Joint Enterprise

Cannot but comment on Panorama's 'Joint Enterprise' piece that highlighted the Police's enthusiastic use of a 300 year old law where a by-stander member of a group is as liable for a murder as the person carrying out the murder. Beyond the headline, it went on to imply that it might be necessary to prove that an individual was a member of a group and the group was known to that individual to be prone to violence, before the event.
It is self-evidently a nonsense law. A member of a group may very well be an accomplice to an event but that is a world apart from being treated as equally guilty to the actual persons that inflicted harm likely to cause death or injury. To stand by, watch and not intervene is a crime, yes, but not comparable and equal to actually crossing the line and actually inflicting injury. There is a huge difference between thoughts which may, or may not, encompass intent and the actual physical realisation. Who knows what might stay the hand of intent before its enactment? Who really knows what intent was in mind or whether there was some other innocent explanation for being with the only gang around?
It is deeply worrying that the Police have distanced themselves from the Society they are charged with policing. It used to be that they were of the society, were members of it and mixed freely within it.
That they can revert to an obsolete law, ignore the blatant injustice explicit within it and promote it as a way to successfully target street crime shows all too clearly the distance they have placed between themselves and the society they set out to control.
Have they lost all sight of the mechanics of deprived areas, have they no comprehension of youth culture or the absence of choice for those without means?
This willingness to use a manifestly unfair law that defies the common man's comprehension can only result in further alienation of all those not born middle-class, white and from a nice area.