The Police are now the enemy

As a former policeman I find it difficult to express my feelings about this, but ever since 1997 the govt have been turning the police into a bunch of jackbooted thugs ever ready to do the govts bidding to trample over the hard won freedoms of the British people.

Indeed, the BBC report that

Police are too heavy-handed in dealing with protests, harassing and intimidating people, a leading parliamentary committee has said.

The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights also criticised the misuse of legislation used against demonstrators.

It says peaceful protesters have had personal property seized and have been intimidated by police.

It wants tighter restrictions to prevent the use of anti-terrorism laws. Police say they are acting lawfully.

The committee also said police were too heavy-handed with journalists reporting on demonstrations. It comes as police forces prepare to deal with large-scale protests in London ahead of the G20 summit.

In a statement, the committee said police had used “legal powers not designed to deal with protests such as anti-social behaviour legislation and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997″.

It added: “Witnesses also referred to local authority restrictions deterring protest, such as requiring third party insurance or licences for the use of sound equipment.”

It also found the use of officers in riot gear to police protests could “unnecessarily raise the temperature” of crowds, making conflict more likely, and said police should not be using Taser stun guns at peaceful protests.

The police must be made accountable which is why Libertarian party policy is to have elcted chief constables and to scrap all the new anti terror laws that the labour govt have introduced.

It’s not really the fault of your local ‘bobby on the beat’, it’s more to do with the open politicization of the top ranks of the police and the deliberate introduction of authoritarianism, for example the database state.

A quarter of all government databases are illegal and should be scrapped or redesigned, according to a report.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust says storing information leads to vulnerable people, such as young black men, single parents and children, being victimised.

It says the UK’s “database state” wastes billions from the public purse and often breaches human rights laws.

The government spends £16bn a year on databases and plans to spend a further £105bn on projects over five years but does not know the precise number of the “thousands” of systems it operates, the trust claims.

In the wake of numerous data loss scandals, the cross-party trust – which campaigns for civil liberties and social justice – examined 46 public sector systems.

It said 11 were “almost certainly” illegal under human rights or data protection laws.

These included the national DNA database and ContactPoint, an index of biographical and contact information on all children in England which notes their relationship with public services.

Meanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions is developing an £89m data-sharing system for anyone issued with a National Insurance number, accessible to 140,000 government staff and 445 local authorities.

Staff at 30 councils have already abused the system and information has been made available to private firms, according to the trust.

Needless to say that the Libertarian party would scrap all this and return peoples right to privicy as well as saving the taxpayer £105billion.

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Police state

The Telegraph reports

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state

Dame Stella accused ministers of interfering with people’s privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.

“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.

“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.

Dame Stella, 73, added: “The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.” She said the British secret services were “no angels” but insisted they did not kill people.

Dame Stella became the first woman director general of MI5 in 1992 and was head of the security agency until 1996. Since stepping down she has been a fierce critic of some of the Government’s counter-terrorism and security measures, especially those affecting civil liberties.

In 2005, she said the Government’s plans for ID cards were “absolutely useless” and would not make the public any safer. Last year she criticised attempts to extend the period of detention without charge for terrorism suspects to 42 days as excessive, shortly before the plan was rejected by Parliament.

Her latest remarks were made as the Home Office prepares to publish plans for a significant expansion of state surveillance, with powers for the police and security services to monitor every email, as well as telephone and internet activity.

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UK becomes banana republic

The UK Libertarian party reports that the police can now arrest people for merely taking their photograph. I am not making this up.

The UK has finally become a banana republic.

The conservatives and libdems have been very quite on this, thus proving they are all the same, a bunch of authoritarian scum.

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Police are useless?

I’ve just read in my local newspaper the Wisbech Standard that a local locksmith caught a shoplifter and after four 999 calls and waiting two hours finally took the culprit to the police station himself.

I’ve therefore sent the following letter to the editor.

