Police - Crime vs Traffic

The real job

There is plenty of outcry in New Zealand about police sitting at the side of the road pointing a speed radar gun at the passing population of frustrated and sometimes frightened drivers. Frightened? The aggression or misbehaviour of many Auckland drivers is indeed a factor in road safety. There is no doubt that road accidents causes more than a reasonable proportion of early death than other forms of human activity that involve motion or mechisation. Univesality exposes us to each other in a very risky way. Our behaviour patterns and reactions are the very key to our survival. It may or may not be like other forms of crime in that it can be a consequence of frustration that we become lacking in the self-control dept. But when our muscles respond to the release of certain hormones we hope this does not translate to an additional 50 kms per hour of volocity on top as the acclerator is pushed down in anger. When we become angry, we lash out seeking satisfaction. A foot to the floor kind of reaction is the most dangerous form of unpredictability on the road. It need not be in anger, but at times when our attention is gathered by other things than paying attention to the detail of how our own vehicle is functioning and in relation to other vehicles hurtling or crawling along the highway.

This still does not answer why we need police to sit in their cars aiming a portable radar gun at us? Are random vehicles appearing over the crest of a rise or behind a favoured moterway signage blindspot more of a hinderance to safety than an aid to good behaviour? Probably not, and that is why the police seek to better our patterns of behaviour on the road. If they can prevent 400 deaths per annum, then they are doing four times more good than if they stopped every single murder.

It is fairly reasonable to argue that the lives of people who are connected in someway, however casual, to a murdering psychotic are in more need of police attention. But then, so many of us become murdering maniacs behind a wheel when someone or something has pissed us off. Like a parking ticket. We get behind the wheel and start letting off steam by punching down on the accelerator. Everyone has done it.

It is that behaviour, if we learn to correct it in our selves, prevents the dangerous spread of frustration between drivers. It would certainly help if drivers were able to simply able to keep their distances at least two whole seconds apart at all times. There would be far fewer accidents. Driving would be less frustrating.

And the police could concentrate their efforts on real criminals. The real stars of the 6pm news. Why do we want them sitting at the roadside?

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Accuser's Credibility Is the Key in Michael Jackson Trial

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Accuser's Credibility Is the Key in Michael Jackson Trial The boy who cried wolf brought crowds of people to his aid before they stopped believing him. The passage of time will show the common sense result, that there is a reasonable doubt. It is described by The Scotsman, at 6:44pm Sunday 29th May. It indicates that the boy, the key witness, more likely than not, has been convinced by his mother to tell the story. Each time he tells it, details are left out. By not presenting hard evidence but possible corrupt testimony the prosecution steers away from the jury defocusing from the simple conflict of the child and his cancer driven pity vs Jackson's tragically mistaken sense of proportion. If they only have that to consider, then the emotional value is in their favor.

Maybe I have missed something here, but it seems a little light on the "evidence" and it is a crimnal prosecution. Maybe the police caught the whole thing on camera, or worse, maybe someone at Never Never given a licence to film for eight months, did, when they were not suppposed to, and they gained a little more than Michael's confidence. Either way, we may have missed it. As far as I can tell, Michael Jackson could be found innocent, but if there is some other factor that means that he is guilty one does rather hope, for the sake of the US Justice system, that it is evidence rather than conveniently prepared and dished up "facts", if that is what they turn out to be.

The media do not seem to be willing to bet either way. Guilty or not, Jackson is the Bush Adminstration's moral wedge by which it can compass its way to religious domination of social values and not necessarily traditional religious social values, either. Rather new world order Christian fundamentals.

Fundamentalism rarely produces a reasonable justice system. Misjudgement, like Shappel Corby being jailed for 20 years when there are terrorists getting only 2-1/2 years. The Indosian justice system has no concept of official error. There seems to be no defence. The court can ignore the obvious and proceed to offend the rest of the world with blatent cruelty. It only need deport Shappel Corby and be done with it, handing her indictment back to the Australian Governent that is responsible for her. She was on holiday and accuses an Australian baggage handler - next, some Australian baggage handlers are themselves being brought up on Australian heroin smuggling operations. Co-incidence? I don't think so.

