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J-dawg | 5 years ago
The system of police cautions, warnings and fixed penalties allow the police to administer punishment with none of the due process that a court would provide.
The idea of a "police caution" is a misnomer that implies it's just harmless warning, when in fact it can affect the course of someone's life many years later.
Furthermore, people are blackmailed into accepting these cautions under the threat of going to trial and potentially receiving a more severe punishment after conviction.
Even more outrageous is the retention of records from the PREVENT programme and "non-crime hate incidents". These are people who have not even committed a crime or been arrested.
The whole system stinks, and given that most people manage to avoid interaction with the police it is sadly unlikely to get the scrutiny it deserves.
The outrageous behaviour of (some of) the police during recent lockdowns actually gives me a little hope, as it as drawn widespread attention to the way they routinely abuse their power.
iso1210|5 years ago
This view doesn't hold when the police get you for speeding (go find real criminals)
Many police officers are quite reasonable, but then you have Derbyshire, whose actions over covid have likely killed people (by reducing compliance with lockdown orders)
The difference with the police in covid is the public are suddenly seeing that the police are dealing with normal people, not just criminal scum who should be lucky they aren't shot.
As I understood it, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 really clamped down on DNA and fingerprint storage. Not enough, but at least it was a move in the right direction. Particularly bad was that if you were charged and found innocent, they would still keep your records for 3 years.
Silhouette|5 years ago
Unfortunately, there is an element of human nature that says, "It won't happen to me." And then maybe one day, if you're unlucky, it does happen to you. And everyone else who is similarly confident that it could never happen to them won't necessarily be there for you, because it's so far out of their experience and frame of reference that even if they're a generally decent person, they have trouble relating to the situation you're in or understanding how they might feel in your place. And so the people who are least at risk, who are often the ones who could make the most difference, don't always act as strongly or as frequently as they could to mitigate the risk to others.
vaduz|5 years ago