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Children Arrested, DNA Tested for Playing in a Tree?
skelator2821 wrote in with another account of a police action gone way overboard. From the article: "To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material. But the afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft tree - then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked into cells for up to two hours." skelator2821's basic question in all of this: "What is this World coming to? Do you think they went to far?" Well? Do you?
They only went too far, if the tree was less than 20ft..
Never happened. True story.
Where else is he gonna make out with 2 chicks when his Mom is home?
We shoot our children down from the trees.
That should teach you to mess with a tree.
I'm not sure. I, myself, have never been to far.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
That's a pretty good way to introduce the kids to the way this country works - complete strangers can cause you large amounts of suffering for the smallest mistakes. That's not how the country SHOULD work, of course, but it is.
These children have nothing to hide. They should not be afraid of DNA tests, or being interviewed by police.
Besides, what if they got hurt falling out of that tree? The police are here to help.
--
make install -not war
I mean, if a police officer can't haul three twelve-year-olds to jail on spurious charges, take mugshots, and record DNA samples, how are we ever going to win the war on terror?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The environmentalist/brave new world crowd has reached a paradox
Cops are dicks.
They always have been and always will be. I can count on one hand the number of run-ins I've had with cops that have been anything other than shitty - and no, I'm not a criminal.
Of course they went too far, they often do.
The culture of deliberate, misleading, trumped-up fear we live in today isn't helping anything either.
Frankly, we need more stories like this so more people realize just what the hell is going on.
disturbed by the "anti-social behavoir" remarks? Or is it just me?
12 year olds....DNA samples (and stored for X years) taken without parental or legal approval? Insane.
Is the law in Britain to take (and store) DNA samples when you are simply arrested? Convicted, yes, I can see....but just arrested? Insane.
(this does not even go into the complete foolishness of arresting them for what they actually did).
seems they went too far but if you ask me cops have been going a bit to far for at least 5 years+ now.
Superintendent Stuart Johnson, operations manager at Halesowen police station, said: 'I support the actions of my officers who responded to complaints from the public about "kids destroying" an ornamental cherry tree by stripping every branch from it, in an area where there have been reports of anti-social behaviour.
Since when was being anti-social a crime?
So in the UK they put kids into the same holding areas as adults and can gather DNA from them without some sort of court order or parental consent? And the criminal records of children can actually be queried by schools?
Not flamebait, not an attack on the UK, but serious questions.
Now at least these three kids and all of their friends will realize firsthand what sort of world they're coming into rather than having to wait until they're all grown up to figure it out like most people do (if they ever do). The people who start the action that fixes these sort of problems are often the same people who have suffered because of them.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
You're right -- my first response to my 12 year old after they've been sprung is, "Suck it up mister, or else someone's going to make you their bitch if you're not a hardcase yet!"
Dammit, at their age I was carrying a gun and defending my land from railroad surveyers and rabid dogs.
So, seriously, can someone explain to me what the eff "Anti-social behaviour" in a legal context means? Sounds to me like I'd be arrested in heartbeat there! While this and other "zero-tolerance" policies seem so offensive to us, just think about what our grandchildren will say. They'll be so accustomed to this type of law enforcement it won't phase them at all. "What do you expect, grandpa, they were climbing a tree for godsake! Somebody had to do something!"
In the criminal justice system, arboreal trespassing offenses are considered especially heinous. In the West Midlands, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Halesowen police. These are their stories.
Feeling as I do that this power relationship brings out the uglier sides of human nature, I'm always sure to let them be the alpha male (or female) so I don't trigger any "I must prove that I'm a badass" reactions. But I'm one of the people who see the implications of the Zimbardo prison experiment in everyday situations, probably to an extent where most people would be rolling their eyes and saying "you're really reaching now."
Sorry to rant, but I feel disgusted with law enforcement agencies lately.
Why the parents have to be under constant pressure, whether their kids will be in trouble for doing something innocent over the web, that might qualify as hacking, the websites they visit, the files they download, the files they share and so on.[/rant]
Are we losing humanity in cops?? Makes me sick of them. Sorry...
hilarious
Oh, no! Three twelve year olds having fun! I better call the fucking cops!
The people who called in are probably chatting with those kids' parents right now about how the police over-reacted.
I'm surprised that this valuable forest was not guarded by CCTV, then the police wouldn't have had to wait for neighbors to call them.
"Bob, forget screen 3, it's just a bank robbery. Look at screen 9, those kids! They're molesting nature! Call out the Worcestershire & Sherwood Foresters Regiment!"
