Policing the police!

Last night on Newsnight Jeremy Paxman leant across the table and huffed, "I thought you Tories were in favour of the police!". Damian Green quite rightly replied that in most situations that was correct. He had just been confirming that a police officer had suggested that he "faced life in jail if convicted of misconduct in a public office". Green said that he thought it "absurd" that such a thing had been said.

No right-minded Conservative is going to give the police a blank cheque to do or say whatever they want. On this occasion the officer who made the remark was being gratuitously menacing. It is this kind of behaviour that is getting the police a bad name.

Jacqui Smith is a hopeless Home Secretary. She does not appear concerned with the underlying problems that current policing is throwing up. It's bad enough for high-horse civil servants to use the "national security" card, but it's worse that the law enforcement agencies lack common sense and get into a lackey-type mentality of pleasing their political mistress.

What comes out of the Damian Green affair is that there was a crude attempt to scare him witless and there was a clumsy attempt to use the criminal law where civil law should have been used. This has been a divisive action.

It comes in the wake of the police raid on environmental protesters. 114 people were rounded up at a school at around midnight. Police found large amounts of equipment, including food and various devices used for climbing, cutting and locking on to machinery. They concluded that Radcliffe-on-Soar Power Station was going to be attacked. Quite properly, they felt arrests should be made. My troubling point is this. The police keep telling us they have "information obtained" but it appears that they cannot make arrests because the "evidence" isn't forthcoming. The same is happening with the Lancashire "terrorist" raid.

It's all a bit like schooldays. A teacher is lambasting the pupils because a personal belonging has been apparently stolen from a fellow pupil. "Who took Jones' satchel?" Nobody speaks! Silence ensues, with much eye contact to see who cracks first. When nobody does the teacher finally departs extremely miffed that his "informant" came up with duff stuff!

All these actions lead to mistrust on both sides. The police have a duty to keep us all free from crime and anti-social behaviour. The public has a duty to act as responsible citizens. But we now have so much blurring of the boundaries. The police have become politically corrected and some sections of the public feel only direct action works. We could end up like two sets of dogs in a park, eyeing each other up. That happened a bit at the G20 demonstrations. Some officers "up for it" and sporadically attacking the crowd. The police went into cover-up mode. Would their actions have come to light without YouTube?