Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
This is one of those times it is important to distinguish between Britain, England and, in this case Scotland.
This happened in Scotland and Scotland has a different legal system. You need to ask if Scottish law works that way.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Plea deals are almost unheard of in the UK - there are rare cases where they are handled, but usually it's an odd case to begin with.
Anyone convicted using witness statements from these officers can apply to have their conviction overturned at a Court of Appeal, and the appeals court will examine their case and either dismiss the appeal, or overturn the conviction - if overturned, it goes back to the Crown Prosecution Service, who can bring another prosecution or not.
Not everyone lies under oath.
It does immediately cast doubt on all other convictions in which these officials were involved, and in those cases the convictions should be re-examined and (if appropriate) further action taken.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
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!
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!
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/... No information here about sentences handed out, but I've never read of any derisory sentences being handed out. We generally hold our police officers to account.
All police officers do. They know the elements of the crime they're accusing you of, so to get a conviction they'll tell a standard story that hits each of those elements (whether true or not), embellishing with details from their notes for verisimilitude.
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.