Kent police bring obscenity charge over online chat

"fantasy material"

The clue's in the name, D.S. Numbskull.

They're gonna have to ban a hell of a lot of books from sale if this precedent gets set. And what about possession? Is Nately's whore's kid sister gonna get me in hot water? Or is Catch 22 gonna be rewritten to make her want to be a CSO when she grows up?

Massive, massive fail.

It's called fiction...

Could I politely suggest that Kent Police actually tackle some of the existing, well defined, crimes such as burglary, theft and fraud, in their area rather than making up new imaginary ones.

Thank you.

Depravity!

'a publication is obscene if its overall effect is to "tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely ... to read, see or hear" it.'

That's the BOFH stories screwed then!

I have some questions here....

Where did Kent Police get their evidence? I can see two scenarios (and would welcome more).

Either....

A) The police received a complaint from the someone who was party to the online conversation. In which case they clearly didn't use any form of 'blocking' or 'barring' feature to remove the offender. The implication is that they were a willing party, but all the same this at least may merit investigation; under harrasment laws perhaps? I doubt it'd be easy to prove under existing law.

Or, more disturbingly,...

B) The police were able to intercept the communications of the accused and have done so, either by trawling (which is supposed to be impossible, no?) or because they were already "tapping" and surveiling this individual?

Either way, this is going to be one to be watched very carefully. Just how encrypted and anonymous do we have to be in order to be free to express ourselves?

Do we want more police?

This morning on BBC news, a politican was telling us that the people want a lot more police on the street. She went as far as sayig that people were telling her that they pretty much wanted to open the door and there would be a policeman on the street. This is not the first politician that has been saying that recently .

What is the general opinion on this subject, do people in Britain really want more police or is this complete and utter lies so they can implement their police state?

(Saying this, I realise that in this forum, those that respond are likely to have the opposite opinion).

What about mangas?

Many mangas talk of killing children. Say, Naruto. It contains multiple occurrences of attempts on the lives of underage teenagers.

More Data

With the current enertia to cases like this, I would like to wait and see if the reason that Kent police will not (can not?) comment on the charges is that the images of "children" are, in fact, images of the person being charged; they being underage themselves and that s/he "self-published" online chat (Chat Roulette?!).

Not that this would be indecent exposure, harrasement, or any of the other, commonplace, NORMAL crimes this might be, oh no - gotta use the latest, greatest, shiniest (BIGGEST) stick! Hmm... Kent police using the biggest, shiniest stick they have every time they can - Could that fall under extreme porn?...

well,

First they came for ....

Splendid

Come on boys in Kent - you can do better than this surely?

Obviously what we need here is some sort of massive database of the criminals (i.e. the public). When one wants to engage in a chat with someone else you fill in a form and the on duty KPD (Kent Police Drone) authorises the chat and then monitors it.

If you fall foul of the regulations (not published of course too easy that way) then your banged up and stuck on the nonce list. And given a thorough kicking for good measure.

This is what they want so why bother with all this tiresome in-between stuff? Just bring it in now along with the new laws for walking on the cracks in the pavement and thinking about the weekend while at work.

Twats.

Proof

"The legislation should include the possession of written or printed material of this nature as it is equally as disturbing as the images and equally contributes to an offender’s motivation and fantasy behaviour."

Show me the study that shows this, or are you guys making stuff up again?

But that's what the Police do...

If the Police arrest someone then they'll try to include as many 'crimes' as possible in the charge sheet for at least three reasons:-

a) By throwing everything possible at the 'perp', the CPS may be encouraged to take the case to court. The more charges, the higher profile of the case.

b) Some of the allegations include child porn. The Police pursue those cases with a religious zeal. Anything that might tangentially be associated, if it's not an image can be described as contravening another existing act, in this case the Obscene Pubs Act.

c) Police forces in England (at least) are put into league tables based on how good their crime clear up rate is. Most forces have enthusiastically embraced 'administrative detections', where incidents/acts that would in the past have been dealt with informally are now deconstructed, tabulated into sequences of 'crimes' (committed both by 'perpetrator' & 'victim'), arrests made, cautions issued. Nothing has been done to REDUCE real crime; the only winners are the Police, whose crime detection & clear-up rates are artificially elevated, and 'difficult to solve' crime is ignored in preference of administrative detections, which carry as much weight in the crime stats.

