Public ‘must decide what they want from police’
Metropolitan police commissioner Ian Blair has warned that Britain remains at risk from terrorism and has called for a full public debate on the UK’s security needs.
The UK’s top police officer referred to the London bombings on July 7th and said it is important to start asking what sort of police service the country wants.
Delivering the annual Dimbleby lecture on BBC1, the Met chief claimed that Britain’s police officers had been praised following the July 7th attacks and then “savaged” when an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police on July 22nd.
“Britain remains a target of the highest possible priority to al-Qaeda and its affiliates; we are in a new reality,” Sir Ian said.
“The sky is dark. The terrorists seek mass casualties and are entirely indiscriminate: every community is at risk, which is the starkest of reasons why we need representatives of every community in our ranks.”
The police chief called on Britons to say what sort of police service they wanted, adding that the series of terror attacks since September 11th meant that “fears for personal and communal safety are inextricably part of contemporary life”.
Sir Ian argued: “There is little dispassionate, thought through, public examination of just what it is we are here to do in the 21st century – to fight crime or to fight its causes, to help build stronger communities or to undertake zero tolerance, nor of how these things should be done or what priority each should have or what we should stop doing.”
Giving a brief history of the British police service, Sir Ian pointed out that there were no think tanks and quangos governing the police service and discussing policy as there are in education or the health service.
He called for the police service to remain unarmed and insisted that it must diversify, urging more people from minority communities to apply to the Metropolitan police.
The commissioner concluded: “We need – you need – to move from policing by consent, which is the bedrock of our policing settlement but which is passive, to policing by direct collaboration, which is active.
“The police service needs public engagement and debate to help it fit the multi-cultural, open society to which the London Olympics aspire, a Britain in which I want to live and in which I want my children to live.”
Speaking to a newspaper in advance of the lecture, Sir Ian said a public debate was essential to clear up concerns surrounding the development of anti-terror legislation, such as the recently defeated proposal to extend detention times for suspected terrorists to 90 days.
