Keeping The Population Docile….

Dominic Lawson, in the ‘Indy’ takes issue with the anti-terror laws and the recent police enthusiasm for cracking down on tourist photography at Sandringham:

Over a fortnight later, the security officer responsible for the Royal Family has admitted that the impounding of those ardent Royalists' cameras was "an error" – while pointing out that there are signs on the Sandringham Estate warning visitors that photography is not allowed.

Chief Inspector Stuart Offord now explains: "The officer concerned decided the provision was a way to look at the new measures on photography."

Well, yes. Because confiscating private property is just how you ‘take a look’ at new measures, isn’t it?

Yes, that's what the Chief Inspector said. The provision was a way to look at the new measures on photography. No, I don't have the faintest idea what he meant, either.

He was merely testing if anyone would object, or if they would all meekly comply.

And he was right; no-one did. They all simply handed over their personal property and complained about it afterwards.

That's the thing about organisations when embarrassed by some bad publicity: their explanation of their behaviour is usually much harder to understand than the errors they seek to mitigate.

Pretty soon, they won’t even bother to do that. They won’t need to…

… last year, police officers must presumably have thought they had reason to suspect that Alex Turner, taking pictures of a fish and chip shop in Chatham called Mick's Plaice, was in fact a terrorist. Chatham no longer has its dockyard, or indeed any army barracks... but that didn't stop two officers from stopping him taking his fishy snaps; and when Mr Turner – quite rightly, in my view – questioned their authority to stop him, he was arrested, held handcuffed in a police van, searched and interviewed by two plain-clothes officers.

This is the most unpleasant aspect of such encounters, as most of us will intuitively realise: if the innocent citizen reacts with the outrage of the genuinely guiltless, the officers involved may well take a special pleasure in humiliating him – and it is this which makes most people meekly accept official behaviour, even if they might strongly suspect it is the police who are behaving illegally.

They do it because it works. And because there are no consequences for them of doing it and getting it wrong. Start treating this kind of 'mistake' as a disciplinary offence and you'd soon see the incidences fall...

Last year an Austrian father and son, Klaus and Loris Matzka, were forced by two policemen to delete pictures they had taken of red double-decker buses in Walthamstow. Given their national provenance, it would have been a delightful irony if Klaus Matzka had accused the police officers concerned of being "Little Hitlers"; but instead he contented himself with observing: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

As Mr Matzka also pointed out: "Google Street View is allowed to show any details of cities on the worldwide web."

Indeed.

So, assuming the police (at least, those on the front line) really do care about their public perception, why does this sort of thing happen? Dominic has a surprising theory.

Or is it – and I say this without knowing the characters who apprehended the unfortunate Austrian tourists – that these cases are actually the result not of pressure on police officers from terrorism, but the absence of such pressure?

To put it another way, some officers are perhaps a little bored with the mundane aspect of their work, and wish to inject a bit of James Bond glamour into the daily grind of dealing with the usual drunks and layabouts.

Interesting theory, but then, there can’t be too many of these, and surely the risk to the police’s image would make all the other officers wary of their actions.

Wouldn’t it?

And what about the recent terror attack? Surely that proves that the authorities are right to be cautios?

It turns out that, following an explicit warning by his father to the US authorities about his "extreme" political views, Abdulmutallab's name had been put on a security watch list, known as Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide). Now, guess how many names are on this list. A thousand? Ten thousand? No, this list, according to Washington officials, contains more than half-a-million names.

So no wonder Abdulmutallab was not subject to any special concerns by officials as he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. If, through sheer bureaucratic over-enthusiasm the authorities have managed to create a list of over half-a-million possible terrorists (perhaps including a handful of Austrian bus-spotters) they might as well have an invisible list with no names, for all the use it will be.

Is he correct here? Would those Sandringham tourists and the Austrians appear on that list as a result of the actions taken against them, which the police must know by now were in error?

I'd like to think not, but how else to explain the numbers?

If we are almost all potential terrorists, then we have entered a world of such morbid suspiciousness that none of us can feel safe: exactly the inverse of what our masters' policies are supposedly designed to achieve.

You assume, Dominic, that that wasn’t the real intention from the get-go.

Me? I’m not so sure…