'The lesson I learned from school that day is that there is such a thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

Steve Tomkins remembers a time when he was wrongly detained. The police can make mistakes too

It was 10.30 at night, I was ten miles from home, I was seventeen, and there was nothing for it but to walk.

I was at Sixth Form College, a ten-mile bus ride from home, doing English, and we’d gone to see some play.

I went to my usual bus stop only to find I’d missed the last bus, and so started walking. This was in the days before mobiles and in my case common sense.

Midnight, I was walking by the 70mph dual carriageway by Sutton Common, when a police car explodes out of the night, lights flashing, and siren howling. It speeds past, a copper points at me, and it leaps into reverse. “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello,” I think. “What’s going on here then?”

I turns out there was a hit and run in a stolen car on the other side of the common, and the driver drove off over the grass, dumped the car and ran for it, in the direction of here.

Marillion

And here’s some kid in a Marillion T-shirt walking down a dual carriageway at midnight claiming he’s on his way home from the theatre. Yeah right.

I was thrown – oh, all right, put – up against the flashing police car, searched, and asked why if I hadn’t been running across the golf course my heart was beating so hard.

The copper got on the radio, said they’d apprehended a suspect and told them to release the dogs. The dogs would follow the trail from the car, and when they got here I’d be “bleedin’ well nicked, son”, he said, at least in my memory. Twenty minutes later the dogs were clearly chasing rabbits, and the copper gave me a lift home.

The lesson I learned from school that day is that there is such a thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I doubt you’ve been in exactly the same situation, but I suspect most of us, by one of those freaks of chance that the law of averages throws up every now and then, have found ourselves looking guilty as hell, when we happen to know that we’re as innocent as putty.

And this is, it seems to me, what is wrong with imprisonment without charge. It is too easy to look suspicious. (Admittedly I had to try quite hard, but then if I had had different colour skin it might have been easier.)

That is the whole point of the judicial system. The suspicions of the police may be enough to get you arrested, but there has to be much more in the way of proof before you can be put away.

Leaders

This is why the church, as well as Muslim leaders, has again spoken against the government’s proposals to double the detention period (which is already 14 times as long as in the US). It is not just about freedom but about justice.

The police say that they need longer than the 28 days they now have to gather evidence for trial. Of course they do. We all get that. We all need the week to be a day longer for everything we have to get done. Work expands to fill the space allotted. (Feel free to quote me on that.)

The police deserve our huge gratitude for the work they do protect the people of this country from terrorist attack. They are fallible though, and that means that the people of this country also needed to be protected from their incorrect suspicions.

The story of Jean Charles de Menezes makes this point rather less trivially than mine.