NYPD attack wall street demonstration

The pictures are pretty shocking (although probably hardly surprising if you live in parts of many US cities). But on a lighter note you have to love the ultra-serious delivery and downright anger of the anchorman.

Police forces to cease recording ethnicity during stop and accounts

Really not good news.

The ethnic disproportionality in the application of police stop powers is one of the most invidious aspects of current police practice in the UK - and probably in many other countries as well. There is nothing better suited to driving a wedge between the police and the people they serve (i.e. us) than the sense that we are being unfairly stopped by officers in order that (a) we should account to them for our movements, or (b) that we should be body searched (with no reason necessary under several pieces of legislation). Disproportionality in this type of police behaviour seems to me to be the antithesis of procedural justice (and distributive justice and probably any other type of justice as well).

The argument made by Craig Mackey, who's ACPO lead on stop and search - that police have no real powers to stop and account (so presumably the change is therefore of little consequence) is I think slightly disingenuous. I wonder how many ordinary people distinguish between a stop for an account and a stop for a search, or how often a stop intended to lead to a search does not, and therefore becomes in essence a stop and account.

We should not forget that stopping people in public places merely on the suspicion that they may have committed a crime is one of the most significant powers the police have. On one hand, in the final analysis police officers should be able to approach members of the public to ask them questions and, yes, 'account' for what they are doing. Policing as it is currently construed in the UK would be impossible without this type of contact between police and citizen (for one thing policing would have to become almost entirely reactive). But on the other hand they do this not as ordinary citizens but as wielders of the power of legitimate violence. The coercion in this type of police behaviour lies not in the legal status of the act but in the power of the people doing it. Until they have proved that they can use this power fairly monitoring all stop activity is vital.

Tony Blair's magical reasoning

Tony Blair was interviewed at length on Radio 4 today (listen here - it was in the post 8am section). Among the many pearls of wisdom was his explanation as to why the motivations of Jihadists have nothing whatsoever to do with 'western' actions in the middle east and elsewhere. Rather:

"They believe in what they believe in because they believe that their religion compels then to believe in it"

That's right, they believe in something because they, y'know, believe in it.

Mind you, similar 'reasoning' is used in political discourse all the time. David Cameron recently appeared to blame the crimes committed during the August riots on 'criminality'; although to be fair, unlike Blair he went on to suggest some causes that at least nodded to a move beyond tautology (whether you agree with them or not). Lack of ability to tell right from wrong, lack of self control and so on.

Of course in both cases the magical reasoning is entirely self-serving. Blair is ideologically committed to the idea that Islamist terrorism is sui generis and definitively unrelated to actions taken by western governments; Cameron is a right wing Tory for whom the idea that crime has social as well as personal causes is extremely challenging. It's just a shame that politicians making these types of comments don't get pulled up more often by those interviewing them. If they were, we might at least start to get at their motivations for such laughable arguments.