This chapter examines the investigation of crime. It begins with a discussion of how law enforcement is organized, exploring the role of agencies such as the police, the National Crime Agency, and HM Revenue and Customs, amongst others. It then critically considers police powers around stop and search and arrest and detention, before moving on to examine the rights of suspects in police custody, particularly in relation to interview.
12
Chapter
12. The Investigation of Crime
Chapter
10. Terrorism and Human Rights
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provide an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter first considers the definition of ‘terrorism’. It then turns to laws which the UK government has put in place to attempt to deal with this area, including proscription of organizations, modification of police powers, and various forms of restrictions on movement, including ‘control orders’ and their successors — terrorism prevention and investigation measures.
Chapter
3. Personal Liberty (Article 5) I: Stop, Search, and Arrest
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provide an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines the laws which justify invasions of personal freedom. The majority of the powers discussed are available to police officers only, though in some cases they may be exercised by other officials, or even by private citizens. It first considers provisions for stop, search, and arrest under the Human Rights Act 1998. It then turns to the exercise of powers of stop, search, and arrest under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
Chapter
8. Freedom to protest and police powers
The Q&A series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each chapter includes typical questions, diagram problem and essay answer plans, suggested answers, notes of caution, tips on obtaining extra marks, the key debates on each topic, and suggestions on further reading. This chapter is all about the freedom to protest and police powers. Freedom to protest is protected by common law, statute, and the European Convention on Human Rights. The questions looked at here consider issues such as public order law; the right to protest; the right to freedom of peaceful assembly; and police powers to arrest and search on reasonable suspicion.
Chapter
12. The Investigation of Crime
Alisdair A. Gillespie and Siobhan Weare
This chapter examines the investigation of crime. It begins with a discussion of how law enforcement is organized, exploring the role of agencies such as the police, the National Crime Agency, and HM Revenue and Customs, amongst others. It then critically considers police powers around stop and search and arrest and detention, before moving on to examine the rights of suspects in police custody, particularly in relation to interview.
Chapter
6. Article 8: Right to Respect for Private Life
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provide an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to respect for a person’s private and family life, home, and correspondence. It begins by looking at some general issues, and then focuses on police powers of entry, search, and seizure; and the privacy rights of the individual as against the press.
Chapter
7. Due Process, Liberty and Security of the Person, and the Right to a Fair Trial
The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, diagram answer plans, caution advice, suggested answers, illustrative diagrams and flowcharts, and advice on gaining extra marks. Concentrate Q&A Human Rights & Civil Liberties offers expert advice on what to expect from your human rights and civil liberties exam, how best to prepare, and guidance on what examiners are really looking for. Written by experienced examiners, it provides: clear commentary with each question and answer; bullet point and diagram answer plans; tips to make your answer really stand out from the crowd; and further reading suggestions at the end of every chapter. The book should help you to: identify typical law exam questions; structure a first-class answer; avoid common mistakes; show the examiner what you know; all making your answer stand out from the crowd. This chapter covers due process, liberty, and security of the person, and the right to a fair trial, including articles 5, 6, and 7 of the ECHR and their application to matters such as prison discipline, police powers, and the fight against terrorism.
Book
Ruth Costigan and Richard Stone
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provide an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. Textbook on Civil Liberties and Human Rights provides an account of this area of law. This work covers all the main topics in the field of civil liberties and human rights. It provides coverage of crucial areas such as police powers, freedom of expression, terrorism, and public order. A thematic approach helps readers to appreciate the overlap and interconnected nature of the subject, and the close association between the different articles of the European Convention. Topics new to this edition include: Austin v UK on kettling and the deprivation of liberty; von Hannover v Germany (No 2) and Springer v Germany on privacy; Othman (Abu Qatada) v UK on asylum and fair trial rights; O’Donoghue and Others v UK on the right to marry; the Supreme Court’s views in R v Gul on the definition of terrorism; the Court of Appeal’s rulings in Hall v Bull and Black v Wilkinson on discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation where this conflicts with religious beliefs; Att Gen v Davey on contempt and the internet; and the Anti-Social Behaviour and Policing Act, which will replace ASBOs with Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Disorder.
