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There’s a fine line between police brutality and police duty

August 8, 2010 in News & Politics | 1 comment

From the Telegraph, via Mark Reckons:

Footage captured on a police dashboard camera shows one officer striking the driver’s seat window with a baton up to 15 times and another officer jumping on the bonnet of the car and kicking the windscreen in an apparent attempt to crack it.

Police pulled over Robert Whatley, 70, for not wearing a seat belt as he drove through country lanes in South Wales. The 8-mile chase started after officers tried to give Mr Whatley a fixed penalty notice but he drove off.

The video is embedded below:

What I find intriguing is Mark’s take on the subject:

The Police officers involved have been suspended pending an investigation but frankly I am not sure what needs investigating. They terrified a confused pensioner with as far as I can tell no justification, acting like utter thugs. The man has a heart condition. We could easily have been looking at something much more serious here. Next time maybe we will. That’s why we need to try and make sure there is not a next time.

I’m not saying for a moment that police brutality is in any way acceptable, but it seems quite obvious, to me, that there definitely was a cause for chasing this gentleman and arresting him.

Not only was he not wearing a seatbelt, he also drove off when the police tried to give him a fixed penalty notice. If this is down to him being “confused”, then to be honest, I doubt he should be on the road at all: if he’d been thinking straight, surely he’d have understood that trying to give the police the slip was a bad idea.

Whilst there’s no doubt that the police were heavy-handed, and the two officers involved have, quite rightly, been suspended for smashing the car’s window and dragging the accused out, I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for Mr. Whatley.

The fact he was a “terrified pensioner” had nothing to do with it. The bottom line is that he has been charged with several driving offences and drove off from the police. The law applies to everyone, terrified pensioner or not: it is plainly obvious (to me at least) that this is hardly likely to be as black and white as either the Telegraph or Mark make it out to be.

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Eggs no longer to be sold in twelves, Mail panics

June 27, 2010 in News & Politics | No comments

Image - Rasbak (Wikimedia Commons), modified under licence

Naturally, the Daily Mail’s swallowed this story whole (as has the Telegraph) – but then again, neither of these publications have been known to allow the facts to get in the way of a good EU-bashing. Iain Dale’s post seems to have been written when he was drunk and in the middle of a daydream about Dick Littlejohn: it opens with “you couldn’t make it up” and gripes about the “E bloody U.”

Essentially, the Mail says that new regulations, which would require the carton to display “322g of rolls” as opposed to “six rolls”, therefore means that eggs will now be sold in evil metric fives and tens, and shoppers will be confused into oblivion.

…except it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, there’s no reason that you’d be forbidden from buying eggs by the dozen: the idea that a change in the headline figure would result in the actual quantity changing is a complete non sequitur.

So what if the packaging doesn’t say “six eggs” any more? Eggs aren’t exactly packaged in a way that makes them difficult to count. Two times three equals six, therefore I’m getting six eggs that total x grams.

If anything, the new system, if there is one, makes more sense. When using eggs as ingredients in cooking, something like “100g of egg yolk” makes a lot more sense than “the yolk from 3 medium-sized eggs” which is an absurdly arbitrary measurement. And if you’re buying them to eat as eggs? Well, you can count them!

That said, I’m beginning to sense a pattern here. The Mail often gripes about falling standards in education, but then has the temerity to complain that the public should be asked to do simple tasks – namely, sorting rubbish, or counting eggs/rolls. That said, let’s also consider the countless other EU non-stories the Mail’s pumped out – straight bananas and all – and consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this story might have been spun from nowhere to flog their sodding paper.

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Déjà vu at the Mail

March 23, 2010 in News & Politics | No comments

Daily-Mail-Large

Let’s get this straight: it’s no secret the Daily Mail is full of hot air. Even its front page, which is massive, mostly consists of the same, or similar, material repeated two or three times over.

Of course, when I say “material” I speak in the loosest of terms: there’s “femail” celebrity paparazzi dross, usually a story about the evils of the BBC/gays/muslims/Richard Dawkins, peppered with regular pus-rich ejecta from Littlejohn, Hitchens, Moir et al. In fact, I’m pretty certain the only reason anyone does visit the Mail website is to observe the flora and fauna of the comments section.

However, I’m veering off on a tangent here: the stupidity of the Mail‘s hacks/commenters is covered in far more depth (and quality) by Enemies and Speak You’re Branes. Instead, let’s focus on astonishingly lazy journalism.

It seems rather superfluous, as today is no slow news day: the Obamacare reforms have passed in the US, for better or for worse, some former ministers have been filmed displaying outright corruption, Soham murderer Ian Huntley has had a brush with death himself, and Google has stopped censoring its Chinese operation. It is, therefore, a mystery to me as to why the Mail’s front page currently has the news that a woman is pregnant, an idiot nearly won a Darwin Award, and a woman went out of her house whilst wearing some shoes.

Then, however, you run across this:

It seemed like a simple request.

Swansea Council sent an email to its in-house translations service to have a road sign – ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’ – translated into Welsh.

The only problem was that the Welsh translator wasn’t in at the time. An automated email response was sent to council officials who believed it was exactly what they needed.

But in fact it stated: ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.’

Unaware of the real meaning of the message, authorities had it printed on the road sign under the English.

Hmm… haven’t I seen this somewhere before? Oh, yes. Almost one and a half years ago.

There are two possible reasons for this.

  1. The Mail‘s journalists were so lazy they didn’t check the source of said story, and therefore failed to see that it was dated some sixteen months ago.
  2. The Mail has such contempt for its readers that they believed they could get away with regurgitating this recycled crap to fill up the pages, in the hope no-one would notice that it’s old news.

Given the Mail’s pedigree, I can’t help but wondering if it’s both.

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