The fact they are split on the Sarah Everard vigil shows many Britons are making an exception for the event. The majority of Britons (59%) say protests, vigils and marches should not be allowed during the pandemichttps://t.co/8JOUtSZyOf pic.twitter.com/3zYzd8Kg9c
Comments
Thank God. (On balance).
But surely her contract will not be renewed next year, surely?
This blood cot thing is an interesting variant of the Trolley Problem.
The runaway trolley is not heading towards anyone, and yet half the countries in the EU have switched the points so that it collides with a few thousand.
The damage that Europe is doing to the AZ vaccine is unacceptable. All becuase a few EU politicians have tried to shift the blame for their own failure to procure enough vaccines onto AZ.
I don't think that what the police did here was right or necessary but boy, do they have a lot to put up with.
What I don't understand is why authorities like the police continue to act towards Covid risk on the same basis they did a year ago, apparently ignoring all of the evidence that has built up since then on how it spreads and what events are most risky.
We know it does well from prolonged exposure in enclosed indoor spaces with limited ventilation, and that there are very few if any examples of superspreading events taking place outside. We also know it largely spreads through airborne droplets and possibly aerosols. Yet police around the country continue zealously to challenge people driving in their own cars for breezy walks on the beach or in the Derbyshire Dales, or protestors staging vigils on a common, and everywhere you go there's this great focus on hand sanitising.
I spent half an hour on the tube this morning going to an appointment. Far far higher chance of copping a bit of Covid-19 from that journey than any number of outdoor vigils or trips to beauty spots for a stroll.
For sure, a decent chunk of those who don't approve of vigils - or this one in particular - would have said "no" as is their prerogative. In the real world, the police have to decide whether they want to enforce the law or not.
Thank God for polling which gives them a real slap in the face.
I suspect not.
2) handling such situations including policing the vigil is what the police are paid to do.
They need guidance from their commanders, the most senior of whom is one Cressida Dick. And on up from her is the HS.
The nature of Twitter is that depending on who you follow, it's easy to get suckered into the opinion that every thinks like you. It's just how it works. This doesn't just apply to the "left".
There's significant bubbles of "the right", "anti-vax", etc. Why do you think the likes of Farage and Trump use (used) Twitter?
Pretending Twitter = one view point is just lazy.
(And also, in fairness, easier on the liver if not the eyes).
Social Media's greatest issue is that it creates echo chambers..
Its a small group of people who have the reach causes this amplification, which makes it appear like the whole world has this same opinion....and if something turns out to be untrue or not as it initially seems, too late, all these people have been stucked into thr vortex.
I believe it's a cesspit and don't follow anyone but clearly when looking at what is trending and the follower count of politicians and journalists it leans quite left. Unless of course you think they're all Russian bots...
If you're going to break up a vigil in a noisy environment then raised voices rather go with the territory.
2) Agreed. As I have said elsewhere it is the person who overruled the local commander who should be facing questions.
Most social media seems poisonous, but Twitter is uniquely so.
I will make an exception to the above for pb.com, which, by accident or design, seems to engender robust debate rather than echo-chambering, most of the time.
In the real world the Police have to decide HOW they want to enforce the law.
Which is why we left the EU, and don't have a PM Corbyn, and why Dick will probably survive.
it was within police discretion to allow the original organised vigil to go ahead. Had it done so, it is likely there would have been minimal risk of resulting infections, and there would have been no crime.
And of course if you are protesting because you are upset about the fact that a woman who was walking home across Clapham Common was abducted and killed (it appears by a serving police officer) you are going to be, in the words of Mel Smith's companion, livid.
If there were no retweets, you would never see an opinion voiced by someone you don't follow.
Retweets means you see things posted by the people followed by the people you follow instead.
https://twitter.com/aljwhite/status/1371409714861510660
https://order-order.com/2021/03/15/yougov-public-think-clapham-vigil-should-not-have-gone-ahead/#comments
Albeit, a lot on there are coming at it from the opposite direction to those on here.
Doesn't make the cop's job any more fun though.
How about the "emotional value" of someone's home being burgled. Does that get 10 years?
https://twitter.com/malditojimrey/status/1370375173338243079
I presume 10 years is if you go full Colston statue, rather than write Churchill waz a racist. Still.... compared to what you get for most crimes, seems way out of proportion.
Thinking Twitter can tell you "what Britain thinks" is a bit like using say the Daily Mail or the Guardian for the same purpose.
That doesn't change the fact that the police could - and probably should - have taken a less aggressive approach and allowed cold and boredom to disperse the most stubborn participants. The sight of officers holding down a young woman was obviously an unpleasant one in light of who the victim and main suspect of the murder were, and a more intelligent approach might have avoided it.
