Peter van Onselen, Colin Barnett and conspicuous policing without reasonable suspicion ...

(Above: a new solution for law and order in NSW? Or perhaps WA?)

It's always a shock when you step off a plane and land in a country where airport security involves a bunch of stormtroopers roaming around clutching sub-machine guns.

It's an even bigger shock when you stumble into a military showdown with a bunch of bad boys as I once did in Africa, with military deploying their sub-machine guns and the bad boys holed up, ready for a shoot out.

When you stumble into certain parts of America, at first you might think you've landed in a war zone, and then you realize it's just hunting season and the varmints are about to suffer. The humans get to suffer in the human hunting season.

One of the benefits of a civilized society is the absence of visible weaponry, but of course the visible signs - from guns to sniffer dogs - are designed to make it look like politicians are doing something in relation to the 'war on crime', with its sub-set the 'war on drugs', and that well known corollary the 'war on terror'.

Another benefit of a civilized society is the right to go about your business without let or hindrance, or undue suspicion or overburdensome policing, or cops in your face, backed by a bolshie government that wants the cops to get in your face.

It's called civil liberties, though perhaps the most reviled sub-set in all the sub-sets of the conservative lexicon is the civil libertarian, along with inner westie and the dietary habits attached thereto (except of course if you're a Ron Paul libertarian which gives you the equal opportunity right to hate all freedom impingers, except those whose freedoms rightly deserve impinging).

It's one of the sublimer follies and contradictions of conservatives that they want big government to take tough action, they want more cops on the streets, cops in the houses, cops in the malls, here a cop, there a cop, everywhere a cop cop, hunting out miscreants and baddies.

Grow the government, grow the security forces, grow the intelligence gathering, grow the prisons, and lock 'em all up and throw away the key, so that we can all live peace, quiet and stupefying mindless boredom ... unless fearful that perhaps the cops might be coming for us.

Well I've always had a thing about sniffer dogs, which regularly turn up in the area where I live, always at music festival and street party time, always at the railway station, sniffing away at whoever passes, the implication being that any and all are likely enough to be common criminals. And once that reasonable suspicion is confirmed, it's on with the fun ...

This form of sniffing dogs was an initiative of the NSW state government, determined to show - to satisfy the shock jocks - that it was tough on crime, especially drugs. Of course the shock jocks weren't satisfied, they're never satisified, never can be, it's the nature of the job and the breed, but meantime, the sniffer dog patrols go on.

While I can understand - barely - the benefits of sniffer dogs in the international area of airports, designed to intercept organic materials, drugs and whatever else might be smuggled into the country, the use of sniffer dogs in the streets is singularly useless (some countries don't bother with the dogs, preferring better mechanisms to achieve their law 'n order outcomes).

You only have to head off to a forum discussing the sniffer dogs, and ways to avoid them, to see that while they're a pain, anyone with half a clue can avoid them (here):

Originally Posted by drugs2loveme
Me and a few others are going up to Sunshine Coast for Schoolies this year by train from Syd to Bris (then catching a bus). We really want to take some bud up with us but are packing it about being caught by dogs. Do u think there'll be heaps of sniffers at Central and/or Brisbane Transit around end of Nov? Can they smell the weed if i hide it "internally"...in the female sense? lol (edit- No price or availability discussion)

Dude from what ive seen QLD use their dogs the least out of QLD, NSW and VIC
They rarely use them at festivals (BDO this year was a first) and they occasionly use them in the valley etc at night.

You will be fine. You have more chance of getting caught by dogs in SYdney train stations then anywhere in QLD

Sweet but what about getting on at Central? that's what we're mostly worried about. Are the dogs normally at the entrance or on the platforms?

There at Redfern and Penrith most times. I say expect alot more sniffer dogs and cops at raves in the near future. Its fukn shit. I wanna go to a festival too so im just gonna drop 2-3 pills before i head in. Fukn bastards.

Because of the random nature of the sniffer dog street searches, the strike rate is low, and thanks to the paranoia of the accustomed drug taker, it must be one of the most spectacularly offensive and singularly ineffective forms of policing, while at the same time ensuring that determined drug users get to drop their gear before they head in to festivals, while posting warnings, avoidance tactics, and legal advice to other drug users on the intertubes (at a site based in .ru. Hmm, come on down Stephen Conroy, still silent about your internet filter plan?)