Sir,
I read with disgust your front page article (WS, 7 Nov) about how the police failed to respond to four 999 calls after a local locksmith caught a shoplifter. How dare the police meekly claim that this fiasco was a “mere error of judgement”.
However, it does highlight the role of Wisbech’s half dozen plastic plod PCSO’s. We already know from the national newspapers that PCSO’s watch children drown and hide behind trees rather than confront thugs and now we know that they are incapable of escorting shoplifters to the police station, they are less useful than chocolate teapots.
Nationally, the labour govt spends £240mn a year on PCSO’s yet won’t allow Chief Constables to use this money by spending it on real coppers. But thats just another instance of Gordon Brown wasting taxpayers money.
Local chief plod Julie Spence is also not without criticism. After all, she prefers to spend taxpayers money on 21 top of the range Volvo estates for high ranking officers to swan around in at a cost of £500,000 rather than see Wisbech being policed properly.
The only way to stop this rot in the police is to make them properly accountable. Chief Constables should have to stand for election and PCSO’s should be replaced with proper coppers.

I do hope they publish it in full.

UPDATE. They did indeed publish it apart from the bit about watching kids drown and hiding behind tree. They also gave it a rather good title, “Plastic plods are a waste of our money”.

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The police…

…really are starting to lose the support of ordinary law abiding members of the general public, especially when they act like this.

Be a hero, have a go at yobs, says police chief

A POLICE chief has urged the public to be ‘have-a-go heroes’.

Northumbria Police’s chief constable, Mike Craik, said ordinary people should challenge rowdy behaviour, such as drinking or swearing, to improve society.

Nothing wrong with this you may think, but what happens when a public spirited citizen actually does this.

Paul Lawson, 52, said a gang threatened to kill him when he challenged them.

But he was later arrested on suspicion of attacking one of the them, and then had to wait two months before being told no further action would be taken.

The police have basically become politicised stormtroopers eagerly ready to do the govts bidding in any hairbrained authoritarian scheme and they treat the public like mugs. Is it any wonder they are held in contempt by much of the public, and I speak as a former police officer.

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Homosexual – Police scandal

Cabalamat over at Amused Cynicism has a rather interesting post about how the Norfolk Police are treating one of their constables who doesn’t think that homosexuals should be given preferencial treatment here.

Whilst I agree with the thrust of Cabalamats argument that the Police should uphold British law irrespective of whatever any silly ‘supreme being’ belief system can come up with and that people who work in such jobs should therefore put the application of the law above their own personal views, I do feel that Cabalamat is disregarding the nature of the policemans bosses in calling for such action.

While neither me nor Cabalamat know the details of any allegations due to lack of detail from the newspaper report it is clear (to me at least) that PC Graham Cogman has done nothing more than point out his distaste that one particular group, in this case, homosexuals, was singled out for promotion.

I used to be a policeman and when I took the oath of the office of constable it was to police “without fear or favour” and by having the top brass of Norfolk Police telling everyone that they were encouraged to show support for a particular 5% of the community *IS* showing favour. The same thing happened last year with a group of firemen up in Scotland. Their bosses wanted them to hand out fire safety leaflets at a homosexual pride march and the firemen in question were threatened with the sack if they didn’t comply. The reality of the situation in both the Scottish firemen and this case is that the bosses want to be seen to be ticking the “lets be nice to homosexuals and promote them” box instead of focusing on getting their collegues to perform the duties that we the taxpayer actually pay them to perform.

Considering all this, when PC Cogman was fined 13 days pay he must have realised that he had nothing to lose and therefore might as well take his employer to court for descrimination.

Good luck to him I say, even though I think he is a religious nutter his bosses clearly aren’t concerned with treating everybody equally or even offending the views of those people who like him think homosexual activity is a sin. Norfolk is a small force of some 1200 or so police and I just know that PC Cogman now has absolutely no chance of ever getting any promotion, courses, detachments or anything else he may want to do with his career. Instead he will get all the ‘shit’ jobs going, however good he maybe at police work and treating members of the public the same.

As an aside, the first comment Cabalamat has received is mere noise and adds nothing to the debate. I know Cabalamat has a light touch where moderation is concerned but in this case it’s nonexistant.

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The Police are corrupt.

Many years ago I used to be a Police Officer.

So it was with interst that I read on the BBC today that the Police deny massageing the crime figures. Even during my time in the Met we were told to reclassify attempted burglaries as criminal damage in order to bring the burglary figures down. This has been going on for years for a whole host of reasons.

But lets be quite blunt, this is corruption, plain and simple. If we want an upstanding Police force that does it’s job properly without fear or favour then we have to insist that even such basic things such as this are held to the highest principles.

I blame the politicians for introducing perverse insentives that get the senior management acting in such a disgusting manner.

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