Carp man, Brits need some real problems if forest molestation is a major police issue.
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
I have heard of a lot of teens and college kids, not to mention full adults, breaking down upon being arrested and thrown in jail. Especially when they don't understand what's going on. Being totally powerless will do that to you.
If you are worried about hyperbole in the article, I'm interested in the police claim that they kids were trying to strip ever branch from the cherry tree. Now, I haven't seen this important civic landmark (not entirely sarcastic: trees can be significant, although it didn't really sound like this one was, except from the police description), but your typical tree has a lot of branches, many of which a 12-year-old would be hard-pressed indeed to remove. Of course, we might speculate that the kids had saws and axes, but then we're stuck trying to explain why that wasn't mentioned by the police defending their actions. So that brings us back to the question: how likely was it to the police that the kids were trying to strip the tree and kill it? Did they really believe that? If so, should we trust their testimony and their judgement on this and other case?
FTFA (bolded text was done by me):
... civilized my ass.
Questioned by police, the scared friends admitted they had broken some loose branches because they had wanted to build a tree house, but said they did not realise what they had done was wrong.
Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.
I can think of many other people to be arresting for criminal damage.
What the heck is this world coming to? Kids playing in a tree, break a few branches and get arrested (and DNA tested!? WTF?). Meanwhile, corporations are allowed to get away with this garbage. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with world
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
This is the same country where police executed an unarmed and immobilized man for wearing a winter coat on the subway. These kids should count their blessings.
you can already get fined hundreds of dollars in my town if you're a kid (less than 18 years old) and out past midnight on a public sidewalk
heck, once i was pulled over under the guise of having out-of-date lisence plates, when in reality i was being pulled over because the police officer thought i had too many teenagers in my car and i looked suspicious.
the police officer actually asked everyone in my car for our IDs and looked each of us over before saying "you want to hear a funny joke? your plates aren't actually expired, i just thought they were when i started pulling you over and had to commit to the pull over"
yeah right, lady. real "funny joke"
It's just like the people who said "if it turns out Iraq doesn't have a WMD program, then I will oppose the war," and when Iraq was found to lack a WMD program, they still supported the war, because once you're in, rationalizations and prevarications are too easy to muster to maintain consistency. You don't want to waffle, do you? On the other end of the spectrum, leftists didn't want to acknowledge the excesses of Stalinism, because they had chosen a side. Loyalty to any party or ideology is incompatible with integrity.
Let's look at it like this:
The children admitted to breaking public property by damaging the tree, planning to build a "tree den", and by damaging it, they broke the law, and the law states that law breakers should be arrested and dealt with. Technically, the police officers have done nothing wrong.
So until there is a complete overhaul of how we treat the law, we cannot complain about individual situations like this. It's obviously common sense that they were treated harshly and there was a total overreaction, but it isn't a legal overreaction. It's procedure. We need as a society to be able to adapt and interpret situations differently, especially in legal cases, where the law does not end up doing more harm than good. If the law has a negative effect, how can anyone respect it? Governments need to rethink this and apply a whole new subjective filter to how situations are dealt with, and officers should not fear punishment for not following procedure if it goes against common sense.
I just hope that their parents reinforce this in the right way. "Yes, dear, the police shouldn't have done that. Sometimes the people in charge do bad things." and not "Well, sorry, dear, I guess you need to be more careful out there. These are uncertain times, and it's best just to go with the flow."
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Where I live, some kids were charged with "terroristic activities" after they used baking soda to create "bombs" out of plastic bottles. As a result, the school system is now mandating that students use clear plastic backpacks at all times next year. Sure, everybody will know when little Suzie's on the rag now, but we all know kids will treat such subjects with maturity, and it's all worth it if we can save even one plastic bottle.
Granted, such activity should not be tolerated in school, but when I was a kid we called them pranks, not terrorist plots.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
There will come a time when a few of us stand up and begin to take action. When this time comes, it will not be the actions of those few that determine the outcome, but the actions of the whole community. Thereby, I encourage the continued exhibition of violations of our rights in not only this, but all public (and hopefully objective) forums.
Listen, I don't like kids either... But you my friend... Are an idiot.
Getting thrown in jail is a very good reason to be crying uncontrollably. Expecially if you didn't do anything wrong. It is very difficult to have no control of a situation. You would probably be sobbing. Give up on the macho crap, it's stupid.
You take it, I don't want it...
Gotta protect the underage cherries.
