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Notes -
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/humberside-police-twitter-transgender-limerick-2468385
I'm wary of Chinese robber-ing a nation of 60 million people, but there seem to be far too many of these stories for it to be coincidence (especially when compared with the conspicuous years-long police inaction against grooming gangs in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford). One gets the distinct impression of an ideologically captured police force.
Sometimes, one example is enough. I don't think that example is (it could've been a bored cop, and asking questions without a warrant isn't illegal), but the ones downthread are.
Think of what was required for the 11 arrests for football tweeting:
Even when one example isn't enough, the public response (or lack thereof) to one example can be enough.
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There appear to be some peculiarities to police in the UK that I've heard are to do with a scandal in the 80s that left them incredibly paranoid of being accused of racism, and they therefore are overly-relisnt on procedure and ass-covering paperwork. As a beat officer, any time you interact some sort of minority, that minority will apparently call you racist, which will be officially logged and looked in to. The joke is that going after mean Tweets and people who quote rap lyrics is a better investment of police time/money for the police; makes the numbers look good in terms of arrests vs complaints of racism, since no one goes outside.
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I mean, any such arrest is really dumb. But 'it isn't a coincidence' and 'ideologically captured' are very vague claims. And it's usually a mistake to conclude anything about the relative frequency of events from their relative frequency in headlines you see. 50 school shootings, 800 dead in mass shootings, vs 25,000 total homicides - news consumers intuit a different ratio. The police still spend >98% of their time on things other than 'arresting for offensive speech'.
What sort of argument is that supposed to be? Serial killers also spend 98% of time doing other things than killing.
The argument is you shouldn't use the frequency of news stories of 'arresting people who say bad words' to 'normal police work' to judge the frequency of the events actually happening, which this quote seemed to do:
I agree all instances of offensive speech arrests are bad.
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A claim I would have a lot less trouble believing were it not for their aforementioned systematic refusal to investigate child grooming in four separate English towns for over thirty years with the victims numbering in the thousands, owing entirely to the ethnic background of the perpetrators.
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