Profiling and pre-judging
Many were delighted to see the child killer Ian Huntley jailed. At the time, much was made of the bullying and humiliation that Huntley had experienced at school. It later came to light that Huntley had previously been investigated regarding a variety of prior offences, most of them involving underage sex or sexual violence.
Backgrounds such as that found in the Huntley case seem to have led to a belief that it would be possible to 'profile' people and predict future criminality. In 2006 The Times carried an article about the police targeting dangerous suspects before they can offend:
The highly controversial database will be used by police and other agencies to target suspects before they can carry out a serious offence. [...] The Soham murderer Ian Huntley and the serial rapist Richard Baker have been used as examples of the type of man police will identify.
This theme has been continued and expanded this year with the ONSET system, which will profile children to determine whether they are likely to become a young offender.
This 'Minority Report' style of (potential) crime prevention is a clear reversal of one of the founding principles of UK law - that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And one has to wonder how it will be put into effect; will a young person's parents be told that their child is a 'will-be criminal' suspect? Will their teachers? It seems likely that for the system to have any perceived value, people will have to be told (to 'keep an eye' on the child), and the odds of the child finding out about their suspected status will be high. What effect is that going to have on them?
At least in part this reflects the One of Us problem, as illustrated in the 1980s by the show Yes Prime Minister. In order to be taken seriously by (or indeed, allowed into the restaurant with) those with whom such independent monitors are meant to work, the "independent" has to have a proven track record in administration or a relevant business field, and an existing network of trust and of personal contacts through whom they can do their job.
The trouble is that in order for those two things to be true, the independent officer must, by definition be closely linked to those they are meant to curtail and prosecute: closer than they are to those they are meant to protect and promote. In a representative democracy, with pre-existing entrenched elites, political parties and a first-past-the-post electoral system, I do not yet see a viable plan for how we solve this problem.
Thanks anonymous. I will do as you say. It's all very worrying. Political corruption and control is at an all time high. The police prioritise social control for the sake of the elite.Political corruption and control is at an all time high. News is carefully edited and in the hands of a new breed of baron.When Johnston Press took over the Portsmouth News, they posted huge
banners outside the News Centre. These declared, in colourful big letters:'We are you.'
The most interesting stuff on G2O, was published in the in house
NUJ 'Journalist'magazines. That's a bit like musicians playing for each other. Robin Cook wrote in ‘The Guardian: "Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians". Osama Bin Laden was their western trained leader. Four weeks later he had a fatal heart atatck on a remote Scottish mountainside. Exactly why he was there has never been adequately explained. Nor has his death. He was a fit man. Media explanations of how the emergency was dealt with are full of inconsistencies.
It pays to be vacuous in politics. New Labour’s Robin Cook, as many know, was the fiercest critic of the Iraq invasion amongst Labour's senior politicians. He was Foreign Minister throughout Tony Blair's first term in office (1997-2001). He was the architect of the party’s ethical foreign policy and had first-hand knowledge of intelligence related to Iraq, WMDs and threats (real or imaginary) from abroad. When Blair joined the U,S invasion, Cook resigned from the cabinet.
As Paul Evans observed in New Statesman last week, trusting such systems requires us to believe in a "perpetually benevolent state". Recent events amply demonstrate that neither police officers nor politicians are beyond corruption; and the bodies tasked with preventing and punishing such corruption (such as the IPCC) seem unable or unwilling to take effective action.