Local Policing

Published on Fri 11th Apr 2008

A local policing issue illustrates the dilemmas of balancing law and order against traditional British freedoms.

A mother told me that her teenage daughter had been filmed by police while standing at a bus stop in Teddington with her friends. They had committed no offence; and no one has argued that their behaviour was in anyway anti-social. They were young people in a street where there has recently been some trouble with young people.

The police justify the exercise by the results: misbehaviour by young people in the area has fallen. But, no doubt, a curfew requiring all young people to stay indoors after school would also reduce juvenile offending. Are such collective measures, affecting innocent or guilty alike, justified?

I am normally 100% supportive of the police who fight crime on our behalf. But these tactics worry me. They attach stigma to a social group, regardless of blame, because of their age (but it could easily be their colour or dress).

Other national law and order initiatives have the same dangers. The government is backing a DNA database and, beyond that, a national ID card system. Anyone questioned in a police incident has a DNA sample taken and kept indefinitely regardless of guilt or innocence. There are practical policing advantages; the sample may help trace someone who is guilty of another, unrelated, crime. But police states use the same logic to justify keeping populations under constant surveillance. There are other dangers including loss of data (remember the missing tax CDs with 15 million families' personal details).

I am more supportive of CCTV which target locations, not individuals, although it is also part of the surveillance society. But I do draw the line at filming entirely innocent young people to build police data.