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They can't, or won't, differentiate between terrorists/gangsters and a harmless businessman going to a meeting. Of course, this man was foolish to have a collapsible baton and a penknife in his briefcase and to allow them to search him, but the Police could have just bollocked him, told him not to do it again and let him go.

Policing is now about completing forms, and meeting targets, it has nothing to do with catching real criminals (thanks to our dear fascist Home Secretary). Besides if they only arrested gangsters and terrorists that would count as institutional racism.

I suppose we can't blame these individual Policemen for their reaction to finding his penknife and collapsible baton. Over the past 50 years the British government has brainwashed the population and LEOs to react hysterically to civilians carrying anything that could be used as a weapon. Nowadays the UK Courts are even prepared to imprison someone who they accept was carrying a knife for a legitimate purpose.

Consider this report originally published in the London Evening Standard, dated October 31, 1996:

A man who uses a knife as a tool of his trade was jailed today after police found him carrying three of them in his car. Dean Payne, 26, is the first person to be jailed under a new law making the carrying of a knife punishable by imprisonment. Payne told ... magistrates that he had to provide his own knife for his job cutting straps around newspaper bundles at the distribution plant where he works .... Police found the three knives--a lock knife, a small printer's knife, and a Stanley knife--in a routine search of his car.... The court agreed he had no intention of using the knives for "offensive" purposes but jailed him for two weeks anyway.(p.437) ....

[The magistrate said] "I have to view your conduct in light of the great public fear of people going around with knives...I consider the only proper punishment is one depriving you of your liberty." (Source).

This sort of judgement makes me want to puke!