|
|
 |
| |
Shami Chakrabarti |
Postcode lottery is 'unacceptable’
Lawyer speaks out on dispersal zones
THE use of police and council powers against young people is disproportionate and creating a ‘post-code lottery’ of discrimination, Britain’s leading human rights lawyer said on Friday.
Following an address to sixth-formers at Hampstead school, Shami Chakrabarti CBE, director of the National Council for Civil Liberties (Liberty), said the wide and increasing use of dispersal zones to tackle alleged youth disorder in Camden was ‘blanket, discriminatory and arbitrary’.
She said: “By creating a patchwork of dispersal zones specifically targeted at young people you create a post-code lottery in police powers, which is simply not right. A police constable should have the same powers wherever they are in the country, and people should be tackled for their behaviour and not who they are or where they are.
“ The dispersal zones are brought in on the theory ‘this is an area where young people are causing trouble’; but imagine if you substituted the word ‘man’ for young person – let alone where you substituted a racial description.”
In January, when a nine-month council review of the use of anti-social behaviour powers found that there was no evidence to show dispersal zones were effective, Camden had three dispersal notices in operation. But a summer of complaints about disorder from Somers Town to Haverstock have prompted the police to request a total of seven dispersal zones, all of which Camden Council has approved.
Ms Chakrabarti said: “I can understand that if I was elderly and living on my own in an area with (youth disorder) problems I might well want to see something done – but the problem is that the arguments for the introduction of these powers range from the emotional to the unreasonable. What are you going to do – turn the whole of Camden into a dispersal zone?”
She also discussed her concerns over the use of blanket powers and highlighted the incident at Hampstead school itself in November last year, when riot police arrested eight people during clashes with students in Westbere Road.
She said teachers who witnessed the incident had been ‘deeply distressed’ when a call to police expressing concerns over tensions with a rival school resulted in the deployment of riot police using stop and search powers.
“If there wasn’t reasonable suspicion of an individual crime – if it was ‘there is going to be trouble, so we’ll go in’ – then it is an example of police use of powers actually escalating, rather than solving, a problem.
“There is also a suggestion that certain students were singled out. These kids could have been less upset if anyone had been treated the same.”
The incident, which is currently the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry, was not raised during the Liberty director’s hour long presentation to students starting their sixth-form at the school.
Instead students focused on questions about the Iraq war, police powers generally, and the effects on civil liberties of legislation introduced since 1997.
A Camden police spokeswoman said: “An investigation into the police action (at Hampstead school) is currently taking place and we await the results of that before commenting further”. |
 |
|
| |
| Your Comments: |
| |
| |
| |
|
|
|
