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"(It is) making you realize that the police ain't always there to pick on you or hate you," Musawy told the BBC. |
LONDON – Scotland Yard has invited a group of 17 to 25-year-olds, nearly all of them Muslims, to attend a drill on responding to a terror plot, hoping to win their support for its controversial anti-terror measures.
"The bottom line is to kind of work with the police to try to resolve these issues, these problems, the bombings that happen, working with the community and the police," Ali Al-Musawy, a 17-year-old participant, told the BBC News Online on Monday, November 2.
"(It is) making you realize that the police ain't always there to pick on you or hate you."
Musawy is among 30 young Londoners, mostly Muslims, attending a police exercise on anti-terror measures, such as the controversial stop and search powers.
They were giving video feeds with news of a terror threat and asked to make decisions to respond to a terror attack.
The aim is to give the young people a better understanding of why and how the police make decisions.
The Act Now exercise is part of the government's £140m "Prevent" strategy to fight extremism, launched by the Home Office in 2003.
The government says the strategy aims to prevent Muslims, estimated to number more than two millions, from being lured into extremist ideologies.
Waste of Time
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| "I feel even more victimised by the police now and I know most people in my community do," Mahamood told the BBC. |
Many Muslim participants blasted the exercise as a police public relations exercise.
"As a tool for anti-terrorism I think it's a waste of time," Hanad Mahamood, 24, a youth worker from Brent, told the BBC.
The young Muslim has had his personal share with the police's controversial anti-terror measures.
"I was being stopped and searched just for being a black youth and Islam is on the agenda now," he said.
"I feel even more victimised by the police now and I know most people in my community do."
But many of the anti-terror measures have drawn fire from Muslims who complain of maltreatment by police for no apparent reason other than being Muslim.
Musawy has a problem with the police's stop and search powers.
"That is a big issue, because there are youths that say 'Why's he coming to me on suspicion of terrorism, do I look like a terrorist?' and 'Why can't they search the other white guys, why can't they be the terrorist?'" he notes.
"That's an issue with the police; they should know how to handle things."
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