Sunday, April 24, 2005

Police: It's only real porn if fewer than 328 are involved


Police Commissioner Rob Robinson must have known that Police were looking at porn on their computers. I mean, if 20 percent of the police computer systems and twenty percent of toilet walls had porm, it shouldn’t have been too hard to find some of it before now. But Robinson wouldn’t have told Hawkins. Robinson may be the police puppet for the government, but Minister Hawkins doesn't know how to pull the strings, so he gets out the scissors. "Operational" and "matter" are Hawkin's two favourite words.

Up to 3000 police were found to have unacceptable emails, that's nearly a third of all police. And I thought police were supposed to be out in their cars catching speeding to raise money for their new computer system. Well, fighting crime some of the time as well. Not behind computer screens all day checking their emails for porn.

The only reason that 328 staff are being investigated is because the threshhold of what is unacceptable has been raised. So they are redefining what is "unacceptable". Perhaps it is more do to with the fact that if too many people got fired, the police force will be even more depleted and Hawkins would not be able to get his "extra" police on the beat. Not that he is doing it anyway…

I wonder if this decision to rejig the porn threshhold is a reflection of how we are being policed: If too many people are not having their 111 calls answered within a certain period, well, why not lengthen that acceptability period. If too many people are reporting crime, just turn up the next day, or week as the case may be. Reduce standards even further.

It's been done before: If too many teenagers are drinking, and causing trouble, we reduce the drinking age so they can get their alcohol legally. Now that we've done that, they want to increase the driving age so that the damage done by the reduction of the drinking age is minimised.

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