International Law

Hazel Blears and Sergeant Flanderka - "tension monitoring" i.e. snooping on local communities

The Hazel Blears the NuLabour former Home Office Minister who introduced so much counter productive bureaucratic red tape and form filling when she used to be in charge of Policing and Counter-terrorism, is at it again, now that she is inflicting a new Community Snooping policy onto Local Government.

She has just published a poisonous document entitled: Guidance for local authorities on community cohesion contingency planning and tension monitoring (.pdf)

This seems to envisage the gathering of political intelligence on local communities, and on "individual troublemakers", not just by the Local Authorities and the Police, but by a whole host of public sector employees turned into Government spies:

37. The most effective way to do this is through establishing a multi-agency tension monitoring group, led by an officer/s from the local authority and/or the local police force. This should include key partners from the statutory sector (e.g. housing, community safety, education, fire service, health, probation/youth offending team, community workers, neighbourhood wardens and police community support officers, National Asylum Support Service), and relevant representatives from the voluntary, community and faith sectors.

The sort of data which Hazel Blears wants to collect and share :

Relevant pieces of intelligence might include:

• quantitative data (e.g. police crime statistics and intelligence reports)
• qualitative community intelligence from neighbourhood wardens, community workers, casework by local councillors and feedback from local community meetings and organisations
• racially or religiously motivated offences or incidents
• details of new arrivals, refugees and asylum seekers, and Gypsy and Traveller communities in the local area
• gang and turf conflicts
• neighbour disputes

Why does a dispute between two neighbours suddenly constitute "community tension", requiring reporting back to a Central Government Department ?

• complaints of noise nuisance

What about the noise nuisance from Airport Expansion plans ?

• examples of poor community/local authority relations, poor community/police relations/low levels of trust in local politicians

How exactly are low levels of trust in the police and in local politicians, going to be improved by such spying and snooping on local communities by those very same politicians ?

• surveys of community views on reassurance, cohesion and safety matters
• state of local economic activity (decline or improvement)
• financial and social investment in the area
• demand for housing and condition of the local housing stock
• plans for renewal and the sustainability of planned or actual improvements
• political extremism
• media reports.

So is every Local Authority now going to waste money setting up its own "media monitoring unit" ?

Full post as published by Spy Blog on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).