Don't quote me on this, but I think the PCSO are to the U.K. what "Community Resource Officers" are here. I don't know if you have CRO's where you are, but they are common around here. They are supposedly there to do all the "light" things for real cops. My only experience with one was when I called the police to report my car stolen a few years ago, and some civilian showed up at my house to take the report. It was sad.
At any rate, here's an article about the Love Police, from prisonplanet. It was linked from their Facebook page. It's pretty interesting, and explains a bit about what they do.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/activist...rror-laws.html
Quote:
In May 2009, data released to the BBC revealed that the Metropolitan Police in London used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in the capital. That figure equated to stopping and searching a member of the public every three minutes under terrorism laws.
The figures represented a more than 140% increase on 2007 numbers.
Of all the stops in 2008, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%. Furthermore, when you take into account how many of those arrests have translated into convictions, according to the Home Office, you come up with a round figure of 0.0%.
A separate Freedom of Information Act request in 2009 also revealed that the use of the stop and search power has increased exponentially by over ten times in less than ten years.
Furthermore, Ministry of Justice statistics, published in mid 2008, revealed that from 2006-2007 police used their powers to stop (but not search) nearly two million members of the public and demand they account for their behavior or actions, a rise of one third from the previous year.
This meant that in just one year around 3.5% of the entire British population was stopped in the street by the police under suspicion of terror related offences.
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