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U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

nytimes.com

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Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#51

Post by [deleted] »

tamalesfan wrote: post #44
jessriedel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> but in the US Thanks for pivoting the thread to criticism of the US. These stories about controversies in non-US countries are unwelcome and cause a lot of anxiety, and the sooner the discussion can be refocused on the deficiencies of the US the better.

[deleted]

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#52

Post by drak0n1c »

Romanulus wrote: post #12

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."

This change (for better or worse) was motivated by multiple cases where wrongly accused individuals narrowly avoided losing their liberty due to the last minute discovery of exonerating gossip and notes on the accuser's phone. There isn't a strict black and white spectrum on this issue when it comes to liberty, because it concerns cases where one individual is seeking imprisonment of another individual.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#53

Post by sjy »

deogeo wrote: post #28
JulianMorrison wrote: post #25

The point being, it would be nice to know the trial isn't going to collapse because the defense got a subpoena on the phone's contents and nobody in the prosecution had plans for what they found. This is an artefact of the adversarial model of justice. Someone is being paid to get mister rapist, mister burglar and miss stabbity off the hook and they can and will use anything that makes you look like a liar or unrelia…

You're talking as if a trial 'collapsing' (I assume this means the accused is found not guilty) is some huge catastrophe, when in fact the possibility of such 'collapse' is the whole point of a trial.

The point of a trial is to allow an independent tribunal of fact to make difficult factual decisions, like whether to believe a complainant’s oral testimony. In one of the cases cited in support of this change in practice [1] the police had access to a “computer disk containing 40,000 messages [which] revealed the alleged victim had pestered [the accused] for ‘casual sex’”, but this was not noticed until part-way through a trial which everyone had spent months preparing for. In this case, justice required that the private message history between the complainant and the accused be shared with the police and, if the case was to go to trial, the court. But the fact that the messages were discovered during the trial, rather than in the early days of the investigation, was a catastrophe for which the police apologised.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-42873618

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#54

Post by opwieurposiu »

abvdasker wrote: post #24

This seems like it will inevitably discourage victims from reporting crime. Imagine a scenario where someone is mugged but doesn't want to report it to the police because they have some texts from their weed dealer on their phone: as a result the mugger never gets reported and may mug somebody else. Not to mention the huge opportunities it creates for a kind of blackmail (criminal A commits a crime against criminal B…

When criminal A reports criminal B this is known as "Snitchin". On the streets, snitchin' is widely regarded to be bad for your health. Therefore anything that discourages snitchin should regared be a net positive for society and longevity!

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#55

Post by jessriedel »

tamalesfan wrote: post #44
jessriedel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> but in the US Thanks for pivoting the thread to criticism of the US. These stories about controversies in non-US countries are unwelcome and cause a lot of anxiety, and the sooner the discussion can be refocused on the deficiencies of the US the better.

I guess you're being sarcastic, but fwiw my intention wasn't to criticize the US but rather correct a common misconception about law enforcement that exists throughout the developed world, including (apparently) the UK:

https://www.quora.com/In-the-UK-are-the-police-legally-oblig...

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#56

Post by tus87 »

DanBC wrote: post #35
Zenst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid points that many may disdainfully overlook. But nonetheless, still valid. But sex crimes do have a stigma in society and there is for many a reason, though mostly though historical injustices and injustices that still transpire today have produced. This the tendency to lean towards guilty until proven innocent, over innocent until proven guilty, can and do play out socially and in a majority of people's mindset…

> This the tendency to lean towards guilty until proven innocent In England there are over 150,000 rapes each year (From the annual crime survey). Only about 5,000 are prosecuted, and only about 2,500 are convicted - and many of those are people pleading guilty. For the last year we have figures for there were 4517 prosecutions, 2635 convictions and 1882 unsucessful prosecutions. Of those convictions there were 1,522…

Seen as guilty by who?

We know the police do, as they admit as much. They explicitly say they have a policy of believing the victim at which point they sign up to the prosecution rather than investigating both sides. This is not in dispute - they openly admit it, usually as a reassurance to "victims".

