No photos - Jules Mattsson C 2010

The police have once again displayed their enviable ability to be very quotable while saying Bond villain ominous things. The current one is a 16 year freelance photojournalist who was photographing a major parade that was walking down a high street. It’s a situation that is so public, so common and so clearly photograph-able that stopping someone doing it is a bit ridiculous.

The worst thing I took from that was when the photographer was almost arrested for swearing (at 5:55 in the video). Because the police officer had pushed him down some stairs. That’s a modern version of the classic “breaking a policeman’s foot with your face”.

He did really pretty well there. It’s hard to keep as calm as that in these situations, especially if you’re getting poked, grabbed, shoved and implicitly accused of crimes ranging from spying (taking photos of the military) to child abuse (taking photos of children) to terrorism (annoying the police) by a large group of people with weapons, a reputation of this sort of thing and state backing. This wouldn’t even be an story if he hadn’t managed to record it.

You don’t really want to talk to the police, because it doesn’t benefit you to do so. The very best that will happen to you after talking to the police is that you’ll continue to do what you were already doing and not be arrested, but if the police are restricting your rights like this you’re really faced with no option but to question what they’re doing. The police need authority to do anything, that’s how civil liberties work – if something’s not a crime it’s not a crime to do it. There’s an element of creating a paper trial in these situations – you want some extra proof of what happened because you don’t want to end up with your word against a police officer. Ask them if you’re detained, what law they’re enforcing and if you’re free to go. Definitely try to get their names, numbers etc so that you can identify them later. I do wonder what would happen if you said you want to take a photo of the officer because it will let you identify the officer when you complain but that is why you want a photo of the officer if possible. It’s not illegal to photograph/film police officers and the IPCC has refused to investigate complaints, even quite serious ones, where the officer can’t be identified by the person making the complaint.

The officer in this story changed his story constantly and, although it is possible the 16 year old Jules was a spy or a child abuser or a terrorist or behaving antisocially or blocking traffic, the odds of him being all five at the same time are seriously pretty unlikely. If you’re doing something wrong the police can arrest you for that, they don’t five different things. The police should have identified what he was doing wrong at least before they pushed him down the stairs if not before they spoke to him to begin with.

Luckily there’s an audio recording, there’s photos of the officers, there’s a whole lot of press coverage (Independent). There were four figure settlements paid to photographers for similar police misconduct the day before. It should be reasonably easy for him to get this sorted out. I do wish him luck.

The sad thing to remember is that the substantial settlement he is almost certain to get from the police for this incident comes straight out of tax payer funds. This is wrong. Make the officer pay it – it’s their fault after all. The police officers who are doing their jobs correctly and are protecting the public can spend the money they aren’t paying out when they mess up from their budgets on new ways to protect tax payers (and students).

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The police officer who shoved Ian Tomlinson to the ground minutes before his death has escaped any responsibility for his actions. This is despite widespread public outrage, a video of the event, three post-mortems and a 15 month long investigation by the CPS. It’s nice that the government are spending so much taxpayer money on this but they really shouldn’t have bothered – we’ve not seen any return on it. The Guardian has uncovered more evidence than they have.

The decision by the CPS not to do anything about the attack is pretty rotten, to say the least, because they say that they have investigated the evidence and there is no hope of proving the manslaughter case beyond reasonable doubt. Fair enough, some people say, but we’ve got a video of him being shoved to the ground – what about trying him for assault? No, say the CPS, because the 6 month time bar for that charge has passed. Lots of people say, why didn’t the CPS bring the assault charge within the 6 month limit then? Because, say the CPS, they couldn’t because of an ongoing investigation into the incident… by the CPS.

If the CPS are mentioned a lot in that paragraph it’s because they’ve been instrumental in making this tragedy into the farce it now is.

The family of Ian Tomlinson are now collecting money to do it themselves. In the monumentally unlikely event that they are allowed to have a private (not public) prosecution (it would very possibly be the only one we will see in our lifetimes – there have only ever been two in Scotland and they’re not much more common down south) they would present their evidence to a jury instead. It will be horrendously expensive for them, it’s possibly the most expensive court action there is, and it seems to be the only way it will ever get to a trial.

