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UK Police Accessed Civilian Data For Fun and Profit, Says Report (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Motherboard: A report from activist group Big Brother Watch surfaced that says more than 800 U.K. police staff inappropriately accessed personal information between June 2011 and December 2015. Motherboard reports: "The report says some police staff used their access to a growing trove of police data, which includes personal information on civilians, for entertainment and personal and financial gain. In several notable incidents, one Metropolitan Police officer found the name of a victim so funny that he attempted to take a photo of the driving license and send it to his friend over Snapchat. A Greater Manchester Police officer tipped someone off that they would be arrested, and one from North Yorkshire Police conducted a check on a vehicle on his phone whilst off-duty. The report also includes incidents of staff distributing other types of police data. Someone from South Wales Police was dismissed after photographing and distributing restricted documents "for personal gain," the report said. Not only was some information not needed for official police work, according to the report, but was shared with third parties outside the police, including some organized crime groups, 877 times. In total, 2,315 incidents of inappropriate access or distribution of data were reported. The majority of incidents, 1,283, ended up with no disciplinary action taking place, while 297 ended in a resignation or dismissal, 258 resulted in a written or verbal warning, and 70 led to a criminal conviction or caution."
If the average IQ of everyone is 100, it stands to reason that once you factor out the number of freakishly intelligent folks who don't choose to get shot at for less than $40,000 per year, you're at about 80-85, with a few outliers that are saddled with heroic ambition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The article is concerning UK officers. Not sure they really get shot all that often and their interactions with the public do seem to be more positive so I would expect more people would be interested in policing over there.
"Robust action": You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
They take no action in the majority of cases then wonder why people are skeptical of giving them more powers to see what ordinary people are doing.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It can be argued that the offence should be taken more seriously, but there's some good news here.
The story seems to suggest that exactly 2,315 incidents happened between June 2011 and December 2015. Wrong: this is the number that were discovered. I would be highly surprised if there were more incidents that no one picked up on. How many more I will not speculate.
Surveillance systems are always abused in this way.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Certainly possible and exactly the sort of thing that can be asserted during incident investigation, in which case it wouldn't have been mentioned in the article if that assertion was considered true. But applying realism we know that the two most likely reasons are that the vehicle had a female driver that the policeman liked the look of or that the vehicle made a maneuver that annoyed him but unlike most drivers, who are generally constrained to shouting, swearing and pushing on the horn, he had the option of finding out more about the vehicle.