The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

334 THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICHgovernment, in May 2007, responding to news accounts, acknowledged ithad secretly established a new national antiterrorist unit to protect VIPsby first profiling, then arresting persons considered to be potentially dangerous.Amazingly, this power to detain suspects even before they actuallycommitted a crime was based on mental health laws.“The Fixated Threat Assessment Centre (FTAC) was quietly establishedlast October [2006] and is set to reignite controversy over the detentionof suspects without trial,” wrote The Times reporter Joanna Bale.“Until now it has been up to mental health professionals to determine ifsomeone should be forcibly detained, but the new unit uses the police toidentify suspects, increasing fears that distinctions are being blurred betweencriminal investigations and doctors’ clinical decisions.”The FTAC unit will be staffed by four police officers, two civilian researchers,a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a community mental healthnurse. It was hailed as the first joint mental health–police unit in theUnited Kingdom and a “prototype for future joint services” in other areas.Even as this police unit was assuming the power to arrest and holdpotential “suspects,” Scotland Yard refused to discuss how many suspectshave been forcibly hospitalized by the team, because of “patient confidentiality.”Meanwhile, the British government was introducing legislation tobroaden the definition of mental disorders to give doctors—and nowpolice—more power to detain people.“There is a grave danger of this being used to deal with people wherethere is insufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution,” said GarethCrossman, policy director for Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties.“This blurs the line between medical decisions and police actions. Ifyou are going to allow doctors to take people’s liberty away, they have tobe independent. That credibility is undermined when the doctors are partof the same team as the police. This raises serious concerns. First, that youhave a unit that allows police investigation to lead directly to people beingsectioned without any kind of criminal proceedings. Secondly, it is beingdone under the umbrella of antiterrorism at a time when the governmentis looking at ways to detain terrorists without putting them on trial.”Is this coming to America soon? Libertarians fear that such measuresmight be slipped into legislation such as funding for the military or