That Shappel Corby is more likely innocent than not comes from her immediate concern for her mother on realizing the horror of her sentence. 20 years, even if she were guilty (when no evience has been admissable, guilt is doubtful as it has not been established, not guilty is the only verdict) is unecessarily harsh for 4-1/2 kg of cannabis. It is ironic that a cold blooded calculating psychotic murdered a man for no particular reason then attacked his girlfriend and her friend with a sword, severing off one of her hands (later reattached, we are told). He was also sentenced, on the same day, to 20 years without parole. A special sentence for bad bad types. Shappel Corby would be scared off after 3 days in an Indonesian prison. They need not worry,. she will never return to their fair but probably polluted shores.

Neither will anybody not prepared to risk trusting luggage handlers not to interfere with their luggage.. They do. Customs Officers also inspect our bagage. Heaven help us if they start to interfere with the luggage.

The jury have different minds to the rest pf us. They may not react the same as "everyone else". They may come to different conclusions bearing witness to the actual personalities involved. One can not fault the defence for preventing their "key witness" not to take the stand.

However, Jackson may not be allowed to be innocent before proof of guilt is presented.

It may be a little late for proof to be presented, since the prosecution has rested its case. Do the media, or any commentators, in passing judgement, not do the "system" a disfavour? Is it actually quite hard to maintain the equalibrium of calm separation that an emotional case such as this may require when, whichever finding is made, one can be quite sure of a value in telling one's story after it.

It could be considered a crime to profit from close connection with such a case. It could be deemed criminal to ride on the shirtails of justice.

Insanity Plea falls flat

Personality problem and P use do not constitute legal "insanity".

Guilt is established when responsibility can be assigned. Therefore, in criminal cases for minors, or for the mentally incompetent, guilt may not be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

In this case a man was murdered by the now convicted defendant, in cold blood to "send a message" to police. The defendant looks wide eyed and crazed at the jury but they were not intimited or did they flinch from finding him guilty.

The judge handed down a 20 year non-parole jail term as the prisoner in the dock yelled out "bring back the electric chair".

Does this mean that there is a difference between legal "insanity" and actual irrationality?

The legal precident that P use can not justify crimes appears to have been set.

Children and Crime in New Zealand

When a child turns 17 the law stops protecting and starts stepping in where anti social activity becomes something that is being caused by a person empowered by "society" to make choices. When those choices include hurting other people, the law steps in to protect the other people.

Liberal forces will tell us we should be trying to rehabilitate the criminal. Progressive thinkers believe that is the evolved way to proceed. The criminal has made their pleasure known - they want to cause movement. They want to show someone fundamental that they can make things happen, and underneath that they want to show that they can survive.

The trouble with difficult childhoods is the amount of attention not placed on normal progression. To much time get spent looking at how to escape the difficulty or the memory of the difficulty. Violence toward children, when it is inflicted young enough, can cause developmental abberations. Ritual violence or repeated instances of pain inflicted with cruelty subverts the normal social process of being rewarded for social behaviour and having antisocial tendencies blunted by educative progress.

For, what is a society but an organised system of interactions. Social conditions are setup by law - laws enable me to complain and thus control the status of things. This control is an artificial endowment. But it serves to carve out a behaviour pattern that we become familiar with, and a behaviour pattern we can live with.

Unfortunately, the process of criminal youth justice assumes that the child comes from parents who are at fault. When a child commits too many crimes, the state removes the child from the home. The political divide in New Zealand is between efforts to reintegrate and a failing infrastructure called Child Youth and Family Support with its very unfortunate acronym, CYFS. Subject to Government intervention and loss of its leader, this Government body chases up failing families, truants and young offenders.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of demand for the services of CYFS. The staff turnover is terrific and the quality of staff is inconsistent to low with some exceptions. The problem with a system that fails to care adequately when it is the safety net itself, and a system that takes a care of custody over children and mixes troubled adolescents along with criminal adolescents is a recipe for more of the same.

