UK Police Arrest 30 People Per Day for Internet Comments
thetimes.com
thetimes.com
That is incredibly vague and highly subjective. One could flag half of the articles on Pubmed as "indecent". Perhaps the onus should be on the government to put an interface online that scores a string of text and gives a receipt that shows the government approves of said string of text.
>Enter Text: Stop walking around the neighborhood showing Uranus to everyone
>Approved: Verification Code >d33db33f42<
>Enter Text: "Twitchy little ferret, aren't you, Malfoy?"
>Denied: Cruel and unkind insult.That’s probably intentional.
The UK police keep records of all police actions that result in arrest or warnings. Any evidence gathered at the time or later is attached to the file per action ID#. The article here is drawn from the results of an FOI request to the UK police database.
The UK court system keeps a database of all actions advanced to prosecution before the courts. The numbers that enter the system, the numbers pleaded out, mediated out, dropped, brought before a judge, trial results be they dismissal, guilty, innocent.
As per the article, of the some 12,000 arrests or warning per recent years, only some 1,100 resulted in a sentence.
Many countries only publicly release coarse totals, eg: in the UK the 12,000 annual police actions specific to this law are bundled in with ~465,000 other public order offences publicly released and totalled in: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
> beyond taking the BBC's word when it summarizes something
Multiple individuals, media outlets, stats nerds, etc make these requests and publish or blog if discrepencies are seen.
For example, this FOI request was made by The Times .. not the BBC.
WHAT is happening here? We don't know. And the government is not saying, beyond publishing how much they're doing.
And the law is not much help: they're punished for "causing offence", not even specified to whom (mayors seem to be overrepresented, although there seem to also be majors on the receiving end)
It's the same for robberies, petty fraud, assaults, etc. Just the totals in broad categories are published.
There is a reason for that, privacy, personal details of victims and the actually innocent although accused. These are things that take time, money, resources to scrub from the public record and so are not publicly published.
The reporting done on robberies is done by reporters who understand the privacy laws and apply for access, by people that attend courts or pull transcripts and sign off on the privacy aspects.
Researchers get full unfettered access to entire databases on the same basis.
If you want to know more then take action to allocate funds to drill into the data, write to a newspaper and lobby for them to do the drudge work, approach universities that study crime stats.
Crime reporters, and interested general public, look at the Court dailies and attend hearings on subjects of interest. That's how the public hears about details of a spicy robbery, fraud, or assault. That or parties involved alerting reporters.
The difference is robbery is much more clear cut than "causing offense", "hate", or other speech crimes.
Again, if you or others are interested then by all means either do the work of a reporter and researcher or sponser it, or lobby to have the work done on the public purse.
I'm guessing that as a UK citizen (?) you have no wish to spend your taxes on complete scrubbing and processing of every last category and sub category of record within the ever growing government archives?
Perhaps subscribe to or make a solid donation to The Times and write and ask them to do further work on the FOI returns they've already sourced and to expand their document base.
That's actually a troubling statistic. It implies that the police are throwing their weight around on flimsy legal grounds -- as an intimidation tactic -- or are coercing "settlements" outside the court system.
My feeling is that the police has become quick to arrest.
The super high convincing rates America has are because accused have no real lawful protection.
How so? The courts are not even involved in most of these cases. Arresting people, knowing they will never get charged is not an appropriate form of warning in my view. It's intimidation.
> Maxie Allen, 50, and Rosalind Levine, 46, were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, the police concluded that there should be no further action.
> A police officer also said that elected officials could be treated as harassment suspects if they continued advocating for the couple.
> Andy Prophet, chief constable of Hertfordshire, defended the arrests, saying that the force had given warnings and they were lawful, although he conceded that “with the benefit of hindsight we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
Most worrying is the fact that causing other "distress" with words is a crime. If I point out something you do that I find morally bankrupt, it _should_ cause you distress.
The 1st Amendment should also be rescinded and I am glad I have seen some headlines in major publications that voice concern for having such a thing in US.