Bolitics The New Condem Government

[colhint]

so do I, but what if several people over a period of time phoned hone and said they heard things  about the station. I'd hope they would check it out, wouldn't you?

[Morley_crosses_to_Withe]

Both gave their view on who they saw being stopped. They don't pretend to have seen the operation from start to finish - pretty obviously, they were commenting on what they individually saw, over presumably a short time, as you pointed out earlier. No, they don't contradict each other, for the same reason.

I'm sure they stopped some white people as well. If they hadn't, their actions would be so clearly contrary to both the law and a later section in the guidance I referenced above that they would be open to immediate disciplinary action, and the agency to legal challenge.

But is it likely that most of the people stopped were black? Well, 30 years' experience of how stop and search powers actually possessed by the police have been used, tend to make anyone of a rational cast of mind think that there will be a similar chance of black people being disproportionately stopped.

Against that, you might want to point out that Brent is the borough with (I think) the highest black population in London, so of course there will be a lot of black people stopped. Would you go with that argument?

Edited July 30, 2013 by Morley_crosses_to_Withe

[peterms]

Mick Twister @twitmericks

 

A high-up Conservative peer

Dismissed the Northeast with a sneer:

"Entirely lacking

Requiring fracking"

Lord Howell declared, from his rear

[snowychap]

What I'm saying is that the law requires them to have intelligence about individuals before stopping them - see the guidance I quoted.  It doesn't mean they can hang around at stations and stop people because they have been told that someone overheard a conversation there last week.  That's pre-1990 East Germany you're thinking of.

Though the guidance (as I'm guessing Risso's very bold quote is from) would seem (as per various sections of counter-terrorism acts, section 60s and so on) to extend all of this to reasonable suspicion within a vicinity (none of which is justifiable to anyone other than in an operational fashion to someone higher up the foodchain).

p.s. I would hope (though I'm not sure I should hold out that much of it) that anyone in any of these circumstances who was either a British citizen (or subject or resident and so on) or a legal immigrant but didn't have 'his papers about him' (okay that's my rather coarse take on it all) turned round to said 'IO', politely told them where they ought to spend the rest of the day and duly went about their legitimate business.

Edited July 30, 2013 by snowychap

[peterms]

so do I, but what if several people over a period of time phoned hone and said they heard things  about the station. I'd hope they would check it out, wouldn't you?

 

But a station is a place of transit.  You may as well say "What about Oxford Street?" or "Brixton tube?  Yeah, some dodgy geezers down that way".  That's not "intelligence" in any meaning of the word, surely?

[Morley_crosses_to_Withe]

so do I, but what if several people over a period of time phoned hone and said they heard things about the station. I'd hope they would check it out, wouldn't you?

But a station is a place of transit. You may as well say "What about Oxford Street?" or "Brixton tube? Yeah, some dodgy geezers down that way". That's not "intelligence" in any meaning of the word, surely?

But Kensal Green is a very random station - possibly too random - don't you think?

If they were just out on a whim, then they'd have been better off doing their spot checks in a busier place such as Oxford Circus.

Whilst Brent might have a large ethnic community, so do many other places. The fact that it was targeted at a specific station of no obvious relevance makes me think they may have had some specific intelligence.

[tonyh29]

The Tory party is seemingly full of quite objectionable people, determined to persist with the North / South divide

Perfect example here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23505723

Fracking should be carried out in the North East of England, where there are large, "desolate" areas, a former energy secretary has said ..............

Edit: Lord Howell is the father in law of Gideon - 'nuff sai

Present or past the Tories really are a revolting mob aren't they.

yawn

You forgot to add " and their supporters " to your attempted wind up

[snowychap]

As this is the go to bollitics thread:

I've just caught the tail end of the Newsnight 'discussion' with Stella Creasy and Toby Young.

I was surprised to find myself agreeing more with Young than Creasy (who very, very, very worryingly seemed to be relying on the awful nonsense that is the Protection from Harassment Act to justify her campaign for the censorship of twitter - which is much more than the reporting and dealing with threats of violence, rape and (maybe) more that she and others have had to endure in the last week or so).

The Harassment nonsense 'crept' from something very narrow to an Act that is often very lazily used by the police to deal with either low level anti-social behaviour or even to silence simple disputes (and thus simplify any future action they may have to take).

Young is right that this kind of move is censorious.

No one has the right to be threatening someone else with rape, physical harm or whatever and that needs to be dealt with by the criminal law. If Creasy doesn't even consider that her campaign has potential (negative) repercussions beyond her own argument then I am very disappoint - though I can forgive the immediate response if it's mainly due to the personal involvement.

Edited July 30, 2013 by snowychap

[peterms]

 

 

so do I, but what if several people over a period of time phoned hone and said they heard things about the station. I'd hope they would check it out, wouldn't you?

