Police have no right to rush into action on dubious intelligence, say most Muslims in poll

A recent poll has shown that Muslims in Britain have lost faith in the police and strongly object to the philosophy that the police must act on information even if it later turns out to be wrong.

This would appear to be a reaction to the clumsy police raid on a house in Forest Gate which resulted in a young Muslim man being shot, and was later acknowledged by the police to have been carried out as a result of faulty intelligence believed to have been given to them by an informant of especially low IQ.

The Muslim community have also lost faith in Sir Ian Blair and are calling for his resignation.

Fifty-four per cent of Muslims said Sir Ian Blair should resign over the Forest Gate raid, while 29% said he should not.

In the poll, carried out two weeks after the raid, Muslims were also asked: "Do you think it is right or wrong for the police to act to pre-empt potential terrorist attacks, even if the intelligence, information and warnings may turn out to be wrong?" Thirty-one per cent said it was right and 57% said it was wrong.

This view contrasts sharply with that held by the general public. When the same question was asked of a representative sample of all adults, 74% said the police were right to act and 17% said they were wrong.

Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said last night the respondents could be "reacting against the many hundreds of Muslims who have been arrested in high-profile raids across the country since 9/11".

With the threat of home grown terrorists seeming to be more urgent than any threat from al Qaeda, it seems to me especially important that we retain the trust of the Muslim community.

It is quite obvious that we are failing in that task.

The kind of clumsy policing we witnessed in Forest Gate and the diabolical shooting of Charles de Menezes have only further eroded confidence.

As long as Blair and Hayman continue in their present posts that confidence is unlikely to return.

There has to be a radical rethinking of how the police face the threat before them. If these two men are incapable of undertaking a task of that size then it really is time to think of replacing both of them.

Tags: Muslims, police, poll, Blair, Hayman, Forest Gate, Charles de Menezes,