"Anti Trust" Rules

I picked this up from the Devil.

A quote from the Kent News website where you can read the whole story:

A police spokesman confirmed that Superintendent Joanna Young, an Area Commander for Kent Police, had told the six volunteers they would not be allowed back into Herne Bay police station from January 20 if they didn’t sign the forms.

Police say the information is needed in case the volunteers become “vulnerable to financial inducements”.

A police spokesman said the vetting procedure was due to a new computer system set to launch next month which would give volunteers “controlled access” that could be used “for personal financial gain”.

“We value tremendously their support but the Kent force is not prepared to compromise the security of our systems.”


In other words, for wholly paranoid and controlling reasons, the police are acting in deliberate mistrust of an organisation whose whole purpose is to support the work of the over-stretched police forces of this country.

This is the way private and public contracts of all kinds are being run now: out of fear, hate, self-loathing, whatever, we have less and less ability to trust those we work with. We demand of them to prove that they are not doing or simply are not something that we fear. Another example of this is the recent statute expanding CRB checks. This has an added benefit in that as well as automatically conferring suspicion on people, it requires a large number of people to be employed processing these claims. In this particular case a public service is demanding more information than it needs, for reasons of its own.

If the police cannot work with Neighbourhood Watch in a mutually beneficial arrangement, then which other organisations can do so?