UK police release airport drone suspects, admit there may not have been drones
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> During a conference call between ministers, chaired by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, it was agreed the 67 drone sightings were legitimate.
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-46670714)
As much as "it was all a false alarm" would make a killer headline (and clearly has, even in speculation), it doesn't seem that anyone actually believes that. Just a poor choice of works.
I'm not sure what institutionally causes this, but it must be something causing it as it's always the same.
Remember when recently a senior Police officer in a statement just decided to call some extremely serious allegations they were looking into 'true' as if they had already had the trial and preempting the whole judicial process? I can't understand how you can accidentally 'misspeak' like that.
There was also the scandal where a v senior copper on the Cyber side was found cheating.
They hire less smart people on purpose because they tend to question orders less and do what they are told more (their words, not mine).
> Policemen: Most Romanian people are not fond of the law enforcement institutions and try to avoid contact with constables. Romanian public opinion about policemen says that they are primitive, uneducated and totally corrupt. Some of these police jokes belong to the absurd genre.
Q: How do you choose a stupid policeman from a group of policemen?
A: At random.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_humour#Stereotypes
So in practice the written test got removed or downplayed
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/f...
The ruling is that it is not literally illegal to refuse to hire someone for being smart. On an totally unrelated note, the applicant was an older fellow, and age discrimination is illegal.
The applicant was also hired as an officer in another jurisdiction.
Most departments that have more than 100 officers require a bachelor's or associate's degree. The department I worked for did not explicitly have this requirement, but I was the only person in our class of 96 hires that did not have either a college degree or military background. Most had bachelor's, a few had master's, some had doctorates.
On a completely separate tangent, law enforcement as a field is much like a skilled trade. To do it well you need a specific set of skills and the desire to learn them. Any high school graduate can do the job more than adequately if hes willing to listen and learn the stuff he needs to learn. At the end of the day a cop simply needs to be an honest person who understands the basic principles of the laws related to policing, and is willing to take calculated risks to help others.
A lot of Canadian police forces have “media relations officers”.
IE: armed PR personnel that manage the media.
Even our highway patrol has one. I imagine him racing from accident to accident, lights and sirens, to give/record spoon-fed media updates.
I’d imagine there would be swift discipline if a front-line officer were to give an unvetted off-the-cuff media interview.
However, there's been 67 legitimate sightings and no pictures, videos? Not even grainy, badly zoomed video?
Can the control tower see these using a simple set of binoculars?
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/police-prepared-shoot-down-drone-0...
> Detectives were understood to have drawn up a shortlist of potential culprits after the pilot gave vital clues away by audaciously flying the drone right up to the air traffic control tower.
> In a move known as "buzzing the tower", it emerged the perpetrator had taunted airport staff by circling the drone around the building and flashing its lights, an industry source told The Daily Telegraph.
On the other hand, I won't be surprised if the couple that were released use the fairly strong libel laws to punish early press shaming.
Pics or it didn't happen
I’ve been in many debates about this in the drone flying community (and with friends who know me and how much I fly) and I keep coming back to this point. I’d even take a blurry “UFO sighting” photo under consideration, but even that doesn’t exist.
Virtually every single “close call with a plane” has thankfully (thankfully both for the safety of passengers and for other UAV pilots who would be impacted by the irresponsible party’s actions) been proven later to not have been a drone.
PS, cow tipping is real (as in its “possible”, not that folks are successful), but it’s much harder than folks realize (I grew up in a farm state and have seen it done once with multiple big guys involved, but also seen many a drunken fool fall on their face trying too).
To avoid situations like the above, I typically file a flight plan or at minimum contact nearby ATC if I know I’m going to be flying above 200ft much. That said, I’m not required too and neither was the drone pilot in this incident either. I wouldn’t be opposed to a transponder, if they were made on drones, but to date I don’t know of any major manufacturers providing that feature.
There should be some sort of penalty for blatantly lying to the public, even if it is done to save face about your incompetence.
https://twitter.com/sussex_police/status/1075723025713127424
Newspapers reported their names, usually that happens off the back of neighbours tipping off the papers for cash about the police knocking on doors.
Various celebrities could argue otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard#2014:_Property_s...
http://suttonnick.tumblr.com/post/181330292801/hendopolis-ma...
But this newspaper probably won't have to pay out anything. They've been careful with their wording; they do this a lot; they have lawyers on staff; and defamation is difficult in the UK.
Today though, the BBC are saying "<full name> and <full name> from Crawley are saying that they feel completely violated by the media attention". I can't understand what is going through the editors mind when they approve sentences like that.. there is literally no reason any member of the public would need to know their names, and having the BBC repeat them on the hour every hour is just kicking them when they are already down.
Better to have publications about your vindication instead of just your arrest.
And BBC should have enough SEO to bury the arrest stories.
“always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place.”
Don't these two contradict? The best consistency possible between them is that the damaged drone was placed there rather than flown, at a different time. In all likelihood it probably did crash, though. Given the timing of finding it, it would seem related to this incident. Perhaps there should be some skyward-facing CCTV-like cameras at airports to remove some ambiguity in situations like this.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/21/drone-believed-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/drone...
"investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport."
They didn't say this to avoid spooking the public, and having a whole lot of people cancel their flights and holidays (plus it would have been major fuel for the Yellow Vests).
Here's a video of some people blocking a bridge, causing delay to an ambo: https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/10735588338789621...
That makes perfect sense.
That people in a group would unite to leave that group once they feel it has been corrupted or no longer serves their interest isn’t hard to predict or understand.
Many of them may be in favor of a common currency and free trade, while disliking the swift ramp up of military spending, austerity policies, etc. enough to leave and build something else.
I mean, it’s likely you were just making a joke, but... There are currently protests heating up to riot point across Europe over these issues, and I’m not laughing.
A few winters ago there was minute by minute updates on Bird Flu.
The press was covering swans and ducks found dead on the ground. Each individual fowl corpse was covered in breathless detail amongst infographics and timelines
The government was manoeuvred into buying close to a billion pounds of Tamiflu treatment. Some of that was returned, but £500m wasn’t (thanks to commentators below )
Tamiflu killed more people that the H5N1
So may more examples beyond this
£9bn was about the total prescription medication budget at the time, so I think you've gone wrong somewhere.
Some sourcing on the medication budget: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/rising-cost-medici...
> Estimated total NHS spending on medicines in England has grown from £13 billion in 2010/11 to £17.4 billion in 2016/17
A few years earlier in 2006: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20060509.shtml (The transcript used to be available, not sure if it's possible to get to it now, but that gives the £9bn figure).
I remember coverage. And no doubt the Sun had one of their helpful infographics, and the Mail blamed immigrant birds etc etc. Meanwhile most of us got on with our lives.
In general, I doubt the UK is any more susceptible to such phenomena (cf Americans and their panic at the sight of a turban, or beard). You may also just be profiting from the benefits of hindsight, and throwing in a conspiracy theory for what exactly?