I probably would have been harder on the police department, but one has to wonder about the 12-year-old's responses to their experience
No one doesn't. Kids climb trees. They don't normally get arrested for it. Their responses were normal.
These infant-willed "preteens" didn't belong in a 20 foot cherry tree.
Maybe you've never seen a tree before. So you might want to sit down for this.
20 feet is actually quite short for a tree. Most people would consider that a shrub, not a tree.
When you climb a shrub or a tree, it is not necessary or even possible to climb up to the very highest leaves at the top. They won't hold your weight. Therefore the fact that the tree height is 20 feet strongly indicates that these kids were at a much lower height at the time of their arrest. They were probably at varying heights from zero to about ten- the article doesn't say. This would further indicate that emotional stability (as determined by an arrest) need not be a prerequisite for climbing shrubbery.
It's obvious.
How can anyone be social without being on World of Warcraft.
There's no chatrooms in that cherry tree.
Disgusting how antisocial those chidlers were being.
What is this world coming to when children go outside to 'play' in 'trees'
Somebody give them a copy of GTA. We'll fix them up good.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
While it was not (yet) as bad as The Sun when I left the UK in 2002, the Daily Mail was a strident, hysterical, sensationalist muckracking journal well on its way to parity. I would believe maybe 15-20% of what is reported here as "fact". The paper also carries a political/social agenda on just about everything, and I suspect very strongly that we are seeing an extremely distorted story that is being "economical with the truth".
So, if -- and that's a VERY big if -- everything reported is true I deplore it, but I have serious doubts as to whether the story is at all objective.
If the Mail was looking for a reaction, I'm sure it got what it was after.
It's interesting that Google News and Google proper only carry two reports of this, and there is no mention on the BBC web site (as of 21.38 PDT).
This has all the hallmarks of a carefully manufactured and groomed story deisgned to garner publicty and web page impressions.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Thank you, Tony Blair. Having created a crime-free paradise (by American standards), the British government has proceeded to outlaw merely unpleasant behaviour.
-OSCON just wrapped up. What do you think of it?
-Just in general, not specifically related to the treehouse story, are cops fascist thugs sometimes?
-Bill Gates has a bazillion dollars. Isn't that too much?
-Does this dress make me look fat?
A shrubbery, you say?
I have just one question, were these "children" in possession of a Herring? Ah yes, just as I thought. Indeed, plainly this caper was part of that infamous criminal cohort the Knights who 'til recently said "Ni", now commonly referred to as the Knights who say "Ekky-ekky-ekky-ekky-z'Bang, zoom-Boing, z'nourrrwringmm".
http://lorien.sdsu.edu/~carroll/shrub.html
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
150 quid for littering, kids ordered to clean up hop scotch grid. This place is definitely one of the must see places in the UK. Unless you're from a civilised country.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
How many trees do corporations, land owners, and the government itself chop down every day? My guess would be more than one!
Break a branch, become a criminal, go to jail.
Raze a forest, become a Captain of Industry, go to government.
KFG
Heh, I made the mistake of trying that when I was a kid, great big willow tree, probably 30 feet tall. I could pretty much get right to the top, of course 1 bad step on the way down and I was in a world of hurt for about 2 weeks, still have the remnants of the scar on my chest where I kinda fell past a ragged branch on the way down. I was real lucky in that fall though, only got the wind knocked out of me, 5 feet in the wrong direction and I would have landed on the big root that was partially sticking above ground by about 6 inches. Soft grass/dirt or hard wooden log, hmm, I'll take the grass thanks ;)
I will type small words so you grok:
... was ... a ... tree
... public ... land
It
On
There ought to be nothing wrong with kids playing in public trees, and I'd be willing to bet my house that the tree will survive an afternoon's attention from 3 twelve-year-olds.
Nice spin put on it by the police spokesman "destroying an ornamental cherry tree by stripping every branch from it". It was a tree in a public park, not a centrepiece of an arrangement. I'd love to see the twelve-year-old who could "strip every branch" from a tree... Certainly the ones in the picture didn't look up to it. Hercules'd have problems.
My dictionary defines "destroying" as "to put an end to the existence of". Somewhat emotive language for a few broken twigs, I feel. You don't lock young kids up over a few broken twigs; if you do anything, you drive them home and let their parents give them merry hell for being delivered home by the police.
Or you could just let them play. It's a friggin' tree!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
You raise an interesting point: are the police responding this strongly -- too strongly -- because no one else will?