Chapter
11. Police powers and accountability
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter focuses on police powers, accountability, and the regulation of police discretion. It begins by considering the legitimation of police legal powers in democratic societies and the problem of police accountability. There is then discussion of policy-making for the police force—priorities in resource allocation, strategy, and style—and the street-level actions of rank-and-file officers. Developments in police powers before and after the landmark Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984, and the principle of fundamental balance between powers and safeguards supposedly enshrined in PACE are covered. The chapter then examines developments in police accountability, including the mechanisms for handling complaints against the police and the role of political control in police governance. It concludes by assessing the attempts to reconcile police power and democratic accountability in contemporary societies characterized by a patchwork of domestic, transnational, public, and private police agencies carrying out ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing.
Chapter
5. Police questioning of suspects
This chapter examines the power of the police to question suspects, both in theory and in practice. It discusses the expanding powers of the police to interrogate, reflecting the drift from due process to crime control; the multiple aims of police interviews; the dwindling away of the right to silence, for example as a result of the introduction of adverse inferences and the ‘sidelining’ of legal advice; the (inadequate) regulation of interrogation, for example, through trial remedies founded on interviews being ‘unfair’ or ‘oppressive’ ; traditional police interview tactics; the development of investigative interviewing, based on the PEACE model; why the innocent confess and the role of coercion and suggestibility in this; and the need for a corroboration rule.
Chapter
5. Questioning
This chapter examines the questioning stage of the criminal process, looking at the role and powers of the police. It covers the context of questioning and interviewing of suspects, interviewing victims, and confessions in court. It argues that confessions remain a suspect type of evidence despite the fact that the police questioning process is well regulated. Police detention will always be stressful, and innocent suspects will always have some incentives for confessing. This is why there is a case to be made for the corroboration of confessions. It is also crucial that the gains made since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) are not undermined by government initiatives to cut costs by reducing the amount and quality of legal advice available to suspects.
Chapter
19. Police powers
This concluding chapter studies police powers. It is the function of the police to keep the public secure by preventing and detecting crime, and maintaining public order. This involves the exercise of public power and powerfully engages the relationship between the citizen and the state. There are clear links between police powers and the rule of law: it is imperative that police powers are not used in a random, arbitrary way; are clear, foreseeable, and accessible; are not unlimited; and are in accordance with the law. Police powers are mostly statute-based, the most significant of which is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) which was enacted to achieve a balance between protecting citizens’ rights and effective police powers. Under section 66, the Home Secretary issues detailed Codes of Practice regulating the exercise of police powers and providing clear guidelines for the police and safeguards for the public.
Chapter
21. Human Rights V: Governmental Powers of Arrest and Detention
This chapter examines government powers of arrest and detention. Section I provides a three-part analysis of police powers to restrict an individual’s physical liberty under what we might regard as ‘ordinary’ laws. The first part of the chapter considers powers of ‘arrest’; the second section addresses powers of detention that arise consequent upon arrest but before the detained person has been charged with any offence; and the third considers situations in which a person can lawfully be detained without actually being arrested. Section II shifts the focus of the chapter to what we might consider to be ‘extraordinary’ laws, by describing and analysing the extent to which the constitution permits deprivation of liberty for ‘terrorist’ offences, specifically powers of arrest and detention which existed between 1945 to 1977, and then in the post-1977 era.
Chapter
19. Human rights in the UK: public order and police powers
This chapter examines the rights contained within Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression), Article 11 (freedom of association and assembly), Article 5 (the right to liberty), and Article 8 (the right to a private and family life). It considers the domestic application of these rights as well as the various cases in which they have been raised. In doing this, the chapter explores the balance that must be struck between certain rights on the one hand and competing interests and needs on the other. With this in mind, it focuses on two areas: first, the freedoms of association and assembly, balanced against the need to ensure public order; and secondly, the freedom of liberty and right to a fair trial, against the need to ensure that the police can carry out their functions and responsibilities appropriately.
