However, if you believe that the murder was in any way connected with the fact that Merseyside Police “lost track of” Chapman then you’re highlighting your ignorance of what the Sex Offenders Register actually is and the Police’s role with respect to people on it.

Basically, all that is required of most people subject to SOREG is that they notify the Police of their address. The Police aren’t, in any real sense in the vast majority of cases, required to supervise or keep under surveillance people who are on it and they don’t have the resources to do so. I don’t see how Chapman providing an accurate address would have prevented him from using the internet to groom a child and I don’t see how it would have stopped him meeting her. There seems to be a belief that the Merseyside Old Bill should have been watching him on CCTV 24 hours a day or that they should have had a car full of coppers parked outside his house. Not the case, I’m afraid. SOREG doesn’t really achieve much, in most cases.

Now, I’m not saying the Police shouldn’t have issued an alert earlier and I’m not saying that this wouldn’t have prevented the crime (it might, it might not), I’m just saying that you seem to have a mistaken idea of what SOREG actually is.

On the surface, not a lot. Delete the profile, which is a good move in itself if there is evidence that the profile is dodgy.

Unless the IP address could be identified as coming from a fixed address (all Charlieman comments submitted here from home come from a single IP address), nothing on the IP front either. I am one of the 0.001% of the internet with a fixed IP address. But the identity of the ISP who hosted the creep’s account is still useful.

Deletion of a creep’s profile does not prevent them from returning to a site under another pseudonym. But ISP identification (few people change ISP willingly owing to the disconnection period) with signature information within the original creepy profile can raise alerts if social networking sites are bothered when reviewing new profiles. Facebook aren’t bothered.

Knightjack made this point in ‘Tazers to Truncheons’, and it was discussed a certain amount here during the analysis of the G20 debacle. You’re precisely right; the generation of top coppers who have led, planned, directed and then lied about the litany of over-reactions, brutality and political violence were learning how to behave as policemen in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are forces which have gotten past this, because some of the honest coppers from back then got promoted; but in the Met, Sir Paul Bloody Condon drove out progressive and liberal senior officers [1] and actively pursued an agenda of social authoritarianism and the suppression of protest. His proteges, fast-tracked by him because they were his type of copper, are now running the Met and in charge of the various high-profile anti-protest operations; Stephenson, Blair and company.

[1] Mostly because they were the ones lobbying for declassification of cannabis back in 1990-1995, and once he got the top job he made it his business to purge the force of senior officers who held that view. I didn’t realise it at the time, but he was already talking privately about this plan in 1994, when he was still Asst. Commissioner level.

The solution?

Apparently the above occurs because they are encouraged to self harm by looking at websites and the answer is to censor the internet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/health/newsid_8563000/8563670.stm

How many women do you think that Peter Chapman hit on before before he misled Asheligh Hall? Many would no doubt have swallowed the persona or just disregarded him as a harmless weirdo. But if, and it is an if, somebody had smelled something suspicious about him, they should have had a magic button to press.

Therefore, in the sense that the button (or imaginary “something”) wouldn’t have affected the case in question, it doesn’t seem to fit the concept of a “fair point”.

In the most part I agree with Paul’s argument. Lee Griffin follows up with a good post about why Ashleigh Hall should have been more aware.

But whether or not the police have used the absence of a CEOP magic button (or a similar suspicion reporting mechanism) on Facebook as an excuse for failure is separate from the concept that Facebook should have a prominent *something*. Whilst Ashleigh may have missed the warning signs, another person might have spotted something amiss and reported it.

We should be confident enough to argue: “fair point about the absence of a reporting mechanism, but why weren’t you properly monitoring a high risk individual?”

All the lies discussed in this list were posted by senior police. There may be a wider issue with police culture, especially when special groups are set up, though they’ve improved a lot since the SPG. I think they still have a chip on their shoulders about past misdemeanours that prevents them from being more open today.

“Those of us who remember the miners strike have a naturally sceptical attitude to the media and the police. Its notable that a lot of the today’s senior coppers must have cut their teeth at the time.”

…or maybe it was the way they blatantly lied about Jean Charles DeMenzes ‘running through the gates’ or ‘wearing a bomber jacket’ shortly after they shot him in cold blood.

We can’t trust the police any more than we can trust criminals. They have lied to us, beaten us, shot us dead and lied again to cover it all up (G20, Ian Tomlinson etc.)

When will the public see through this charade – the police are not there for your protection, they are there to protect ‘them’ from ‘us’.

Maybe facebook is simply too democratic for them. I mean it’s already caused a few stirs by demonstrating how many people object to various things – like the recent exam backlash by students.

Vive la revolution comrades.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libcon: How a Stupid Row About Facebook Distracts From Police Failure http://bit.ly/bBtuj7...

It usually goes like this.

Boy hit on head by spade.

The Home Secretary smiles inwardly and announces a Dangerous Garden Tools Act controlling spade use and including a statutory instrument allowing him to ban anything else he doesn’t fancy.

That’s how they’ll get the internet in the end.