When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Apr 29, 2013 - 24 comments

What started as a report of a convenience store robbery near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last night has sprawled into a chaotic manhunt for the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. The deadly pursuit, involving a policeman's murder, a carjacking, a violent chase with thrown explosives, and the death of one suspect, has resulted in Governor Deval Patrick ordering an unprecedented lockdown of the entire Boston metropolitan area as an army of law enforcement searches house by house for the remaining gunman. The Associated Press has identified the duo as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who remains at large. Both are immigrants from wartorn Chechnya in southwestern Russia. The Guardian liveblog is good for quick updates, and Reddit's updating crowdsourced timeline of events that has often outpaced mainstream media coverage of the situation. You can also get real-time reports straight from the (Java-based) local police scanner.
posted by Rhaomi on Apr 19, 2013 - 4937 comments

A UK man who downloaded recipes on how to make explosive devices has been jailed under the controversial Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes it a crime to be "in possession of records of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". [more inside]
posted by unSane on Jan 27, 2012 - 81 comments

How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam. There aren’t nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of America’s police. So we got these guys instead.
posted by lullaby on Mar 2, 2011 - 69 comments

London's Metropolitan police have a press campaign to help us inform on each other identify terrorists. How do you spot your terrorist? Well he could be the one with the camera ^pdf. Or he could be the one with two mobile phones ^pdf. Or the one with a chemistry set and a house ^pdf. Flickr folk have their alternative takes on the poster campaign. Photographer's rights in the blue previously. And the met have already gone to bat against the terrorists an innocent photographer
posted by itsjustanalias on Mar 5, 2008 - 33 comments

Investigation reveals British Police knowingly employed serial killers as informers. Or should that be "knowingly employed informers as serial killers"? Film at 11.
posted by dash_slot- on Jan 22, 2007 - 36 comments

"The thing is, we're in Central London and we have to be really careful these days. I like your shots though... very nice." Dave Gorman's ever-so-slightly surreal Flickr adventure.
posted by greycap on Sep 12, 2006 - 61 comments

"'We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears'.... [Police] officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats." While there have been no specific threats of terrorism against Miami, "'[t]his is an in-your-face type of strategy. It's letting the terrorists know we are out there,' [Deputy Police Chief Frank] Fernandez said."
posted by orthogonality on Nov 28, 2005 - 71 comments

Blair loses in the Commons for the first time since his election in 1997. MPs refused to pass laws allowing terrorist suspects to be jailed without trial for 90 days, and Blair's parliamentary majority of 66 turned into a minority of 31. The government has been holding back on the vote for months in an attempt to persuade their party to back the Prime Minister - they failed.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Nov 9, 2005 - 38 comments

Update on the killing of the innocent Brazilian man by London police at Stockwell station. A special report by the Observer reveals some of the key elements emerging from the ongoing investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Jean Charles de Menezes "wasn't wearing a heavy jacket. He used his card to get into the station. He didn't vault the barrier. And now police say there are no CCTV pictures to reveal the truth." So now the inquiry will have to rely exclusively on eyewitnesses accounts. It appears the man they saw vaulting the barrier was one of the armed officers in plain clothes, while de Menezes "simply walked towards the platform unchallenged". The plainclothes armed unit that shot de Menezes was not the same team that had been following him from his London flat: "there was a delay in calling an armed team to arrest de Menezes, which meant he had already entered the station by the time the officers arrived". Also, it appears that once inside the station, the armed officers had no radio contact with police on the outside. As new details emerge, more questions remain unanswered.
(As previously discussed here and here.)
posted by funambulist on Aug 14, 2005 - 87 comments

Man shot 5 times in London. Around 10am, suspected suicide bomber runs into a tube station and is shot and killed at close range by plain-clothes police officers. News still developing, high risk of further incidents.
posted by Acey on Jul 22, 2005 - 247 comments

Apologies come from the top Queensland, Australia: "QUEENSLAND'S elite anti-terrorism police will no longer use photos of real people in target practice after concerns were raised by indigenous and civil liberties groups." Dp the police have the right to use someone's mugshot for target practice, without permission or consent?
posted by skinsuit on Jul 7, 2003 - 16 comments