Robin Wilton's esoterica

There's a news story today about some UK police being issued with hand-held fingerprint scanners for road-side use. Obviously this has provoked a lot of reaction about "infringement of civil liberties", but a lot of this seems to me to be missing the point.

The article says that police will fingerprint a driver only if she or he cannot give satifsactory proof of identity when stopped. Under those circumstances, the person would otherwise be taken to a police station and fingerprinted.

The bizarre part of the article is that it repeatedly describes fingerprinting as a way of identifying the driver. It also says that fingerprints taken would be compared against a national database of 6.5m prints. Those two statements can't both be true.

If a driver cannot convince the police of his or her identity, all that roadside fingerprinting will achieve is to tell the police whether those prints match an existing entry in the database.

That doesn't reassure me about the assertion that "the prints will not be kept on file". If new prints are not filed along with those already there to provide a match, then the previous paragraph will remain true indefinitely - making the whole exercise rather pointless.

In case you're wondering how this kind of thing can get onto the statute books, or you're struggling to remember the parliamentary debate on the subject, the answer is here; the end-of-session parliamentary 'clear-up' which saw huge slabs of legislation rubber-stamped without debate.

This was the same Act which makes every offence arrestable, including those which previously would have been considered so trivial as to merit only a caution. Of  course, as an arrestable offence, every offence can now be used to trigger the taking of DNA and other data which will then be retained indefinitely, whether or not the person in question is charged or convicted of anything.

I feel the wool being pulled over my eyes. Conversely, if you are prepared to take the article at face value, can I interest you in an Eiffel Tower and a crate of finest snake oil? Serious bidders only.

You may remember that after my recent trip to Hong Kong I blogged about having seen a methadone clinic for the first time. Today there's news of a recommendation by a senior UK police officer that some heroin addicts should be taken 'out of the illegal market' by having their heroin prescribed through the health service.

According the the article, Howard Roberts, Deputy Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, sees three direct consequences of such a policy: the first is simply a reduction in the cost of the addiction; the figures used are that the average addiction generates a cash requirement of about 15,000 a year, but in order to raise this through criminal activity, an addict will typically need to get 45,000-worth of assets because of the 'conversion rate' of stolen goods into cash. Prescribing heroin legally would apparently cost about 12,000 a year.

The second is of course a drop in crime, because the addicts are no longer having to steal to support the heroin habit.

The third is a more fundamental effect on what he describes as "the method of operation of the criminal market-place for heroin" - in other words, using the 'true' cost of legally-produced heroin to undermine the economics of the drug trade.

I think it's great that law enforcement at this level have an open mind towards this kind of remedy, but I have a few (ill-informed) reservations.

1 - I wonder why he recommends prescribing heroin rather than methadone... though one of the things I found out last time was that apparently methadone is actually harder to 'kick' than heroin. On cost grounds, methadone might do more to reduce the cost of addiction, though it might have to be used over a longer period.

2 - the way any market operates, if current buyers are taken out of the illegal market, it will generate a strong incentive for suppliers to try to open up new markets... in other words, push to new addicts. That might prove to be an unintended consequence of the policy.

3 - the fact that someone is on methadone does not (according to the research I did previously) guarantee that they will not seek other illegal drugs at the same time. Presumably the same applies to legally-prescribed heroin.

Point 2 just suggests that if the police want to use this as a means of fundamentally affecting the criminal market for heroin, they will have to acknowledge that other preventive and enforcement measures will have to accompany it. But then, if they're saving money on detection of heroin-inspired crime, maybe that's a workable trade-off.

Points 1 and 3 worry me more, because they imply that any legal prescription programme would have to be accompanied by an effective and long-term programme of rehabilitation; safeguarding participants against the temptation to use other illegal drugs, dealing with the fact that they are still unlikely to be able to take up productive employment while being treated, and so on.

Those tasks will fall to bodies other than the police, and specifically to local government bodies such as Adult Care and Social Services, who are already finding their budgets severely over-stretched. There is plenty of media coverage of cases in which known addicts, psychiatric out-patients and the like re-offend while supposedly under the 'supervision' of such bodies, and that does not inspire confidence in their ability to cope with a further population of candidates for rehabilitation