Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Extreme holophobia
The Times reports here on the arrest of a retired brigadier and weapons expert who was trying to board the Paris train at Waterloo. In his luggage he had what is known as a "credit card-sized toolkit", we've all seen them in the free catalogues and is the sort of thing I think might be useful, or more likely I'd never use. Anyway said toolkit is reported to contain a 2" (5 cm) blade, which judging from the picture in the print paper is about as much use as a weapon, as the newspaper itself.
None of this of course will stop the police especially with the prospect of both a "crime" and a "detection" in one action. Mr Foulkes found himself arrested, fingerprinted, and his DNA taken and stored on the database. It appears the police were "good enough" to spare him the handcuffing, he attributes this to his former rank.
Mr Foulkes accepted the caution (which means an admission of guilt) "... after the event I realised that the right way of dealing with it would have been to say, ‘I’ll see you in court’, and to have argued it out there, instead of accepting the caution ...". Accepting the caution was foolish of him, but he was probably motivated by a desire to be clear of the whole business; nevertheless I cannot condone his failure to fight the issue. Still he seems to be prepared to take it up elsewhere, but I doubt it'll do him any good.
In any event it shows just how weak and pathetic we are as a society. Here we have a man carrying on his person a small blade (I cannot in honesty describe it as even a knife). He poses no threat or even a potential threat, yet because of a combination of extreme interpretation of the law and a police desire to administratively "detect" crimes, he finds himself as a criminal.
Once upon a time it would have been unusual not to carry a knife, the population weren't all trying to knife each other. Even with these draconian laws, knife crime is hardly non-existent. Like the gun laws, all these knife laws do is prevent the law-abiding citizen from having something, which should be legal. Where weapons are concerned, it's time for a far more common sense approach; the basis of our laws should be that for people without convictions for violent crime, if found with a weapon there should be a presumption of "lawful intent", which can be rebutted with other evidence, but in the absence of any such evidence then there is no crime.
None of this of course will stop the police especially with the prospect of both a "crime" and a "detection" in one action. Mr Foulkes found himself arrested, fingerprinted, and his DNA taken and stored on the database. It appears the police were "good enough" to spare him the handcuffing, he attributes this to his former rank.
Mr Foulkes accepted the caution (which means an admission of guilt) "... after the event I realised that the right way of dealing with it would have been to say, ‘I’ll see you in court’, and to have argued it out there, instead of accepting the caution ...". Accepting the caution was foolish of him, but he was probably motivated by a desire to be clear of the whole business; nevertheless I cannot condone his failure to fight the issue. Still he seems to be prepared to take it up elsewhere, but I doubt it'll do him any good.
In any event it shows just how weak and pathetic we are as a society. Here we have a man carrying on his person a small blade (I cannot in honesty describe it as even a knife). He poses no threat or even a potential threat, yet because of a combination of extreme interpretation of the law and a police desire to administratively "detect" crimes, he finds himself as a criminal.
Once upon a time it would have been unusual not to carry a knife, the population weren't all trying to knife each other. Even with these draconian laws, knife crime is hardly non-existent. Like the gun laws, all these knife laws do is prevent the law-abiding citizen from having something, which should be legal. Where weapons are concerned, it's time for a far more common sense approach; the basis of our laws should be that for people without convictions for violent crime, if found with a weapon there should be a presumption of "lawful intent", which can be rebutted with other evidence, but in the absence of any such evidence then there is no crime.
Tags: knife crime, holophobia, weapons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Labels: weapons
