UK Men Get 4 Years For Trying to Incite Riots Via Facebook

An anonymous reader writes "In addition to the 12 arrests from last week, a judge has sentenced 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw and 22-year-old Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan to four years in prison for their failed attempts to use Facebook to incite riots in the UK. The judge said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent. The two men were convicted for using Facebook to encourage violent disorder in their hometowns in northwest England."

Comments

Bully for Cameron!

[radio4fan]

Prime Minister David Cameron said:

Mr Cameron said: “What happened on our streets was absolutely appalling behaviour and to send a very clear message that it’s wrong and won’t be tolerated is what the criminal justice system should be doing.

Mr Cameron is no stranger to appalling behaviour, being a former member of the Bullingdon Club, "notorious for its members' wealth and destructive binges". The club song apparently goes: "Buller, Buller, Buller! Buller, Buller, Buller! We are the famous Bullingdon Club, and we don't give a fuck!"

Cameron's 'Buller' escapades include running from the police through the streets of Oxford after a heavy flowerpot was thrown through a restaurant window.

Re:Wow?

[Suferick]

They pleaded guilty. That tends to short-cut proceedings a little (no fancy speeches to a jury, questioning of evidence etc)

Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe

[Ed Black]

"civil unrest against a perceived corrupt political system"

Nobody involved cared about that. Seriously - you had to be there, it really was people of various walks of life just grabbing everything out of shops then setting fire to them (then attacking firemen when they tried to rescue the families in the flats above), kicking people half to death, etc. - just going nutz to get stuff and get money and get away with settling scores against specific people or whatever community they disliked.

People being violently and/or sexually assaulted, robbed or even killed in the street. Not bankers, not politicians. Their own.

Not one bank or political institution was touched, only places with Cool Stuff in, and the cars/houses/persons of the working and/or poor people in their own communities.

"a chaotic mess of angry people lashing out"

A chaotic mess of rapturously smiling laughing people taking what they wanted and doing violence to people. Families having their homes torched and their lives endangered, swathes of jobs being ended by businesses being torched when nobody can afford insurance these days.

Killings of people who tried to help the victims, attacks against ambulances trying to treat the victims, attacks against firemen trying to put out fires.

Seriously, I don't know how to explain this convincingly enough without sounding emotive - this is in the place I've grown up in. Don't let people get away with saying it was a political demonstration - I mean you had to be there but seriously it REALLY. WASN'T., I would say what we all saw and endured had no protest component to it whatsoever past about 9pm on the first night - it was just open season for the cannibalistic predators of London to hurt/take from their own.

Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe

[TheRaven64]

I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country. There are cameras everywhere

Let me guess, an outside European perspective gained from reading The Daily Mail? The number of cameras in Britain is massively over exaggerated. The number that's usually thrown around was generated by taking a mile of one of the busiest streets in central London, counting the number of cameras (including speeding cameras and privately owned CCTV cameras inside shops on both sides) and then multiplying that number by the number of miles of roads in Britain.

The more realistic number includes motorway monitoring cameras, which are not recorded, have one person monitoring about 100 of them, and are used to notify radio stations and so on of large traffic jams and dispatch emergency services to accidents. The next highest number is automated speed / red light cameras. The government controlled ones in city centres are operated by the local councils and are mostly being shut down because they provide little benefit and the councils can't afford to operate them.

and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it

Not sure why this is a sign of totalitarianism. Is it less totalitarian if you have a human matching the faces to photographs? The face recognition that's been talked about in the media recently has been matching the faces of people from Facebook who said things like 'I got a new 42" TV in the riots!' to images from shops' CCTV. How evil...

internet and phone serveillance everywhere,

Unless you think The News of the World and Phorm are government agencies, I'm not sure where this comes from.

and all big parties are decidedly right-wing

Bullshit. One of the two parties in our coalition government is still slightly left of centre, and my MEP is from a decidedly left-wing party.

it is still legal in the UK to beat up your children

any UK news source, then you'd see examples of parents being imprisoned and having their children taken into care for this.