Do Victoria’s police minister Bob Cameron and that state’s police commissioner Simon Overland like policy to be evidence-based or are they more interested in political point-scoring and window-dressing?  If you judge their decision to introduce into law this week new powers that will allow police officers the power to stop and search anyone they find without having to justify their actions, then its definitely the latter that exercises their minds.  The use of a similar power in the UK has been abandoned this year because, surprise, surprise, it has been found to undermine relations between the police and communities.

Under the Summary Offences and Control of Weapons Acts Amendment Bill, which by the way is predictably supported by the law-and-order crazies in the Liberal and National parties in Victoria, police can search anyone without having to show reasonable cause in areas where violence has taken place or where police intelligence indicates it might be an area where violence will occur.  The law is designed to enable police to search for weapons such as knives.

The problem with such a law is that it will be abused.  Homeless people, people with mental illness and young people will find themselves being forcibly searched by inexperienced officers or those police who have a grudge against individuals.  And one can easily imagine how police will, on a Saturday night, line up a group of young people and search them simply because they are congregated in a public place.

The UK police have a similar power under that country’s anti-terror laws.  But in May this year the assistant commissioner of police for Scotland Yard, John Yates, told Lord Carlisle, the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws, that consultations police had with communities “confirmed suggestions that the power is seen as controversial and has the potential to have a negative impact, particularly on minority communities”.  Lord Carlisle had previously said that the stop-and-search power is used inappropriately by police.  London police can now only use stop-and-search procedures without having any reasonable cause around iconic buildings such as Westminster.

The misuse of the draconian power such as the one proposed by Cameron and Overland is what forced the UK police authorities to tell their officers to stop using it.  As The Guardian reported on June 6 this year since the middle of 2007 “the number of black people stopped under the powers rose by 322%, compared with a rise of 277% for Asian people and 185% for white people”.  And the law has had no impact on crime detection.

Cameron and Overland, and all legislators in the Victorian parliament debating this ill-conceived and dangerous proposal, would be well advised to heed the words of Yates, who rightly said of the stop-and-search power:  “There is no requirement to have any reasonable grounds to conduct the search. This power reverses a fundamental principle in that no suspicion of wrongdoing is required.”