Ground Floor Perfumery, Stationery….And Cells

The police are to set up “retail jails” on high streets and in busy shopping malls to detain yobs and other offenders for up to four hours under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

Talks are under way to open the first of these short-term holding cells in Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London. The five purpose-built rooms would be smaller than normal cells and made of Perspex so that suspects are visible.

The police will also gain sweeping extensions to their powers to take fingerprints and DNA samples from anyone they suspect of committing a crime. In addition, the proposals appear to lift the barriers that separate the police fingerprint and DNA databases from the new national identity register. The changes were proposed in a Home Office consultation document reviewing the Police and Criminal Evidence (Pace) Act 1984 code, which lays down the rules and safeguards for police treatment of crime suspects.

The Home Office says the suggestion to set up a national network of “short-term holding facilities” across England and Wales in busy urban areas stems from concern that the police spend too much time at the station processing low-level offenders or checking their identities.

“It takes police officers off the street and away from frontline duties,” said a Home Office spokesman. “A potential solution in dealing with high-volume offending is to enable the police to make use of short-term holding facilities located in shopping centres or town centres,” the consultation document says. It proposes that those held in the prototype Selfridges cells be kept for a maximum of four hours to have their identity confirmed and be charged, summonsed or given a fine.

But the Pace review goes further and suggests that suspects be fingerprinted, photographed and have their DNA sampled, regardless of the offence they are suspected of. At present, fingerprints and DNA samples can only be taken in relation to so-called recordable offences – generally those that carry a potential prison sentence. The Home Office made it clear yesterday that it wants to give the police that power for all criminal offences – including antisocial behaviour, littering and shoplifting.

The Pace review says the “absence of the ability to take fingerprints, etc, in relation to all offences may undermine the ability to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending.” The consultation paper goes on to ask whether there is scope to “remove the operational constraints” on inputting DNA, fingerprint and photographs into other anti-crime databases.

The human rights group Liberty said the Home Office was preparing to link up the national DNA and fingerprint databases with the new national identity register. Policy director Gareth Crossman said: “The government is fast replacing the best traditions of English law with a chilling presumption of guilt. Six years ago, DNA sampling was about combating serious crime. Today dropping litter is proposed as lame excuses for an ever-growing national DNA database.”

The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said the code review should not be used as an excuse to push for an extension of police powers.