[Zenst]

They literally give you a 50% discount on that prison time by default and the rest you are released on probation, miss appointment or any crime and straight in front of a judge and can easily end up serving the rest of the sentence.

Sadly this whole automated 50% discount upon your sentence has made many people despair at the whole system and often see headlines of some heinous crime and how they are out after a few years.

Of course this whole process was from what I can tell a accounting way to cope with prisoner numbers and with that, curtail building more jails.

But many sentences are a joke already in the public eye, without the addition of some automatic 50% discount.

Today, they are trying to end that 50% discount for certain types of criminals - terrorist types being one and in the UK, been two well news instances this year of criminals of that category being out early and committing violence that in the first instance, led to deaths.

I will also add that many career criminals know the legal and law system better than those that enforce it and with that, know how to game the system and how to play it. With that personally I have no faith in our police at all, though that is based upon experience of drug dealers moving into the flats below and the police being beyond useless, even with hard evidence and literally passing on details of those who informed upon them onto the criminals - be that having a word, passing on statements, lapping up their lies.

One case, they called round to raid the place and knocked on the door whilst the gang was there, they were made to wait 5 minutes whilst the gang flushed the heroin and crack cocaine down the toilet - took 3 flushes to get rid of it. Then they let them in, surprisingly they found nothing.

I literally had to take the law into my own hands in the end and built a contact microphone and wired up the walls and recorded their activity and literally blackmailed them to bugger off, I then got evidence against the corrupt police and had a wee chat and they are now no longer with the police.

I tried all the legal avenues and did all the right things and got utterly and totally shafted/ignored and frankly after 50 years, utterly lost faith in the police in the UK these days. Which still saddens me and brings a tear to my eyes. I won't even touch upon the health impact of noisy neibours and the associated antics of drug dealing but let's just say, PTSD comes from many forms.

[Mirioron]

I'm curious: what do you think about the police in the UK going after people that post mean tweets on Twitter? Does it erode your faith in the police even further?

[Zenst]

Honestly, twitter and the social media outlets should be on top of that and whilst many think it's a waste of time for the police to be doing that, they need to remember that there are laws pertaining to communications that equally apply to later technology and should be applied.

So I'm just fine with them doing it and if anything, you could say they are a bit soft upon that front.

I'd add that until these twitter crimes see twitter pay a fine for each instance, they will carry on. Sure it won't be fair, but the unfairness has been one-sided too long and not just twitter - all social media platforms.

[EDIT ADD reference to pertaining communications act] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003

This superceeded the 1984 laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_1984

But they both cover communications that will cause offence.

What has changed perhaps is what people define as offencive. Now that is a matter of debate that will go on for ages, but I don't hold any disdain for the police in that respect, not do I have any experience upon that matter to draw upon.

[Mirioron]

That's really interesting to know. Thank you for your perspective!

[DanBC]

It doesn't happen much. Almost all those things you hear about are either campaigns of harassment or incitement to violence.

Sometimes, rarely, it's the police having a discussion to let someone know what the law is in order to prevent that person committing an offence. And even this discussion with potential offenders is probably going to end after the police mishandling of the Henry Miller case: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/miller-v...

How do you feel about US police arresting six year old children for misbehaviour in class? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-51638871/six-y...

[Mirioron]

>Almost all those things you hear about are either campaigns of harassment or incitement to violence.

I rarely hear about those. Almost all of the cases that make international news are about police "checking someone's thinking" or arresting someone for posting lyrics or satire.

>How do you feel about US police arresting six year old children for misbehaviour in class?

Sounds exactly like something I'd expect from the US. Over policing is a problem that have over there. I was asking the parent poster about this specific point, because they were disappointed with how the police use their resources. I was curious how they felt about police resources being used to deal with tweets instead of something else. Personally it would annoy the hell out of me if the police weren't doing their jobs actually doing police work, but somehow still found the resources to police mean tweets. Those priorities seem backwards to me.