To make CYFS responsive to the amplified needs of this modern world may not be possible. It is understaffed and the staff seem to have a way of designated if a CYFS field worker is "ok" or "not up to it".

We could value our young, but it would be best to start in the home, where the damage is actually done. But to do that would take another huge rip in the social fabric. One that may not mend.

Dog day Afternoon

NZ Herald

Dog day Afternoon

3 bank robbery attempts on the same day show that video is not an instant invesigative tool, but it is probably the best way for the police to catch the bank robber who uses his anoniminity as a weapon. He is nothing special to look at so rather than alarm bells ringing at best his bland looks may excite a delayed relaction or a niggling matter of concern. It is not long though, until someone will make a connection somewhere and Mr John Doe will be caught in the act. Then video footage is a more powerful weapon in the hands of the police.

As a tool of forensics, this footage may reveal intimate details that may prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person filmed is or is not a suspect. For example, a pattern of spots or the shape of his nose and position of eyes. As a tool of investigation these brief glances of the suspect give few clues but that they have been published on the front page of today's NZ Herald, makes watch dogs of us all. It will also probably alert the suspect that someone is onto him.

The New Zealand Herald

The New Zealand Herald

Police Porn

One must consider work place computers much the same as the walls of the lunch-room. Yes, it is possible to cut out pictures of Brad Pitt or Naomi Watts and reveal one's dark youthful secret crushes to the world, but one only has to turn 24 to realise it may not advance your cause in the world of the workplace. In a similar way, hijacking the work owned resource (known as "bandwidth") for one's own neferious purposes may seem like a blokish tradition and such theft harmless, but it is incriminating in that it is theft.

3000 police staff were caught with pornographic images. Images that were produced to elicit a "private" reaction, perhaps a physical response such as sexual arousal or even laughter, both arguably "unacceptable in the workplace".

That smoking is "unacceptable in the workplace" bears certain fruit when examined for human rights logic. I have a right to live and you do not have the right to poison me finally won out over the right to destroy ones own heath, that had been finally lost.

That any fool can obtain the most bizzare or obscene material and that some of it may be illegal is a failure of border control/customs (for example, China tries to ban any such internet access), and, until it causes someone to express themselves in harmful manner to another, the police probably have not wanted to know. Now the extremely socially reactive will have good reason to believe that the police can be cured of a reluctance to act in cases such as rape of a sex worker. Such reluctance is assertable because computer forensics turns up porn on the police computer system. That it is made public and by lowering the bar to punish a more managable number of officers and let the rest be warned by their own sense of guilt is an interesting attempt to silence critics. The police in NZ seem subject to extreme policitical scrutiny as the opposition attacks the police minister, Hon George Hawkins, he may be the only real chink in Helen Clark's armour.

Content Skipping and Copyright Law

Content Skipping and Copyright

Internet News

Poor laws require more enforcement than well thought out laws. A new law in the US allows for content-skipping technology to be employed in DVD players so that parents can auto-pilot their children past dubious content in DVDs or other media. Home censorship in the hands of parents sounds excellent in theory. After all in our modern world, we view parents as liable for the actions of their children, so it stands to reason that parents should be the final arbiter of whether a child sees something dreadful or damaging.

In theory. In reality it is a violation of free speech. It is the author's right to be recognised for their own work, and if that work is changed or edited by a machine, then it is no longer a faithful representation of the author's work. Copyright law exists to protect the right of the author to make duplicates of movies, texts or music. Originators should be able to preserve the integrity and meaning of their communications alongside duplication control. Otherwise it is not free speech but encumbered speech.

