Gun Culture

Monday, July 16, 2007

ACPO wants open ended internment

Generally when I hear that ACPO has asked for something, I think it is a fair bet it will be bad news for freedom.
So when I saw a representative of ACPO on Sky News talking about what a mistake it was to specify a number of days for internment detention without charge, I knew what he really meant was he wanted unlimited detention.

‘We should never have got involved in the 90-day debate. In hindsight, we should have said that we needed an extraordinary mechanism to give us the ability to investigate these complex cases under judicial supervision,

Ah, here we go.

Ken Jones, the president of Acpo, told The Observer that in some cases there was a need to hold terrorist suspects without charge for ‘as long as it takes’.

Of course this would only ever be used in the case of terror suspects wouldn’t it?
Just like these cases:
On 22 March 2003, the police used surprisingly extreme tactics to prevent more than 120 activists from reaching a legally sanctioned anti-war demonstration in Fairford, (Gloucestershire, UK).
Terrorist Act used to detain 82 year old heckler at Labour Part Conference