The public support for Cressida (a victim of the patriarchy by surname alone!) in the polling is also quite striking. The more the usual ACAB / Defund The Police mob are involved in subsequent events, the less sympathetic the public will be.
Twitter polarises to ridiculous extremes. In the real world, there is room for nuance, for striking a balance, for friendly disagreement. It is possible to assume good intentions on the part of those you disagree with. In the twittersphere we are reduced to gangs of lunatic extremists goading each other into weirder and weirder views and assuming the worst intentions of the opposition gang of lunatics.
It's brilliant for factual reporting of things which otherwise would not be covered by the media. And it's brilliant for people who like to scream obscenities at strangers and celebrities. Other than that, it's awful.
I'm not doubting your figures, it would just be interesting.
If they do get the full sentence they'll get pardoned by Richard Burgon's government in 2029 anyway.
I do think there should be some punishment for vandalism and criminal damage although 10 years is clearly ludicrous.
But as a basic principle I would start from the point that no act of vandalism or criminal damage that does not involve endangering someone's life (so excluding things like damaging life saving or medical equipment perhaps) should carry a potential sentence more severe than the lightest sentence for doing actual harm to someone.
I am sure that there would need to be refinement but it seems to send entirely the wrong signal that damaging property is considered more serious than damaging people.
Far more information put out onto twitter by a journalist at the ground than from the public announcement system.
Similar use during major rail disruption.
So, for rapidly sharing information it can be very good, but where there is opinion involved, much less so.
It's just a shame I'm now missing what it's really good at: rapid dissemination of news and data, particularly on the science of Covid, before the rest of the media has caught up.
The only must read Twitter these days is Hugo Gye and his (usually) good news vaccine rollout tweets.
People behave badly, in a way that is against the law but which for various reasons tends not to be prosecuted. So tougher laws/punishments are brought in. When all we need is the will/resources to enforce the existing laws.
Luckily @Scott_xP curates them for me.
It's deeply flawed, in my view. You need a maximum, of course, but it should be a sensible pre-estimate of the worst that can happen under that particular law, and it should sit sensibly alongside other offences.
Once the first few sentences get handed down, the supply of 'customers' will rapidly dry up.
To demonstrate - I'm a keen law student looking for my first legal job, I would be open to working in criminal law, and yet there's very few, if any, job vacancies in that area. You'd think with the huge backlog there would be a big demand for criminal lawyers. Clearly not.
When a majority opinion is reported by pollsters, typically it matches the opinion encouraged by 90% of the UK newspaper market—that is of papers put out by 3 companies (News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach). I guess one will thank God for pollsters if one wants these companies to determine what people think, and in turn to benefit from the band-wagonning that pollsters' reports encourage.
29% of Twitter users are 18 to 29 and only 8% over 65, 42% of Twitter users are college graduates compared to only 31% of the US population and 41% of Twitter users earn over $75 000 compared to only 32% of the US population.https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/
In the UK 39% of Twitter users back Labour compared to only 32% of the UK population and only 34% of Twitter users back the Tories compared to 41% of the UK population
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168017720008
The Police have to determine HOW they do their job, just as others do with their own too.
You can be good or bad at your job depending upon how you do it.
Only doing their job my arse.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1371429627353260032?s=20
The issue here is not the law primarily. It is how it is applied by the police at the time in question. There was no need for them to act in the way they did both before hand where they decided to simply ban any gathering, then ignored the gathering through the day including the visit by a member of the royal family and then managed to get into a situation where they are caught manhandling women at a vigil about violence towards women. There is simply no way the police come out of that looking good.
What they could have done is negotiated with the organisers and had a small symbolic vigil with a very limited number of people at Clapham Common and with the organisers asking that no one else attend. That would have been within the scope of the law and the court ruling. But instead they decided to go all heavy handed because they could. Utter stupidity.
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/mma/ufc-fighter-robbed-polyana-viana-brazil-gunpoint-beats-mugger-man-attack-injuries-fake-gun-a8716971.html
https://twitter.com/JoeMurphyLondon/status/1371430043168161795?s=20
Plus panic ye not - we still have plenty of tweets posted here where b) above applies.
How many homes that are burgled don't even get visited by the cops, but some grieving women are peacefully holding an outdoor vigil? Send in the goonsquad.
There is a good chart on page 10 of the main report showing what is normally called digital exclusion. As a resulf of that, the young and higher social classes are overrepresented on social media and the elderly and lower social classes underrepresented. This is sort of obvious when you think about access to devices and services incurring a cost. So any kind of opinion from social media needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-research/adults/adults-media-use-and-attitudes