UK Men Get 4 Years For Trying to Incite Riots Via Facebook 400
An anonymous reader writes "In addition to the 12 arrests from last week, a judge has sentenced 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw and 22-year-old Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan to four years in prison for their failed attempts to use Facebook to incite riots in the UK. The judge said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent. The two men were convicted for using Facebook to encourage violent disorder in their hometowns in northwest England."
It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite others (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoate_offense [wikipedia.org]
Re:Overturned on appeal, most likely. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was a judge sitting in Chester crown court. Magistrates have a maximum sentencing power of 6 months. IANAL, just heard that expression repeated a lot recently; many looters who plead guilty are being remanded for sentencing at a later date.
Bully for Cameron! (Score:5, Informative)
Prime Minister David Cameron said [telegraph.co.uk]:
Mr Cameron is no stranger to appalling behaviour, being a former member of the Bullingdon Club [wikipedia.org], "notorious for its members' wealth and destructive binges". The club song apparently goes: "Buller, Buller, Buller! Buller, Buller, Buller! We are the famous Bullingdon Club, and we don't give a fuck!"
Cameron's 'Buller' escapades include running from the police through the streets of Oxford after a heavy flowerpot was thrown through a restaurant window [ft.com].
Re:Wow? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with you, except Syria hardly violent revolution, it was peaceful demonstrations with emotional crowds for sure, but Assad didn't wait for them to turn violent - he just crushed them to show that dissident won't be allowed at any measure. Fact that he tries to do some cynical PR in same time just speaks volumes what he exactly thinks about his nation.
Those people on the top in Syria aren't that afraid from revolution than the fact that they will have to answer about their crimes.
Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody involved cared about that. Seriously - you had to be there, it really was people of various walks of life just grabbing everything out of shops then setting fire to them (then attacking firemen when they tried to rescue the families in the flats above), kicking people half to death, etc. - just going nutz to get stuff and get money and get away with settling scores against specific people or whatever community they disliked.
People being violently and/or sexually assaulted, robbed or even killed in the street. Not bankers, not politicians. Their own.
Not one bank or political institution was touched, only places with Cool Stuff in, and the cars/houses/persons of the working and/or poor people in their own communities.
"a chaotic mess of angry people lashing out"
A chaotic mess of rapturously smiling laughing people taking what they wanted and doing violence to people. Families having their homes torched and their lives endangered, swathes of jobs being ended by businesses being torched when nobody can afford insurance these days.
Killings of people who tried to help the victims, attacks against ambulances trying to treat the victims, attacks against firemen trying to put out fires.
Seriously, I don't know how to explain this convincingly enough without sounding emotive - this is in the place I've grown up in. Don't let people get away with saying it was a political demonstration - I mean you had to be there but seriously it REALLY. WASN'T., I would say what we all saw and endured had no protest component to it whatsoever past about 9pm on the first night - it was just open season for the cannibalistic predators of London to hurt/take from their own.
Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe (Score:5, Informative)
Monday week ago I was caught between the looters and teh police in Lewisham while returning a car. I had rocks and bricks sailing past my head. Then on Tuesday, one of our neighbours decided to make a stand and stop these little pricks from taking his wheelie bin to transport their ill gotten goods by asking them politely not to do it. Their response? They stabbed him. He's in intensive care and may not live.
Last night, we had 3 thugs breaking in to the place next door to us. We called the police and they responded very quickly and arrested the 3 of them. This is the same kind of "protestor" that everyone is talking about. So you know what? NO. These ARE NOT protestors, they're opportunists. The BBC has given them ample opportunity to present a case, and none have been able to do so. The internet is not rife with reason, but rather rampant stupidity on the topic.
This is not society's fault, nor the fault of the police, or the government, but the fault of a generation of bottom feeding scum sucking opportunists that need a harsh lesson in reality dealt to them.
Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country. There are cameras everywhere
Let me guess, an outside European perspective gained from reading The Daily Mail? The number of cameras in Britain is massively over exaggerated. The number that's usually thrown around was generated by taking a mile of one of the busiest streets in central London, counting the number of cameras (including speeding cameras and privately owned CCTV cameras inside shops on both sides) and then multiplying that number by the number of miles of roads in Britain.
The more realistic number includes motorway monitoring cameras, which are not recorded, have one person monitoring about 100 of them, and are used to notify radio stations and so on of large traffic jams and dispatch emergency services to accidents. The next highest number is automated speed / red light cameras. The government controlled ones in city centres are operated by the local councils and are mostly being shut down because they provide little benefit and the councils can't afford to operate them.
and face-recognition software is used to identify people on it
Not sure why this is a sign of totalitarianism. Is it less totalitarian if you have a human matching the faces to photographs? The face recognition that's been talked about in the media recently has been matching the faces of people from Facebook who said things like 'I got a new 42" TV in the riots!' to images from shops' CCTV. How evil...
internet and phone serveillance everywhere,
Unless you think The News of the World and Phorm are government agencies, I'm not sure where this comes from.
and all big parties are decidedly right-wing
Bullshit. One of the two parties in our coalition government is still slightly left of centre, and my MEP is from a decidedly left-wing party.
it is still legal in the UK to beat up your children
any UK news source, then you'd see examples of parents being imprisoned and having their children taken into care for this.
Re:And that is the problem in England (Score:3, Informative)
I think you're making some serious exaggerations there, there were a handful of Lords sent to jail over the expenses fiddling (Lord Taylor and Lord Hanningfield are the two that spring to mind), not bus loads.
In terms of sleaze you're about 14 years out-of-date for that. The last election where sleaze was ever a big issue was 1997 when Tony Blair came to power, and the reason that that was a big issue was because it was an easy target for Labour, and an easy one to sell to the tabloids. The last election was mainly fought on the economy and suggestions of a less confrontational style of politics ("I agree with Nick" became fairly well known at the time).
Your last paragraph is a bit of a joke as well, it's nothing like that over here. Yes we're cutting now because of the global financial crisis, but we did very well for the last decade, making a significant amount of money through financial services which is one reason that we were hit quite hard by the financial crisis. However it's nothing like Greece over here, nor Portugal, Spain or Ireland. There's an argument that we're actually probably in a stronger position than France or Germany as well, because due to their stake in the Euro they are having to bail out Greece, Ireland et. al.
Hoodlums aren't at the controls either, yes there were some riots that were disgraceful, but they were brought under control within days and the main reason that they got as bad as they did was due to the Police not going in hard enough initially and a lot of people just deciding that they could get away with it. If they were in control it would still be going on, and there would have been some political motivator behind it. It was just a tiny minority who wanted to get a new TV without paying for it. The international media were quick to sensationalise what were fairly small scale (although destructive riots), but much less was made of the thousands who turned out afterwards to volunteer to clean up the mess.
Re:It's a crime to attempt a crime, or incite othe (Score:4, Informative)
This has been widely misinterpreted in the UK that you can't do anything when someone breaks into your house and threatens your life. According to the westminster system, you have the right to use proportionate force against an intruder. Proportionate being the grey zone. Thankfully, a recent case where a family was help up by knifepoint cleared the waters somewhat, as when the father killed the guys with a knife, he eventually got off on self defence because he had an honest and reasonable fear for the safety of his family. David Cameron, our PM, intervened and said that an investigation of clear disproportionate force should be able to be used against an intruder to remove all doubt, although it has been argued that this would simply cause a spiral of violence. However, the judiciary and the legislate have made it quite clear. If your robber is running away, you can't do anything, but if he's entered your home and you have a genuine fear for your life, smash him in the face with a brick.