[guardian.co.uk] Prevention is better than cure.
Innocent until proven guilty. Two adages so familiar that any squeak of
dissent from either can sound outright unreasonable, yet the reality is
that, when it comes to criminal justice, there is great tension between
them. It falls to the police to reconcile the two, and the last few days have brought disturbing signs about how they are striking the balance.
It
was in the early hours of Monday morning that the police made a
record-breaking preventive mass arrest. The band of 114
environmentalists seized at a school in Nottinghamshire – where, it is
alleged, they were conspiring to commit criminal damage and aggravated
trespass at a nearby power station – were outnumbered by the officers
from three separate forces who arrived to seize them.
It may well be
that the companies and the families who rely on the coal-burning steam
turbines at Ratcliffe-on-Soar would have been severely inconvenienced
if the police had not acted as they did. But inconvenience is not a
sufficient basis for apprehending such a large number of people for
things that they may or may not have gone on to do. Taken together with
the enforced containment of the G20 protests (where one bystander died
some time after receiving a heavy hand from the law, triggering further
clashes captured in shocking footage that emerged yesterday), the
Ratcliffe incident suggests the police may be exploiting surveillance
to develop a new precautionary principle for dealing with
demonstrations – a principle that holds that the mere possibility of
disorder is a cause for taking liberties.
Such an approach would
be as self-defeating as it would be unprincipled. So-called "kettling"
of protesting crowds into cordons is as much a recipe for boiling anger
as the orderly release of steam. More importantly, in the long history
of civil disobedience, the awkward squad have been right as often as
they have been wrong. Those who break the law in a democracy must, of
course, be willing to face the consequences. But the lesson of history
is that attempting to prevent non-violent protests before they happen
will do more harm than good.
With terrorism, by contrast,
pre-emptive policing has to be part of the mix – at least for anyone
concerned with protecting innocent life. The hasty move against a group
of 12 mostly Pakistani students in northern England last week could
still turn out to have prevented an atrocity. That is so even though it
was launched in the most inauspicious circumstances, after a long lens
caught Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, who has since had to resign,
waving around secret documents about the investigation. But the
potential justification remains just that – and the lack of bomb-making
equipment or other hard evidence reportedly turned up in the trawls of
suspects‘ homes tends, if anything, to weaken the fears. The police
have no choice but to use their predictive powers, but these can go
every bit as awry in the context of terrorism as in any other field.
The force would do well to remember that. Some of the briefing about
the suspects, in particular suggestions that they are from the tribal
badlands of Pakistan, have turned out to be wide of the mark. The
dangers are underlined by memories of Forest Gate. In 2006 a raid based
on flawed intelligence saw an innocent man injured by gunfire and ended
up in the disgraceful arrest of a suspect – whose innocence caused many
blushes – on child pornography charges. Things like that can end up
alienating whole communities. This, in turn, stops the flow of
intelligence. At that point the scramble to prevent a single horror can
undermine the capacity to avert many more.
The police have a duty
to act when they think lives are threatened. But storming a school, to
prevent a peaceful – if potentially disrupting – protest is a shocking
extension of that power. Good policing and ultimately public safety are
better served by tolerance than repression.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
