Less Big Brother, more bobbies on the beat

STUART OUTTEN, who survived a savage machete attack during a routine traffic stop in East London, is being hailed as Britain’s ‘hardest cop’. He’s certainly one of the bravest.

PC Outten suffered horrific injuries to his skull and arms but still managed to bring down his assailant with a Taser. He reacted with exemplary courage and presence of mind. During a riveting interview on LBC radio yesterday, he also displayed commendable modesty.

He told presenter Nick Ferrari that it was only after he had been slashed four or five times, and with blood gushing out of his head wound, he thought to himself: ‘i’m in a bit of trouble here.’

instead of panicking, he said: ‘i was thinking that if i can slow my breathing, slow my heart rate, slow the blood loss, i can stop myself from passing out.’ His calm response allowed him to reach his Taser and disable his attacker, Muhammad Rodwan. ‘Without that Taser, i’d be dead,’ he added.

Rodwan reached for the rusty machete after being pulled over in Leyton for driving without insurance. Yet despite the ferocity of his unprovoked and potentially deadly assault, he was acquitted of attempted murder at the Old Bailey and convicted of the lesser offence of wounding with intent.

The judge refused to allow the jury to hear evidence that Rodwan had committed a ‘strikingly similar’ machete attack on two men in 1996, ruling that it wasn’t relevant because it was too long ago. Would the verdict have been different if jurors had been presented with that damning evidence? We’ll never know.

Rodwan was given 16 years, but will almost certainly be out in less, under the absurdly lenient guidelines which dictate that most criminals serve only a portion of their sentences. Some may consider he got off lightly.

Not lawyer Sophie Khan, however. She tweeted after the trial that Rodwan had acted in selfdefence and called for Stuart Outten to be investigated for using ‘excessive force’.

MiSSKhan should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. There’s a world of difference between mounting a proper defence and trying to blame the victim for saving his own life.

if anyone should be investigated, it’s Sophie Khan — by the Law Society, for bringing the profession into disrepute and slandering a heroic policeman.

PC Outten is precisely the kind of copper we all admire. His ordeal is a timely reminder of the way in which police officers put their lives on the line every day to keep the rest of us safe.

it’s also given me pause to reconsider my doubts about arming every bobby with a Taser. Over the years, daft stories about coppers who have Tasered everything from a stray sheep to a blind man whose white stick was mistaken for a samurai sword have provided me with a rich vein of material for Mind How You Go.

But as Stuart Outten admits, he’d probably be dead were it not for his Taser. So maybe the case for equipping all beat cops with one is overwhelming. We could certainly do with more like him out there. Boris Johnson has promised to hire another 20,000 officers. What bothers me is how they will be deployed.

in recent years, too many cops have been withdrawn from the streets, to gawp at CCTV cameras or trawl the internet for perceived ‘hate crimes’. The result has been a stabbings epidemic, particularly in London. So it is disturbing to learn that the Met Police has decided to go ahead with the installation of new facial recognition camera technology, which will bring surveillance to levels not seen outside Communist China.

Britain is already the most spied upon country in the so-called ‘free world’. There are more than half a million cameras in London alone.

The system has been on trial for years and still has serious flaws. Even if it was perfect, there are genuine concerns about civil liberties being breached. No one was asked if they wanted it. No one voted for it.

Just because we have the technology, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we have to use it. My worry, as usual, is that when you give anyone more power — especially if it comes with a uniform — they will always, always abuse it.

For instance, last May police issued a £90 fine to a pedestrian who tried to cover his face to hide his identity. When the man learned officers were testing facial recognition equipment, he pulled down his cap and pulled up his jumper to conceal his mouth and nose.

As he walked past the cops, they stopped him and then, when he complained, threatened to arrest him and issued a fixed penalty for ‘ disorderly behaviour’. The incident, in Romford, Essex, was caught by a BBC camera crew.

Will we all now risk arrest if we cover our faces? What about those masked climate change protesters, or women who refuse to take off their burkas?

WiLLcoppers spend all day studying images to work out whether a crime has been committed — like the Video Assistant Referee in football?

At this rate, we might as well abolish the jury system and hand decisions about guilt or innocence over to VAR.

We are getting dangerously close to making the movie Minority Report, in which people are arrested prior to committing a crime, a reality.

in the U.S., San Francisco has already banned facial recognition technology and other cities are expected to follow suit.

We’re not told, either, how much all of this will cost. Surely the money would be better spent putting more cops on the street — which is what the public wants.

All the available evidence confirms that when there is a visible police presence, crime falls.

if Muhammad Rodwan hadn’t been stopped in his tracks, who knows how many other innocent people he would have maimed or murdered with his rusty machete.

What we need is fewer Big Brother cameras and more brave bobbies on the beat like the heroic PC Stuart Outten.