But a station is a place of transit. You may as well say "What about Oxford Street?" or "Brixton tube? Yeah, some dodgy geezers down that way". That's not "intelligence" in any meaning of the word, surely?

But Kensal Green is a very random station - possibly too random - don't you think?

If they were just out on a whim, then they'd have been better off doing their spot checks in a busier place such as Oxford Circus.

Whilst Brent might have a large ethnic community, so do many other places. The fact that it was targeted at a specific station of no obvious relevance makes me think they may have had some specific intelligence.

 

 

Brent has the largest ethnic minority population in London, which I guess means the UK as well. 

 

I suppose if you set up street searches in Brixton, everyone would know what that meant, but oddly in Brent, though there are more black people living there, it's a little less obvious, apparently.

 

My point in other posts is that random spot checks, eg Oxford Circus, would appear to be against their own guidance. 

[Risso]

Peter, you've taken one Twitter post, and extrapolated from it that the racist filth were randomly stopping black people. You have not the merest scrap of evidence whatsoever.

[peterms]

Peter, you've taken one Twitter post, and extrapolated from it that the racist filth were randomly stopping black people. You have not the merest scrap of evidence whatsoever.

 

Nonsense.  The photographic evidence of the operation came from Twitter (btw, do you disbelieve the Arab Spring happened on the basis that it was largely Twitter which carried the most real-time accounts of it?  Or anything at all, if someone first drew attention to it through Twitter?).

 

The comments on who was being stopped came from eye witnesses.  They saw black and "foreign-looking" people being stopped.  I'm sure some white people were stopped as well.  I also think it's likely that the people stopped were disproportionately non-white, as has been the case since, oooh, for ever, under police stop-and-search actions.

 

There's an FOI request in to establish the ethnicity of those who were stopped - let's see if there's an answer provided.

 

They happen to have chosen the part of Britain with the highest black population for this exercise, and for the "racist van" patrols.  Of course it's also Sarah Teather's constituency, so perhaps there's an element of getting back at her for her criticism of what they're doing.

 

It's not the first time they've done this.  They were strongly criticised a couple of years back for exercises in the north west, where they stopped people leaving transport or took them off transport for questioning (nb their own regulations state questioning must be consensual), and demanded ID.  Here.

 

When this government came in, they scrapped the ID card scheme, saying they were going to be rolling back the surveillance state.  What utter bollocks.

 

Papieren, bitte!

[peterms]

 

 

 

[Risso]

[Eames]

Am I missing something here? 

 

The Border Agency (part of whose job is to find and remove illegal immigrants) are stopping people who they believe may be illegal immigrants (its not a huge surprise that they may have been "foreign looking") and asking them a few questions?  As a result of the action they detained three people (none of whom I assume where black based on the report)  It is not an enormous surprise even in an area with a high % of non white residents that in a search for illegal immigrants the BA stopped people that looked non white is it? I am therefore completely convinced that a disproportionate number of non whites were stopped since I would imagine that a disproportionate number of illegal immigrants also happen to be non white. 

 

I would imagine that if I moved to say Lagos illegally, I would try and base myself in the area with the highest % of white people so as not to stick out like the bollocks on a bulldog.  Looking for illegals in leafy Surrey villages is likely to be somewhat of a fruitless venture. 

 

 

There is quite literally nothing to see here beyond the rather comforting story of "Border Agency does its job" 

 

Fantastic.  

[Jon]

Good work, Mr Rissworth

[peterms]

Am I missing something here? 

 

There is quite literally nothing to see here beyond the rather comforting story of "Border Agency does its job"

Yes, you're missing the whole point about the limitations on their powers, whether they exceeded them, whether they followed their own guidance...I'm not going to repeat it all.

 

As for them doing their job, I found this story quite touching.

[Eames]

 

Am I missing something here? 

 

There is quite literally nothing to see here beyond the rather comforting story of "Border Agency does its job"

Yes, you're missing the whole point about the limitations on their powers, whether they exceeded them, whether they followed their own guidance...I'm not going to repeat it all.

 

As for them doing their job, I found this story quite touching.

 

Which is a lovely comical tail.... 

 

You seem to have a real bee in your bonnet about immigration..... come to think of it.... there is something foreign about those eyebrows and that tash....... 

[drat01]

[AVFCforever1991]

[Risso]

 

Am I missing something here? 

 

There is quite literally nothing to see here beyond the rather comforting story of "Border Agency does its job"

Yes, you're missing the whole point about the limitations on their powers, whether they exceeded them, whether they followed their own guidance...I'm not going to repeat it all.

 

 

 

 

And one Twitter photo and the views of a couple of bystanders doesn't prove anything, one way or another.  You could be right, and they might simply have turned up to a place they thought was full of black people and started randonly targetting them simply because of their colour.  Or they could have been reacting to specific intelligence, and then targetted people based on their behaviour in the station, as their regulations appears to allow.