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Prosecution of UK News Photographer Collapses After Recording Disproves Police Testimony (wordpress.com)
Slashdot reader Andy Smith writes: Slashdot reported last September how I was arrested while standing in a field near a road accident, as I photographed the scene for a newspaper. I was initially given a police warning for "obstruction", but the warning was then cancelled and I was prosecuted for resisting arrest and breach of the peace. These are serious charges and I was facing a prison sentence. Fortunately we had one very strong piece of evidence: A recording of my arrest. Not only did the recording prove that two police officers' testimony was false, but it caught one of them boasting about how he had conspired with a prosecutor to arrest and prosecute me. Yesterday the case was dropped, and now the two police officers and the prosecutor face a criminal investigation.
If you were in the US instead of the UK, you may well be dead right now.
"STOP RESISTING!"
That badge does not make them good people, but it does give them significant power over you.
Resisting Arrest should be a fine, and Breaching the Peace is a catch-all law that should be used for e.g. putting a drunk in a cell overnight. Neither should have prison sentences attached.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This just shows the lengths that the police will go to intimidate photographers and others to try to make them afraid to photograph or record the police! If the police are doing nothing wrong, why would they care if they are recorded or photographed?
Past convictions of other suspects arrested by those officers and convictions obtained by the prosecutor should be voided if they depended on testimony by the officers or the accuracy of statements made to the court by the prosecutor.
Does anyone here know if English law works that way? Do the previous victims of the dishonest officers and prosecutor now have a right to re-trial?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yeah lol.
Here in Australia the cops are fine. Every time I hear someone say bad things about them, I ask them if they were being a dick. Every time I've asked that, the answer has been yes.
Not sure how this made front page news on a tech site. The judge wouldn't have imprisoned the journalist most likely regardless
How does this guy keep getting /. articles based on his uncorroborated, self-published, vaguely overwrought blog posts?
Dude, can you post the video that saved your hide?
The charging documents?
Can you have someone from the union release a statement on what they accomplished?
It sounds like you pissed off an asshole cop, and the prosecutor looked at the evidence and decided to drop the case. It's too bad you had to go through that, but is there a tech angle that I am missing?
Not entirely. If you think so, you're living in a fool's paradise.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Then the American experiment failed
FTFY. Scottish law is not the same as English law.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Always record incidents, public or private authority notwithstanding. The Dao dragging incident would have been quietly covered up had it not been for all those nearby passengers snapping away with phonecams.
If you encounter a ban on recording incidents, record more. Today's tech makes it easier to record surreptitiously than ever before. If there is a threat of officially forced deletion, get your footage onto social media as quickly as possible. Some camera apps have an option to automatically mirror to your Dropbox account.
And from another psychologist, I'd say his criticism is overblown.
Whilst UK police seem to be better behaved than their US counterparts, they are almost never punished.
I agree. You do look like a foolish asshole:
"Since the Union with England Act 1707, Scotland has shared a legislature with England and Wales. Scotland retained a fundamentally different legal system from that south of the border, "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Furthermore, the page you reference notes differences in Scottish law.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
And it's a good thing only the police had weapons in this situation. The photographer went through the legal process and won. If he had started a gun battle, he would have been shot dead and never vindicated.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Really, you descend to using strawmen instead actually attempting to refute my statement? None of what you show above refutes anything I wrote. I'll take it that you agree with me.
Here is a clue for you. In the World cup, a competition between national teams, is there a UK team, or an English team? Also, I suggest you do some reading about the Scottish Parliament.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
freedom. Do we still have any? Is it important?
"That's not a good source" is a valid argument when you've provided a good source, but not so much to defend ignorant nonsense you've pulled out of your own arse.
Frank Burly (4247955), said:
And it's a good thing only the police had weapons in this situation. The photographer went through the legal process and won. If he had started a gun battle, he would have been shot dead and never vindicated.
It is very unlikely that the police officer was armed. UK police are rarely armed, and there's almost no reason why a policeman, such as in this case and in this location, would be carrying a gun.
Actually it is rocket science...
Body cams won't solve all of these issues, but at least they make it more difficult for cops to just invent things. Video can also exonerate officers unjustly charged with brutality or other violations of rights, so it's not a one-way street. The trick is to implement body cams with policies that are enforced, such as always turning them on during interactions with the public, making it impossible for them to be erased by the officers wearing them, etc.
1707 was the date of the acts of the union of the parliaments. There still remained (and still remains between these two) two legal systems; one for England and Wales, and one for Scotland. There is also a third one for Northern Ireland.
There are three separate prosecution services. One for England and Wales:
The Crown Prosecution Service
One for Scotland:
The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service
And one for Northern Ireland:
About the PPS
For some differences between England and Scotland: The Differences Between The English And Scottish Law
Northern Ireland is different again. (It is the only part of the United Kingdom where abortion is still illegal.)
As to which of these the US got its laws from, I'll leave that to someone in the US!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Psychology Today is the best you can do? Whose side are you on, anyway?
The Lifespan of a Lie — 7 June 2018
About the author:
* Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
* He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley.
* He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
* He received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship.
The author did mundo research, which including, near the end, an interview with Zimbardo himself, which included the following Frost–Nixon interaction:
The entire article is awesome. Read it now.
In summary, the entire experiment was conducted on the basis of publish or perish, and Zimbardo left few stones unturned—acting mainly through compliant Lieutenant Jaffe—to ensure that the end result was "publish".
Here's another link I dropped into a Slashdot thread a few days ago, of an academic whose pursuit of his local career incentive crossed more than a few lines:
Why the Joy of Cooking is going after a Cornell researcher — 28 February 2018
Plus, Orwellian popcorn swells enrollment and sells textbooks:
On the other hand, there's a responsible, modern literature, such as Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).
There are specific passages in there about the neurobiology of bad cops (under stress, unreliable neural pathways become faster and stronger than reliable neural pathways, operating entirely beneath the level of executive self-control).
Another recent book, Matthew P. Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) explains why—in modern society—operating at far less than our best has become de rigueur.
At the center of this book, with more laboratory studies than you can shake a stick at (many of these conducted until the cold, impartial eye of clinical fMRI scans),
[*] fMRI scans are cold and impartial when applied to slow, global brain phenomena such as sleep; for the fast and small, this, too, can be Wansinked.
I colourful
Not only is Scots law distinct from the law in England & Wales, it is famously distinct to the point that juries in trials can return a third verdict.
Why don't you go find out what it is, and then come back and apologise to everyone for thinking you knew better, when you really really didn't.
You did indeed hit on the great part about body cams for police officers. They protect both the police and non-police from false accusations. While almost all of the body cam footage has resulted in showing that police were falsely accused, I suspect that the presence of body cams have kept the police from making false accusations in some situations.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Could well be that neither had guns. Not all police peoplke wear guns.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
UK police are rarely armed, and UK civilians aren't clamoring for the right to own guns. These are related phenomena. If we take the poster I was responding to We have to assume if the lawss changed so that the citizenry could own/carry guns, that far more police would too. Look at the US for an example.
Your ad here. Ask me how!