.

But surely the Rt. Hon. Jacqui Smith can see that encouraging police to harass individuals, even if they have ASBOs or criminal records, opens the way to all kinds of abuse. Police officers are human beings. They, like all of us, have prejudices and, in selecting victims for harassment, may act on those prejudices. This may happen unintentionally. Even if victims are chosen at random, by drawing names from a policeman's helmet, there's a good chance that the police will be suspected of prejudice.

I suspect that the people selected for police harassment will be young, male and working-class. This is what the press releases suggest. Middle-class offenders who fiddle expenses, tax or insurance claims, thus raising the cost of living for the rest of us, are unlikely to be harrassed. I don't suppose the Bullingdon Club, which includes David Cameron and Boris Johnson among its former members, will be expected to endure such treatment.

But the idea of "giving them a taste of their own medicine" is surely crazy. The police will annoy people who annoy others - presumably in addition to any sentence passed by the courts. (Bypassing legal processes is another dangerous habit of this government.) So where will it end?

Will we see police burgling the homes or burglars or taking to the roads on a mission to knock down careless drivers? Will they defraud fraudsters, rape rapists and kill killers, on the Home Secretary's advice?

The police force should behave better than the rest of the population. Officers should not take part in this silly, offensive game of tit-for-tat.

Meanwhile, Bullingdon Old Boy Boris Johnson is attempting to demonstrate how authoritarian he can be. He's banning the consumption of alcohol on tubes and buses. I travel a lot on tubes and buses and it's never seemed much of a problem. Mind you, I once drank alcohol on the tube. I was given a free sample of Beaujolais Nouveau at Waterloo Station and carried it with me onto my underground train. I don't think it made me behave badly. Boris is also suggesting Saturday schools where young people would be compelled to drill and learn manners. I wonder how many Bullingdon members were in the Officers Training Corps of their public schools.

"When constabulary duty's to be done"

posted by k

There used to be jokes about police incompetence. Detective stories pitted the aristocratic seuth or thoughtful private investigator against the bumbling bobby. There was a lot of snobbery in this, including the old-fashioned snobbery that believed that income from fees - or, better still, income from inheritance or investment - was superior to income from regular wages.

Most of this snobbery is upper-class contempt for what the idle rich sometimes term "the lower orders". But it's true that payment of wages buys a certain measure of loyalty - and sometimes that loyalty can be misplaced. Before the snobs think this works in their favour, they have a similar loyalty to whoever pays their fees or the system that provides them with unearned income. Our need to eat and comfortable familiarity with a certain standard of living is likely to skew our view and interpretation of the world.

Nowadays we have more sympathy with the police, and considerable nostalgia for the "bobby on the beat". This has spilled over to the defence of the police in the wake of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. I've heard a range of spokesmen (they have all been men) defending the police in the wake of the recent verdict. "It was unjust," defenders of the police proclaim. "These were ordinary policemen doing their job. Policemen have to make split-second decisions. Sometimes they'll get it wrong."

But the verdict wasn't against any individual policemen. The verdict said that the Metropolitan Police as an organisation, failed to take sufficient note of Health and Safety procedures. The BBC lists 19 failures of organisation. These are to do with strategy and procedures - and are not a condemnation of the firearms officers who shot an unarmed Brazilian electrician seven times in the head.

For the sake of all travellers, these errors need to be addressed. They include a "noisy and chaotic control room", where officers couldn't hear or misheard the urgent information that was being passed to them by surveillance officers. They also include a four-hour delay in sending support to the surveillance team. These are procedural problems which cost a man's life.

Despite unfounded fears that Jean Charles de Menenez was a suicide bomber, no-one atttempted to stop him from boarding a bus or underground train. It's lucky the police officers weren't more trigger-happy. The train driver was chased down a tunnel by an armed officer and a policeman from the surveillance team (known only as "Ivor") had a gun pointed at his chest.

There are links to fuller coverage of the trial at the blog calm, almost too calm.

Meanwhile, I'm grateful to the judge and jury for their deliberations and careful judgment. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner denies "systematic failure". Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who I once admired, condemns the verdict as "disastrous." Cabinet Ministers are lining up in defence of the police and Commissioner. But the Met's refusal to accept the verdict or address its failings endangers us all.

've lived with awareness of terrorism since the I.R.A. attacks on the 1970s. I'm pretty tough about travelling around London - it's my home town. I can cope with the fear of terrorism. But just now I'm a little nervous of the police and their great big guns.