“I suppose you can guess that some of these women, in their eighties and nineties now, may have married outwith their own group? Heavens! Some of them may have married Asians. And their children may have done so too. “Perhaps not too likely, but hardly impossible.”

Yes but am not convinced that those who set up/defend the rationale behind stop & search appreciate this. They also do not appreciate that if they stereotype so much on the ground then such groups will proactively select non stereotypes to carry out their plans.

“Now,elderly spinsters might be a different story. You’d need Police Rapid Response units to deal with them…”

Dunno. What experiences have you had to say this?

Point well taken. But at some point there are going to be civil liberty toes that need to be trodden on.

A better debate for PP would be something like this:

We may or may not have seen petty authoritarianism – YES
We have become more restricted in our liberty – YES
What then of those restrictions should be repealed?

For what it’s worth:

Airport Security – Probably
Smoking Ban – on balance, no
CCTV – Matter for private firms.
ID Cards – Yes, but on cost, not civil liberty grounds
Handgun ban – No.
Dangerous Dogs ban – Probably yes/

Not that easy is it?

Just because it’s been bugging me, what the heck does ‘abracist’ mean?

Thanks for that.

Sometimes I think not enough folk around here see the wood for the trees, and then you two come along…

Ravi Naik has a very good point @ 29. When are we going to be evidence based rather than media dominated?

I was thinking of Terence. Though the others are valid as well.

Would that be Robert Cottage? Or David Copeland or James Shaw. Or, perhaps Stuart Kerr? The propensity to bomb folk you think are less than human is not exclusive to Islamists.

http://212.150.54.123/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=118

What about the white, far-right terrorist who has just been convicted of manufacturing weapons and bombs?

What ‘list’ were you looking down?

I’d have thought muslim on muslim murder was a bit more prevelant. But you, newmania, have the facts.

Please present them…

I don’t think this is exactly right:

The trouble is that someone at one stage told the average Jo/e Bloggs that they had a right to know and suddenly we are all consultants.

I do think that there is a complete pretence that spying on people is in some way difficult, or indeed worthwhile.

Or that it is hard to understand why the state might think it useful. It is easy. It is what we should do, apparently if we want to stop this.

The fact that it doesn’t work is a sort of elephant in the room.

I think there is a complete lack of intelligence, in the sense of intelligence, being used here.

The fact is that for the most part these things happen behind closed doors and require extensive ‘cloak and dagger’ style operations. That is where the real work is done; in extensive, painstakingly meticulous, mind numbingly repetitive investigations. Checking and cross checking.

All these ‘bones’ take time, effort and funding that would be better deployed somewhere else but it seems the baying hordes once awoken need to be fed. Even if it is only some make believe. It was easy when my daughter was small and pretended to be a ruler. I just made her abdicate when it was time for bath and bed

Apologies, I missed my main point. It is the only example that suggests all this checking is justified.

One, iffy case from 1986.

That’s it.

Perhaps other folk can provide other examples, but I doubt it.

I think a lot of government anti-terrorist initiatives are about ‘throwing bones to the baying hordes’.

Realistically, it is going to take something other than street and airport theatre to defeat this.

I asked, elsewhere, whether airport, at the point of passenger scrutiny, had actually worked. There is a kind of iffy case from 1986:

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/05/security-theater-now-playing-at-your-airport-by-daniel-pipes/

That’s it. There is no evidence, except in the negative, that it is actually achieving anything. It would seem obvious to me that, if airliners are hardened against security threats then other concentrations of victims would become a target for warped minds. Such as railways in Madrid and London. Or buses.

I am not suggesting that we ‘give up’ on airport security, I am suggesting though that our entire strategy is likely to fail, unless and until we divert money to actually identifying the warped bastards that want to kill us. That seems to me to be a priority, and one that airport theatre is a diversion from.

We have an obvious ratchet effect at play here. And with no obvious benefit.

Take knife crime for example. Every city has certain estates, where knife crime and gang crime is likely to occur. These are areas where people do carry weapons.

However is it a best use of resource to be carrying out stop and search against people in the entire area? Mostly gangs tend to hang out around a few streets, in a certain park etc. You need to know members of gangs, you need to know the gang haunts, their activities and constantly target them, hassle people who choose to be gang members, rather than anyone willy nilly.

Around the corner from my street in the last 18 months a man was stabbed to death, a gun was fired, and the two parties involved had been involved in at least two other fight before these two incidents. Why do the police not know who these people are? They are people who hang around as a gang, why don’t they identify them and hassle them, they might have found a gun, they might have found a knife, they might have stopped a car full of lads armed with bats and knifes hunting a man down.

And you know how right-wingers and the police defend this? By telling you the choice is only between stopping an Asian male and a old white granny.

I would expect that by now someone would have drafted a conclusive and objective study on whether racial profiling actually works based on those 162,846 stop and searches.

Old white grannies.

I suppose you can guess that some of these women, in their eighties and nineties now, may have married outwith their own group? Heavens! Some of them may have married Asians. And their children may have done so too. Perhaps not too likely, but hardly impossible.

So, there is a slight chance that the asian youth would walk over to his grandmother and ask her how she’s doing.

It’s the problem about making assumptions isn’t it.

Now, elderly spinsters might be a different story. You’d need Police Rapid Response units to deal with them…

When I hear of this as the rationale it makes me wonder if old white grannies are hanging nearby, late evening, in the same street as said asian youths (and no other ‘groups’ of people present) when the stop & search occurs. Which, if that is the case, the police are making a clear & direct choice b/n the two. But a part of me thinks that old white grannies are no way nearby at such times …

Using the same rationale, do the police make a choice when faced with old brown grannies too?

And am not convinced that all right wingers do defend it.