RE: ID Cards

["Owen Lewis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Pete Mitchell
> Sent: 22 February 2005 17:30
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: ID Cards
>
>
> Owen Lewis wrote:
> >
> > petem wrote:
> > >
> > > Owen Lewis wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Two points of interest, I thought:
> > > >
> > > >         1. Liberty's argument (given a generous share of the
> > > limited time) rested
> > > > entirely on the presentation of mere supposition as assured fact.
> > >
> > > What suppositions in particular did you have in mind?
> > >
> >
> > That the introduction of ID cards will result in a marked
> increase in police
> > harassment of racial minorities and other 'vulnerable' groups.
>
>
> I don't think your criticism is a reasonable one. Under that definition
> of "mere supposition", any prediction of future events can be dismissed
> as "mere supposition" and not a fact, since nobody knows for *certain*
> what will really happen.

Not so. Certain matters are capable of absolute proof. Euclid's theorems?
Other matters if not proved can be considered likely from heuristic evidence
to the point where, for common purposes, they may safely be assumed to be
true. AFAIK there is no heuristic evidence to support Liberty's assertion.

>
> I think it's OK for Liberty to say, "Previous laws of this type have
> been misused in this way in the past, so we believe that this one will
> be misused in a similar way in the future."

Which 'law' did you have in mind for Liberty to fixate on? (I ask because
they made no such claim for themselves, as I remember).

>
> In fact, that's the standard warp and woof of political debate - to try
> and predict the outcome of policy options and choose an option
> accordingly.

AFAIK there is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion. If you can
show me differently, I should be obliged.

> > > Well the Home Office makes a habit of presenting supposition as
> > > established fact too, as the Belmarsh detainees are well aware. So
> > > presumably this applies to them too.
> >
> > True. But two Wongs don't make a Wight (I *know* that should have been
> > 'white' but one can now go to jail for repeating hoary old
> lines like that
> > verbatim). It is a disgrace that govt resorts to spin as it so
> frequently
> > does. However, that is surely not excuse for allowing oneself
> to be seen as
> > equally facile, shallow, manipulative and even plain dishonest.
>
>
> I think that's too harsh. Like I say, Liberty can point to precedent to
> justify their claim. We all know how the anti-terrorism act stop and
> search powers were never ever going to be used on anybody except evil
> suicide bombers and wicked organised criminals. And then they got used
> on a twenty-year old girl in a woolly hat and camo trousers who happened
> to be at a demonstration against an arms fair; and then we found that
> a continuous state of emergency had quietly been declared in London
> and the Met were using these powers routinely on lots of people
> every day.

You make it all sound terribly innocent, right-thinking and fun; I also
don't the fair - nor the young lady you refer to. I can say, however that
the threats issues by sundry groups against arms fairs in this country and
one or two other places have included bomb threats, other death threats and
conspiring to make explosions. This is serious criminal activity and of a
terrorist nature. Those who make common cause with such people swim in mucky
water along with sharks. IMO, they can't really complain if their activity -
and identity - is rigorously investigated.

In my youth, I was on the pointy end of police stop and search on not
infrequent occasions. I never liked it - no more than I do now - but, even
then, I accepted it as a an inevitable part of effective crime control. Why
me? Well I was young, male and often wandering about in the wee small hours
of the morning (and on one well remembered occasion, on the Kingston
by-pass,  was carrying a shotgun at the time). Only once have I felt that
police powers were being exercised abusively. This includes the more recent
occasions when I have been stopped whilst driving about in the wee small
hours.

It is the pattern of one's activities, the timing and location of them that
are the greatest influences on whether or not one is stopped and that is how
it should be. There is no single pattern but several, varying with the
prevalence of different types of criminal behaviour in given localities.
Some of these behaviour patterns are more common in some of the ethnic and
age groupings than in others. Others, e.g. burglary, follow no such pattern.
It would be offensive to commonsense that those responsible for crime
prevention and detection ignore any statistical linkage in allocation of
their limited time. Where they are ordered so to ignore, there is little
wonder that occurrence of statistically-related crimes are then seen to
increase. Colour or ethnicity are by no means the only indicators. The
incidence of broken windows resulting from the throwing or kicking of
objects is, I suggest, overwhelmingly connected to juvenile males whilst the
incidence related to elderly women is essentially nil. Finally, certain
localities have ethnically, racially or religiously heavily skewed mixed of
population. In such areas, even were the police blind and senseless, any
series of 'stops' are going to show a heavy ethnic etc. bias if compared
with some national or even constabulary-wide notional mean.

But we digress. None of this has the least to do with the claim that the
introduction of ID card will affect the number of - or balance of by profile
persons stopped by the police.  This is a claim I think to be unsupportable.

Owen