Today I came across this story, which I think says a great deal about Britain today.
A bloke has his home raided by the Police because they've identified what they think are suspcious patterns of heat movement from within. How have they come to this conclusion ? By using infra-red deat detention equipment from a Police helicopter. This leads them to conclude that the occupant is harbouring a cannabis factory. As it would do, I suppose, if you've got an ultra-suspicious mind and nothing better to think about.
And you thought they were looking for murderers...
So Plod breaks into this man's garage. They find nothing more than a wood-burning stove, used to heat a workshop. In forcing entry they leave a big hole in the garage door, which they patch up with a bit of loose-fitting chipboard. They don't bother to clear up the mess they've made. They stick a search warrant through the letter box along with a bit of paper which said they hadn't taken anything as evidence. And that's it. No apology. No post-raid phone call to say why they'd broken into the home of an innocent man. Not even a compensation form so that the occupant could claim for the damage - he had to go to the Police Station to get that.
So, faced with rising levels of violent crime and conveying an almost total disregard for victims of muggings, or for people whose houses have been burgled or whose cars have been broken into, the Police have, it seems, got the time and the money to go up in a bloody helicopter and monitor our heat consumption. (For God's sake, is there any way in which they are not watching us ?) And having found something they think might indicate use of a drug which might as well be legalised anyway, they've then got the time and resources to break into a locked garage, just so that they can find...nothing. But having then been shown to be totally wrong, they are incapable of an apology or of any practical help to make good the damage they've caused.
I used to respect and admire the Police. I used to think they were on my side, as an innocent law-abiding person. But my support of them has been corroded in recent years by stories such as this, which betray an overuse of power, a lack of respect for the people they're supposed to be protecting and absolutely dire prioritisation. And I'm not alone.
3 comments:
Makes you wonder why they just didn't knock on the blokes door. If he'd tried to do a runner they could have been pretty confident that he had something to hide. A bit simpler than bashing in a guy's garage door.
There was one in the paper a few months back; the house they raided on the grounds of the amount of suspicious heat it was giving out had recently been bought by a WPC who had chosen that particular New Build house because of its' Green, Sustainable. Eco friendly credentials. Ha bloody Ha.
Any helicopter with an (ooh) infrared camera over-flying a Justice Services Facilitation Point (Police Station) these days would like as not just show four overly warm overly large bodies huddled around a card table.
Makes me wonder what a surface to air missile would look like for a few, deiciously brief, seconds on a Police heckilopter's monitor screen.
I have trained my three dogs to respond to the sound of a hovering heat-monitoring helicopter by running around the house lighting their (rather impressive) farts as they go. At the moment the movement is random but we're working (by guided example) on their tracing out crop-circle patterns and short messages.
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