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Amazon.co.ukPump up the paranoia
An anti-terrorism campaign by London’s police forces is exploiting the public’s paranoia in the hope of catching would-be terrorists in the act. It will also have the effect of making life even harder for press photographers. But maybe the erosion of press freedom might be seen as a bonus by the Metropolitan Police.
[photopress:police_poster.png,full,alignright]The 2008 counter-terrorism campaign includes a poster headlined: ‘Thousands of people take photographs every day. What if one of them seems odd?‘ It goes on to say:
Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photographs and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.
Other posters ask London’s citizens to look out for houses with ’suspicious’ activity and people with multiple mobile phones (I know several – indeed, business people often now carry a company Blackberry and a personal mobile).
One wonders if the Metropolitan Police, City of London Police and British Transport Police are really prepared for the flood of tip-offs that are likely to come from self-appointed little hitlers. It’s a sad fact that there are many among us who are only too ready to become vigilantes.
The outstanding TV series, The Nazis: a warning from history (available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk), gave a chilling example of how this works. If memory serves, in one sizeable German city, the Gestapo needed a staff of only seven. That’s because the population, conditioned by propaganda, was only too willing to do the Gestapo’s work for them by informing on each other. Big Brother does not need to watch you if there are thousands of Little Brothers and Little Sisters doing the watching for him.
Organisations like the Metropolitan Police have much to gain from this culture of fear and suspicion. It helps them in their constant effort to win greater powers for themselves. It helps support their case for ever-larger anti-terrorism budgets. It bolsters their importance regardless of how effective such campaigns might be against actual terrorists.
Inevitably, there will be innocent casualties – collateral damage, if you like. People will be wrongly accused. Lives will be made a little more difficult. No doubt we will be asked to accept that this is ‘a price worth paying’ and that ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’. Alas, the latter depends on a perfect justice system: it relies on the assumption that, if you are innocent, the police and the courts will recognise this. Is there anyone who thinks that the police and the courts are perfect?
These campaigns, by preying on people’s paranoia, help erode the quality of life. And they can have other, even more serious effects.
Photojournalists already suffer from the UK’s culture of paranoia. ‘Paedophile!’ is now, sadly, a common form of abuse hurled at professional photographers working on the street, even when no children are present. (Paranoia, of course, feeds most effectively on the stupid.)
Photojournalists are also subject to frequent harassment by the police, who misuse Section 44 of the Terrorism Act to carry out illegal stop and search actions. These can be very effective in stopping bona fide photojournalists from doing their job. Sometimes Section 44 is abused as the result of ignorance on the part of the police officer, but that is no more excusable than deliberate misuse.
Oppressive regimes cannot bear a free press. I’m not suggesting that the UK is now a police state comparable with Nazism. But nothing is black and white. There are many shades of grey between a truly free society and a totalitarian one. As we progress along that scale towards tyranny, freedoms – including press freedoms – become eroded while state powers become stronger. And as part of that process, we must all be turned into participants in the act of oppression. With this Metropolitan Police campaign, British society just became a little darker.
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