If we are all under suspicion, then we are all threatened

Tuesday January 5, 2010

People meekly accept official behaviour, even if they might strongly suspect it is the police who are behaving illegally, writes Dominic Lawson in the Independent.

Even were I to live within walking distance of the Queen’s Sandringham estate, writes Dominic Lawson in the Independent, it would never occur to me to spend any part of Christmas Day standing outside its church to take photographs of attendant members of the Royal Family.

Yet, odd as such behaviour might seem – it’s not as if the media don’t produce film and pictures from the same event, saving everyone else the trouble – it is about as harmless as anything can be. Yet it was a peculiarly modern form of bureaucratic insanity, surely, which compelled the Norfolk Police officers in charge of this annual Christmas spectacle to confiscate the cameras of all the well-wishers lined up outside Sandringham church on Christmas Day.

Thus, though the 2000 Terrorism Act gives the authorities no power, without a warrant, to make people delete the film in their camera, there are a number of well-attested cases of this. Last year an Austrian father and son, Klaus and Loris Matzka, were forced by two policemen to delete pictures they had taken of red double-decker buses in Walthamstow.

Given their national provenance, it would have been a delightful irony if Klaus Matzka had accused the police officers concerned of being “Little Hitlers”; but instead he contented himself with observing: “I’ve never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries.”

Full article: Independent (5 January 2010)