Chapter
11. Freedom of Religion, Association, and Peaceful Assembly
The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, diagram answer plans, caution advice, suggested answers, illustrative diagrams and flowcharts, and advice on gaining extra marks. Concentrate Q&A Human Rights & Civil Liberties; offers expert advice on what to expect from your human rights and civil liberties exam, how best to prepare, and guidance on what examiners are really looking for. Written by experienced examiners, it provides: clear commentary with each question and answer; bullet point and diagram answer plans; tips to make your answer really stand out from the crowd; and further reading suggestions at the end of every chapter. The book should help you to: identify typical law exam questions; structure a first-class answer; avoid common mistakes; show the examiner what you know; all making your answer stand out from the crowd. This chapter covers freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the right to peaceful assembly, including the scope of those rights, their protection in domestic law and under the ECHR and their application to matters such as religious practices, trade unions, and political organisations, and the right to demonstrate.
Chapter
2. Stop and search
Alpa Parmar
This chapter examines the powers of the police to stop and search people in the context of an initial discussion of police culture and discretion in general. The development of greater powers over the last 35 years since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) was introduced is charted. The chapter considers whether stop and search is racially discriminatory; the constraints and controls on the exercise of discretion; and the impact of stop-search powers. It argues that the working assumptions based on ‘suspiciousness’—i.e. hunch, incongruity, and stereotyping on the basis of types of people, previous records, and so forth—still play as important a part in influencing the exercise of discretion as do legal constraints. This is all true even when responding to citizen reports of suspected offences.
Chapter
4. Detention in the police station
This chapter examines the effectiveness of the checks, controls, and safeguards provided for suspects in police detention, including for suspects considered to be vulnerable by the police. It also evaluates the effect of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998. The discussions cover the powers and duties of custody officers and detention officers; length of detention without charge; suspects’ rights including the right to legal advice and the rights of vulnerable suspects; the purpose of and experiences of police detention; and deaths in police custody.
Chapter
6. Non-interrogatory evidence and covert policing
Ed Cape
This chapter examines the main types of non-interrogatory evidence gathered through criminal justice processes. First we look at witness and identification evidence; like the interviewing of suspects, this is not as straightforward as it might appear. We then move onto entry of premises (eg suspects’ homes, places of work, etc), search of those places and seizure of ‘suspicious’ goods discovered by searches. Whereas most entry and search is known to the suspects and/or owners of the premises concerned, ‘covert’ policing is, by definition, not made known to the subjects of the policing. Covert policing takes many forms: eg, surveillance, ‘undercover’ policing, use of informers, interception of communications. Finally we examine scientific evidence which, like witness evidence, is far from straightforward. There are many problems common to all these types of information-gathering. These include the fragility and ambiguity of what often appears solid and objective; the way they erode human rights; the effect of ‘police culture’ on what is gathered and how it is interpreted; and the lack of accountability for what is done and how it is done.
Chapter
4. Investigating crime and gathering evidence
The criminal process is, to a large extent, an investigative one, existing to prepare cases for effective trial. To this end, authorities are given powers enabling them to gather evidence. But these powers can infringe numerous interests, some relating to the workings of the process itself, in addition to external ones, such as liberty, privacy, freedom from humiliation, and bodily integrity. This chapter examines how the gathering of evidence is and should be affected by these concerns and covers powers and practices in relation to the investigation of crime and the gathering of evidence. It discusses stop and search, surveillance, eyewitness identification evidence, voice identification, forensic and biometric samples, and the privilege against self-incrimination.
Chapter
19. Police powers
This concluding chapter studies police powers. It is the function of the police to keep the public secure by preventing and detecting crime, and maintaining public order. This involves the exercise of public power and powerfully engages the relationship between the citizen and the state. There are clear links between police powers and the rule of law: it is imperative that police powers are not used in a random, arbitrary way; are clear, foreseeable, and accessible; are not unlimited; and are in accordance with the law. Police powers are mostly statute-based, the most significant of which is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) which was enacted to achieve a balance between protecting citizens’ rights and effective police powers. Under section 66, the Home Secretary issues detailed Codes of Practice regulating the exercise of police powers and providing clear guidelines for the police and safeguards for the public. Police powers to maintain public order under the Public Order Act 1986 and other statutes may conflict with the right to freedom of peaceful assembly under Article 11 ECHR.
12
