Since the Scarman inquiry there has been a significant decrease in reprehensible conduct by police in police stations and cells (Editorial, 7 April). Not just the racism that Scarman addressed directly, but more generally. He set up the system of Independent Custody Visitors (ICVs) that has done so much to constrain the police on their own premises. Getting a kicking in the cells is no longer the routine that existed before these representatives of the local community had access to them and to the CCTV record.
However, the ICV system faces some constraints that Scarman didn't envisage. First, the lack of CCTV in vans means that these vehicles are now the location of choice for lamentable lapses from proper professionalism. In London the opposition to CCTV in vans has been from both the operational end of the Metropolitan police and from the various forms of the police authority. Given the ease of fitting them in buses, this opposition seems to be based more on self-interest than on practicality.
Second, the authority has made systematic inroads into the independence of the capital's ICV scheme under both the Livingstone and Johnson administrations. They have both consistently sought to reduce this democratic oversight of the police to a box-ticking adjunct of the authority's statistics-gathering.
Here in London all the mayoral candidates want to give the police more money, more staff, more powers and more weaponry. They never raise the issue of effective democratic accountability of those state forces permitted to use force against citizens. All the main parliamentary parties are happy to undermine such democratic oversight as does exist and to further constrain it by way of secret judicial proceedings wherever they can get away with it.
We have to support Estelle du Boulay, Helen Shaw and those custody visitors now cloaked in institutional anonymity in their steadfast striving for democracy against the overbearing state.
Nik Wood
London