The authorities have done a poor job with this case and if they really have to mess it up the very least they should expect is to have to resign when they get called on how badly their mess stinks.

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The idea is that police officers are required to wear a uniform to do their duties and that putting on that uniform takes time. It is estimated that it takes an officer about 15 minutes to suit up for work, that adds up to months along the lifetime of an officer. It’s about a week (45-50 hours) a year that he should either get as annual leave or paid worktime says an administrative court in Münster.

I’m against the idea of unpaid overtime myself too but this seems quite remarkable as a concept. It seems wrong to only cover people who have to put on a uniform in the morning before going to work and not people who just have to wear clothes when working. The quantum also seems to work on the basis of how long it takes you to get ready so, for example, an employee who wears a three piece suit would spend slightly longer than someone who wears a two piece suit and thereby is due slightly more money from their employer. I think as a precedent there’s really quite a lot you could do with this one.

This action is actually extremely serious – there’s a union behind this one and they’re using this as a test case with thousands of related actions to follow should the police waive their appeal or lose again. It would cost the German state a fortune if this goes through.

In summary to all my German readers – there is suddenly an economic case for wearing a scarf to work every day and you should immediately stop wearing slip on shoes.

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Disclosure:

I think a lot of airport security is a bit of a farce designed to look busy with little to no protective value. The images in this post are cropped, but otherwise unedited, screenshots taken from the security pages at www.glasgowairport.com and it really does say these things on the site.

I like security

I’m going away on my holidays soon and I was looking up the airport baggage restrictions so I’m not forced to post my luggage home or something. I’ve written about the restriction on liquids for the blog before which I consider a particularly ridiculous piece of security theatre.

The big reason I find it so offensive is that I most definitely would like my life to be protected from people who want to blow up my plane, and if my life is on the line I don’t want stupid rules about taking your shoes off and only buying drinks after you’re through the scanners when they could actually be doing something else that might save my life. Other reasons include generally not liking stupidity, or being hassled unnecessarily (“will you remove your shoes?” “why?” “in case you blow them up”) and the mind boggling costs involved in stupidly hassling people unnecessarily.

The 100 ml rule

Generally in any kind of security, computer or airport, somewhere in the middle is both the natural compromise and the worst option – it’s neither particularly convenient nor particularly safe. The 100 ml rule is a classic example of this.

As far as liquids being dangerous and the “100 ml rule” are concerned there are only two possible questions raised – either:

1. Liquids, gels and pastes are dangerous. In that case why are you allowed to take them onto a plane with other people? (No one’s allowed to take 100ml of gunpowder in a clear plastic bag) or,
2. Liquids, gels and pastes aren’t dangerous. Well, in this case why aren’t you allowed to bring as much as you like? (After all, lots of Scottish ex-pats would like to blow their weight allowance on Irn Bru)

I also don’t understand why 100ml of liquid, gel or paste explosive wouldn’t be enough to make a big bang or why terrorists couldn’t organise and pool their 100ml bottles together to make a bigger bang? Also, why are liquids only dangerous if you have them in carry-on? You can have your entire weight limit in liquid explosive stowed in the hold (it’s against the airline rules on explosives but, after all, you are a terrorist) that’s simply not looked at or tasted.

Tasted?

There’s some serious problems with the testing scheme as well:

This goes for baby milk and medicines, I’m not sure if it covers human/animal liquids or toiletries or perfumes but there’s kinda no reason why it wouldn’t.

Firstly, just tasting something isn’t actually a test for anything. In every movie where a cop sticks his finger in the white powder and tries a bit he then sends it to an actual forensic lab to be looked at properly. “I stuck my finger in it and had a bit” is never going to stand up in court. All you’re testing there is if someone will drink weird things out of a bottle if you ask them to. That’s a game very drunk students play.

