Abuse of power part 5
Should it ever be acceptable for the police to be used to support a political agenda, or for the police to allow themselves, whether by design or otherwise to follow such an agenda? This is not a new issue. During the Miners' strike during the Margaret Thatcher era, when essentially the unsuccessful series of strikes meant there would be no return to the days of "who runs the country" as per Edward Heath in 1974, the very accusation was made that the use of heavy police presence was being used to break strikes. This nonetheless was in the context (whatever your political perspective) of acts of violent disorder. Whilst this is a nearer that is difficult to remember and seems a very long time ago, those who have seen the film "Billy Elliot" will have got the flavour of what the dispute was like.
We are now however in a completely new era. The surveillance powers available to the police are of a sort which could not even have been dreamed about 20 years ago. Presently there is a proposal from European Union, supported by the Home Office, to extend the use of so-called "remote searching" by bugging computers to follow website use and e-mail correspondence. There is also the extensive use of CCTV. Technology can be used to avoid and detect crime, but it also means that when powers are given to police they are given against a background of potential surveillance available to them which is potentially very intrusive. No one doubts that it is necessary to have powers to deal with terrorists. However many commentators have questioned, to paraphrase the old saying that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter, whether these powers are sometimes used to interfere with politically inconvenient demonstrations. The problem is that the innate tendency to use powers once they are available, especially they are not circumscribed, means that it is most unlikely they will be restricted to the proper terrorist threat.
Probably the most absurd example of this concerned the amount of use that has been made of these powers in connection with railway stations. I have never been a trainspotter, but always regarded it as a harmless pastime likely to injure no one. As the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman Norman Baker put it, trainspotting is not a criminal offence or a terrorist threat. I am not quite sure how one plans terrorist offences by looking at trains and taking down their numbers. Walking along the platform and consulting the timetable would seem to be sufficient. However, Mr Baker established that the terrorism legislation has been used to stop some 62,584 people at railway stations. Even more were questioned elsewhere (87,000). Perhaps the most absurd example came last year, when a 15-year-old schoolboy (in school uniform) on a geography field trip was stopped by police community support officers and held as a terror suspect for taking photographs of a railway station. The startled youngster was told to sign terrorist legislation forms or face arrest. While this might sound comical, I'm sure it was not comical for the individual concerned.
If the police are to be given powers which allow them to follow instincts without having specific grounds to point to for exercise of the powers (to avoid them hesitating and failing to prevent prospective terrorists through lack of reasonable grounds to do so) then the police have to make sure that those powers are used sensibly, sparingly, and rationally. Otherwise the only reasonable conclusion is that such extended powers cannot be given without being misused.