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British Civil Liberties Film Released
An anonymous reader sends us to a BBC article about a British film likely to attract the attention of civil liberties supporters. The film, Taking Liberties , is a documentary about eroding civil liberties in present-day Britain. It will be showing in cinemas in major cities across the UK starting next weekend. From the article: "Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms. 'This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist... Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back,' says Atkins."
Who's going to go watch a documentary about civil liberties when Big Brother's on TV?
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
So all you have to do is rob people there, since nobody around here is fool enough to intervene
Ahh. there is your problem. People in that nieghborhood don't give a shit. How did nieghborhoods ever have low crime rates before CCTV? Because they stood by their nieghbors and acted in their own best interest by actually doing something about it themselves. By hiding behind closed doors pretending not to see, they are getting the shitty neighborhood they deserve. Act like a victim, get treated like a victim. I have more than once come out of my apartment into the street and made my presence known, when there is a disturbance on my street.(I live in New York City) Guess what happens when I walk out and look them in the eye? Well usually it's some arguement that is starting to turn physical, but when suddenly there is a witness threats go back to being just words. The one actual mugging that I encountered the guy just ran away.
We are all just people.
It's not so much a matter of Police competence as it is paperwork. Twenty years ago, the Police didn't have to fill in an hours worth of paperwork for an arrest for a minor offence which is why they were on the streets doing their job in the first place. For each minor arrest, a copper can be kept off the streets for a minimum of 1 hour documenting every detail of the incident. If a kid vandalises a car, robs someone and is picked up on a description the reaction is more likely to be "fuck off you can't prove it" than "I won't do it again".
And there's the truth of the matter. Everyone in the UK knows their rights but too many have no sense of responsibility and they are fully aware of the fact that some smart arse lawyer who doesn't give a shit about truth because that's not what he's paid for will get them off on some minor procedural technicality. And the worst part is that it's a small section of the Police that bought this situation about. Remember the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad that caused as much crime as they stopped? The Birmingham 6 & Guildford 4 convictions, the Special Patrol Group etc. Normally, when things get out of control there's a swing back towards the other side five years down the line only in this case, the swing has continued to the point where your average thug has the same immunity to consequences that the above had in the 70's and 80's.
CCTV should not be a necessity. Unfortunately, in this "have your cake and eat it" society it is a sticking plaster over the gaping wound of idiot thuggery that seems trendy at the moment. If you can work out how to make being an evil little tosser uncool then you may have a chance of improving things but sadly it seems to be evil little tossers that run this country seem happy to put up more cameras.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Just like in the Great Woman Wars, when the suffragettes fought their way, rifles in hand, to the ballot box, the Race Wars waged in the '50s under the careful, analytical and ruthless direction of Martin Luther King, and the Gay/Lesbian Guerrillas of the '70s(who still, of course, meet the Christian Right Crusaders in occasional skirmishes).
Or perhaps there are other ways to change unjust systems in democracies? I'm painfully aware that democracy doesn't work as well as we'd like, but saying that a war is the "usual" way these changes happen seems either overly prematurely defeatist("We can't stop this from devolving into a war"), apathetic("I'm not going to do anything about this until it devolves into a war") or like a survivalist fantasy("Can't wait 'till the war!").
I just got done sitting on a jury for a drug trial. It was a frightening experience. The evidence was so weak and indirect that I couldn't even believe they had charged these two people with a crime. One of them was a transsexual prostitute who was clearly (to me) just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, when the jury started to deliberate, there were four of us who all thought it was going to be an open-and-shut not guilty verdict, but we ended up with a hung jury, 8 voting guilty and 4 not guilty. This is the kind of offense that can easily land you in prison for life under California's three strikes laws. And no, you don't have to be a career criminal to fall under three strikes. The prostitute was charged with three felonies from the same night, and that's enough. There's a guy who's in prison for life under three strikes for stealing four chocolate chip cookies. After the trial was over, I visited the place where the cop claimed he'd conducted surveillance from using binoculars. Well, you absolutely cannot see the stuff he claimed to have seen from that location. There are buildings, trees, and walls in the way. I hope these defendants don't have to go to trial again, because next time they might be unlucky in the jury they get.
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