My Run In With The Law

I’ve said I’d blog about this for a while but I haven’t gotten around to it yet, until now.

Allow me to set the scene, I was travelling home after visiting my girlfriend for the weekend. Due to it being a Sunday and train companies doing repairs usually on that day, my journey needed to take a diverson via Liverpool (actually only about 10 minutes of the 2 and ½ hour journey was as it is supposed to be!). There had been a lot of waiting around that day and this had aggravated my sciatica (trapped nerves in the spine) which causes me pain in my leg.
So anyway, I get on the Merseyrail train from Liverpool to Chester and whilst I’m sitting there my leg starts aching. Seeing a sign that says not to put your feet on the seats – I notice that between the seats there’s a shelf, so I put my foot on there to ease the aching. The next thing I know, three ‘Enforcement Officers’ appear. Now, for people who haven’t seen them before – they basically look a bit like police officers wearing high visibility jackets etc. (as you can see in the pciture above from the company's website).
I was basically told that I was violating a Merseyrail bye-law ‘for having my feet on the seat’. After I protested that blatantly my feet were not on the seat – they said there was a notice down the other end of the carriage that said that the little shelf technically counted as part of the seat. They then proceeded to take my name, address and details. All of this was recorded on a small camera the enforcement officer was holding whilst her two colleagues stood behind her menacingly. To be honest, I was really scared during all of this, and kind of just did whatever they said.
They left me with a little card and told me to ring the number on it if I wanted to avoid going to court over it. The card reads

“A report will be filed with our Prosecution Team, which may result in you being prosecuted for a breach of Merseyrail Byelaws. If you are found guilty we will be asking the Court to award a contribution to our costs of £150, the Magistrates will also impose a fine of up to £1000 and/or 3 months imprisonment”.

Now when I rang up I was offered to pay a £50 fine instead of going to court and sign a form that admitted I was guilty of putting my feet in the seat. Now I feel that the whole situation was ridiculous, yet I couldn’t afford to go to court and lose – I could barely afford the £50 (after rent and council tax, I have about £150 to pay for food, utility bills and anything else).
I doubt any poor person is in a position to contest such penalties. Furthermore, are people who actually put their feet up on seats that big of a social problem that it’s worth having gangs of these ‘enforcement officers’ equipped with video cameras? To me it looks like a money making scheme adopted by the rail company, rather than tackling incidents of behaviour that is actually dangerous.

Accidental Lawbreaking

Another break from Socialism 2008 reports (there are 3 more in the works). I basically need time to write them so I'm publishing this that I'd written beforehand.

Can you break a law by accident? Conventionally, to be found guilty of breaking a law you are usual assumed to have wilfully or recklessly done an action which breaks a law. I’m not sure how this stands leaglly, but to me that assumes that you have knowledge in general that said act is illegal. What if you didn’t though?
Now obviously the vast majority of people know that murder is a crime, the exceptions being very young children, people with serious mental health issues etc. The same can be said for most major crimes. However, what about minor crimes - the potential is there for this to occur.
I wish to cite a few cases how this may happen based on fact. Firstly, the crime may be a very obscure one. This is especially possible given the explosion in criminal offences in recent years. Secondly, there is the case of crimes that relate to a specific area – bye-laws for example could be broken by someone who is not from the area where that bye-law applies to. Thirdly there are the infamous ASBOs which have been used to blanket ban some activities – such as young people gathering in a certain area. Committing a crime in this instance can combine elements of the above – but ASBO’s aren’t criminal legislation although breaching them is a criminal offence.
So what could be done about this. One solution could perhaps be to make people aware of such laws – whether through general education in the case of obscure laws or signage in the case of specific area laws.
I think however, that a more pertinent question is whether we should criminalise these matters at all or whether they are better being dealt with informally. After all, our criminal justice system and prisons are completely clogged up. But I don’t mean by issuing on the spot penalties or administrative penalties to deal with such problems – that method is an essentially arbitrary one which is open to massive abuse. We really need a social approach to dealing with such minor offences rather than a criminal justice one who’s main effect seems to be criminogenic.

Harassing Young People

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has recently been heralding an initiative in Essex where officers harass ‘yobs’ by following young people around with video cameras. The Guardian recently published an article (30/05/08) written by one of their journalists who had spent a day with the ‘Operation Leopard’ police taskforce.
The journalist describes how the police roam the estate looking for a ‘hit list of individuals’, filming them and anyone they are with and occasionally visiting their homes. Apparently those filmed have the right not to be, but as with many ‘right’ that we don’t have when it suits the authorities, the journalist notes that this option wasn’t given to any of the 15 people filmed in his presence.
But one of the many problems of such ‘targeted’ police work is that it targets either stereotypically contrived sections of the population, or ‘known offenders’, the latter given only a tiny proportion of all crimes committed are ever arrested isn’t the ‘evidence-based’ approach its advocates make it out to be. But also, as a conversation the journalist has with a 19 year old target uncovers, just because someone has committed one or more crimes in the past, doesn’t mean they will do so in the future, indeed many people who have engaged in criminal or anti-social behaviour when they are young simply drop out of it later or ‘grow up’ as the 19 year old expresses it.
Many working class people rightly feel threatened by ‘street’ crime and anti-social behaviour, so it is perhaps understandable that many residents on the police’s survey supported the initiative believing the inconvenience of a dozen or so youths is worth it if crime is reduced. There are two problems with this though, firstly that saturation and intimidatory police tactics can often provoke a fierce backlash from the relatively powerless groups subjected to them. Secondly, there aren’t enough police officers to operate such schemes everywhere, and given that it doesn’t remove the underlying causes of such actions, as many residents themselves expressed, once the operation leaves the estate crime and anti-social behaviour will probably increase again.
Socialists do support the use of policing to tackle crime, but only under local democratic control and we would favour a more reactive use rather than proactively harassing people, who often are completely innocent. But this would be as an auxiliary to tackling the problems at the root of crime, unemployment and alienation which give many young people no future under this current capitalist system.