Unintelligent intelligence

A raid, a shooting, arrests, suspects released and police admitting that their intelligence was faulty. The recent raid on a house in Forest Gate, London, by 250 police, which resulted in the shooting of one of two men they arrested was not the finest hour of London's Metropolitan police. Thankfully, on this occasion, there were no fatalities but it was eerily reminiscent of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes last July in the wake of the London bombings.

Of course, the police were acting in good faith. They had received intelligence which justified their actions. However, it is not just the intelligence that is faulty but the very methods used to gather it. There seems to be a glaring imbalance in the approach adopted to get information.

According to the Islamic Human Rights Commission, since 9/11 some 950 people, the majority of them Muslims, have been arrested in Britain under the Terrorism Act 2000. Of these, only 148 were charged and only 27 convicted of terrorism.

Many thousands more have been stopped under the increased stop-and-search powers that anti-terror laws have given police. In 2003-2004 they were up by almost a third. Last year British Transport police statistics revealed that Asians were five times more likely to be stopped than whites. In the month following the London bombings, they had apprehended 2,390 Asian people. None were subsequently charged.

Clearly Forest Gate and Jean Charles de Menezes were not isolated incidents. The ricin plot, after reports of an Al Qaida plan to smear the poison on door handles, resulted in one of the longest criminal trials in British legal history. No ricin was ever found.

It is a grim truth that terror is a clear and present danger in Britain but a one-sided approach to gathering information risks alienating a section of the community whose goodwill is vital.