Hough v Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police

[Pete Mitchell]

Mary Kirwan wrote:
> 
> Quite bizarre.
> 
> The entire issue should revolve around whether the belief was reasonable,
> which has to involve a consideration of the information in the computer
> record. If it said 'Johnny likes to wear a red hat', that I presume would
> not suffice to found a reasonably held suspicion of likely wrongdoing..
> 
> Even if the information in the record was highly sensitive, enough of it
> would have to be revealed to properly ground the suspicion, or the arrest
> should not stand - the need to uphold the legality of the arrest would have
> to yield to the necessity to protect the sensitive information. Cant say I
> understand the argument here, even at a stretch.
> 

Presumably the facts of this case mean that similar judgements can never
again be made. 

After all, the policeman who made the arrest could only have claimed he
had a "reasonable belief" of wrongdoing if he reckoned he could trust
the information supplied to him by the police computer. However, judging
by this incident it is clear that the information held on the computer
is not trustworthy. Now the arresting policeman has no way of assessing
how accurate the entries on the computer are; as far as he knows, any
given entry is as likely to be wrong as to be right. Therefore in any
future such incident, no policeman could reasonably hold such a belief
of likely wrongdoing by the suspect. And so all arrests based on
information from the police computer will in future be wrongful.

-- 
Pete Mitchell