Radio Ham

Via Chicken Yoghurt, here are two videos currently doing the rounds, causing people to shriek about Britain turning into a police state. Orwell warned against it, doncha know.

http://www.qik.com/video/203590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKl2sEN4yNM

At first sight these incidents may appear similar, but they are, in fact, completely different. In the first, two officers apply the law correctly, and are reasonably polite, albeit one of them gets a bit arsey in response to the somewhat dickish attitude of the filmmaker. In the second the PCSO trys to misapply the law, and is extremely rude and obnoxious in the process.

I guess from a professional point of view I am more appalled by the second video, but any complaints that this shows the UK as a police state are way wrong; this is an example of an idiot acting like an idiot, something you cannot legislate for, and who is acting here without the law to back him up. How can that be evidence of a police state?

From a civil liberties perspective, however, the first video is the concern. This is not news – the terror legislation that allows officers to stop members of the public without suspicion is some 8 years old – but still, it highlights the problem. We should have more to fear from police politely applying unfair laws than from stroppy tools in uniform making things up as they go along. I’d rather an individual officer fails to apply a sensible law that the whole force fairly applying an unjust one.