Leading Article: Police must focus on the real dangers

"HAVEN'T YOU got anything better to do with your time?" is a common plea by miscreants when collared by the police. But in the case of the West Midlands squad's pursuit of the work of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe one is inclined to think that, just maybe, the forces of law and order in the Birmingham area have got a little confused about their priorities.

True, some of the images in question would make most of us blanche. True, the Crown Prosecution Service advised the police that two especially graphic shots would contravene the 1959 Obscene Publications Act by tending to "corrupt and deprave". So it was that the police felt sufficiently confident to ask the publishers, Random House, to destroy all copies of the photographs on the understanding that they would forget about prosecution, say no more about it and the folk of West Mercia could again sleep safe in their beds. Random House was right to call the police's bluff and tell them to get lost.

The Crown Prosecution Service, on mature reflection, decided that "the effect of the book has to be viewed as a whole" and that there would not be a realistic prospect of conviction.

What the CPS really meant to say was that they and the West Midlands police are both already suffering from public confidence deficit disorder and did not need to go out of their way to be ridiculed in court. In the end sense prevailed.

The Mapplethorpe farce serves us well if it demonstrates the absurdity of censorship. The law should err on the side of free speech and expression. To be sure, there are dangerous materials, for example those associated with paedophile rings and circulated on the Internet, that do need to be controlled. Our antique legislation is no match for the real threats to the most vulnerable in society.