Secondly, I don’t know if anyone’s realised this but I think, if I was planning to blow up a plane that I was on, then risking poisoning to convince the security guy to let me on the plane would be a total no-brainer. However, if I was on medicine and I was ordered to take a dose (or possibly more than a dose) outside of my prescription to prove to a guy with a plastic nametag and no medical degree that it was medicine I’d need to say no. The suicide bomber would be the one you’d let on the plane.

Baby milk

You’re expected to open and taste a full half of your baby milk. That’s just a weird policy – again, if baby milk is potentially dangerous you should damn well test it all if it’s going on my plane and if it’s not dangerous why are you testing any of it? Half is just not the right amount of testing to do.

The irritating thing to remember when looking at this rule is just how reasonable and common sense some of the restrictions are – no grenades, for example. That’s perfectly fine by me, I’m all for keeping grenades off planes.

And finally

…there are crazy things like this:

Seriously, they make you drink-test your medicine cabinet and breast milk from little bottles in a clear plastic bag but you get to take a pressurised gas cigarette lighter on board a non-smoking flight. Weirdly you only get to take one – yet again, if it’s dangerous why let any on at all and if it’s not dangerous why can’t you take two?

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There is a huge vested interest in the arms industry and there’s really nothing that cannot be justified if you say it’s in the interests of national security. However it’s completely ridiculous to just pour money at something on the off chance it happens in the future. You’re in trouble if you start doing that anywhere else – there has been huge outrage at the amount of vaccine and antiviral drugs that were stockpiled to deal with swine flu that turned out to be unnecessary even though it would have saved millions of lives if they had been needed. Yet, even then, considerably larger amounts of money are spent making sure we’ve got enough Eurofighters so we’re able to adequately shoot down the military jets that our enemies just don’t have.

There is always a problem of “fighting the last battle” because that’s really all you can be sure of – evidence based defence policy is really pretty tricky stuff. Obviously I’d still like evidence based policy to come into defence because the current policy of “I have a (generally faulty) kind of outdated product I’d like you to finance the production of and then buy” is killing us financially. The lack of evidence from the future is why you have ludicrously unhelpful naked body scans and liquid restrictions at airports – 9 years ago some terrorists hijacked a plane and no one wants it to happen again. The problem is that you never want to be the guy who relaxed the restrictions, just in case a plane blows up the next minute and you have egg on your face so it becomes a persistent challenge to be tougher than the guy before you.

That’s why Britain is planning to spend up to (some say at least) one hundred billion pounds on a nuclear deterrent. We’re never actually going to fire it, and no one thinks we’re going to, but having it scares off the Soviet Union. I’m not convinced it actually scares off suicide bombers (the hint’s in the name) that are pretty much the only big ticket enemy that’s attacked British soil this century.

That is why it is crazy that Trident is not included in this year’s strategic defence review. It’s absolutely crazy to earmark the biggest expense and something that just sits around being there and then argue that everything else that’s cheaper has to be more efficient.

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A police support officer remained on guard outside the house last night.

To police guard? Wait, what?

This was a horrible story about an urban fox that had snuck in an open patio door unnoticed, found a bedroom with two sleeping babies in it and attacked them. It’s horrific but the root cause was basically fixed once you threw the fox out and shut the door. Beyond needing to do something what is the police guard possibly going to achieve there? You’ve basically just tied up a police officer for a week or two until the press get bored.

That said, I think it is weird that so much is made about if the ship should have been there or not. The implication seems to be is if the ship shouldn’t have been there, if what it was carrying was bad, its mission was inflammatory or if they were violent when boarded then the boarding, shooting etc was justified. I think firstly that last one’s arguing from the consequences but secondly the earlier ones are also forms of the they were asking for it defence.