Today I was riding my bike home from work when I passed a car stopped by the side of a busy road, next to a small park with a bike path. The passenger's side door was open, and a girl about age 10 was standing by it crying. I stopped to watch, surprised. The girl was talking to someone in the car, and she would half get in the car, then step back, then repeat, crying all the time.
What do you think was going on? Doesn't look good, does it? Doesn't that make it remarkable that, as I approached on my bike, and while I was stopped, about three or four other people walked, jogged or rode on bikes past, and of course about two dozen cars drove by -- and no one else stopped? It was also in clear view of some new condos across the street that sell for upwards of $500,000 -- but no one came out of them.
I went up to the girl, and, staying well back (to help the girl feel safe), I looked more closely. In the car was a woman with another child. I asked the child her name, whether the woman was her mother, and whether she wanted to get in the car. She told me her name, said it was her mother, and that she did want to get in the car. The woman said it was her child, and that the girl wanted to get in the car, but wasn't being allowed to because she was in a "time out." I assume the woman was driving when she stopped and put the child out of the car at the side of the road as some kind of punishment. The girl would then be crying because she feared she was about to be abandoned.
After thinking it all through for a bit, I believed the woman. The girl and the woman and the other child in the car looked alike (all blonde wavy hair, similar face, and so on), and when I talked to the little girl she drew away from me and closer to the woman -- that is, she seemed instinctively to trust the woman more than me. The woman's story seemed unlikely for an abductor -- silly, unrehearsed, unlikely to soothe suspicion. So I didn't call the cops. (I did suggest to the woman that, as one parent to another, my advice would be to avoid disciplining her 10-year-old by pretending to abandon her on the side of the road. I said this rather less forcefully than I would have if her children had not been in earshot. For example, I did not call her a fscking idiot who should have been sterilized at menarche.)
I'm still bothered by whether I did the right thing, although the girl climbed in the car after I talked to her seemingly willingly enough, and the car drove off not in any obvious hurry. I hope I wasn't too trusting.
But my point is that it was very noticeable to me that no one else wanted to get involved. Dozens of other adults passed close by and saw what I did -- no one else stopped to take a closer look, make sure the girl was OK.
Perhaps we have come to delegate some of what used to be our normal social responsibility to our fellow man to the police. Small wonder that these things happen, then, although I wish they wouldn't.
Nerds everywhere should be deeply concerned about tree traversal being made illegal.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Even if the kids were doing exactly as the police claim they were, stripping every branch in a malicious manner, that is quite simply not a crime which warrants a DNA sample to be put on file. There's NO justification for that.
The parents really ought to sue the police department to have the DNA samples destroyed and removed from the database, then continue on and sue them for emotional damages. Magnify the pain: sue the department, sue the individual officers involved, sue their superiors, and drag it out as long as is physically possible. If they've got enough resources to spend time and effort jailing and DNA sampling 12 year olds, then they can certainly spare some for legal fees to defend their actions. I know this sounds like a sue-happy idiot talking, but the police went way out of line and are, as usual, totally unapologetic about it. The only way to get them to stop is to show them that there are brutal consequences for such actions. The entire department has to suffer in order to create a culture where they'll think twice about doing it again.
for some, 1984 is a warning/vision of a dark future..
for others (elected officals and the like) it's actually quite erotic..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Has anyone here even considered the possibility that the three kids were spoiled brats that desperately needed the education they didn't receive from their parents?
Like being punished for destroying others' stuff (including public stuff) ?
This story itself is possibly a flamebait, on the "damn stupid cops" motto.
2e-2 euros.
Sounds incredibly stupid, but is effective as all hell. I did just that and even ended up calling the cop ossifer and he ended up forgetting that i was going 55 in a 30, and asked if I was hiding drugs, then when I did not object when he asked if i would mind him taking a look in my car he let me go with a verbal warning...total time elapsed 7 minutes. total time for a friend of mine getting pulled over for driving by a gas station on the highway with his radio a little loud: 2 hours 32 minutes (I was there and ended up getting home late) abject terror helps speed the process along, and no one likes to beat obvious pussies, then they look like dicks.
Possibly it wasn't mentioned because this was reported in the Daily Mail, a nasty, right wing, petty-minded paper, which sometimes doesn't seem to have a great deal of regard for the truth, and has more regard for pushing it's own agenda.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
If the action should be justified, we're talking an army of kids armed with chainsaws and other powertools cutting down dozens of trees while they yelled obscene words and tortured the wildlife encountered. Three children breaking off a few branches by hand should never EVER result in any form of police action. Why call the police and not just go to the tree and tell the kids to please stop? - It's not like these kids looked like hardline gang members (picture available in the article)... But I guess it's easier to call the cops and exaggerate enough for them to come.
