More madness from the Mad Mullah...

Just when you think that perhaps just perhaps, he has learned some common sense, up pops Richard Brunstrom, the idiot who runs North Wales Police Force.

Brunstrom writes on his blog about the recent furore about councils misusing CCTV to prosecute people who, for example, do not clean up after their dogs.

He says: “Research clearly and repeatedly shows that our citizenry in the UK is very comfortable with today’s surveillance society; CCTV makes people (including me) feel safer. The research also shows the importance of local issues – a clean and tidy environment has a much bigger impact on most people’s quality of life than does the burglary rate.

“Crime is now so low... that ‘traditional’ crime has become if not a rarity then certainly unusual.”

What planet is this man on? I hardly know where to begin.

Firstly, even senior policemen agree that CCTV does not work. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police force unit says "CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. There's no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

Secondly, Brunstrom claims that “our citizenry in the UK is very comfortable with today’s surveillance society”. I would dispute that but if you spend a long time telling people that they have something to fear and that only CCTV (or 42 day detention or ID cards) will save them, it is hardly surprising that they will agree with you.

Thirdly, “‘traditional’ crime has become if not a rarity then certainly unusual”. This on the day that another teenager was stabbed to death in London.

Richard Littlejohn in his Daily Mail column today also has a story about the Mad Mullah.

Up Mad Mullah Creek without a paddle – you’re nicked

The Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban has extended his reign of terror from the roads to the waterways.

North Wales Police have arrested, fingerprinted, photographed and taken a DNA swab from a man accused of the heinous crime of canoeing without a permit.

Nigel Conway refused on principle to pay the £3 demanded by a rafting company to paddle along an 830-yard stretch of the River Dee in Llangollen.

The company leases the bank from a local landowner and believes it is entitled to charge others to use the river.

Mr Conway said: “I refused to pay because everyone should have the right to access water free of charge.”

The firm reported him to the police and a week later he had his collar felt. He was taken to the station and interviewed for two hours in connection with “obtaining services dishonestly” under Section 11 of the Fraud Act. He’s on police bail, awaiting charges.

This is despite the fact that there is no specific law relating to access to rivers in England and Wales.

“It was such a joke, even the officers at the station were laughing,” said Mr Conway.

Sorry, but it’s not funny. It’s monstrous. The rafting firm should have been told to take a running jump. At the very best, this was a mere civil dispute.

How dare the police arrest an innocent canoeist and treat him like a criminal? I hope he sues the leather motorcycling pants off the Mad Mullah and forces him to destroy his fingerprint and DNA samples.

Chief Constable Brunstrom runs North Wales like one of those deranged, sadistic sheriffs in some American Deep South hick town. I’m only surprised Mr Conway wasn’t breathalysed, too.

How long before the Mad Mullah gets round to putting up speed cameras on the banks of the River Dee?

The surveillance society...

An interesting new book has landed on my desk. The Road to Southend Pier details Ross Clark's struggle against the surveillance society.

Britain’s Information Commissioner said that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society so Ross Clark decided to find out if that was true.

These are some of the facts uncovered by Mr Clark:

• There are 4·2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, one for every 14 people
• In 2004 Melbourne dismantled its 23 cameras because they did not justify the A$500,000 they cost annually
• Britons are the third most spied on people on earth; only China and Malaysia spy more on their citizenry
• In 1998 Newham introduced a facial recognition software. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on sunny days and had a tendency to confuse young people and women and had a tendency to recognise black people
• Despite the claim that DNA is foolproof – it isn’t. If everyone in Britain (60 million people) was on the database the chances of a mistake being made by misidentifying someone’s DNA at a crime scene is actually one in 16
• In 2007 John Reid admitted that the Prevention of Terrorism Act had been drafted in such a way that people on control orders i.e. terrorists could not have their fingerprints and DNA taken
• In 2007 the Home Office admitted that despite the plethora of CCTV, DNA databases, tagging and police surveillance it had “lost” 322 registered sex offenders
• In 2005 2,000 people randomly volunteered to be surveyed for the biometric ID card. It took an average of seven minutes and 56 seconds to record the information. To cover the entire country would take 905 man years
• Between April and June 2007 the six largest European airlines lost 1·12 million pieces of luggage – this at a time when passengers and their baggage are supposed to be monitored every step of their journey