As I was saying...

To a work collleague this morning the only way to escape the guberments totalitarian advances is going to sign up to go to the NASA built moonbase/Mars base. Because now they've started you got more chance of living on a diffrent planet than getting 'em to stop.

And for those that think this seems a bit over the top you do realise they are now legislating against yours/my imagination (however funny/sadistic/weird that is).

The final straw as again i was saying to him will be when they banned kids form climbing trees (although i am aware conkers are now banned).

corrupt

"a publication is obscene if its overall effect is to 'tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely ... to read, see or hear' it"

So that would include the rules for MP's expenses then. Many MPs have certainly been corrupted by rules for expenses. Although I'm not sure they've all become depraved.

Possesion of an imagination.

Plod don't like this *at* all.

They don't seem to have a very good grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality.

Funny as so much of the authoritarian police state is founded on *imaginary* threats.

Time to start the "Campaign for Real Policing"?

Here come the Thought Police (again!)

Despite the failure of the attempt by Baroness O'Caithan to introduce an "Extreme Writings" provision into English Law, it seems that Kent Police are trying to bring one in by default by suggesting that an online chat counts as "publishing"!

Of course they will probably decide to claim that this is a "loophole" in existing legislation and we'll then see some politician who's heading for defeat jump onto the bandwagon to help generate some positive headlines because "well, it's For The Children, isn't it?" and anyone who disagrees is obviously not "Thinking of the Children!"

What's next? Banning Viktor Nabakov's "Lolita"??

A theory

I have a theory that the reason the police force want to concentrate on these kind of crimes is that they want the easy way out. Speed cameras are all automated, otherwise they can just sit down in their patrol cars with their speed guns. Some computer crime where they can sit down looking through people's stuff. They just want to sit down and not go walking the streets.

If they do walk the streets, they don't want to deal with chasing burglars or those that are physically dangerous, but instead they want to attack those with expensive equipment (cameras) that they feel could be threatening. They know that once they claim some crime has been done with the camera, the person is less likely to argue back due to danger of having their equipment damaged.

So, in summary, the reason the police do not go out on Friday and Saturday nights to keep order in the streets is due to them being scared of being hit despite all the body armour and so on.

Comments fail

Once again, I read through the comments associated with a "police" story and find that like lots of other places on the Internet, is filled with comments by people who think they are some kind of expert in the legal system and know all of the facts associated with the story.

1) CPS are nothing to do with the police. They are a separate body, and have no interest in crime detection rates, clear up rates etc.

2) CPS lawyers decide upon on the evidence submitted as to what charges are appropriate and within the public interest. By "appropriate", that means with no worse than a 50/50 chance of conviction.

I would expect that in building the case, the police brought evidence of the chat in question to CPS, because it would suggest the individual has a propensity towards the sexual abuse of children and may also contain evidence of guilt related to any of the other charges. CPS have obviously looked at this in relation to what the OPA and relevant case law says and feel there is a good chance of conviction.

@AC 14:36

I think you may be the nearest. Here's a scenario that I could see being entirely likely.

D) Police scoured through a computer or computers looking for something to charge someone they didn't like and found a few images that were very borderline as to whether they were indecent or not. (I suspect the same case would occur if almost anyone's computer was examined in these 'enlightened times').

Knowing the CPS might well not proceed with just those charges, they then tried to bolster their case with some OPA charges, knowing that the CPS might well find that part of law interesting and therefore be willing to proceed with the whole lot, avoiding the police having to admit they hadn't really found anything.

The CPS may well be a seperate body but when they work so closely with the police what are the chances of them not being corrupted by the same zealous urges as the police?

As has been said before, Kent Police have 'form'