Hmmm... I wonder whether the report that caused the police response where akin to the first variant decribed above ("Help, a gang of kids are destroying or cherry trees!") or something else. Anyway, I sure once the police actually showed up they had to make up something in order not to look too stupid. They failed miserably though.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Police in the UK in the last few years have had pressure to crack down on young 'hooligans' roaming the streets at night causing damage. I don't think that these kids were doing anything wrong, but there were plenty of 12 year olds I saw in my time in the UK that should have definately been reprimanded for their actions, if not locked up.
Some examples.. My mother came over to visit me and on the first evening she was in London she had an (uneaten) apple thrown at her while walking from the station to my house, hitting her in the chest. This was delibrately thrown from across the street from one of a group of around 15 10-15 year olds.
When cycling home one day, a couple of kids on a scooter travelling in the opposite direction suddenly stopped. The kid on the back threw an egg, which hit me in the shoulder. I was going around 17-18mph at the time and it didn't tickle. My friend had the same thing happen a few years earlier, except it was thrown from a moving car in north london. It hit him in the eye and he has lost partial sight in one eye.
I couldn't park a car on the street for more than a couple of weeks, or it would get broken in to. I'm fairly sure it was kids, since the car was never driven away, just the window smashed or the lock broken.
When walking home through a small park, another one of my friends was struck on the back of the head by a full 2L PET drink bottle. The kid still had the bottle in his hand and when my friend turned around, there were 5-6 or so kids ready to "go at it". My friend just walked away.
One or two 12 year olds are nothing to worry about. But 10-15 little bastards, some with kitchen knives or metal pipes or whatever have the capability to kill 2-3 adults. And get away with it! because they know nothing will happen to them because they are kids. They know all their rights and none of their responsabilities.
It's situations like this that ABSO's were created, which is why I'm all for them.
Coulter: "I'm sure the mothers of these brats are only trying to cash in on the publicity generated when these terrorists-in-training assassinate god-fearing citizens from their lofty perch using liberal weapons of mass destruction."
FOX: "Such as?"
Coulter: "Lethal b-b guns. Poison darts."
FOX: "And what about Bin Laden?"
Coulter: "Hates American trees. Wants to crash planes into them all."
> FOX: "What would you do to protect us?"
Coulter: "Cut down all the trees. Keep the terrorists out of them. Castrate all liberals."
FOX: "God bless America."
Coulter: "It's all Clinton's fault. Oh, and buy all my books."
FOX: "Did you really have your Adam's Apple surgically removed so you could pass as female?"
Coulter: withering sneer.
Tony's isn't even there yet, he's in Georgy's pocket.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The UK seems well on the way to becoming a police state. They have cameras on every street and they cannot own the means to defend themselves. Of course, we are seeing more stories like this on our side of the pond. The only way the US will resist this trend is to turn to Libertarianism and demand that the Bill of Rights be respected by all branches of government.
It starts off with just cutting down one cherry tree as a kid. Then - I shall not tell a lie - it can lead to organising the overthrow of the British rulers in a revloution lasting years, assisted by the (gasp) French and the establishment of another country where people even drive on the other side of the road out of spite.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makesthem. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. ... Create a nation of law-breakers, and then you cash in on the guilt."
-Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged", Chapter III, "White Blackmail"
The police in the UK are trying to build a DNA sample database of the entire population.
So far, they have only got permission to take samples if they arrest someone; this may explain their willingness to arrest everyone they can, for the most trivial reasons. The law then allows the sample to be retained indefinitely, even if the person is released with no charge (hence, the parents cannot sue).
The UK is rapidly becoming one of the countries with the most draconian social controls in the Western world.
...for inaction.
In today's sue happy (and criminal prosecution happy) world, people don't dare get anywhere near other people's kids. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A SINGLE, CHILDLESS MALE. Just the the mere accusation of having molested a child is to be handed a lifetime sentence that will never escape you. Even if you are proven innocent without a doubt, people will ALWAYS think you just haven't been "caught" this time.
