The Musings of Harry

I’ve always found ACPO to be a strange beast. This is the weird and worrying organisation that receives funding from the government in order to lobby the government. Government lobbying itself is, of course, a stupid waste of money, but that problem pales into insignificance when one considers what ACPO routinely asks for. This is the organisation that would like us to allow the police to hack websites, to lock people up for witholding encryption keys, to discriminate against white officers, to punish sober drug users for driving, to increase the number of speed cameras in the UK by a factor of thirty, and, most recently, to detain terrorist suspects indefinitely without charge.

It is my opinion that ACPO have no hold on reality. This opinion is strengthened every time I encounter one of their new proposals. They exist in a bizarre little bubble, where public are mere plebs, undeserving of liberty or privacy, and the police are always right and never make mistakes. Undoubtedly, this perception is reinforced by the Judiciary’s deplorable reluctance to prosecute police officers for misconduct or incompetence, even when said incompetence leads them to murder members of the public.

To allow the police to hold people indefinitely without charge is, frankly, insane. It is beyond an affront to civil liberties: it is an affront to civilisation. Civilised societies do not intern their citizens. That behaviour is the preserve of dictators. Thankfully, Brown seems to agree:

Whitehall sources said the PM was receptive to the association’s demands, but believes an upper detention limit is essential to avoid a de facto Guantanamo Bay based in the UK.

ACPO’s ultra-right-wing demands are becoming increasingly ridiculous, leading one to question what relevance they have in a modern society. I was gratified to find Shami Chakrabarti expressing an almost identical sentiment:

“It is coming to the point when we have to ask serious questions about the role of ACPO in a constitutional democracy. We elect politicians to determine legislation and we expect chief constables to uphold the rule of law, not campaign for internment”

Right on. If these quotes are anything to go by, we can at least draw comfort from the fact that ACPO’s absurd proposals are at least being met with the response they deserve.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:17 and is filed under Civil Liberties, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.