Police powers plans: Key points

Here are the key points of the Home Office consultation document Modernising Police Powers to meet Community Needs.

Powers of arrest:

• Allow police to arrest people for all offences, including minor ones such as graffiti and litter. At present - with exceptions - people can only be arrested for offences which carry sentences of at least five years.

• Set clearer criteria for citizens' arrests - including a clear legal requirement to hand over the arrested person to the custody of a constable "as soon as practicable".

• Abolish the ability for police to arrest people for breach of the peace.

Search warrants:

• The scope of search warrants to cover not just on a specific property, but to focus on the person and cover any premises occupied or controlled or accessible by them.

• Scrap the one month time limit automatically placed on search warrants.

• Scrap the rule limiting entry to one occasion only.

• The time-consuming system of getting search warrants could be speeded up by allowing them to be applied for and granted by e-mail or fax.

Community Support Officers:

• New powers to direct traffic.

• Take on the role of custody officers in police stations.

• Powers to issue warnings to beggars.

• Powers to enforce byelaws.

• Powers to search people they have detained.

• Allow designated investigating officers to operate in plain clothes on occasions.

• More powers considered to tackle alcohol related anti-social behaviour.

• Testing people for drugs on arrest rather than when charged.

• Enhancing the ways of encouraging drug-misusing offenders to undergo appropriate treatment on leaving custody.

• Allowing courts to remand a person into police detention for up to 12 days if they are suspected of swallowing drugs.

• Courts to be directed to draw inferences from a suspect's refusal to submit to an intimate search.

Road offences:

• Create a new offence of using or keeping an incorrectly registered vehicle.

• Give powers for fixed penalty money to be used to fund expansion of automatic number plate recognition technology.

• Create a new power of stop, search, seizure and confiscation in relation to possession of fireworks by under-18s in a public place.

• Create a new offence of protesting outside homes, where the protest is in such a way as to cause harassment, alarm or distress to residents.

• Amend existing laws to make it an offence for someone ordered to leave the vicinity of a home to return within three months for the purposes of persuading the resident or another that he should do something he is not obliged to do.

Parliament protests:

• Ensure that the law to deal with demonstrations outside Parliament is effective - possibly to ban long-term protests.

Identification:

• Allow police to take DNA samples, fingerprints or foot/shoeprints covertly - for example, by undercover officers - to determine identification of suspects and their possible involvement in an offence, although such material would be for intelligence use only and not for use as evidence in court.

• Police powers to take suspects' fingerprints should be extended to any public place, not just at the police station.

• Officers should also be able to photograph suspects outside the police station, and use moving images such as video.

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