Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts

Jamming Prisoners' Mobile Phones Is a Waste of Time

Australia is testing technology that is intended to stop prisoners from using mobile phones to communicate with the outside world. Prisoners deserve to be locked up safely away from the community but don't they have some rights? This is like throwing then into the "cooler" and separating them from other people for days on end.

Relatives are not prevented from visiting them. It just seems that blocking communication is extreme. This is an added punishment like introducing legislation retrospectively. When people committed crimes that led to incarceration they had no idea that they would be cut off from the outside world in such a draconian way.

It is known that some criminals use mobile phones to continue crime on the outside. But is this grounds enough to stop communication for everyone in prison? Clearing prisons of mobile phones is an ongoing problems with hundreds of them being confiscated each year. When jamming is used it stops emergency calls getting through. And ordinary citizens in the community close to a prison will be blocked as well.

It seems to be a "knee-jerk" reaction to solve a perceived problem. Many government sponsored initiatives appear to be silly "after the fact". This is another one that fits into this category.
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Law by Ty Buchanan
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Australian Government Accesses Data From Internet Companies

The NSA has said that it targeted non-US citizens in its information grab from large Internet companies. Australian and American government agencies have secured detailed data about Australian citizens. This fact came out in a new report.

In the first half of 2013 546 requests were made on Australians. Facebook provided details on 349 of these. The US demanded information on 20,000 users assumed to be Americans. Access was granted on nearly 16,000 US accounts.

Which government agencies made the demands was not announced by Facebook. Internet companies seem to have been given some sort of filtering power to decide what is released. This is strange considering such companies are not elected non-government agencies. Are they entitled to be above the law?

Requests to Twitter by Australia have risen 600 percent since the second half of 2012. All members of the international data oligopoly were approached. About two thirds of all requests were successful. There is a fine balance here. What happens if police want information that Internet companies will not grant? Are in-camera court cases about to become the norm, where information is deemed to be too sensitive for the public?
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Conservation
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Brave New World of Criminal Investigation

We are entering a brave new world where DNA will be accurately read to predict eye color, distance between the eyes and nose shape. This will greatly improve police work in solving serious crime.

Even knowing whether a suspect is bald is helpful. Genes contain single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs).  These can now show whether someone is probably bald. We have some way to go because of the complex interaction of male and female chromosomes.

A rough composite picture will be soon be available. This can be used to screen out suspects. Facial metrics is advancing rapidly. Analysis of insulin-like growth hormone (IGF-1) and human growth hormone (HGH) can give a rough picture of build and height.

The importance of mitochondrial DNA which passes along the female line is well known. This can predict ancestry using Y chromosome (NRY) and autosomal markers. Patterns for Europeans, white Americans and East Asians have been identified.

In the future the crime rate could be significantly reduced and we could live in societies that are much safer than today's dangerous milieu where we are afraid to go out at night. A safe world - that is something hard to imagine.

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Conservation
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Changes to Treatment of Young Offenders

The Queensland state government is making drastic changes to the way young people who commit crimes are treated. Young offenders are to be named and shamed. Those punished by being sent to institutions will be transferred to adult prisons when they reach the age of eighteen.

Many of the "young criminals" are victims of crime themselves. Difficult home life has pushed them into crime. Naming them would make their lives intolerable.

The government decision has been made on just one survey. It seems the decision was made before the survey began. Young people are not mature adults. They are growing and learning. Judging them at such a stage in their lives is marking them as bad citizens for life.

Other changes include making fixed penalties for some crimes committed by adults. Judges will not have the discretion to modify the sentences according to prevailing circumstances.

A change that just about everyone agrees on is courts knowing the case histories of adult defendants during a trial. Many offenders get away with crimes simply because their past behavior is not known.
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Conservation
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Council Surveillance Cameras Could be Banned in Australia

While some countries have embraced general camera surveillance others are still cautious. The problem is that in national constitutions people have a right to privacy. Cameras placed in public streets clearly trample over this right.

Nowra, a town in New South Wales, has come face-to-face with this issue. An Australian rights campaigner, Adam Bonner, took the local council to a tribunal and a decision was made to order the council to desist from breaching the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act. It was not an instruction to turn the cameras off but it had the same result.

The Administrative Decisions Tribunal New South Wales decision has thrown a spanner into the works nationwide. State bodies set precedents for national courts. It has shown, however, that people can act locally to stop camera surveillance at local government level. One person has stopped a council in its tracks.

The Nowra Council did not help itself by telling the tribunal that the cameras were not operating when they were. Just how the council will ask people if they give permission to be filmed is unknown. Just telling them with a sign will not satisfy the tribunal decision. Signage already there is deemed by the tribunal to be insufficient.  This also brings into question whether police have the right to install fixed speed cameras.

