Record numbers of pensioners are being criminalised for trivial offences by target-driven police. Officers arrest 40 senior citizens every day in Britain on average, official figures show. Their crimes range from failing to pay a fine for overfilling a wheelie bin to not wearing a seatbelt or chopping a neighbour's hedge without permission. Many are being punished for the first time after decades of abiding by the law.
Critics say these 'easy collar' arrests are part of a cynical drive to meet police performance targets. Figures from forces around the UK reveal that a staggering 44,321 pensioners were arrested over the past three years.
Previous estimates of 'grey crime' have attributed 2,000 offences a year to the over-65s. But since 2007, the number of elderly people being arrested has reached more than 12,000 a year. Last year a record 13,000 over-65s felt the long arm of the law. The figures, obtained by the Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, have astonished campaigners for the elderly. They have accused the Government of criminalising the retired of Middle England for minor misdemeanours instead of chasing the real villains. The true number of over-65s being hauled before the courts could be far higher if prosecutions by local authorities are taken into account.
The punishment handed out to a greatgrandmother caught selling a goldfish to a teenager in a council sting operation caused outrage this week. Pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, was electronically tagged, fined £1,000 and placed under curfew for flouting new animal welfare laws which ban the sale of pets to under-16s.
Police have been criticised for a series of incidents involving the elderly where officers have been accused of heavy-handed-ness. They include a Christian grandmother who was accused of a hate crime after writing to her council to complain about a gay pride march, while a 70-year-old in Cheshire, who had never been in trouble with the law, was arrested for criminal damage after cutting back a neighbour's conifers too vigorously.
Yesterday veteran TV presenter and election candidate Esther Rantzen said: 'I don't think we are talking about people taking up robbery at the age of retirement or gangster grannies. As a result of ludicrous legislation brought in by the Government, jobsworths enshrined in law are picking on the elderly for minor infringements of unimportant laws to meet their targets.'
The figures obtained from 53 forces indicated around 90 per cent of arrests involved elderly men rather than women. Motoring offences, including not wearing a seatbelt, make up half the cases dealt with by the courts. Refusing to accept a wheelie bin fine can also lead to court.
Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne said: 'These record figures are a result of Labour creating a new crime for every day in office, rather than an OAP crimewave. Labour's legacy will be to have criminalised a generation and treated tens of thousands of law-abiding middle-aged and elderly citizens like villains.'
A spokesman for Saga said: 'These figures are very concerning. It may be that police find it easier to feel the collar of a plucky pensioner. There also seems to be a range of new offences brought in by the Government that don't seem to be based on common sense. It's a question of police trying to drum up arrest figures rather than catching the real deviants in society.'
Criminologist Dr David Green, director of the Civitas think tank, said: 'The Government says it doesn't have targets. But many police forces have their own targets and want to look good - so they are going for the easy collar, not for the hard criminals.' A spokesman for the Police Federation denied making 'easy collar' arrests and claimed that 'These figures reflect a growing ageing population.' He did not explain how an over-65 population increase of 1% between 1983 and 2008 can possibly be reflected by a more-than-sixfold increase in the number of over-65 arrests.
What he should have said, of course, is that a great many pensioners are targeted not by the police but by the myriad other agencies created by Nu-Labour, the entire infrastructure of petty minded bureaucrats who exist for the sole purpose of grinding down the little people. A whole new industry of bailiffs, wheel-clampers, traffic wardens, civil enforcement officers, speed camera operators and god knows what else has been created over the last 13 years, all paid for by our taxes. We live in a country where the government has turned on its own people.
Something that definitely does have to be laid at Mr.Plod's door are the 14 million photographs of (mostly) innocent motorists that are taken every day (oops, Silly Old Sod! There's no such thing as an innocent motorist. It's a well-known fact that we all turn into speed-crazed homicidal maniacs the minute we slip behind the wheel). The images are being stored daily on a huge “Big Brother” database linked to automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) technology to track vehicles’ movements. The records not only include details of car registrations, but often photographs of drivers and front-seat passengers, a police document has revealed. They are being held on a database in Hendon, north London, for at least two years without drivers’ knowledge or permission.
