Post Comment: Shades of Orwell in Project Catastrophe
Jul 16 2010 Post Comment
The gradual sense of horror, panic even, at Lloyd House, headquarters of West Midlands Police, over the ill-fated Project Champion counter-terrorism project must by now be very real and growing by the day.
In the space of a few weeks the force has gone from attempting to defend the use of 216 cameras in Muslim-dominated areas as little more than a routine crime-fighting exercise to admitting that serious mistakes were made and agreeing to switch off the network and remove completely 72 covert cameras.
Add to that an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a separate inquiry into what happened by the Thames Valley Police force and, most significantly of all, an application for judicial review by the human rights group Liberty and it becomes clear that the reputation of West Midlands Police is on the line as never before.
If Liberty’s request for a High Court hearing is approved, Birmingham’s cameras could become a national cause-celebre among the many groups concerned with the abuse of state power.
Liberty’s claim that Project Champion goes “way beyond the acceptable use of technology to tackle crime” and that the use of secret cameras to spy on entire communities “by virtue of their race or religion” is unlawful would have direct implications for all other police forces in the country if upheld. It might actually also hamper police efforts to detect terrorism suspects.
Matters would not have come to this had police and city council leaders seen sense at an earlier stage and agreed to scale down Project Champion into a more manageable and justifiable scheme. From what is known so far about the way events cascaded, a number of points are clear.
Some of Birmingham City Council’s senior political leadership knew about Project Champion three years ago and even offered financial support. Inexplicably, or perhaps deliberately, the cabinet member with responsibility for community cohesion, Alan Rudge, was left out of the loop.
It is clear also that the police did make efforts to brief Sparkbrook and Washwood Heath councillors about the purpose of the cameras, although there are mixed reports as to whether the intention to place the two Muslim-dominated wards under wall-to-wall surveillance was ever spelt out.
The council-led Safeguarding Birmingham Partnership, another ineffective quango, has hardly emerged from all of this in glory, having been exposed as very much the junior partner tagged on to Project Champion by the police, presumably in an attempt to pretend that the operation was primarily an assault on ordinary crime rather than terrorism.
With the damning words of Tory councillor Gareth Compton ringing around the Council House, comparing “Project Catastrophe” to the worst Orwellian nightmare, the damage to relations between police and civic leaders is real.
But that is nothing compared to the loss of faith in police motives by Muslim communities across Birmingham who continue to believe that, in Britain at least, they have the right to go about their daily lives without being spied upon day and night.
