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This would on the face of it constitute a crime (tampering with evidence?), but on the Holloway Road after midnight the force of this argument was less clear, as I recall.

I recommend you immediately transfer the images to a memory card of some description, which would allow you to delete them from RAM; I doubt many of them would know the difference.

The officer opened the boot of the car, had a quick look around, and only after my grandad suggested he might also want to look beneath the boot floor cover, did he do so.

As my grandad reported to me, “searching for bombs”.

My personal suspicion is that somebody somewhere has search quotas to meet. Says my grandad, “about 8 policemen came out of the station, and one of them made a beeline for me” — another car (with owner) was searched in the same parking lot.

Probably, my grandad dozing in his car made for a good, danger-and-surprise-free search.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmstand/d/st000201/am/00201s03.htm

Perhaps you could blog your opinion as to the quality of their debate for covering all the issues. I can’t find the House of Lords debate, but it’s probably better, and more willing to acknowledge the issue of police simply being able to intone the magic words “I believe there’s some terrorism here” and doing anything they like as a result.

Parliament is the key forum for this. They gave the police these powers in 2000 (for no reason I can see), and they’re the only ones who can take it away when things get too silly.

I am not a lawyer, but close reading of Sections 43 and 44 suggests that they are distinct, but easily confused.

For Section 43, the officer must “reasonably suspect” you are a terrorist. Then there’s all kinds of stuff he can do to you.

Section 44 allows him to stop anyone without suspicion, but his powers are then limited. I don’t believe he can ask you for your name, or take down your details, not even off your credit cards. That is not “searching”. The business about terrorists sometimes using stolen credit cards is baloney. Stolen credit cards are used for a lot of other crimes, and it’s about as good a claim as searching your pack lunch because all terrorists eat food.

Articles can only be seized if they “reasonably suspect are intended to be used in connection with terrorism”. This is quite different from “can be used for terrorism”.

Ultimately this is going to have to be resolved by someone with detailed understanding of the law (that’s very few people), getting themselves arrested, by, for example, not allowing the police to copy their details from their business card, and presenting their case before a judge that the police are wildly over-stepping the authority given to them by Parliament, as they appear to be doing so in this case.

Or, another way to look at it, Section 44 is targeted at terrorist objects which could be in the area, and may or may not be in the process of being carried by people.

If they want to bother people and take down their details, then that’s Section 43, which requires them to be suspicious of you.

Oh, yeah. A hard-core videographer would have stuck around opposite the police and filmed and interviewed their next victim.

What interests me about the figures you received are the way they can be spun.

Basically, 1% of s44 stops resulted in an arrest. That’s 99% of people who were needlessly delayed and/or intimidated. That really doesn’t look very good.

However, there are two “nefarious” ways to spin the data.

1) “During Anti-Terrorist searches, we arrested over 2,000 people.” Sounds like “We’ve arrested over 2,000 terrorists.” But it’s not! Who knows what those people did to be arrested. Maybe they had outstanding parking tickets, were carrying pirated DVDs or simply didn’t want to be searched. I’m not condoning breaking the law, but inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of citizens on the off-chance you’ll catch someone who may have committed a crime seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

2) “Anti-Terror Stop And Search has a 27% Success Rate.” Over a quarter of the people stopped had some form of action taken against them. We don’t know what these verbal warnings were for. Maybe for carrying a few grammes of a category c drug – or maybe they were warned that their laces were untied. Who knows?

I think this whole issue smacks of security theatre. What’s really annoying is that it’s driven by a tabloid desire to put bobbies back on the beat. It’s a shame that all the research shows it’s a waste of time and money.

Thanks

T