Last week, surrounded by counter-terror police, sniffer dogs and finger print scanning devices, commuters could be forgiven for thinking they had accidentally got off the tube at Heathrow airport in the midst of a major terror alert.
But in fact this enormous ‘counter-terror’ event was taking place in Haringey, and was not based on any specific intelligence about a terror threat. This, now, is simply a part of normal policing.
Covering the event for an article in the Hornsey Journal, I was impressed, not for the first or last time that week, by the professionalism of the police officers I met, and by their genuine interest in engaging with the community. But this did little to allay my unease at seeing British counter-terrorism police rifling through the Marks and Spencers bags of bewildered Christmas shoppers on an ordinary December evening.
The Home Office says that police will only search people “if they have a good reason, for example, that you fit the profile of a criminal seen in the area, or they think you’re acting suspiciously.” In other words, it starts from the basic presumption of innocence which is the cornerstone of British justice.
But under the under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, police can stop pretty much anyone on the off chance that they’ve done something – anything – wrong. This, of course, is a boon for community policing. It’s also a body blow for our rights.
It took two minutes to check my DNA against a police database of 9.25 million people's using this fingerprint scanner
“To be honest,” Inspector Mark Hembury told me, “we’d be very lucky to catch a terrorist today.” But on the brighter side, he said, these sorts of investigations “inevitably turn up all sorts of things”, from small amounts of cannabis to the odd young miscreant who’s missed an appointment with his parole officer.
In other words, it’s simple: arrest everyone, and you’re bound to catch a few people who’ve done something wrong.
On this occasion, though, as a rather sheepish press release later revealed, pickings were a bit slim. Police made only four arrests, all of which were for breach of bail- a relatively trivial offence.
None of the police I spoke to seriously thought they were doing anything to deter terrorists. It was simply a very effective- because incredibly heavy-handed- way of solving other crimes.
Even if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, the blatant dishonesty of introducing those powers by stealth under the auspices of tackling some abstract unseen ‘ism’ should ring alarm bells for anyone with as much as a GCSE in history.
I have a great respect for the Metropolitan Police, and it is not their job to rein in their own lawful behaviour in the interests of protecting human rights. That is, however, the job of our government. And, instead of doing it, they have introduced legislation which seriously compromises our civil liberty.
There is no point in protecting our society from external threats if in doing so we deprive it of the freedoms which make it a desirable society to live in.
