I blogged the other day about illegal quota-setting by a privatised traffic warden service. I expressed shock that, within days of the court’s finding, David Cameron would announce the contracting-out of certain areas of police work.
Now, in the aftermath of the murder of 16 civilians by a “rogue” US soldier in Afghanistan, the BBC revived a link to an earlier story referring to the atrocities at My Lai and elsewhere. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15499138
“Officers were under pressure to produce high body counts of enemy in Vietnam and those pressures persist.” That is to say, groups of soldiers had “kill quotas” to fulfil. But I imagine the bad guys had guns, too. So I guess it was just natural to fill the quotas up the easy way, by killing unarmed women and children.
Can this be true? Surely the BBC is making it up. In any case, I imagine American military training nowadays extols discipline, not merely a Space Invaders mentality: so this week’s gunman no longer has the defence that he was “obeying orders”. But can you imagine what might happen if the US, or the UK, sent a privatised peacekeeping force to Afghanistan? Or we could both send one - just to add that competitive edge?
Can David Cameron still be serious about privatising law-enforcement? Altamont could shortly look like a walk in the park.
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