I lived in a small town back east for a time, and I spent alot of time climbing trees. In these small towns there is "always" that one person who's purpose in life is to make everyone else's life miserable. One day the building inspector arivies... in regards to my treehouse. It seems even in small towns in order to build a treehouse you need a building permit. Extreme but fair enough. But the thing is, there was no tree house, there was no building or construction on ANY level. It was a cushion in a tree. It didn't even stay in the tree, it wasn't tied down. And the electrical inspector arived as well, which in "all" fairness I did own a radio but used batteries, so I *imagine* someone "could" have thought I was using house current. And then the fire department, the fire department arived, two trucks full sirens... I have NO idea why, by this point building and electrical went off to discuss the matter with the fire department. A police car drive by but didn't stop. While they wouldn't "say" who issued the complaint, it was rather clear who did as all three took a visit to that house down the street and gave someone a firm talking to about issuing false complaints. No treehouse, no electricity, no fire.
This being said, there will "always" be some bozo who complains. Perhaps the reason is justified, perhaps they are totally off their rocker. In this case, perhaps the kids needed a firm talking at worst, a friendly talking to at best. I lack any clear information at to the ownership of this tree.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Maybe they were crying because they had been "sucking it up".
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Oh, what sad times are these when parents can say Ni at will to policemen. There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
when i was a kid there were 5 climbable trees (the sugar maple's branches were too high) in my yard. i spent so much time in those trees, like natural jungle gyms. my friends and i would time each other to see who could climb to a certain branch the fastest. my arms were scraped from rough bark but i never fell.
i think adults want kids to act like adults which is sad.
fear is the mind killer
A friend of mine recently resigned from the police for this reason. Apparently he had arrest quotas to be met, leading to him being effectively forced to arrest some people who he thought would be better served with a warning. Everyone nicked in this way had their DNA put on record, even though in a lot of cases there was no intent to prosecute. In the end he couldn't stomach the cynicism beheind this policy and resigned on principle, for which I salute him.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
That whole law is utterly rubbish! The Law;
* dictates child rearing and punishment,
* allows police to disperse groups of any TWO people at will,
* bans immitation weapons,
* allows city councils to label any publicly displayed painting or artwork as "graffiti" and order the land owner to remove it at their cost (even if they weren't the ones to create it),
* if you have 20 or more people on your property, or in your house, police can label it a rave, and incarcerate everyone at said "rave,"
* allows city councils to set a hight limit on plants so as to not block the light onto your neighbor's property, and charge a fee to perform the maintainance if the owner is not willing to cut their plants down to size,
* Strengthens ASBOs which basically criminalizes behavior that is otherwise lawful.
If the United States were to pass such a law, I would call the USA a lost cause, and move to Mexico.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Read the article, they weren't climbing a tree, they were ripping it apart.
b ase
To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material.
Climbing doesn't get you wood.
Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.
They got off with a warning.
As far as DNA samples, well maybe if the UK wasn't so focused on getting everyons DNA they wouldn't have done so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_National_DNA_Data
I just spent a month in Europe, including a week and a half in England. They have laws protecting anything but the smallest saplings from any sort of damage. It's supposed to protect their historical landscape. You can't even trim or cut down trees IN YOUR OWN YARD without approval from their equivalent of the city council. The fact that this tree was on PUBLIC land on INCREASES the agitation they would feel about kids tearing a limb or two off of it.
The tree business is just one example. Most new construction in the country uses brick on the exterior, and tile on the roof, so that everything matches the buildings that have already been standing for hundreds of years. It's all part of their culture to preserve their heritage.
So, the police have just done exactly what their laws say ought to have been done. Slashdot needs to be arguing about the culture that promotes this sort of thinking, which results in this sort of law and behavior.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I had a cop approach me today, said someone called 911 from my home. I know this is BS; nobody's home at all, cept for me and I'm heading out.
So they showed up with a bs story about getting a 911 call and you granted them a search on that? I'm all for being polite and cooperative but I'm not going to reward them for giving me a bullshit story. I would have asked for the dispatch non-emergency number and called them right on the spot. Helpful and polite, yes, but I'm not giving them permission to enter.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Oh well, there was that guy who was arrested for taking pictures (using his phone-camera) of Cops arresting a drugdealer. Charges: Obstruction of justice (eh?) and trespassing (he was on his own doorstep), and yeah, there are witnesses that can confirm both. Then we have that nice she-cop that decided to arrest two lost young women that asked another cop for directions (after only recieving rudeness as an answer from her) on charges of trespassing... on a public road. And now we have a cop who arrest 12 year old kinds for climbing up a tree and breaking off a couple of small branches. Yeah, somebody should have told them that doing that in a public park is not OK, but arresting them, DNAing them? Next time they go for exitement they better start shoplifting, that has less severer "first offense" outcomes. God bless America (and Great Britan) - they are on the best way to become a police state, wherer "to serve and protect" means "... the goverment and our own whims".
