Section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 defined an arrestable offence as:
- An offence for which the sentence is fixed by law; i.e. murder.
- Offences for which a person 18 years old or older, who had not previously been convicted, could be sentenced to a term of 5 years or more. This constituted the vast majority of offences, including theft, serious assault, burglary and criminal damage.
- Offences that were listed in Schedule 1A of the Act, which contained a long list of offences that do not attract a 5 year sentence but were considered to require the powers an 'Arrestable Offence' designation confers. Examples included possession of an offensive weapon, ticket touting and driving whilst disqualified.
Section 25 provided further powers of arrest for "non-arrestable offences" in certain circumstances. This had no equivalent in the original 1967 legislation.
With the increasing number of newly created offences being included in Schedule 1A and thus being made arrestable, it was perhaps unsurprising that the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 abolished the category of arrestable offence, replacing the dual rules with a single set of criteria for all offences. The question now for police is whether it is "necessary" to arrest the relevant person, by reference to various broadly-drafted statutory criteria.
References
Bibliography
- Zander (2005). The Police and Criminal Evidence Act (5th ed.). Sweet & Maxwell. ISBN 0-421-90580-8
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Monday October 08, 2007 at 04:19:06 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.