We know (because we've been told by a policeman) that ANPR is a wonderful tool for crime detection and prevention. We don't doubt that it is. But many people think the price is too high. Mass intrusion into people’s movements cannot be described as "proportionate” and probably breaches our rights to privacy under the infamous Human Rights Act. Since criminals, illegal immigrants and general low-life make entire careers out of their "hooman rights" it seems only fair the the rest of us should have some too.
This weekend Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, the civil rights group, said it planned to launch the first legal challenge to the surveillance system. “It’s bad enough that images and movements of millions of innocent motorists are being stored for years on end,” she said. “That the police are doing this with no legislative basis shows a contempt for parliament, personal privacy and the law. Yet another bloated database is crying out for legal challenge and we will happily oblige.”
Liberty is seeking a motorist of good character who objects to having their daily movements stored on the ANPR database to bring a test case. The type of person Chakrabarti has in mind is someone such as John Catt who, at the age of 80, in 2005 was stopped with his daughter Linda and had their car searched under the Terrorism Act. They were threatened with arrest by City of London police if they failed to answer questions. After they complained, it emerged that their car had been secretly “flagged” on the police computer because it had been spotted in Brighton near a demonstration against the arms trade.
The ANPR network has expanded unchecked by parliament since police first decided to develop a national system in 2006. It is now linked to more than 10,000 CCTV cameras discreetly placed on motorways, main roads and in petrol stations. It has also been integrated with the cameras originally set up in 2003 to enforce the congestion charge in London. Software being developed for the system will eventually allow police to track the movements of up to 100m vehicles at any time — more than double the number currently on the road. The database can also be “mined” to track the past movements of specific vehicles.
Police insist the system concentrates on capturing a narrow picture of a car’s number plate. However, internal guidelines produced by the National Policing Improvement Agency show that in some areas ANPR “routinely captures the faces of front-seat occupants”.
Overseen by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), the system was originally introduced in a small number of towns and cities to spot uninsured and stolen cars. Police in London later pioneered its use to detect cars linked to suspected terrorists. Senior MPs and privacy campaigners accept the system has helped to trap criminals; ANPR cameras on the M1 are said to have played a critical role in helping police hunt the gang that tried to bomb London and Glasgow in 2007.
However, they say that the system amounts to surveillance of millions of innocent motorists. Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “ANPR is a valuable tool to protect us against serious crime and terrorism. But you just can’t have a database on this scale without proper accountability and safeguards.” Claire Corbett, of Brunel University’s law school, said: “The police say if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But there is always a potential danger that the data could be lost, leaked or stolen by a corrupt official.”
The GOS's objection to the system is not based on the dangers of leaked data, but on something much more basic: it's simply that it's none of the police's business where he goes or what he does when he gets there. Until he commits an offence, they should keep their great honkers out of his affairs.
The GOS's solution to the problem is pretty simple too. He doesn't want to mount a legal challenge. He does not plan a campaign of civil disobedience, and isn't going to fit false number-plates to the Grumpymobile. No, he's going to do all he can to help the police in their quest to keep tabs on him and all the other inhabitants of this great country.
Every day he's going to send the Chief Constable of Suffolk the following letter ...
"Dear Chief Constable Simon Ash,
I note and applaud your efforts to use ANPR to record the daily movements of motorists in Suffolk. I have no doubt that the database record that results from this initiative will be a valuable and heavily-used tool in the fight against crime, terrorism, civil disobedience and individual freedom.
As I consider myself a good citizen and would always wish to cooperate fully with the authorities, I thought it would be helpful to save you the trouble of sending out an ANPR van, and tell you that today I intend to drive my car (an elderly Mercedes 190E, black paint, registration no.GOS 666) from my home, via the A14, the A140 to Diss, the A1066 westwards to Garboldisham, the B111 through East Harling, then the A11 and the B1077 to Hingham in Norfolk. I shall spend a little time with friends there, and return in the evening by much the same route.
I hope you find that useful. I'll send you a similar letter every time I go out in the car. Just think, if everyone in Suffolk did the same you could save many thousands of pounds a year because you wouldn't need those expensive camera cars and their operators. Ah well, we must all try and do our bit!
Yours sincerely,
The Grumpy Old Sod
P.S. I just remembered - I hope I'm right in assuming that as this is more or less an "official" letter, there's no need for me to put a stamp on it?"
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