Surveillance State Attacks Itself

In a superbly timed piece of New Year’s irony, Jack Straw has attacked the police:

“I’m afraid I’m rather sceptical about the excuse that a public service, in this case the police, is overworked and therefore can’t change.

“With a given level of resources, some police forces, or some parts of police forces do very much better than others.

“And it is the ones who are the less efficient and who have the wrong approach to the public who fall back on this ‘Oh, I’m overworked’ [argument].”

He said while some officers would claim it took four hours to fill in forms, “good police officers will take an hour to fill in the same forms because they want to get out and catch criminals”.

He added: “Some police officers, whatever they say, actually quite enjoy being in the police station in the warm. We are dealing with human beings, but we are also dealing with the kind of discipline and culture in the police service.”

And it’s ironic of course because the reason why police forces are so overworked is because of Straw and his minions – the architects of the surveillance society, who’ve passed numerous laws in the last 12 years to criminalise and stigmatise more of us than ever before. Yet of course Straw too is right, the agents of his database state are indeed hampered by poor leadership, organisation and organisational culture, but those aren’t problem which lead to police whingeing. Henry Porter ends the year saying:

But if I have one overriding concern in 2009 it is about the British police, which every day seem more like a force than a service, whether it is displaying violence at legitimate demonstrations, making secret databases of political and environmental activists, swooping with unnecessary might on innocent people such as the rock band the Thirst, making arrests to add to the DNA database, Tasering members of the public as punishment or treating football supporters with a shocking disregard for their rights. It has been a bad year for the police, and a worrying one for the general public who see an essential trust and respect being lost. The next government must find a way of bringing the police under control and making them realise that they are the servants, not the masters, of the public.

And he’s right. The problem is to do with police unaccountability, and a belief throughout their ranks that we are now subservient to them. Has their arrogant organisational culture been egged on by the Home Office (and now the Justice Department too), or has it happened because of their neglect? The answer is probably a bit of both, so Jack Straw is right in his prescription of what the problem is, but has deflected responsibility for its cause. It’s our responsibility to hold him, Alan Johnson and their successors accountable in 2010, because the mass media for the most part won’t, and only the smaller opposition parties are trying – and their voices are nowhere near loud enough. With the ISA this year we’ve gone well past the old refrain of ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ – if we want the state to remain subservient to us we have to make it.

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