It’s a strange argument that crops up in quite a few areas – for example non-consensual sex is often “distinguished” from rape on the basis that the victim was asking for it. I’m not convinced this is much of an argument, even if you really were asking for it. In consent based crimes literally asking for it’s a pretty good legal place to be (this is called giving consent) but, for example, if it’s dressing provocatively then it’s not really you asking for it. In intention based crimes it’s even less helpful – a bank robber who kills a hostage who says “shoot me instead” isn’t going to get off. The idea is simply that a bank robber shouldn’t shoot anyone whether they’re asking it for it or not. Part of living in a functional society is learning to not shoot the people you think are asking for it because eventually everyone would get shot at least once (even if just in self defence).

In this case the formal name for the asking for it defence is a red herring – it diverts attention from the original question. The answer to “was Israel right to have landed soldiers on the ship” isn’t “what was the ship doing there in the first place?” it’s really a qualitative opinion along the lines of “yes” or “no”. Similarly “was X right to have non-consensual penetrative intercourse with Y” isn’t answered with “did Y accept a free drink from X?” It’s fairly subtle and superficially seems on topic but it’s a digression all the same. The ethical guideline is that you don’t get to do bad things to people just because they’ve done bad things themselves, and logically if that was the case that would just mean that other people are allowed to do bad things to you (and no normal person thinks this). This is the general argument for why burglars don’t leave their human rights at the door.

That’s not to say that asking for it is not a good argument in some cases. It is an established principle in delict (tort if you’re a big silly and aren’t Scottish) that no actionable injury results from one who puts themselves into a dangerous situation and sustains reasonably foreseeable harm (so, for example, if you are injured during a tackle while playing football you can’t sue the other player whereas if he pulls out a gun and shoots you you can). So if you actually are asking for it you generally can’t sue for damages later on. Where you can pull it out is quite limited, by virtue of being a consent based defence, because it’s not enough to just know it’s dangerous but you have to actually consent to being hurt and that’s quite tough. Generally people use contributory negligence to be an easier form of this. It’s of limited use in criminal law and, for example, there are a large number of cases where wholly consensual sadomasochism was judged to be ABH (and in R v Brown the victims were even judged to be aiding and abetting their own actual bodily harm, which possibly reflects attitudes to homosexuality rather than, y’know, justice)

The interesting thing about this is that the asking for it defence isn’t even a particularly thorny issue and if you ask them directly people generally accept that raped women don’t actually ask for it, but that it is so intuitively attractive. People like a good guy and a bad guy and stories where both people are, if not actually as bad as each other, at least lacking clean hands are just depressing. We like to go “well, that burglar shouldn’t have been robbing the house, give him both barrels” when really it’s important to stop and say “why should the other man have given him both barrels?” This is why people like making up brutal things to do to paedophiles or terrorists, it’s easy.

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Apple has released a new internet device yesterday (relative to when this was written) which has pretty much filled Twitter ever since. You have probably heard of this if you used the internet in the last year or so.

I particularly like the built in iBooks program. I actually own an iBook so I find this slightly confusing, the iBook was a laptop and iBooks is an online ebook store. I really think that having such a big player in the market will really change what we see in the ebook market. I hope it means that we will have the sort of really amazing media features that you can do with computer technology. The New York Times has already shown off an application where you can read their newspaper and have inline video content. I think that’s really very impressive. Apple is not a publishing company, it wants to sell books so that people have a reason to buy their iPad device. Therefore things which are good for selling the iPad will be pushed for. I think that bodes well for user experience and possibly price if not necessarily choice. Also they’re selling them in ePub format and more stores should do that.

There’s been a real internet backlash against it. I think this is probably because it’s been the single biggest tech story of the decade. The “Apple Tablet” was the big non-surprise of the year. People expected it to just about make your tea for you. The main complaint is that it’s just a big iPhone. I think this seems to forget that people really like their iPhones. Saying something is just a bigger pile of happy drugs won’t mean it isn’t awesome.

I think the comments that the name is stupid because it sounds like a feminine hygiene product are just facile. That gives the anti Mac brigade a bad name. When it says pad think “of paper” and “oh, that’s a play on iPod” not “that’s a lady thing” and snigger to yourself. It’s not a good look.

