Well, well, well, the 'Terrorism Act' again

[Bono]

http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/2008/07/someone-didnt-attend-their-diversity.html

    Julie Maynard was returning from a trip to Calais with 12-year-old Joshua when she was stopped and questioned about her relationship with her son.

    When she insisted that he was her child, she was questioned for several hours and told: "It is obvious he has nothing to do with you".

    Miss Maynard, a legal advocate from Ware in Hertfordshire, was taken to a separate detention room - leaving her son in distress - before eventually being released.

Ms Maynard's son is mixed-race, which she believes sparked the initial suspicion. Best of all, when she challenged this, the response was, well, a little less than ideal:

    When she asked if she would be asked the same question if her son was white, she claimed that the officer replied: "Are you accusing me of being a racist?"

    The family was then surrounded by 10 police officers, detained under the Terrorism Act and told to get out of their car.

Well, well, well, the 'Terrorism Act' again. What was that about it only being used in extreme circumstances and not for trivial matters? Not that child-trafficking is trivial, of course, but what would this family have been detained under before this Act came into play...?

    She described the episode as an "unpleasant and frightening experience" and has now received compensation and an apology from Kent Police for their "lack of tact". The female detective constable handling the case was transferred to other duties.

Something 'non-customer facing', we can only hope...
Posted by JuliaM at 16:50
Labels: multiculti madness, policing

[Bunwahaha [still dunno why, but well, so be it]]

Is this event an accident or a vision of the future...?

Well, after the 1,000 reasons allowed to British police to enter in a home, the fact that this country is maybe the one in the world which have the more cams to survey the population, this news, we could think this state is driving to a police state. I hope it is not so much...

[Bono]

Now to mention the increase in minimum detention time, and the repeal of the protection against double jeopardy and guarantee of trial by jury. As afleich once said, Labour may have been able to shake off their socialism, but they haven't been able to shake out their arrogant, 'we know what's best' attitude. Let's hope Brown's fall comes sooner rather than later.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyone assuming that a Conservative government would be any better on civil liberties than the current government is deluding themselves. It would merely be better in some areas, worse in others (it's possible to spot some areas for both already). Security politics generally breaks down along the lines that it always has; government-v-opposition. The real problem is the usual one (a variation on the theme of "no government is ever going to destroy the system that got it elected", though in this case it's more about not giving away the power they found that they (sort of) had once they'd been elected). A secondary problem is that relatively authoritarian measures on certain issues are generally popular with ordinary people; and parties in government are almost always, by definition almost, less popular in government than in opposition and are always looking for ways to make this less so.

The case in that blog post looks more like police stupidity and heavy-handedness than anything more sinister (and, yes, they would have found something else to detain them over before the Terrorism Act came into force. It isn't as though incidents like this didn't happen in the past; you need only to think of the regular abuse of Stop-and-Search powers a few years back now) although there is an argument that police stupidity and heavy-handedness is in itself sinister.

[Bono]

Anyone assuming that a Conservative government would be any better on civil liberties than the current government is deluding themselves. It would merely be better in some areas, worse in others (it's possible to spot some areas for both already). Security politics generally breaks down along the lines that it always has; government-v-opposition. The real problem is the usual one (a variation on the theme of "no government is ever going to destroy the system that got it elected", though in this case it's more about not giving away the power they found that they (sort of) had once they'd been elected). A secondary problem is that relatively authoritarian measures on certain issues are generally popular with ordinary people; and parties in government are almost always, by definition almost, less popular in government than in opposition and are always looking for ways to make this less so.

That's exactly why it's so important to oppose every instance of these increases in government power.

The case in that blog post looks more like police stupidity and heavy-handedness than anything more sinister (and, yes, they would have found something else to detain them over before the Terrorism Act came into force. It isn't as though incidents like this didn't happen in the past; you need only to think of the regular abuse of Stop-and-Search powers a few years back now) although there is an argument that police stupidity and heavy-handedness is in itself sinister.

The problem is that these laws enable this kind of behaviour.

[Silent Hunter]

They used to be able to arrest you just for "acting suspiciously".