Making my blood boil(er suit)

Via Littlejohn’s column (ew, sorry) comes the latest yuman rites/PC gorn maaaaaad tale:

Police have been banned from forcing suspects to change into blue paper boiler suits while their clothes are sent for forensic analysis.

Yep, you guessed — yuman rites.

Greater Manchester Plod have been told that they must fetch clean clothes from the prisoner’s home.

It’s a story that has apparently been doing the rounds for the last day or so, but I’d missed it until now. I’ll leave Dicky’s elision of ‘suspect’ and ‘prisoner’ to one side for now and concentrate on the ‘ban’.

All the national newspapers that have covered this story home in on the ‘human rights’ aspect, and they all to some extent report a ban (either ‘banned’, ‘dropped’, or ‘no longer’ – in any case, something has ceased).

Even the local newspaper from which this apparently stemmed headlines its report ‘Police ban boiler suits for suspects’. So what’s the problem?

Firstly, nothing’s been banned. At the end of the MEN article there’s a named (remember that for later!) spokesperson from Greater Manchester Police saying:

“This is best practice and followed where possible. We do still use paper suits or tracksuits that can be worn if the suspect does not have a change of clothes.

“There is no legislation that bans suspects wearing the paper suits. If these are worn they are only done so in custody cells, and not in public areas.”

That’s not a ban (the quote, strangely, doesn’t make it to any other report). But it does still look like there’s a move away from those boiler suits. Maybe that’s to do with human rights.

Eh, maaaaaaaaybe. The evidence for this looks like it comes from this in the MEN:

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said: “Where possible, arrangements will be made to collect clothes from the homes of suspects.

“This may be family members bringing them in or they may be collected. We are also able to issue white tracksuits. The force is following best practice guidelines.”

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 all suspects have to be dealt with quickly, fairly and “without oppression” while in custody.

However, individual forces are free to introduce their own best practice rules of procedure, the spokesman added.

What’s not at all clear to me is that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was mentioned by the spokesperson – sure, it’s in between other things he says, but it’s not directly attributed to them. It could be in quotation marks because it’s direct from the spokesperson, but that’s not clear (incidentally, the phrase ‘without oppression’ doesn’t appear in the Act – and ‘oppression’ is only used in the context of interviewing). And don’t forget we’ve already heard

“There is no legislation that bans suspects wearing the paper suits.”

Although I suppose that could just about mean suspects aren’t banned from wearing them at all, just outside. Or something.

Either way, the paragraph was copied unquestioningly into other reports, and the Express even put ‘oppressive’ in its lede. That still wasn’t enough for one of the Mail or the Express who, maybe sensing the lack of outrage in the article, came up with an anonymous chief inspector to helpfully say the suits have been banned for a while thanks to human rights. The other newspaper then repeated the remark. Lifting an anonymous quote from someone else’s article – that’s classy.

I’m not saying this story definitely has nothing to do with human rights, although I’m certainly very sceptical. It could be about human rights and complying with the spirit of PACE; or it could simply be to try to avoid giving the impression that a suspect is automatically a criminal – a distinction apparently lost on a lot of people commenting on the articles.

But if it is a human rights story you’d expect there to be a bit more solid evidence than an anonymous quote and an inconclusive statement that might have been from the police. And it’s definitely not a ban.