By the courts? Well if you look at the carriage of a trial, the fact the accuser gets to give evidence over a TV, advice to juries about "myths" (but never the myth that women never lie about rape), tight controls over what evidence the defense can even raise or how they can test the evidence against them (but not the prosecution)...the system is stacked against the accused in a way that is miles away from a fair trial. Simply allowing a trial without evidence could be said to be guilty until proven innocent.

The jury? Well that varies, but given the proportion of not guilty verdicts, thankfully not most of the time. Juries aren't perfect, but the reason we have them is to protect the accused from people like you.

If you had an ounce of self awareness you might put yourself in Mark Pearson's shoes and ask, if that was you, would you still be shilling for the CPS?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-falsely-...

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#57

Post by smnrchrds »

Yet another Black Mirror episode proven prophetic.

If I remember correctly, season 1, episode 3 "The Entire History of You" depicted a world where most people had eye and ear implants that recorded everything they saw and heard. When one of the characters who did not have the implant called the police to ask for help as she watched her boyfriend being beaten up, the cop requested to to be given access to her implant. When she said she did not have one, they simply hanged up on her.

And now, less than 8 years later, here we are.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#58

Post by Starknaked »

bennybob wrote: post #39

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...

Surely in that case the man accused of the crime would have known they previously had messages from the accuser that were like to be critical to his defence?

Did he not make anyone aware of them or did they just ignore it?

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#59

Post by tus87 »

DanBC wrote: post #31
dgellow wrote: post #8

> 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…

I'm not sure I understand your point. In England we don't have a national police force; we have lots of local forces. There's wide variation in how they respond to crime. We noticed this variation was causing injustice: women (and men) who were raped were not having their crimes robustly investigated; men who were accused of rape were not having their defence robustly investigated. The new guidance is telling police…

> Fishing expeditions are not allowed.

That's exactly what a criminal investigation is. They keep fishing until they find probative evidence. The creative ways police investigate certain unsolved crimes puts most fishing expeditions to shame.

Unless of course you aren't interested in the truth but want to railroad people accused of very specific crimes for political reasons...

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#60

Post by sjy »

claudiawerner wrote: post #49
DanBC wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your point. In England we don't have a national police force; we have lots of local forces. There's wide variation in how they respond to crime. We noticed this variation was causing injustice: women (and men) who were raped were not having their crimes robustly investigated; men who were accused of rape were not having their defence robustly investigated. The new guidance is telling police…

The point being made by GP is that the rules are already too broad; simply writing them down does very little (if anything) to address the worry about data intrusion. If I were to do something horrible to another person, they wouldn't have much reassurance if I said "here's a list of what I can (and thus can't) do to you, and when (and thus when not) I can do it to you". I'm a very data security conscious person. If…

> the last thing I'd want is for the police to say that they can't continue to work on my case unless I grant them access to my device(s) ... If anything this should be part of a policy in which victims elect to volunteer information when asked if there's anything that could help the case

My understanding is that the police in the UK have always been required to pursue reasonable lines of enquiry, including those that might contradict the complainant's evidence. That means when investigating a crime they must consider the possibility that the victim is not telling the whole story (where it is reasonable to do so, eg. there is no way to corroborate the victim's account).

The new guidelines (which, unfortunately, I can't find the full text of) apparently tell the police when they should exercise the power they have always had: to tell victims "we don't have enough evidence to justify putting further effort into this investigation, unless you agree to hand over your phone to us, because that would increase our confidence that you are telling us the truth."

Police have competing priorities and it is inevitable that some crimes go unpunished because the witnesses are not believed by police, or refuse to voluntarily provide information which could affect their credibility. I am sure I would agree with the police doing this in some extreme cases, but as another data security conscious person, it's unlikely I would fully agree with the police interpretation of "necessary and appropriate." [1]

[1]: https://twitter.com/PoliceChiefs/status/1122757012859904002

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