London Word contributor Jo Lamiri's 13 year-old son was recently stopped on the street by a police constable and asked what he was doing. The suspicion, apparently, was that he was truanting. This, perhaps, was reasonable given that most local schools had not broken up for Easter, unlike that of the boy concerned. Even so:
[The officer] wasted 20 minutes when he could have been doing real police work, and made my son late. At least he didn't search him…even so, the form makes for comical reading. The reason for stopping him? "Presence in area". So, what to do, mums? Keep our children in all day playing on the computer?
I phoned our local police station to complain about this over-zealous approach and to check that there isn't a record against my son. "Would you stop me?" I asked. "No, you don't fit the profile". So, teenagers - particularly boys - are being stopped even if they're doing nothing wrong, simply because they're teenage boys.
I've brought my children up to be law-abiding and to have respect for the police...Yet this mutual respect is jeopardised by the actions of the police themselves. If my son sees himself as a police suspect, although innocent, what kind of message does that give him? Or, indeed, those corralled by the police in a "kettle" at the recent G20 summit?
That's the heart of the problem: alienate the law-abiding, whatever their age, ethnicity or social class, and you lose the respect of the very people who wish you well in the prevention and detection of crime. There has to be a mix between preventive vigilance and letting people alone. Has the Met got it right? What does the Mayor think?
