The tragedy of unaccountable secret police power in the UK and the US

[Paul Rigby]

The piece is about the Metropolitan Police's ghastly conduct in the Stephen Lawrence affair, but this paragraph is so good it merits wider application:

We know of the extent to which agencies will go here and in the US in apparently noble causes: spying on internet users; befriending, betraying and even seducing vulnerable targets; trampling on the rights of law-abiding protesters. And we know these facts not because the authorities have confessed, but because guardians of the public's right to know have thrust them into the public domain. Our state does not self-correct. It grudgingly admits culpability, but only when the alternatives have been exhausted. This will not change.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...ay-inquiry

[David Guyatt]

I heard on the radio today a discussion about the public trust in the police following these Lawrence revelations.

I, for one, certainly no longer trust them and would treat them completely cynically should I ever have a need to contact them.

It is evident, for me anyway, that in the Lawrence case the peelers spied on the family to get some juicy wrongs they could pass on to their chums in the Murdoch press to denigrate the family, in order to lessen the impact of the police's inherent racialism, so far as the public is concerned.

It's a real disgrace, of course. But that's the nature of the whole crooked world in which we live today.