As I suspected yesterday on the issue of the police use of bail as an illegal way of moulding the time limits on custody to suit their own inept investigation techniques, Police Minister Nick Herbert today promises emegency legislation to help out the state enforcers in their efforts to abuse the custody process to their hearts content :

Emergency laws are to be brought forward to overturn a High Court ruling limiting police bail in England and Wales to a maximum of four days.

Policing Minister Nick Herbert told MPs the move was necessary to allow officers to do their jobs properly.

Surely if they were doing their jobs properly they would have the evidence available to charge on arrest rather than bail first and find out if there is anything they can charge for later?

Mr Herbert told the Commons that police “believe that the judgement will have a serious impact on their ability to investigate crime”.

“It is likely that in most forces there will not be enough capacity to detain everybody in police cells,” he said.

“In other cases it risks impeding the police to such an extent that the investigation will have to be stopped because the detention time has run out.

“The judgement will also affect the ability of the police to enforce bail conditions.”

The minister said that with about 80,000 suspects currently on bail, the government could not afford to wait for a Supreme Court appeal.

The last sentence there demonstrating to me that this lot are just the same authoritarian bastards with no regard for either the law or the people they rule as the last lot.

Interestingly, the same article has the following rather bold quote from a (soon to be ex?) solicitor who says what most non-authority types actually think :

But Joseph Kotrie-Monson, the solicitor who represented Mr Hookway, insisted the ruling in his case did not change the law.

“It merely prevents police from abusing the custody process to reinterview citizens any of number times over periods sometimes as long as two or three years, provided the length of those interviews does not exceed four days,” he said.

“Where there is new evidence, the police can detain again. What they can’t do is take someone who is not proven to have committed any crime into custody as many times as they want, because they forgot to ask the right questions the first time around.

“The reason that [Home Secretary] Theresa May seeks new legislation is because she knows that the police actions up to now have been both unlawful and unconstitutional.”

Too damned right!