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Police Powers and Public Meetings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

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Extract

Apart from the passage through Parliament at the end of last year of the Public Order Act, the Courts have in the past few years interpreted police powers on several occasions in the direction of restricting liberty. No excuse is therefore required for examining once again in this Journal a topic, one aspect of which was discussed in the last number. The case of Elias v. Pasmore [1934] 2 K. B. 164 raised important questions as to the right of the police to search premises in the course of making an arrest on a warrant. That case recognized for the first time the validity on such an occasion of a search, which resulted in the discovery of documents (not being documents in the possession of the person named in the warrant) containing evidence of an offence committed by any person, even though the search and seizure were illegal as regards other documents discovered on that occasion. This protection for police action only extends to the actual documents which are evidence of the commission of a crime; but it matters not that the crime is one alleged to have been committed by some one other than the person in the course of arresting whom the search is being made.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1937

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References

1 ‘Police Search’ by the name author. See 50 L. Q. R. pp. 354—367.

2 Parliamentary Debates, 1933–34, House of Commons, vol. 290, col. 1968.

3 For a definition of what constitutes a breach of the peace, see Hailsham, Laws of England, vol. ix, art. 476. The following are examples: An affray (fight in a public place), an assembly for fighting in a private place, a duel, a challenge to a duel.

4 [1936] 1 K. B. at p. 219.

5 The Public Order Act, 1936, s. 3, gives power to the police to impose conditions upon the holding of processions and in certain circumstances to have them prohibited in a given area for a maximum period of three months. So far as meeting? are concerned, the Act prohibits the carrying of offensive weapons (s. 4), offensive conduct (s. 5), and amends the Public Meeting Act, 1908 (s. 6), to enable the chairman to require a constable to take the names of interrupters. Otherwise the police powers as regards meetings are still governed by the Common Law and a few statutory provisions, as cited above.

6 This, in practice, means at the highest the Divisional Court.

7 See Davis v. Lisle [1936] 2 K. B. 434.