In the UK burroughs with no camera surveillance have higher arrest levels. CCTV is not an effective crime deterrent. People see it as punishment for offences rather than as a preventative method.
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History
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Ned Kelly Was No Hero

Ned Kelly has been made into a folk hero yet his exploits were very bad indeed. He killed policemen and believed he was hard done by and above the law. Like Jesse James in the US it is surprising how an evil person can be made larger than life. While there was possible police corruption affecting the lives of both, it was not a prime factor in their behavior.

From the start they had the belief in the their own superiority, that they could live above the law. Even today many strongly support the "heroism" of Ned Kelly. He was recently laid to rest in a Requiem mass. His skeleton, minus the head, were cremated. It has been 132 years since his execution.

There is something to be said about his fight against British rule in the colonies. Police control over the population was strong and brutal. Carrying the fight from Ireland to Australia is seen as a virtuous act. The problem is Ned Kelly was not really acting on this premise. He wanted to declare a region of Australia his own.

The authorities could not allow a break-away province and with the killing of police he was a "dead man walking". His gang was too small to fight the whole police force on its own. Despite his armour, twenty-eight police bullets struck his arms and legs. The sheer number of hits shows the ferocity of the final battle. He was captured and taken away.
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History
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The Wrong Missing Body Found by Psychic

Mediums can be right - some of the time. An Aboriginal female elder in NSW told police she saw a girl dead in a dream. A six year old girl had been missing. The problem was the body found by police was of an adult, a woman. She had been dismembered wrapped in plastic and left at an Aboriginal burial site.

A Sydney woman was last seen in June. Post-mortem tests will probably confirm that the body was missing 31 year old Kristi Mc Dougall. The Aboriginal woman strongly believes that she has psychic talents.  It is odd that the Aboriginal knew about a murdered adult before police suspected it.

The odds of finding bones of dead people in an Aboriginal burial site are extremely high. Though having a premonition that a recently dead person are there is not strong. The seer has helped police with their enquiries, but not in the way she had "imagined".
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Society
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Darwin Police Station Evacuated Because of Fleas

Flee from the fleas! A police station has been evacuated in Darwin because a prisoner brought fleas into the jail house. The fleas spread all through the watch house and even to a police van.

Police had to wear gloves and tuck their pants into their socks to keep out the menace. They were also ordered to take a shower when they finished each shift.

But all this was in vain. After a week of scratching in agony they abandoned the station. The place has now been thoroughly fumigated.
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Society
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Man Attacks Youth With a Hedgehog

Don't throw wildlife around! You may be punished for it.

A New Zealand man has to attend court for throwing a hedgehog at a teenager. Mr Singhalargh threw the poor animal five meters at a 15 year old in the eastern North Island town of Whakatane.

The teenager was injured. He got a large red welt and several puncture wounds. The man was arrested shortly afterwards for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog.

The police did not say whether the hedgehog was alive before the ordeal, but did say that the animal was definitely dead afterwards.
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Society
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Internet Companies Are Not Complying With Police

Despite calls by some countries for Internet companies to had over information on citizens' searches and email, the knowledge superhighway is moving in the other direction. Information stored in the cloud are out of reach of national police forces. Gone are the days when just about everything that a suspect has done is available recorded somewhere at sometime. Data is there but it cannot be accessed.

The ordinary person will not have much sympathy for police trying to "background" a suspect. They see authorities as being too intrusive anyway. For years Australian social security sent out "demand" forms for aged pensioners to provide up-to-date information about what they had in the bank. A court found that social security did not have the legal right to demand honest answers. The forms are still being sent out. Legally they are still suspect. Such is the quagmire authorities are in.

Anyway, back to the case in hand. Police are saying even getting data from Google is a problem. Even obtaining information Between Australians in Australia has barriers. In some cases it takes five year to get information via court processes. In that time period technology has moved on and not everything is stored for posterity.

The National police forces' desire for greater access is like smoke over a factory chimney. It will blow away with the breeze. Companies operating across national borders will never comply because their customers don't want them to play the game. The European Cybercrime Convention treaty is a furphy. Internet companies are watching with no intention of complying.
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Internet
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Court Decisions Are Ridiculous

It seems that you can get away with anything if you put up an absurd defence. A woman was charged for driving her car without light while the car had a flat tyre. The woman's defence was that she had taken the sleeping drug Stilnox earlier and she couldn't remember driving. Being interviewed by police was also out of mind.

Remember the weird claims made when Prozac was first brought onto the market? You don't hear anything bad about Prozac today. The same thing will happen for Stilnox. If the drug is so dangerous it would not have been allowed onto the market at all. It is just convenient to have something to blame for strange behavior.

The Court found in favor of the woman. It must be said when reviewing court decisions that the government puts weird people in charge of courts. Magistrates and judges continue to give lenient sentences despite pleadings by police and the public. They are certainly a law unto themselves. Indeed, many judges believe that they are above the law. They see the separation of powers as an avenue to become dictators which gives them the right to make absurd decisions.
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