Charging ahead22 June 2010 |
|
The new government's position on charging powers owes more to reassuring the police about impending budget cuts than considering the impact on the wider community, says Sophie Khan
You might have thought that the first public speech the new home secretary, Theresa May, should have made was to a community group dedicated to upholding civil liberties, especially as ‘civil liberties’ has become the new brand word for the Conservatives. Instead, she chose to address the Police Federation on 19 May 2010, and proposed to hand back more power to the police under a ‘new deal’ in policing.
Licence to police
For the first time in seven years, statutory charging decisions for minor offences, which have since the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 vested with lawyers at the CPS, would be made by custody sergeants in their ‘licence to police’ alongside existing extraordinary powers of arrest and charge for public order and road traffic offences.
Charges for common assault, theft and breach of bail would be solely decided by the police under the pretext that if there is “more freedom to the police professionals; more power to the people”. How this will relate into day-to-day policing may not be as easy as May thinks, especially as there are many situations involving police officers where the charging decision is taken because of a vested interest in ‘pinning’ something on the individual to ‘save face’.
Just a few days before May’s speech, District Judge Henderson sitting at Highbury Magistrates’ Court expressed his “grave misgivings” about a case that had been brought before him by the police, and felt that the police had charged my client with a minor offence in the hope that he would plead guilty. Fortunately, he was found not guilty and is now pursuing a civil action against the police to include malicious prosecution.
Although my client was able to pay for the costs of his defence, many other people in the same position do not have the same resources and find it extremely difficult to defend themselves against the police which leads to fines and convictions that they should not have on their records. The growing appetite of the police to abuse their powers in these situations has not being recognised and I do not think that May has fully considered the consequences of handing back further charging decisions to the police.
Lord Auld in 2001, following the inquiry of the criminal justice system, highlighted the numerous miscarriages in justice and mistakes that had been made by the police in their charging decisions. May needs to take this on board before she reverses a highly important aspect of the criminal justice system which has led to fewer miscarriages of justice and unviable cases being dropped at an early stage – saving millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. The statutory charging decisions need to remain with the CPS, not just because lawyers are best placed to make the decisions based on the facts of the case but also because the individual suspected of an offence has the right to have his case seen by a CPS lawyer to preserve the integrity of the system. The input of lawyers in the decision-making process at that stage should not be underestimated, particularly as the public is shouting out for a stronger civil liberties society where there is a visible balance between the public and the state. The proposed ‘new deal’, however, goes against the grain of what the public expected of the new coalition government and seems to have ignored the mood of the time.
Democratic accountability
Although May has indicated that the “new freedom must come with strings attached”, she seems to have again ignored the strong opposition to her plans to have elected police commissioners. The Association of Police Authorities has already publicly stated that the plans will be “strongly opposed... but welcome proposals on cutting bureaucracy”. This could leave a situation which would take us back to the dark days of policing where the word ‘accountability’ did not even appear in the police’s dictionary.
Cutting bureaucracy will see the scrapping of the stop-and-search form, which will come as a heavy blow to the tireless work carried out by monitoring groups, such as the Westminster Police Stop and Search Monitoring Group, which over the years has successfully worked with the local police to establish greater accountability for individuals stopped in the Westminster area. May, as well as undermining the hard work of these groups, will also limit the statistics that could then be used to show patterns of discrimination in the use of stop and searches towards a section of society.
Without accountability locked into the procedure there will be more infringements of civil liberties with no means of recourse or redress – and recent cases such as Gillan and Quinton v UK, in the European Court of Human Rights earlier this year, would not have been able to show the disproportionate use of stop-and-search powers in section 44 of the Terrorism Act on black and Asian individuals.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also relied on stop-and-search statistics to raise the profile of police forces that continue to use the powers in a discriminatory way, and has written to the Metropolitan, Dorset, Leicestershire, West Midlands and Thames Valley police forces and given them until Friday last week (18 June 2010) to provide evidence as to the steps they will be taking to comply with equalities legislation. The home secretary may have thought that by making her maiden speech to the Police Federation she would be able to appease the police who will soon be subject to budget cuts. However, politicians need to be more realistic in the policies they are advancing and consider the full consequences for the whole community before making such public statements.
No comments:
Post a Comment