Today's Wild West.

    While we here in Scotland. population 5.2 million, are lumbered with a police force that has carried out nine times more stop and searches than New York, population 8.4 million, or London, population 8.3 million, at least the victims are still alive. Take the police force in Pasco in Washington State, population 59,000, they have shot and killed four people in the last six months. This is more than the three years figures for police in the UK, population approximately 62 million. In the last year, they also managed to outstrip the police in Germany, population 80.6 million.

     The video shows a shocking misuse of power, the man concerned, apparently he threw rocks at an officer, had obviously stopped running to face the officers, but hit the ground in a hail of bullets, just like a Wild West movie. America, land of the free.

       Of course if our Scottish Police chief has his way there is nothing to say that we might not be competing with the little district of Pasco in Washington State. 

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Police And The Abuse Of Power.

     Scotland has a population of approximately 5 million, yet the Scottish police managed to carry out more than half a million stop and searches in eight months of 2013. Are they working hard to make sure they stop and search the entire population? Surely this number and nature of stop and searches can't be acceptable. We are already spied upon by an array of CCTV cameras in every street in every city, in pubs, buses, supermarkets, etc. and we have recently felt the horror of being spied on from the sky when it suddenly goes dreadfully wrong. We have to put an end to this snooping, spying, constant surveillance type of society. We are bring up a generation that will see it as normal to be scrutinised at every turn, to accept that privacy is a thing of the past. Everybody has the right to the dignity of privacy, and this can only be encroached on when there is "evidence" of wrong doing.

 Stop and Search in Scotland is an abuse of power

SACC Press Release

 

     Scottish police are conducting extra-legal stop and searches that have been banned in England and Wales and potentially violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The Scottish Government should ensure that police stay within the law and that people in Scotland have at least the same rights and protections as people south of the border. 

     SACC is alarmed by figures released by Scottish Police last week, which show that they carried out more than half a million stop and searches between April and December 2013. Worse still, police say that 70% of these stop and searches were not carried out under the statutory powers available to them. They claim that in these cases they had the "consent" of the people involved and therefore did not need statutory authority.

We would welcome any legal challenge brought by victims of non-statutory stop and searches, and we would like to see the public putting more pressure on the Scottish Government to bring stop and search in Scotland under proper legal control, as it is in England and Wales...

Read the full statement

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