http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr ... 97661.html

What the feck was he thinking?

Must have been trying to impress Holly

1 - He was wanting to doorstep Cameron with a list and see the reaction.
Or
2 - He was wanting to prove a point about what you can pick up on the Internet and the dangers therein.

I don't think he did well on either count, and appeared to come over as being rather naive as a result.

Cameron is assuming that all the paedophiles are gay. Saville and Glitter went after girls, so hardly a gay witch hunt. Unless of course he knows that the named men are gay.

This is Cameron's "crusade" moment. Remember when George W Bush used that word after 9/11?

The problem is that despite appearing to not want one, he's sewn the idea in the minds of idiots who are easily confused. It was a poor choice of words in a situation that I expect he wasn't prepared for.

Even so he should be able to cope with such events. He must have been aware of who was involved even before this appearance. This has been brewing for days. Calling it a gay witch hunt might mean that some idiots will now target gays as paedophiles. From what I have seen the people coming forward are men so the gay connection might be valid but they are still victims of paedophiles. They need to prosecute as many as possible otherwise you will get comments like the government protects paedophiles as staunchly as the catholic church.

They need to prosecute all the ones they have reasonable evidence of having committed a crime. no more, no less. Prosecuting people for the sake of appearing to do something (especially for a 'no smoke without fire' kind of crime as child abuse) is just as much of a travesty of justice as not prosecuting people.

Jon

I agree but with such a serious offence they really need to mark the rest on the Police National Computer as probable/possible sex offenders. There is also a very significant possibility that these people might have committed other offences that have not come to light.

With all due respect Am, what the [LIFTED]. Marking people you don't have enough evidence to charge with a crime as 'probable sex offenders'? On a computer system on which there's no pressure to double-check if the data is correct or not? On what farcical planet is that anything like a good idea?


There is an also very significant possibility that they didn't do a damn thing. If the police did as you suggest and it somehow became public knowledge that a person was marked without having even been charged with a crime, they would immediately be able to sue the police from here to high heaven.

But yes, let's throw away the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing our entire justice system is based upon.

Jon

How very McCarthy.

Well if anyone is arrested their DNA is stored for many years just in case of other offences. No different to what DNA regulations currently allow. It was not until Jimmy Saville was named that many came out of the woodwork. If girls could have made complaints that may alone not have been provable with time and more claims it increases the chances that he would have been stopped during his lifetime.

Their names appearing on an internet search is very different to them being arrested. Imagine if it became illegal to shave your head. Do we add Justin Bieber to a database, just in case...

It's entirely different to what DNA regulations currently allow. The DNA database is there to allow a comparison of evidence to identify a suspect - you have to have evidence a crime has been committed (in the form of a DNA sample from the scene of the crime) before you can use it. The 'probably is a kiddy fiddler' database you're talking about throws away the whole inconvenient 'evidence' bit and goes straight from accusation to conviction.

If someone is charged with an offense, fine, keep that on record (there are arguments as to why you shouldn't but they're actually pretty weak). But if you haven't got enough evidence to even charge someone with something, what justification can you possibly have for saying that they 'probably are guilty'? The lack of enough evidence to even bring a charge suggests they actually probably aren't.

If they drown they're innocent, if they float they must be a peadophile, is that the rule now?

It goes nowhere near conviction. It should only be considered as a starting point. Don't forget that Saville told the girls that no one would believe them. So while one case might not be enough to convict, a number of such claims might pique the police's interest. Still not going to convict him. Don't forget that there were plenty of reported problems about Ian Huntley before he got the job in Soham but these were not on the database.

If someone has been investigated and cleared then yes they should have a clear record. I also see that there needs to be protections in the case of malicious claims, in a similar way to rapes. Anyone investigated deserves privacy, even after such allegations. Though by having a national record if the person was to move and be suspected of similar offences elsewhere it would start to trigger queries, it might have caught Saville, who committed offences all over the country. I am not going anywhere near suggesting that these people are outed except at a trial. Lord McApline deserves privacy and he should be entitled to protection from malicious claims. Though would anyone have known unless he spoke out today? These cases are similar to rapes in that in many cases it might only be one persons word against another, as there will be no other evidence. My ex told me about a man who raped his wife regularly but locked her in a room for days till the bruises disappeared, and there was no physical evidence against him.

'Suspected'? 'Suspected' means nothing in law. You can't do anything to 'a suspect' until you arrest them - and to arrest someone you need due cause. What is the due cause for recording someone as being a probable child abuser in a database and how come that due cause isn't enough due cause to arrest them, which you can record already? Who is to check that the due cause has been properly established? If the database is private, how are we to check if the data it stores about us is accurate or not? Will it be subject to FoI requests? And then next thing that will happen is you'll get a 'megan's law' style campaign where concerned parents demand they have a right to know if a 'suspected offender' is living somewhere in their vicinity, because obviously they have a right to protect their children from someone who may do them harm.

It's not so much a can as an entire petrol tanker full of worms.



No, it wouldn't. Because the only reason anybody would be on the 'suspected' register is if there wasn't enough evidence to charge them. If you can't charge someone, you haven't 'caught' them. And in any case, who is to say someone with the (apparent) influence of Saville wouldn't have been able to keep their name off the register the same way they managed to keep their activities from public scrutiny for 40 years?


If you store it, it will leak. There are lots of examples of information 'leaking out' of the national police database as it stands. No database that can be accessed from hundreds of locations around the country by thousands of people could possibly be described as secure.



That's reprehensible, but not the point. One terrible exception does not invalidate hundreds of years of legal practice and several basic principles of justice. Taking your example, would it then be OK to for any man whose wife had not been seen in public for three days to be recorded as a 'potential domestic abuser'?

I am not suggesting that we scrap all rights, but there has to be a way to do things differently.