Suspecting

You will, of course, have already heard about Lancashire Police launching a DVD that teaches primary school children how to spot terrorists.

Primary schoolchildren are set to be taught how to spot potential terror suspects as part of a police strategy to tackle extremism.

Lancashire Police has made a DVD featuring animated animals in a bid to teach children about the dangers of fundamentalism.

The force's new Preventing Violent Extremism unit said the DVD aimed to teach youngsters about terrorism and fundamentalism in an 'accessible way'.

Children will be encouraged to inform on their classmates if they feel other pupils are expressing extremist views.

Maybe its just the wording in the article and relatively abstract from real life, but the term 'potential terror suspect' fills me with dread, because it is everyone. We all have the potential to be a terror suspect, and its nothing to do with us. Its about suspicion, its the observer who makes someone a terrorist suspect, by suspecting them.

Here, via Wolfram Alpha

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

No. Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.
(according to the question more or less asked in the 1910 book Physics by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss and answered by Scientific American magazine on April 5, 1884, on page 218.)

If someone is suspected of being a terrorist for whatever reason, they become a terrorist suspect, there's no other qualification, you don't even need to validate their terrorism, you just need to suspect it. And now we're encouraging small children report suspected potential terrorists.

Is this before or after we've convinced them that there isn't a troll hiding under the bed and no boogeyman in the wardrobe?

On to more pertinant things, how does the Lancashire taxpayer sack whichever fool in the Lancashire Police came up with this? Do they write to their MP (who will only have days to deal with it before clearing their desks and signing on at the Job Centre Plus)? Do they file a complaint with at the local police station? Glue the locks of the Lancashire Police Headquarters and leave a note? How do the British People practically stop this sort of thing happening ever again? What can we do? Does it matter who we vote for tomorrow or next month?

This is about getting Chief Police Officers / Commissioners directly elected isn't it? We're going to have to get the Tories to highlight it on their manifesto and then do it when they get in.