121–130 of 131 posts
i read that it's 2% conviction rate in the UK. that has to be the most discouraging thing. Get privacy invaded for a 1/50 shot of a conviction and then the sentences aren't huge this is so messed up
A judge is supposed to look at the evidence and if there isn't any there isn't much to be done. We don't prosecute people based on feelings and hunches or flipping a coin.
This is seems fair enough to me, it's an attempt to prevent this kind of thing happening again: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-engla...
Ah, yes, so if you are a victim of a violent crime (let's say, someone mugged you at gunpoint, but did not bruise you - just held you at gunpoint until you surrendered your wallet), it seems perfectly reasonable for the police to hold your phone for weeks or months, searching through all of your photos (including the occasional nude photo of your spouse), in order to MAYBE find that one of your contacts might be a cu…
If we use the same definition as for conviction, ie proven beyond reasonable doubt that a crime did not occur, you get similar single digit. In one case it is the court that define proven beyond reasonable doubt and in the other the police, but they more or less is the same single digit of the total number of reported cases. We can assume that the police definition is a bit less strict than the court, but how much is just speculation.
We could use the rate in which prosecutor deem a case likely to succeed and thus brings it to the court and compare that to the rate which police finds it proven beyond reasonable doubt that the crime did not occur, but we will still end up with a huge rate of false reports.
Which is why people tend to compare the total number of reported cases vs those that police finds is proven (with evidence) beyond reasonable doubt that the crime did not occur. This makes the number of false report very low, and where the 2-10% comes from. To me that is just not very sincere approach.
Reminds me of the quote (of Benjamin Franklin): "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That quote has an interesting history. When Franklin first said that, the "those" he was talking about was the Pennsylvania Assembly. They were trying to impose taxes to raise money to defend the frontier. The Governor kept vetoing these attempts, because the taxes would affect the Penn family. Franklin wrote a letter to the Governor objecting to this, and included that quote. The "essential liberty" he was talking a…
That doesn't make any sense. How would giving up the "liberty to impose taxes" help to purchase weapons to defend the frontier?
> Mr. Ephgrave, the assistant commissioner, acknowledged such concerns in his statement. > “We understand that how personal data is used can be a source of anxiety,” he said. “We would never want victims to feel that they can’t report crimes because of ‘intrusion’ in their data.” > “That’s why a new national form has been introduced,” replacing policies that varied from place to place, “to help police seek informed c…
Not sure about the UK, but in the US the police have no formal duty to protect you. No matter how much warning/info/evidence they have that someone will be victimized, and no matter how easy/reasonable it is for the police to prevent it, citizens are generically not entitled to compensation for failure to be protected. Rather, the police's mission (both formally and as a functional matter) is overwhelmingly about cat…
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We can always vote and legislate for something better. From my experience in the US, police vary from decent people just trying to serve society, to up-armored mall cops on power trips. If you give them assault rifles, tanks, and unlimited surveillance, you encourage the worst among them. A guy wearing a uniform and trained in de-escalation instead of "verbal control" could do some good.
> We can always vote and legislate for something better. How? Which political party or independents promote a policy to reduce police powers? And even if there were, or are, any politicians with such a policy we ought to be more suspicious of them!
Policing is mostly local, so I think this is an area where there's a real chance to make things better. National politics are hopelessly tribal in the US, but city/county level politics are much less so. Go to city council meetings. Pay attention, and complain if they try to buy leftover military hardware like a BearCat[1]. Vote for and talk to your councillors. Organize a petition to de-militarize your local police force.
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Better yet, you can remotely plant discouragement on someone's phone. Catfish someone, send some nudes, reveal as slightly underage. You can then even explicitly mention the blackmail, since even if they could eventually prove it was just a catfish, it would be a huge hassle to do so.
This thread made me realize that while requiring victims to give up privacy is bad, we must thank them because it exposes fundamental issues with the law. For example, should it be against the law to drink alcohol if you're underage? I'd say no. There should be no punishment for drinking alcohol underage. Similarly, possession itself should never be against the law. It is a different matter if we are taking about tox…
But I don't agree that we should somehow appreciate this practice because it can highlight other bad laws. Fishing expeditions function whether the laws are sensible or not. You can modify my above catfishing scenario for whatever happens to be illegal. Even if the images are fine, keep going with texts that show an intent to meet up. Even if no meet up occurred, it's still a big hassle. The setup is basically DIY entrapment for whatever crime you want to design.
The problem is not merely being caught up by other bad laws, but Cardinal Richelieu's old "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." The unfounded search is the problem, as it focuses police attention on the victim as a new potential criminal to investigate.
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If the accused is innocent then they are the victim and the accuser is the perpetrator.
That's not necessarily true though is it? Two people can have different interpretations of events without one of them making maliciously false allegations. The complainant can have an honest, sincere, belief that they did not give consent. And, for phone evidence, there are good reasons why a complainant may say one thing to police but something else to friends of the accused.
You don't even have to go that far - the allegation could be true, but newly uncovered evidence could cast sufficient doubt that the accused is not found guilty. E.g. an eyewitness correctly identifies an assailant, but it is later revealed she wasn't wearing her prescription glasses.
Wow, this article by the New York times is so different than what news have reported in the UK here. It reads like a cheap tabloit newspaper aimed at getting people angry over an issue by purposefully leaving out facts and details which I would consider borderline lies. The new law is aimed not for any crime victims, but specifically rape and serious sexual offence victims. > "It comes after a number of rape and seri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the accused is innocent then they are the victim and the accuser is the perpetrator.
That's not necessarily true though is it? Two people can have different interpretations of events without one of them making maliciously false allegations. The complainant can have an honest, sincere, belief that they did not give consent. And, for phone evidence, there are good reasons why a complainant may say one thing to police but something else to friends of the accused.