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
The perfect reply to this argument (which comes up every time someone mentions that most cops are assholes) is this: a McDonald's employee has more accountability than a cop does. As a 16 year old burger-flipper, if a customer acts like a complete asshole--even going so far as to yelling and cussing you out--you are NOT allowed to verbally abuse the customer in return in any way, shape or form. At most you can ask him/her to leave the building, that's it.
Years ago, I worked at McDonald's for four months and a very good friend of mine was punched in the face. Through a plate glass window. A woman tried to order at the pickup window, was told she needed to drive around again, so she punched through the drive-through window, hitting my friend in the face. If she (my friend) had hit her back, there's not a doubt in my mind that she would have lost her job. Instead, she walked away calmly and called her supervisor and the police.
Now, I'm not implying that the police shouldn't use force when necessary. I'm also not denying that they're human too, that it's a nasty, dirty job and I'm sure it's really rough on them. But you know what? Working at McDonald's is in many was rougher (if you doubt this, I could tell you some more horror stories... absolutely the worst 4 months of my life, period.), and yet their workers are held to a much higher standard than the police. Why is that? Why do so many of us make allowances for the police to exercise HUGE leaps of personal discretion, to bend the law whenever it suits them? It's a tough job, but they chose it and we shouldn't let them bend the rules (or ignore them) whenever they feel like it. I saw a TON of asshole customers at McDonalds, yet I didn't say a foul word to any of them. I didn't spit in their food either (no one did--they would've been fired on the spot.) I did my job as professionally as I could, regardless of how shitty I was treated.
And I was a fucking fry cook!
Please please please please PLEASE tell me we can hold our police officers up to the same standards as our burger flippers.
Unbeknownst to these children we've secretly switched their country with new freeze-dried Third Reich. Let's watch and see their reaction.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
I disagree. What we need right now is a nice, healthy distrust of our government, and the laws it makes and policies it sets.
The law enforcement people, whether it's police or any other agency, are just the guys with the unfortunate job of enforcing those policies. A lot of them are decent people - I've dealt with the police on a handful of occasions (never on the wrong side of the law) and generally found them individually to be pleasant, professional and well-meaning.
The problem is, as always, the exceptions who are not so inclined, just as most of our society are good people but we still have criminals. Combine laws that are open to abuse with law enforcement people who are willing to abuse them, and that is when problems happen.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Kudos for him.. It's always good to see someone stand up for their principles..
Unfortunately, however, this only means that his spot was filled by someone either without those principles - or who is unwilling to stand up for his/her principles..
SYS 64738
There is a mistake in the article. It states that the police records will be kept fo five years. This is not strictly accurate as the DNA samples will be kept indefinitely on the UK's national DNA database.
Here's a handy little editorial device you might want to learn: [sic]. From wikipedia, "Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", or "just as that". In writing, it is italicized and placed within square brackets [sic] to indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, or other preceding quoted material is a verbatim reproduction of the quoted original and is not a transcription error."
Proper use of this device will shift the blame for grammatical stupidity away from you and onto the submitter where it rightfully belongs.
Yours in pointless pedantry,
Acy
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Back in the day (1976-ish) my father was in the Marines. We lived on a Marine base. My older brother (he was 12) and two of his friends were playing in a creek. They followed the creek (which was beside a road) looking for frogs. At one point a vehicle pulled up and out jumped two armed Marines - guns fully drawn and pointed them at my brother and his friends. They were hand-cuffed, arrested and tossed in a cell.
Then they made the requisite phone calls to their parents. They couldn't reach the first two kids' parents when they called my father. They told him that his boy was in the base brig. They also told him that if he knew the parents of the other boys that he should contact them. They gave my father the boys' names and my father grinned ear-to-ear.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The base CO had the two MPs severely reprimanded, stripped of rank and transferred for type writer maintanence in Poedunk, Alaska for pulling guns on his two boys and my brother.
Moral of the story - Don't pull weapons on the base COs children.
This phrase has seemed to pop up in a lot of British crime articles. Can anyone from across the pond explain to me what exactly it is?
They seem to be using it as an excuse to arrest, harass and imprison anybody for any reason, on the basis that they were doing something "anti-social."
