Have the police gone mad?

I'm beginning to wonder if the chief constables of this country want to get along with us or whether they think they are there to change our minds. It appears they have become very political and rather prone to doing what they think is right and proper.

So it is that if you come across two gay men having a sexual encounter on a footpath you are advised to take an alternative path! The ludicrous deputy chief constable of Lancashire, Mike Cunningham, has called for police to turn a blind eye to outdoor sexual activity. So to hell with the fact that it breaks the law. He is judge and jury now. He knows his mind and his mind will be our mind. I wonder if George Orwell is getting this beamed up to him?

It is outrageous! Under the Sexual Offences Act anyone who takes part in 'dogging', where couples meet for sex in car parks, and cottaging, where men meet for sex in public lavatories, face arrest for outraging public decency, voyeurism and exposure. But Mr. Cunningham isn't outraged. So why should we be? The Daily Mail has a full report, as they say.

However, when the police get uppity about other peoples' political activity they pounce. As I mentioned before, they seem to think that causing the BNP grief by spending thousands of pounds chasing them round the streets, knocking them up at 6 am and generally letting them know that they are "after them" is what they are expected to do. Actually, it does the political system no favours. Mike Hume in The Times has a good article on this. "Free speech means freedom for fools, too".

He writes that, in reference to the Liverpool arrests, "It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see a connection between the appearance of a Merseyside officer on the leaked list of BNP members, and Saturday's arrests. Being able to claim that its members are victims of political persecution is the best publicity for a small outfit that gains support from disaffection with the political class. The best weapons against the BNP are democratic debate and free speech, not censorship and blacklists."

When will these chief constables learn?