From: "Brian Toller", [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Your argument is totally irrelevent. Individual police
>officers do not, should not and never will have the choice
>as to which laws, passed by parliament, they will or will
>not enforce. Yes, enforce. The police do enforce the laws,
>the courts decide on guilt or otherwise and impose
>suitable punishment if necessary.
You seem to endow the individual officer with as little
self determination as the pistol he may wield. The pistol
being his weapon and the officer being the unthinking weapon
of the government.
Of course the police enforce the laws but if they rigourously
enforced every law on the books we'd need more courts than
schools and a jail the size of Wales.
I think we all need to stop and remember that the police
enforce the laws that parliament enacts and parliament is
supposed to represent the will of the people and the last
time I checked police were still people and with a
fairly vocal union to back them.
I suspect that if the spectre of Nazi's and Nuremberg
hadn't been bought into this arguement we would be a lot
closer to agreement or at least agreeing to disagree with
a bit more of a smile than a scowl.
Brian T
--
I just think people have been socialised into stark
naked terror at the mention of Nazis. The Nazis had
a system of law and governance as well, they didn't
just appear from under the bed like some nightmarish
monster. It's an historical event with a lot of
important lessons from many perspectives, including
the legal side of it.
I don't mean any insult by mentioning the Nuremberg
trials, but it was an important historical event
in law that has evolved into various declarations
of human rights in international law that this country
has signed up to.
The idea being of course to prevent anything like
the Nazis coming along again.
The point is that each small step may appear
perfectly rational and sensible, but it can lead
to something very bad. I'm sure the guy putting
Jews on the train to be "resettled" thought it
was perfectly harmless to do so, but if he had
paid attention to what was going on and where they
might be going, he might have changed his mind.
The guy collecting handguns in at the police
station probably thought it was perfectly harmless
as well, but I know too many ex-RFDs living in
destitution. They've lost their families in
many cases, at least one committed suicide.
Now, if ACPO had stuck to their original viewpoint
expressed to the Home Affairs Committee in 1996,
instead of caving in with the Government, it
wouldn't have had to be that way. At least the
Police Federation and the PSA were bigots at the
outset and were perfectly happy to say they were,
but ACPO knew better and said so, then they folded
instead of standing on principle.
Somewhere in the chain from Parliament to PC on
the job, someone needed to say "no, I'm not going
along with this" but no-one did.
Steve.
Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org
List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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