Don't blame the police - really?

You can blame the politicians for bad law - as many of us do - but it's the police at a local and individual level who spectacularly fail to apply common sense in using it. By applying it to every situation in which it will make their lives easier or more satisfying - irrespective of whether it is appropriate - they more or less prove they cannot be trusted to think for themselves.

Remember the Labour conference a few years ago? Ageing hecklers dragged out by private thugs and then arrested (using said newly minted "terror" legislation) by publicly paid thugs. Same conference, several people arrested for wearing T-shirts bearing slogans not in tune with the Labour "message"; same laws deployed. The Cenotaph; people reading lists of names arrested under said police state "terror" law. No one popped out of Downing st and said "look can you arrest those fuckers they're spoiling Tony's afternoon nap".

The web is thick with documented examples of the police who, faced with members of the public who refuse simply to tug their forelock and do what they're told, resort to the most convenient and ambiguous piece of "shut the fuck up" law they have to hand. It says "anti terror law" on the tin, why use it for anything else if they "understand policing far better than their overlords".

If the military followed the same logic as the police, every squaddie in Aldershot would be spending the weekend slotting people he/she didn't like on the basis that "the government handed me the tools, it's up to me to decide how to use them". Ask yourself; if most people can manage to avoid behaving like prejudiced bully boys with penis envy, why can't the police?