Changes in the British police culture

Recent events have pointed out how terrorism can modify the culture of police action in any land.

The latest informations are that the British police shot (and possibly killed, according to some reports) a suspicious Asian man in the London underground. What would appear as an ordinary information in any other country, when it is spoken of use of force by police agents takes another colour in Britain : indeed the police culture prides itself on a culture of unarmed response, except when serious offences are involved, and the persons representing a threat are armed.

Here it looks like the police agents (plainclothes policemen according to an eyewitness quoted by the BBC World Service ) were armed while guarding the London underground. The fact that one of the most famous police forces in the world has been obliged to post armed policemen in its cities is a striking exemple of the terrible destructive force of Islamic terrorism. The use of kamikazes oblige police officers to take no risks with potential bombers, even if it means shooting them before they have any chance of detonating an explosive charge. There is a clear occurrence of the perversity of terrorism, since it deepens society’s fractures and the prejudices one can have against certain categories of the population.

Custody officer duties turned out to civilians: a police officer explains the problems

My second post of the day is devolved to a subject of interest for the rights of the people in custody. The British system was of creating a "custody officer" who is directly responsible for whatever happens to the detainee, and who is also responsible for the respect of the rights of the latter. According to the blog http://coppersblog.blogspot.com maintained by a policeman, the government thinks about giving the job of custody officer to civilian personnel. The author of the blog criticizes the idea because the policemen will not be given to more street jobs. He believes that they will be instead bogged down by other bureaucracy work. I wonder now if giving the task of verifying that the legal guarantees are well provided for to a civilian is quite the right thing to do... On the other hand, the positive aspect is that there are more civlian "eyes" within the framework of custody...

If you are interested by the problem, and you wish to know more about the medical problems in custody, then I may invite you to read my thesis in bioethics which is freely available over here: http://dawnofeurope.250free.com/author.htm Click on the adequate link once on that page to download the document.

By the way, I also invite you to read my new online newsletter which touches to broader subjects than only human rights and bioethics: http://dawnofeurope.tk

This month's issue also has a series of interviews about the European constitution referenda and the French and Dutch "no". You can read them here: http://dawnofeurope.250free.com/issue/aw.htm

A couple new posts on police and human rights - tackling police corruption

A recent article in this week-end’s Financial Times pointed out that Transparency International had branded the Indian police force as one of the most corrupt throughout the world - not a small performance, since India is the largest democracy in the world. Actually, India scored 2.8 on 10 in Transparency’s scale (which, according to the FT indicates « rampant » corruption). You can read the section devoted to India in the 2005 global corruption report over here .

The implications of corruption for human rights are severe: when corruption is the dominant mode of functionning, the regard for human rights, equality of treatment before the law, and the probability of police fighting criminality are very scarce. In a dictatorship, corruption fulfills a sort of « oiling » function, in that it allows a space of negotiation in the application of laws which are often harsh and uncompromising. It also creates a fundamental disbalance in the exercise of power between the have and the have-nots. It is all very bad in itself, when a dictatorship applies laws, but the additional burden of corruption introduces another element of insecurity for the citizen, in those circumstances.

In a democracy, normally, none of the inconvenients of dictatorship are present - notably the question of harsh laws. In those conditions, having the insecurity of corruption added on to the problem of having a face to face relationship with the society, is problematic. Third world countries are especially vulnerable to corruption, as there is often a sub-culture of corruption that pervades the very structures of society, making it especially difficult to rebuild a clean public service from scratch. The problem with a corrupt police force is that violence is extremely easy under those circumstances...

If you wish to have an idea of the effects of corruption on society (and you can only imagine what are the effects when they come to police forces), then log on to read the global corruption report on the site of Transparency here . This link will bring you to the page on which you can download the report. If you wish to immediately download the part of the report speaking of the effects of corruption on civil society, then click here.

I also commend the introduction by Francis Fukuyama which gives an excellent idea of the effects of corruption on civil society: read it here . For those who do not know him, Francis Fukuyama is a professor of International political Economy at John Hopkins University, and he has reached world fame for having written a famous piece about "the end of history", back at the time when the Berlin world had fallen. He has lately expressed some concern about the rage of cloning...