I haven’t used one (of course I haven’t) but I think it goes without saying that it will sell like hot cakes and some market will be affected by it. But I went to the Glasgow Apple store on launch day and I have used one by now – it’s smooth and very impressive. I didn’t get one, I didn’t see the need it would satisfy and I’m not earning enough just now to spend £400 on fun things.

The big news is that they’ve ported iWork to the new device which means that you can actually do pretty honest work on what is primarily a music, book, movie and photo browsing device. I don’t know how much work will be done on it but the potential is there and that’s a good reason to consider buying it. I think that you shouldn’t buy it just to make documents in iWork (especially if you have a laptop already) but that it is a nice to have feature, a little bit like how my phone works as a torch in a pinch.

The Guardian has come out yesterday (relative to when this post was posted) with a scathing review about how it’s so expensive to buy the big model. I’m a big fan of having quite small storage in my mobile devices (2GB seems to work well for my phone and mp3 player) because it’s massively cheaper and there is a genuine limit for how material much you can physically consume in the periods between plugging it back into your computer to charge it up anyway. I think at around £700 for the ultra high end 64GB model with 3G and GPS it’s nice if you have the money but it’s not going to be any better that the small model. I personally don’t see the benefit in getting the 3G upgrade but I can see how it would be useful to a certain group of people (lorry drivers are experimenting using it as a huge satnav for example).

It just seems like a very expensive way to be connected on the move but, then again, it’s a £400-£700 internet appliance so frugality isn’t the overarching principle to begin with.

I don’t think the Conservatives can really come up with a bundle of fundamental freedoms that didn’t occur to the drafters of the UN declaration or the European convention. There are genuine European substantive law issues that limit what they could say but, more to the point, once you get beyond rights to life and a fair trial; freedom of expression and gathering; and freedom from torture and so on you’re limited in what you can really put out as a human right anyway. “Broadband internet” is hardly human rights material, for example.

The main problem clouding this whole issue is that there is some woeful misreporting of the juicy HRA stories – at the previous election David Davis campaigned with the anecdote of a inmate who went to court seeking to enforce his human right to hardcore pornography. This is true, it happened. However what also happened is the judge laughed in his face and told him to get back to prison. That bit doesn’t make so much news. We risk repealing a piece of our constitutional framework because some people we don’t like have the temerity to go to court and unsuccessfully try to use it.

The current news is that two terror suspects can’t be deported because they face torture if they go back. The problem is that the authorities only suspect they’re terrorists but can’t convince any court that they are. That’s what suspected means. Basically some detective has a hunch. Detectives get hunches all the time, some times it’s just something they ate.

We have no idea what evidence failed to convince a judge that they were terrorists because the evidence, and the trial it was heard in, is secret. The reason given is that they don’t want to reveal their sources and I suspect that’s probably true. I just don’t know if it that’s because it’s a rubbish source that’s given ridiculously poor evidence that’s been pulled out of an orifice or if it really is some impossibly dashing secret agent bedding femme fatales while drinking martinis and driving fast cars. We wouldn’t get to hear about the evidence either way. The question in my mind has boiled down to “is the government more likely to employ James Bond or Mr Bean?” This is what I’m reduced to in trying to evaluate my own country’s counter-terrorism policy.

In the absence of an open trial process we’re left having to take the people who can’t grit the roads or tender building contracts properly at their word when they say they genuinely have caught a bad person. Even crazier is that the person they say they’ve caught has to take their word on this too because they aren’t told what they did or what the evidence is either. I never understood that — what sort of secret are you protecting by not telling them, surely they already found out when they did it in the first place?

The immigration tribunal service is not a shining example of common sense — it once told an homosexual Iranian it wanted to deport that it was safe to be gay in Iran as long as you don’t tell anyone (the authorities had recently decided to hang the man’s partner from a lamppost) — and should simply not be treated with implicit confidence in abilities that they don’t demonstrate.

You certainly don’t need to throw the baby of the Human Rights Act out with the bathwater of the Daily Mail.

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