Terror plod sanctions cybercops

A GOVERNMENT review has recommended police get more high-tech gadgets to make them more productive and cut down on paper work.

But Sir Ronnie Flanagan's Review of Policing, published today, also made a subtle warning about technology putting both police and civilians into straightjackets.

The police, said the former top plod in Northern Ireland, had become overstretched after taking on more responsibilities and paperwork.

As well as regular policing they had to counter terrorism, manage civil emergencies, protect children, manage sex offenders, and stop anti-social behaviour. And all this while recording every bash of the truncheon in official records and dealing with the ever-intrusive key performance indicators to which much of the paperwork is tied.

Flanagan thought if gadgets did the job of gathering evidence, they could save time filling in forms.

Police forces around the country have been toying with things like PDAs that link to their intelligence database, helmet-cams that record every move. Mobile fingerprint readers and DNA scanners are mooted as well.

But there is an irony that links the police need for tech to save them from suffocation by bureaucracy on the one hand, and the danger that the civil security tech phenomenon (Auto-Number-Plate Recognition, CCTV, traffic fines through the post and coming delights such as facial recognition) will suffocate society.

The example of two high-tech police dragnets this week might illustrate the point for some. On Tuesday, Wiltshire Constabulary proudly reported the success of an ANPR road block it had set up on the A303 near Yeovil, the town famous for collecting fingerprints from pub goers.

It screened 8,146 vehicles and stopped 106 of the drivers. Six cars were seized, twelve were demobilised for "defects" and six drivers were reported to the DVLA for not having tax. They also used a fingerprinting gadget that matched 45 people against their records. Five people were arrested.

Also on Tuesday, Essex police reported that they had operated a high-tech dragnet last week outside Grange Hill tube station and the Limes Farm estate shops. 95 people were made to walk "airport-style" scanners in search of knives, guns and drugs. Just one-person was found
carrying a knife, which is somewhat heartening. It was a 17-year old lad. Silly boy. He was cautioned, hopefully with a clip round the ear.

This Operation Quartz also involved a 25-strong roaming police foot patrol and several ANPR cameras. The scanning, said an Essex police press release, was "completely non-discriminative", which sounds like a euphemism for indiscriminate.

These kind of scenarios might have been on the mind of Sir Ronnie, whose was a career copper in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, when his report considered the question of what the police should do about completely non-discriminative scrutiny of their demanding jobs.

"One option would be to match the growing complexity of modern policing by seeking to specify every outcome and control and bureaucratise every aspect and process, from the centre to the force and within the force from the chief constable to the constable, in an attempt to cover every risk and meet every demand," he quivered.

"To me, however, such a response would fail to acknowledge that a fundamentally different, more dynamic model is essential," he said.

This attitude, which has come from a police understanding that technology can impose inhuman, binary controls on irregular human lives, should also be extended to the way in which the police do their policing, he said.

"This acknowledgment must be translated to a more proportionate approach to crime recording with serious offences comprehensively recorded and lower level offences dealt with in a more streamlined way," he said.

He called for a public debate not only on the nature of policing, but on the nature and desirability of risk in public life. Essex constabulary might have had this in mind when they cautioned that poor lad. µ