There is a new phrase in law enforcement circles, although it is more about enforcing the state's prejudice than any law. It is the Potential Dangerous Person, or PDP. This label is given by Northumberland and Cleveland police forces to someone who is suspected of crimes but who has not been charged, let alone found guilty of an offence. Under this new designation they will be targeted as criminals, watched and no doubt harassed.

The PDP initiative, reports the Sunderland Echo , is now monitoring people in County Durham and "is helping authorities across Wearside, as information is shared between areas". The scheme links police, the probation service, with education, adult and children's services in an information network which without any judicial process will decide on a person's guilty intentions.

The newspaper says, "A person can be classed as a PDP if police have evidence of their crimes but do not have the backing of the Crown Prosecution Service to charge." As well as those said to be at risk of committing serious sexual offences, the programme also covers those who could potentially be involved in serious violent attacks.

What seems so sinister and frightening about this scheme, which has acquired little of the attention it deserves, is that simply on the word of a police officer, social worker or probation officer, a person is criminalised and subject to the arbitrary powers of the state, a sentence of – apparently – indeterminate suspicion.

It is all part of the trend under Labour that allows the authorities to undermine the legal concept of innocence and to determine a person's intentions and take action, without reference to a normal court of law and without informing the individual of the nature of accusations against him or her. On Sunday I wrote about a "sleeper" clause in the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 which works with Jack Straw's Protection from Harassment Act 1997 to allow a restraining order to be made on a person who has been acquitted.

The power of the state to decide someone's guilt or bad intentions is most notoriously embodied by control orders, where individuals are held under house arrest and effectively deprived of their liberty and livelihood by a process that does not allow them to know the allegations against them or the length of the order.

It will be argued by those who have lost sight of the fundamentals of our free society that the PDP scheme is no different from the sort of intelligence work that monitors potential terrorists and hopes to prevent terrorist attacks. Our society has more or less tolerated control orders on the basis that they may save many lives, but now the tools of surveillance and control have without any debate spread into other areas of policing.

Mike Creedon, assistant director of Country Durham Probation Service, is quoted revealingly in the Durham Times as saying, "You have to balance the human rights of the offender with the human rights of the potential victim in the community." You see, in Creedon's world, someone worthy of his suspicion is automatically termed an offender.

It is of enormous importance that we understand that to allow the policy of Northumbria and Cleveland forces to go unchallenged is to lose an essential right in British life. If the exchange of information on people merely suspected of violent or abusive intentions continues, how long will it before these networks of agencies begin to turn their attention to people suspected of other crimes or simply of behaviour that the state finds inconvenient?

That the police can instigate this policy without the slightest murmur of dissent, without debate in parliament, without local MPs raising the mildest concern, is a very worrying sign indeed.