Police want suspect towns rated

BRITISH POLICE want to create an intelligence map that will give every corner of Britain a risk score to measure the chances that it might contain terrorists.

They are doing it as part of their neighbourhood policing policy. It
will encourage British people to eye one another suspiciously for signs of terrorist sympathies.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said it wanted to "profile"
British neighbourhoods.

The strategy, which APCO has not made public, will request that schools and colleges in particular keep an eye out for people with suspicious views. It wants the national curriculum to teach children from primary level upwards not to entertain extreme views.

The intelligence map will allow people to tell how suspect a town is by its postcode. Such systems usually work by creating a risk score.

By such a measure, Ilford might be more suspect than Clapham because it has more Muslims, even though Clapham is full of merchant bankers and public relations executives.

The plan is designed to wheedle out potential terrorists of the sort who killed 52 people with bombs in London nearly three years ago.

It will piggyback on the neighbourhood policing initiative, a name that conjures an image of friendly local bobbies helping old ladies across the road. But neighbourhood policing has changed in Britain.

Neighbourhood policing was all about profiling nowadays anyway, said an ACPO spokesman.

"They are taking demographics, census data and overlaying that with crime patterns, and that would include geographical details of where people group and integrate that with local intelligence."

"It's been standard practice in neighbourhood policing for three and a bit years. In many ways it doesn't differ from neighbourhood policing.
It's local policing that gives you the tools to prevent extremism," he said.

He said the strategy, called Prevent, was not ready to published. It contained the police proposals for preventing terrorism and violent extremism. He did not say whether it contained advice on foreign policy. µ