What the Police Bill means

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THE POLICE Bill means:

*The police holding people for 96 hours (four days) without charge, *Police road blocks round whole areas with power to search everything that moves, *Police power to search innocent people's homes, *Police power to conduct 'intimate body searches' of anyone arrested,.

*New and wider police powers to arrest people, *Police power to use force to fingerprint and take 'nonintimate samples' from anyone they arrest, *Police power to use force to finger-print children of 10, *New and wider police powers to stop and search people in 'public places' *New police powers to search and seize confidential information given to doctors, lawyers, priests, journalists, social workers...

The Home Office is pulling out all the stops to convince us that there is nothing new in their Police and Criminal Evidence Bill for innocent people to worry about.

This is like an officer in charge of a firing squad telling those about to be dispatched 'not to worry' because (a) it's all perfectly lega, (b) his squad has done this sort of thing in the past with few complaints from the victims afterwards, and anyway, (c) some of their bullets are blanks.

The new 1984 police-state powers will mean*The police will decide the guilt of suspects. They will have the power to keep people in custody for 96 hours without charge.

The so-called right to silence would be a farce. Only people trained to stand up to interrogation will survive four days in a police station without confessing to any crime the police want them to. Even after four days the police will be able to get magistrates to send people back to police cells so that interrogation about 'other matters' can continue.

* People can be held in custody for four days or more if suspected of a 'serious arrestable offence. The way the government organised by Labour CND. Saturday January 28, from 10am at Sheffi Town Hall. Credentials Greenwood House, 446 Uxbridge Rd, London M defines this gives police officers discretion to decide that quite trivial offences fall within it.

* The police will be given new powers to stop and search innocent people all over the country. Their power of stop and search is already too great and much misused.

* Innocent people will be treated as guilty. The police will have powers to search premises if they have any connection whatever with a suspect. It will not matter that the person whose home is searched is not even suspected of any oftence.

*The police will have the power to harass and pressurise whole areas by throwing road blocks round them and searching everything that moves in them because of the alleged 'pattern of crime' there.

The areas where black people live are the clear targets of this new power.

Seizure

* Whole areas of people's lives are to be subject to state definition and police search and seizure. The information we give to our doctors, priests, lawyers, solicitors or journalists could be read. searched and seized by the police.

* The police will have the power to conduct what are called intimate body searches' by force.

This is not the same as the power to 'strip search, which the police will also have. This power refers to forced searches of mouths, vaginas, and anuses by police officers. It will legalise humiliating and dangerous police assaults on people.

* The police will have greatly increased powers to arrest people. Minor offences like dropping litter in the street will cause people to be arrested if the police decide they do not accept the name and address of the offender.

These new powers of arrest also extend to actions which a police officer says are likely to be an 'affront to public decency' (not in itself an offence). This is clearly directed against gay men and lesbian women.

Home Secretary Leon Brittan also fired offa volley of noisy blanks:

* New draft codes of practice governing police behaviour. They are no better than the codes which permitted the shooting and pistol-whipping of Stephen Waldorf in the streets of London. They will be totally useless in a court of law, and therefore no-one will get any protection from them.

Tape-record

* A promise to tape-record police interviews with suspects in their custody. When?

* A promise to set up a Police Complaints Authority. But this new quango will allow the police to continue investigating themselves.

* A promise to hand over prosecution to a new authority. When?

*Police-community consultative committees... like the one in Brixton which agreed to the police bulldozing the Frontline in 1982.

Such proposals simply distract attention from the abuse of existing police powers which day-to-day experience and each new research report confirms: from the new, dangerous, police-state powers in the Police Bill mentioned above; and from the ways in which the Police Bill seeks to legalise police lawlessness.

Alongside the Police Bill, the state is tooling up a whole new machinery of repression.

Irish

The government has decided to make the Prevention of Terrorism Act iun for period of five years instead of one, and to make it apply to other national communities living in Britain... so that they will suffer the sort of harassment heaped on the Irish in Britain since 1974.

•New riot laws have been proposed by the Lane Commission. New anti-union laws are being pushed through. There has been a massive re-arming and retraining of all police forces in Britain since 1981. with new riot squads going under the names of Instant Response Units, Distiuct Support Units, etc.

The police have experimented with water cannons, and acquired stocks of CS gas and plastic bullets. We see reinforced police personnel carriers on our streets.

Under the so-called multiagency approach, the State increasingly tries to make social workers, teachers, DHSS workers, and rent officers perform policing roles.

Police forces

There has been a massive growth in police numbers since La big increase in police The Police Bill has as its central purpose the creation of the legal framework to control those groups and individuals who mount legitimate resistance to the attack on our democratic rights and our standard of living.

What you can do:

* Join the National Campaign against the Police Bill (c/o 5C Rectory Road, London N16 7QY) and get your organisatior to affiliate, * Set up a local campaign hold public meetings, get speaker! to local community and labou movement organisations, plar street leaflettings and fund-raising gig * Contact your MP and loca and Ioc. councillors and get them te oppose the Bill.

(Adapted from a leaflet from the National Campaign Agains the Police Bill).

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