There is an enormous commotion with television cameras whirring and a tussle between the thugs, the security guards and the musician. Finally, two burly New York cops arrive. The KGB men immediately say the musician is Russian, he must go with them to the airport back to Moscow.
At which, one of the cops says: “”This is New York. The man can go where he likes.”
It was an earthy expression of the presumption of freedom _ a presumption that is being sadly eroded in Australia.
Two dangerous new justifications are emerging for increasing police powers at the expense of personal liberty. One is that police have certain powers in traffic cases and therefore should have the same power when investigating all crime. The other is that police resources are stretched and therefore they need to deal with cases more efficiently. One way of doing that would be to give them a lot more power to deal with hoodlums on the spot.
The get-tough Kennett Government said this month that it was considering giving police power to make anyone suspected of committing a crime to give their name and address and to give them extra power to search people for knives. A spokesman for Pat McNamara, the Minister for Police, said, “”It is an anomaly that police can require drivers to hand over their names and addresses but can’t demand it of a man leaving the scene of a rape.”
Well, in fact the police can arrest the man leaving the rape scene and take him into custody. What the police are really seeking is the power to take the name and address of anyone in the street. On the knife law, police can search (on reasonable grounds for suspicion) for outlawed weapons like guns and flick knives, but not for ordinary knives, which have a far lower threshold of suspicion. Police are just seeking a wider search power, one that embraces almost anyone.
Depending on how the law is framed, police could get the power to stop virtually anyone, demand their name and address, and search them for a knife.
The traffic-law comparison is frightening. I hate the cliche “”thin end of the wedge”, but it seems that the erosion in civil liberties in traffic matters over the past 15 years are simply that. By and large, Australians have accepted what amounts to police having powers of arbitrary arrest (RBT) and being given the power of prosecutor, judge and jury (on-the-spot tickets) and the destruction of the presumption of innocence (red-light and speed cameras). They have accepted it because it has demonstrably cut the road death toll by at least 1000 a year and the serious-injury toll by 8000 and cut the huge damage to property, and it seems a fair price to pay.
There is nothing to suggest that the same benefit would accrue in the general crime area by applying the power police have over drivers to the population at large.
The Police Minister’s “”anomaly” is not that police do not have the wide traffic powers for general crime, but that they have such wide traffic powers in the first place.
The stretched police budget is the other argument. Independent MLA Michael Moore, of all people, has suggested on-the-spot tickets for a range of public misbehaviour offences. The idea is that police would not have to take someone to the police station and charge them, so more police could stay at the scene to control the crowd.
Discussion this month on police budgets has taking an ugly turn. The direction of it is like this: Police have to meet budgets and it is better to have police on the beat than doing administration and paperwork. Court statements and appearances are lumped in with unnecessary administration and paperwork. And before you know where you are, more and more offences are dealt with by on-the-spot tickets which wipe out the need for police to go to court except when one of two silly people challenge the on-the-spot ticket. The courts then join the efficiency drive and show these people that it is not worth challenging the ticket. The presumption of innocence is suddenly replaced by a presumption of guilt.
Liberty is based upon the presumption of innocence and a presumption of freedom. Without them, an act of non-conformity, eccentricity or individualism soon becomes a “”public-misbehaviour offence”. Unless curbed, these trends, combined with the huge growth of bureaucratic controls that keep tabs on single mums’ lovers and why you want to put $10,000 in cash in your bank account, will one day make it impossible for us to say: “”This is Australia. The man can go where he likes.”