Crime and Security Bill

The Home Secretary really must not be allowed to get away with his last intervention. The Association of Chief Police Officers statistics that he refers to are for 2008-09 database matches, and they refer not to any criminal convictions but only to matches with a "direct and specific value" to the investigation. In the absence of a conviction, there is no way of knowing whether the matches between the database and the cases concerned were ultimately innocent or whether they provided evidence of guilt. The Home Secretary is eliding two issues and talking about arrests leading to evidence that there should be re-arrests, not to convictions. A re-arrest is not evidence of a conviction.