Libby Purves, writing in the Times took up the call of Keith Jarrett, the retiring president of the National Black Police Association, for the re-introduction of stop and search to combat rising numbers of youth murders.

If you aren’t British, you won’t know that stop-and-search practices have a long and disastrous history in UK policing. They contributed to terrible relations between police and young black men, in particular, when the criteria for looking “suspicious” enough to get stopped and searched in the street rested almost entirely on whether you were a young black male or not.

Maybe Keith Jarrett is considering that the policy would cut the number of young civilians killed by turning the anger of young black men against police rather than each other. Hmm, that seems a bit mean to his police colleagues. But, otherwise, it’s very hard to understand how alienating young people further from society is going to do anything to cut crime.

I suspect that Keith Jarrett just knows full well what type of soundbite will get picked up by all the British media and he’s thinking of a less arduous and better-paid career in politics or television. Bugger the consequences.

Libby Purves presents Jarrett’s silly argument in a really odd way. It’s a “challenge to political correctness” etc…. So far, so predictable. But she ties it in with a trend for other people saying the supposedly unsayable, as if they are all part of a wave of new anti-PC thinking, thus implying a spurious authority for Jarrett’s nonsense.

For instance, she includes Trevor Phillips – of the soon to be defunct, if it’s not already closed down, Commission for Racial Equality – saying that multiculturalism is a farce. Well, yes, but Trevor Phillips was demanding real integration, not proposing an increase in bigotry.

She includes the Chief Constable of North Wales who called for the legalisation of heroin. A perfectly rational call from someone who can see the social effects of prohibition and suggests a reasonable solution.

Have you spotted the difference yet? These people were not challenging an imaginary “political correctness.” They were making rational arguments about social policies that are producing effects that are exactly opposite to those they are supposed to be aiming to achieve.

Jarrett is not doing this. He is calling for the adoption of a strategy that has clearly failed on any measure. Repeatedly. There is nothing like getting stopped and humiliated in the street when blamelessly going about your business for building a deep and abiding hatred of the police among the generally law-abiding.

With modern technology, the horrors of the old Sus laws would be increased exponentially. Under new proposals, the police are to have laptops on which to record details of “suspects”. Identity documents and DNA databases and all the panapoly of an authoritarian modern state will each feed into the mix. Already the UK DNA database is a world leader (in a shameful league.) The proportion of black males whose DNA is stored is an unspeakably scandalous feature of this.

Libby Purves presents the arguments against this mad policy, albeit sneeringly (OK, it’s not as if I am stranger to the sneer, myself.)

Until now the lazy mantra has been that the police are “institutionally racist”, as the Macpherson report put it, and cannot be trusted. They have to record every instance of searching, and have been threatened with legal action by racial equality watchdogs and accused of poisoning community relations. The riots of 1980, 1981 and 1985 in Bristol, Brixton and Handsworth were triggered by heavy-handed police action against black suspects, mainly in search of drugs or stolen property.

She infers that this may have been all very well in those distant days

But this is 2007, and the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders: often by teenagers, of teenagers

.

She then lists some recent murders. This is clearly to make it seem as if the evidence supports the proposed solution. She presents no evidence for why or how this will work except that Keith Jarrett claims that black parents whom he knows support the idea.

Let me do the same. Young people have been shot and stabbed in my my neighbourhood. Kids from my old primary school have both murdered and been murdered. I will face magnetic north and say “K’plah” repeatedly at random intervals. That will sort it out then?

Stop and search will prevent murders? How? How on earth?

The comments have some predictable responses. For instance, Liz Scott, Gutersloh, Germany says:

The truth hurst, and no matter how hard these white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men try to cover it up, the crime figures are real, and real solutions must be made to overcome them.

Another cover-up? By mysterious white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men? (Aside, I love the way liberal is capitalised. I love the way fat is even in there.)

Jane, Birmingham, UK

I am all for stop and search – if you have nothing to hide then why should you mind afterall it is done to protect us from the maniacs carrying knives and drugs.

But there are comments that bear repeating.
Donald Ideh, London, UK:

… As a black professional, I have experienced the ugly face of policing, the ordinary prejudice with which they carry out their duties. I have had an innocent family member tortured by the state in the infamous Stoke Newington Police Station. These youths are already over represented in prisons and police data bases. The sad irony is that that they are also most likely to be the victims of violent crime.

JonB, Glasgow, UK:

“the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders”
What!?!?!? Are you mad?? You’re claiming there are more murders than drugs or burglary offences?

The pope has apparently begun ensainting Franco’s clergy (or whatever the word is for declaring them to have been “saints” rather than “active supporters of a dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government by force.” Think Guernica). According to the Times, a fight broke out

outside a church in Rome yesterday after the Pope beatified 498 priests and nuns killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Members of the congregation attacked left-wing protesters carrying a banner that read: “Those who have killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified.”

Franco? The 1930s fascist who clung on to power for decades by the simple expedient of not joining his fascist chums in the Second World War. According to the Times, again,

Bands of Communist and Anarchist irregulars on the Republican side burnt churches and killed thousands of priests and nuns. Falangist death squads executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of harbouring leftist sympathies

So, if we are stacking up bodies to measure levels of atrocity, it looks as if even the Times sees that Franco’s toll was the highest.

This isn’t just a historical point, there are current resonances.

The country’s Socialist Government has clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church. The Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÍguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces, has caused howls of protest from conservatives after introducing a law aimed at redressing the injustices suffered by victims of the regime. Among other measures, the law orders the removal of any symbols of the dictatorship, which arguably include the shrines in many Spanish churches to the dead on Franco’s side. Republican victims still lie in dozens of unmarked mass graves around the country.

Why draw the line in Spain? Why not go the distance and start beatifying the Ruandan clergy involved in promoting genocide.

Doesn’t this act seem like calculated provocation with the Pope intervening to show which side he’s on in the current climate?