And what's wrong with being anti-social anyway? Some people are shy, some people have strange tastes and interests. I know I am not the epitome of a social butterfly.
Worst we've got in America is a recent rash of police arresting people from photographing their encounters, which, given the number of police in this country, seems to be more rare than people in Britain being branded "anti social" for chewing japanese cabbage flavor gum or driving luxury cars.
It doesn't really matter whether they were breaking the branches off. Small children don't need to be thrown in jail for minor crimes. In my bustling metropolis of Lincoln, Nebraska, I'd be pretty certain that the cops, given the exact same situation, would have dropped the kids off at their parents' house with a stern warning.
The scope of the police response in this case was completely out of hand.
And I was a fucking fry cook!
Please please please please PLEASE tell me we can hold our police officers up to the same standards as our burger flippers.
To some extent I agree with you. Sadly, the reason you are(were) held to a higher standard has nothing to do with standards. It has to do with making a buck off of ANYONE who isn't going to physically harm you or company property. A corporation has different priorities than a public institution. But consider the following - the customers who were rude to you at McDonald's were probably not just rude there. They were probably rude at the store next door, to the bus driver who took them there, to their neighbors, etc. If everyone is polite to an ass, what incentive does the ass have not to be one? Perhaps the problem is individuals at the various institutions we encounter in life are not given the authority to say, "Take your money and your business out of here, you rude SOB. Your business is not worth it." - if this was done commonly and routinely, perhaps there wouldn't be so many rude asses cruising through life and making others miserable. And perhaps cops would be more professional if they didn't have to deal with abusive people 95 times out of 100. Perhaps if it was only 30 out of 100, it would be far easier, as humans, to be professional with those 30, as they should be.
It's difficult to expect a large institution filled with humans, not to have one or two act like one from time to time.... Just my 2 bits.
I read the summary for this article and was outraged- then I read the article, realized it was in England and my reaction was "yeah that's about right." The UK has lost its collective mind. The English are the only people on the planet who could have read 1984 and said "Hey, that sounds like a nice place to live- let's give it a try."
-sirket
My overreaction comes from having been on the receiving end of this sort of thing when I was too young to stand up for myself. To me, the crime of using excessive power or force on a child or someone else who cannot possibly defend themselves is not very far from the crime of homicide in its moral seriousness. Add to that the fact that someone who has a position of power and abuses it in this (alleged) way needs to be removed from that position of power.
In light of this, let me moderate my response a little: assuming the story is factually accurate, i.e. that the kids weren't being complete hooligans and vandalizing the tree in a way beyond what you might expect from 12-year olds, I would complain to the police chief and if necessary, the mayor, requesting an apology from the officers involved. If this request did not result in those officers personally and sincerely apologizing to the children in question, I would then pursue having them removed from their positions. Failing that, something would need to be done. I'll just note that natural selection only works if some agent causes selection to take place.
> Sorry, but if they believe a 911 call came from within your home, they have probable cause to enter.
Don't try to BS your way through police procedure. If the officer could reasonably claim proabable cause, she'd simply have done so and gone inside without needing to ask. The fact that she did ask indicates that she didn't think she could stand on probable cause.
Virg
The unfortunate side effect being that when all the honest cops like your friend have resigned, what's left are the people who shouldn't have become cops in the first place. :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I would not take seriously a single word that that rag published. A recent example: They published something about my website and claimed to have spoken to me the previously day - a lie. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=395688&in_page_id=1770. They lied, were factually incorrect, they nicked pictures and text without attribution, god help anyone who takes the DM seriously.
Charlie.
Ha ha. One of the incidents I was referring to was being apprehended with some friends by a neighbor who thought we were doing something bad. We were playing on the property of someone who was away, i.e. we were nominally trespassing, but if the person in question had been home, he would have been fine with it, since we knew him and had a good relationship with him. We were held in a room with no windows or lights while waiting for the police to arrive, taken to the police station and held while our parents were called.
Basically, a suspicious and nosy neighbor was able to create an incident from almost nothing. The police believed him over us, and gave us no benefit of the doubt until our parents got involved. The cops could have easily just driven us down the block to the home of one of our parents and straightened the whole thing out, but instead they had to act as though we needed to be taught a lesson. I was taught a lesson alright, but it wasn't the one they thought they were teaching.
None of this is a big deal in any absolute sense, but a cop who's going to use his position to essentially bully kids is not a good guy, and is probably pretty much the same sort of guy that's going to arrest someone for photographing the police. People like that shouldn't be cops, and there's no reason to put up with it.