Tonight:
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You are warned. Never agree to a police caution for doing something wrong unless you are guilty as sin. You will have a criminal record.
If you accept a caution for any minor offence, you may not be a "convict" but, under the current authoritarian regime of Jack Straw, Alan Johnson and Ed Balls, you will find it hard to get a job in almost any public or voluntary service.
You may be prevented from working with young people, even from helping your child's school event.
You may be summarily denied credit and find yourself held up at airports. It will be near impossible to clear your name unless you are rich enough to hire a lawyer.
All this is without being formally convicted of any crime. The system is crazy, but it is not worth fudging.
If you are innocent, or think you might get off for good reason, you should refuse a caution and insist on an arrest, challenging the Crown Prosecution Service to take you to trial and prove your guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
This week's row about the chaotic state of police cautions is the latest result of ministers trying to regiment every detail of the lives of London citizens.
As so often, a knee-jerk response to bad headlines has led to a bureaucratic shambles, with the burden falling on those all-purpose social monitors to whom weak politicians turn in hour of need, the police.
Recent "crises" increasing the burden on the police are fidgeting with cannabis reclassification, hysteria over child abuse in the aftermath of the Baby P case and the bursting prison population.
Each has enhanced the discretionary powers of police officers in dealing with the public, turning every street corner into a mini magistrates' court and spawning a gargantuan stack of Home Office paperwork.
In the case of on-the-spot fines for cannabis possession, some police officers tell me it is quicker to arrest offenders and dump them at a police station than go through the rigmarole of on-the-spot cautions and fines, half of which are not paid and lead to court anyway.
On-the-spot justice also offers scope for on-the-spot corruption, with users handing the stuff over to the police in return for being let off scot-free.
The monitoring of child abuse under Ed Balls' post-Soham blitzkrieg is close to breakdown. Police are being advised to report anything suspicious, "even a child with nose-bleed", to the local children's department.
That department must react in turn, terrified of what might happen if it does not call an instant conference and start proceedings for taking a child into care.
This is on pain of being personally sacked by Balls, as was the boss of Haringey children's department.
Since Balls's high-profile reaction to the Baby P case, there has been a surge of a phenomenal 47 per cent in new applications to take children into care.
This wrenches children from their parents and cripples the childcare service with bureaucracy and potential litigation.
Professionals are reportedly convinced that this puts children more at risk of harm than less. But who cares? Ministers will not rest until every social worker in Britain is sitting at a computer doing their bidding.
The police caution system was revealed by last night's BBC Panorama as equally chaotic. Many serious misdeeds, such as drunken violence and actual bodily harm, are getting off with a caution and an £80 on-the-spot fine, half of which are not paid.
The programme suggested that as many as 40,000 cases of grievous bodily harm, which would once have qualified for a prison sentence, are now being dealt with virtually at random "on the street corner".
As a senior judge, Lord Justice Leveson, was reported as saying: "I don't believe police officers should be judge, jury and sentencer."
The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, has protested at the "almost uncontrollable increase in cautions and fixed-penalty tickets", as if "theft and thuggery were no different from a parking fine".
Justice Secretary Jack Straw yesterday finally agreed to review this state of affairs.
At the same time the boom in criminal records computerisation and its prospective dissemination to all and sundry means that tens of thousands of innocent people, or those guilty of trivial or irrelevant offences, will be denied a chance to contribute to their community as volunteers - without having been convicted of anything.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson wants anyone who has been cautioned for anything to be "flagged up" in front of their neighbours should they dare even to take children on a school outing. This is risk-averse, control-freak madness.
A justice system that is biased in favour of police discretion, in favour of leniency towards violence and against the innocent cannot carry public support.
When it plays safe by taking unprecedented numbers of children from their parents on the say-so of a bureaucratic committee it cannot be just.
There are clearly too many offences preoccupying the police that should not be offences at all, notably drug possession and misbehaviour in pubs, which were once curbed by on-the-beat policing.
There are too many people sent to prison for non-violent offences such as petty fraud, cluttering up the justice system and using resources that should go on combating violent crime.
Justice rations itself. The craving of ministers for more headlines about crimes solved and offenders dealt with has led to an explosion of "out-of-court disposals".
This in turn has made police and social workers into a new profession, an informal magistracy. This is neither fair nor efficient.
Talk to a London constable or care worker and they scream with one voice: "Why did no one ask us first?"
The answer is they might have given the wrong answer.
Reader views (3)
I live in a student ghetto Polygon Southampton where students accused of criminal damage and abuse get cautions instead of being charged.
As this bad behaviour is mainly directed at long term residents we are glad that the cautions are more restrictive than at first supposed.
As the Unis have little discipline procedures
we can only rely on the police to prevent more revenge
or unprovoked attacks by local students.
Therefore I approve of the caution system if the police have no time for arrests, it is better than them doing nothing.
- Lorraine Barter, Southampton Hampshire
The greater crime is that should you challenge a FPN or caution in the court (or in fact any criminal charge) and win, the chances are that you will no longer receive full costs and will hav to fund your challenge from your own pocket despite the fact that when MiniJust consulted, nobody thought it was a good idea.
Whither justice?
- Chris, London
The same ministers who tried to cover themselves in glory during celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall are falling over each other in their haste to copy the Stasi: obsessive surveillance, neighbourhood spies, elimination of judicial oversight, false confession, removal of children, comprehensive databases which blur the distinction between the guilty and the not guilty. Is that what the public wants? Are we so desperate to be "just safe?" If so, let's put the wall back up and build lots of walls everywhere, in Ireland and Jerusalem and in gated communities everywhere. That's what the GDR told their population the wall was for: to keep them safe.
- Bloke, Lambeth