If you're going to speed, why not get a radar warning device? If you want to make drug taking seem like a game of tag with the cops, why not introduce sniffer dogs?

Of course dogs and police work have a long and dishonorable history, with the tactic of police using dogs being mirrored by skinheads who love killer dogs of a malign kind. It means breaking Godwin's Law, but it was of course common in Nazi German for the cops to use dogs in their police work (right at this moment there's nine different issues of the rare third reich monthly magazine FACHSCHAFT FÜR GEBRAUCHSHUNDE for sale (here) and where would SBS be without that lovable hunde Kommissar Rex?)

In Mississippi in 1961 Nazi-trained German Shepherds had a vital law enforcement role to play:

(sourced from here, with the original clipping here).

It's always nice to know that the citizenry can sleep quietly at night while the uppity blacks are kept in their place.

But now the Western Australian government has decided to cut through all the nonsense of sniffer dogs, which are designed at least to provide police with reasonable suspicion before the cops can do a strip search on you.

Peter van Onselen tells the story in Absurd attack on freedoms:

You don't have to be a civil libertarian to oppose giving police the powers to indiscriminately stop and search people without so much as a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Yet that is exactly what the West Australian government is trying to do with legislation before parliament this week.

Think about it for a moment. You could be walking down the street (or even driving a car) and a police officer, for whatever reason, could stop you, frisk you and go through your personal possessions. If you are a woman that includes rifling through your handbag.

No reason needs to be given, no discussion had, no consent.

These are extraordinary powers, unprecedented in this country.

Yep, from the state that kills black prisoners by shoving them in the back of a closed van for a cross country trip without air-conditioning on a day of century heat (Four Corners show here), and takes a 12 year old boy with no prior convictions to court on a charge of receiving a stolen seventy cent chocolate block (here), comes the latest exercise in law and order.

Boy has the land of Wilson 'Ironbar' Tuckey got form when it comes to interacting with its citizenry. Van Onselen is rightly appalled at the prospect of the new laws:

West Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan defends them on the grounds that they won't be used unnecessarily.

But the legislation is silent on this opaque promise, which, with the sands of time, could wash away. Anyone who values their freedoms should be appalled.

The newly elected state Liberal MP Peter Abetz (when he isn't referring to the actions of Adolf Hitler to improve law and order in fascist Germany) says: "When it comes to the crunch, people prefer to be safe than to have freedom."

But a large component of safety is protection against an all-powerful state. That is why the term "reasonable suspicion" is a bedrock of policing standards across the globe.

The real reason the Barnett government wants to introduce these absurd laws is because there have been recent well-publicised cases of botched "reasonable suspicion" arrests resulting in the courts letting the accused walk free. That happens when police don't do their jobs properly.

The solution is to improve policing, not simplistically widen their powers so as to infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens.

As van Onselen points out, there's a catch 22 at work here. Western Australia has introduced mandatory jail sentences for assaulting a police officer, so if you object or react to a search, you might well have committed the offence of assaulting a police officer, just because the bugger stopped and searched you ... not because he had reasonable suspicion, but just because he didn't like the look of you.

So blokes out there, don't go getting too offended when a cop runs his hand up your wife's inner thigh without reasonable suspicion. It could land you in jail.

Well not many people get too upset about what happens in the west. There's a school of thought that it was a great pity that they hadn't managed to bail out of the union in the early days of the Commonwealth as the secessionists had wanted, and another school that says once the minerals are dug up and shipped out, the state should be cut adrift and sent packing into the Indian Ocean.

And of course the Nullabor plain does provide some protection against infection from the greater forms of lunacy on view, as well as preventing too much travel by the likes of the humble sparrow.

But allowing for all that, let's see in the next week or two, how many of the commentariat columnist brigade get indignant about this kind of upping of police powers to a level which is extraordinarily offensive ...

So far Colin Barnett has literally got away with murdering civil rights - the story has been festering since October (here) - and yet I can't recollect a single peep from a commentariat columnist. I guess that goes with a love of Kommissar Rex and a deep hatred for civil libertarians and a yearning to increase the size of government, especially the size of the police and private sector profit-making prisons to keep the uppity citizenry in line, like law-abiding sheep ready to go off to work in coal mine to make money for de man ...

Oh give me some of that law and order thunder and lightning and give me that rhetorical blather now ...

Meantime, go van Onselen, on many days the only reason to click on The Australian ...

(Below: raus, schnell, go doggies go).