Thursday, January 06, 2011

Cops Gone Wild, Civil Liberties Freaks Gone To Sleep

Like the lady says, it's a good job she wasn't a bloke.

Let's check the scorecard here: the police are trying to blackmail a legitimate news organisation, while whining about 'unfair, naive and irresponsible reporting', meanwhile they're sending out letters accusing innocent citizens of kerb crawling.

This is the perfect example of the moral bankruptcy of both the human rights industry and Cameronism.

It should hardly need to be stated - except it passed most libertarians by - that if the Philosopher Kings on the bench can create absurd new rights at a stroke, they can just as easily sweep aside real ones. This is how we ended up with a country infested with lawyers, but where the police can still demand this:
It informed the car’s owner that her Volvo estate had been sighted by officers and added that officers needed to speak to her as soon as possible to ‘confirm that you have not committed any offences.’
...At which point the ghost of Matthew Hopkins has just slapped himself atop the head shouting 'why didn't I think of that'?

And then there's The Dave....

Hey, we were told that Culture War was passé, so ten minutes ago, squaresville. The Dave would ascend the throne and the lion would lie down the lamb, and with one bound Jack would be free.

Oops.

The Dave is in Number Ten, but staggeringly enough, it turns out the loonies have not in fact folded their tents and retired to Tuscany. Nope, leftist fanatics are still using public services to impose their own crazy agenda, after all. Guess we do need to fight the culture war after all.

11 comments:

JuliaM said...

As with the recent case of the motorist who was prosecuted for warning of a polive speed trap, it's disturbing to note that there are plenty of commenters who see nothing wrong with this approach.

Thirteen years of overt New Labour rule and the slow, Gramscian creep through our institutions before that has clearly borne fruit.

Furor Teutonicus said...

XX Thirteen years of overt New Labour rule XX

Has WHAT to do with the speeding incident?

"Perverting the course of justice" AND the flashing of lights to warn of a speed CHECK, have been offences for longer than Captain Queeg Brown is old.

moriarty said...

@FT - I think Julia is refering to peoples attitudes to these cases, not the offence itself.

Furor Teutonicus said...

But the offences have been around a lot longer, and if anything in the last 13 years, attitudes have grown AGAINST the police for enforcing the law, and NOT, as Julia implied "more accepting".

In the 50s, NO one would have raised an exebrow. Now?

I can see that Captain Queeg Brown and his ganfg of farting parliamentary apes CAN be blamed for the fact that people now do NOT support the police. Julia appears to by saying the opposite.

Rob said...

So now you need a "legitimate" reason to drive down a public highway. "Legitimacy" will be defined by some leftist weirdo, after months of accusation and innuendo, based on your gender and race, with zero accountability.

But never mind, we still get to vote every four years or so.

Anyway, I guess Liberty are all over this so we don't have to worry about it.

Moriarty said...

@FT: On the other hand, what chances would the smoking ban had of succeding in the 50s?

I can't really argue Julia's case for her as I can only guess what it is, but I do find it odd that at a time where the justice system as a whole is getting less popular support, that there seem to be more people about who are prepared to defend increasingly illiberal and bureaucratic laws. Maybe they're not supporting the police per se, but just want Something To Be Done about their own personal hobbyhorses. (smoking, speeding, 'hate' crimes, whatever)

JuliaM said...

Moriarty, you've pretty much nailed it! :)

FT, yes, the law regarding flashing headlights is indeed an old one. But how many prosecutions have ever been brought under it? I suspect the answer is vanishingly small. In part because the police needed the support of the public and recognised that this would get the public's back up for no good reason.

So, what's changed? Simply that target culture now drives EVERYTHING and anything which hinders the efficient performance of the police in collecting the statistics and revenue is now pursued with vigour.

Rob said...

He was stopping a nice little earner for them, he had to go.

As for the police needing the trust of thr public, i don't think they give a fuck about that anymore. In fact, i think they view the public with contempt, except for those in favoured groups.

Squander Two said...

This pisses me off:

"Superintendent Angela Williams, of West Yorkshire Police, said: ‘The tactic to target the men who solicit women has been used for a number of years ... and with notable success."

Of course it's successful, you moron. Instituting a nationwide 7pm curfew would be successful, too, or jailing all men between the ages of fourteen and thirty, if success is merely cutting crime. It never seems to occur to the police that some of our laws exist for other reasons, and they absolutely can't comprehend the idea that rather a lot of law is there to limit their power and thereby protect us from them.

Anonymous said...

This is probably the most intelligent set of comments House of Dumb's ever been graced with...ironically it's for a post in which DJ, in his usual non-sequitur fashion, associates libertarianism with support for tyranny again.

Word verification = quisyli. Hmmm.

JuliaM said...

" It never seems to occur to the police that some of our laws exist for other reasons, and they absolutely can't comprehend the idea that rather a lot of law is there to limit their power and thereby protect us from them."

Well, when they have politicians like Kerry McCarthy of Bristol suggesting all men in the Bristol area should be subject to DNA swabs to catch the killer of Joanna Yeates, it's not hard to see why they don't, isnt it?