When police stop and search two children under anti-terror measures there can be little doubt that a law, designed to prevent terrorism, is being roundly abused by officers who seem to enjoy the authority to question any innocent citizen they care to pick on.
The officers in this case apparently behaved no better than thuggish secret police and evidently had not the slightest notion of the rights and respect that once defined civil society in Britain. They stopped a 43-year-old man walking with his 11-year-old daughter and a neighbour's six-year-old, took his mobile phone and USB stick, searched the girls, took a photograph of him with their own camera and then made him stand in front of a CCTV camera so that his face was recorded.
This is among the most disgraceful cases to have yet emerged in an escalating story of stop and search abuse. The implications of this incident, and the vast increase in people stopped at random by officious police will make the blood of any good democrat run cold. More than 170,000 stop and searches were carried out in London alone in the past year, three times the number in 2007. A few weeks ago a nine-year-old boy, Jadan Shepherd, was stopped and searched by police. Both his mother and the 43-year-old man have complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
We know that the man was stopped near Woolwich Arsenal station but there are no details of his ethnic origin. All the IPCC would say in relation to the case was this:
The complainant states that, when he asked under what legislation his property was being seized, he was told it was under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He also complained that he was given no information as to when he could retrieve his goods or who to contact in order to do so, and that there was no communication from police despite assurances that he would be told when he could collect his things.
This apparent misappropriation of people's personal property is another bad sign. Effectively it is theft by the state, a very serious matter. That children were searched and saw the police act in this manner is very depressing.
The Home Office must now set general guidelines to restrict the number of stop and searches, which increase each year because of the targets set for every policing area. A formal notice should be issued to every officer about the respect for innocent people and their property. That letter should be carried by every police officer in the country. The way things are currently moving is utterly unacceptable.