A film maker or writer carefully structures a story so it works. When parts of it are missing by a mechanical or electronic means, there is nothing the author can do to ensure a faithful reproduction of the work. Most authors would prefer that their work not be distributed in an edited or abridged way.

If you took all the profanity and violence out of Shakespere - what do you have left? Not Shakespere. You have an inferior and less powerful rendition that can not impart the same social meaning as the full product. Inferior representations pollute the integrity of human thought and careful planning. Consumer disappointment is the result. That, and badly educated children who think a Shakespere play is a nice fairy story. Pity them, for when they meet with the real world that contains all its warts, they will have no intellectual resources to deal with it.

It is therefore a very poor law as it destroys the work of creative people and allows robots to rule our thoughts. Not to mention that it defeats free speech, automatically.

Spam

Spam comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes as it evolves to conquer protection against virus infection, trojan horse programmes that lie dormant for some time before being triggered, either by, for example, running a script that runs every end of month. Back ups at that time are essential.

Ferocious spam is also a disservice to those that spam to make money. They employ the same technology as do keystroke relay systems that can silently and efficiently capture every keystroke you type from there on, and then send it encrypted to a storage place. The US Government most likely already records the internet in that very fashion - it is not even a remotely private medium.

The law acts against those that use spam to make money. The law can not keep up with those who use spam to destroy computer data if they are smart enough. The only solution is universal client monitoring. What else is driving the price of raw memory down? Silicon was always going to be a cheap resource, so memory has become less a commodity but almost a consumable product, when old memory becomes slow, it is replaced by another set of initials that can conquer previously impossible speeds. Watch how fast that screen clears! See that curve calculation whizz you by. Watch movies, just like a "real DVD player". Watch anything that's remotely video. Enable the user to infinitely distribute and duplicate works and then reap the legal benefits. The recording industry collects for artists and sues for its own expansion. It has a huge source of readily available data forensics.

It is that field that is of importance. Not only what is left behind, but what transpires. For a change, one is able to make an indelible copy of a news story and record history as it happens. Researching that history is what Google is laying claim to, the searching of the history we weave. Myths can be dispelled, when we can search history.

Spam pervades myths about artificial fortunes that is being offered to you at no cost on the part of some self-acclaimed provender of miracles. For example, supplying you with myths about your computer system security.

Here is the real fact. Nothing on your computer is sacred. Anything is available to the skilled network engineer or systems programmer. Scanning data streams sounds innocuous enough, maybe, but recording every keystroke - that is a real threat. The American Government has spend billions on security and that expresses a need to monitor data streams. The model of a recording device that constantly analyses and decrypts streams of information from a data source is not as unrealistic as it sounds. Of course, the vast majority of data sources (for example the webaddress of a registered media such as a newspaper) can be ignored. But certain patterns of encryption or even delta patterns may reveal the work of terrorists or banks or others.

Of course, it is the trailing of reasons for suspicion that lead the law into places criminals do their deeds, but never before has the historical context so favoured the law. Now that your every thought can be monitored, a police investigation may delve into more than you may think. And fair enough. Personal veracity matters when it comes to money and property otherwise one has to abandon the idea of money and property.

Now that the law has started to act against spammers, and all spammers have left trails that ultimately reveal who they are, the tide of spam is turning into something more threatening. Intimate intelligence and knowledge works both ways.

Spammer sentenced

newsobserver.com | Local & State : First felony conviction and sentencing has now occurred of Jeremy Jaynes who used the internet to peddle pornography and committ fraud.

Will the rest of the spammers suddenly take a pause to hide themselves? The matter will go to appeal, and no wonder, Jaynes was grossing $750,000 per month from his operation. Sending him to jail is a waste of a talented but flawed individual. The question of whether society needs protection from the spammer or if "Free speach" must apply to what is a powerful form of broadcasting are both worthy of discussion.

The law targeting junk email raises constitutional quetions: prison time will be defered until the matter is heard under Appeal.