There has been a great deal written recently on the bungling police tactics used in the raid on a house in Forest Gate (in a nutshell: 250 police pile into a house, shoot a Muslim man for no apparent reason, drag two guys down stairs, arrest them for terrorist offences, trash their house, interrogate them for a week and then release them with no charge, followed by a hearty "sorry"). Not exactly great PR for the police. Their catch-all excuse is, naturally, fighting terrorism.<\/p>\n
Well, just in case you think you might be safe from suspicion if you're a non-Muslim, then think again. There seems to be little the Police won't do under the "terrorism" banner.<\/p>\n
Just the other day I was looking out of the window in a residential street in Hackney, East London. I was witnessing a vehicle towing truck preparing to pluck a car from the road and take it away. Looking closely, I saw that the car had an occupant: a terrified woman clutching a new born baby in her arms. I decided, naturally, that this was far too good a photo opportunity to pass, so I grabbed by camera and went out onto the road. By some bizarre coincidence, by the time I got outside, a van full of police officers had also decided to take a closer look.<\/p>\n
I snapped away at this strange scene, trying to capture the poor woman's horror as the burly removal men in yellow jackets wrestled with various lifting contraptions around her car. Then a police officer approached me and demanded that I stop taking photographs. As far as I was aware I didn't consider this an offence so I naturally refused. He then produced his notebook and demanded my name and address. What had I done wrong, I asked? His answer was "hostile reconnaissance". He then informed me that "it was a tactic used by terrorists" and that I was acting "suspiciously". So now I'm a terrorist for taking photographs! I tried to point out that the police were in the way of my photographs and that it was not my intention to photograph them, but he still insisted that I was conducting hostile reconnaissance. A small exchange of heated words between myself and this moron was halted by a second police officer who formally instructed me to "fuck off" and took his colleague away.<\/p>\n
I know this is hardly earth shattering news, but it does show that the police will use "terrorism" for pretty much anything nowadays. If you have a similar story then please, please tell all.<\/p>\n
"Police Intelligence" – the greatest oxymoron since "Friendly Fire"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There has been a great deal written recently on the bungling police tactics used in the raid on a house in Forest Gate (in a nutshell: 250 police pile into a house, shoot a Muslim man for no apparent reason, drag two guys down stairs, arrest them for terrorist offences, trash their house, interrogate them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.innerhippy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}