Today the BBC carried a story by their Home Affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, about a document which they had obtained from the Metropolitan Police with a Freedom of Information Request. The document was the plan which the police had prepared for the tuition fee protests which took place in London some months ago and which got out of hand.
The BBC article serves only to ridicule the author of the report for poor grammar and spelling and for having the temerity to include some mild levity in the text. The article sneers at misspelling and phrases such as “cunning plan”, “embussed” as well as vague witticisms such as the sentence “Ideally we want to be able to use our carriers (vans) again in the future”.
The United Kingdom has submerged itself in corporate newspeak over the past decade with management consultants charging over the odds to write documents which are perfect when judged for spelling, grammar, syntax, formatting, colour coding and branding but which say nothing and serve no purpose.
Well done BBC, I fully expect that the author of this plan will be reprimanded and stopped from writing documents “going forward”. Instead we can expect that, at great expense, the Met will employ some twit in a suit to write a plan full of perfect platitudes and the sum total of human happiness will have been knocked down a couple of notches.
It is OK to make spelling mistakes. The written word came before the dullards who collated the rules. It is OK to bend and distort grammar on occasions. It is OK to include a bit of levity and to use some inventive terminology. Even if one disagrees with all of this, it is definitively OK for a person employed for his policing abilities to have a sense of humour and not be a grammatical pedant.
On the morning when we woke up to a Tsunami in the Pacific and civil war in Libya the BBC reported that some plod was using poor spelling and grammar. Here’s a better story: The BBC are reporting the bleeding obvious as news!
I saw this at a petrol station recently. OK, I can see that it is in the interest of the petrol station owner to log the registration plates of cars in case they drive off without paying. But I can recall no informed debate about whether this data should be automatically made available to the police!
Democracy my arse! Gradually, using fear of crime and terrorism, the state increases the control that it has over the individual. “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” whine the naive and trusting. This is bollocks. History shows that if authorities are given powers they will abuse them.
It’s also a bit rich to advertise it as “neighbourhood policing”. You’d have to have truly Orwellian mind to consider a nationwide network of CCTV cameras to be neighbourly.
In the UK the police continue to stop ordinary citizens taking photographs in public places yet they feel free to take pictures of us any time they like. Police in Brighton have taken to parking a special CCTV van on the pavement. It’s interesting that there has been criticism of Google for their Streetview project yet we are complacent about police collecting similar information.
If I were a IT systems manager in the police force I would consider creating a system collecting all photographs taken by the police into a single database. I’d then reference police computers and online information such as Facebook, Google and Flickr and use automatic face recognition to allow police CCTV equipment to automatically identify people. Add a head up display to police car windscreens and you have little floating tags over members of the public as they go about their business.
Are the police working on such a system? – How would we know?
I’ve known for a while that Google have been digitizing books. Good plan. Hopefully by the time the decade is out they will have digitized the whole of reality. If they do then one hopes that they can contain the whole of creation in a smaller space than it currently takes otherwise the question arises: Where will they put it.
But I digress. The Economist informs me that Google have started analysing the digitized books and collating the derived data. This is an amazing idea. This means that we can now perform statistical anayslsys on massive quantities of text. We can analyze what ideas and subjects people were engaged with throughout recent history. One upshot is Ngram Viewer which allows us to plot a graph of the occurrence of a word or phrase in all the books analysed by Google.
I have to say that this is FANTASTIC! Until now this sort of thing has been completely impossible yet now anyone with Web access can get results in seconds. For example the occurrence of the word Glory has declined drastically whereas the occurrence of police is generally on the rise. Lust has declined gradually and is now into something of a plateau whereas sex is on the rise despite a brief dip in the 90s. – Ooh Mrs!
These may be frivolous examples but sociologists must love this tool. One interesting finding, though counter intuitive, is that the occurrence of the word terror has been declining for 200 years.
Lastly it is satisfying that the phrase Talking Bollocks began a steep increase in popularity in the 1990s though this dipped around the year 2000. Surprising as New Labour did not get evicted until 2010.
I just heard on Radio 4 that the CPS have prosecuted a driver ( Michael Thompson ) who flashed his lights to warn motorists of a mobile police speed gun. They charged him with wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties.
This is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. The speed gun is to catch people who are actually speeding NOT people who may be INTENDING to speed. By flashing his lights Mr Thompson could not have affected anyone who was actually speeding.
More and more the police are taking authoritarian stances and feeling that they are entitled to harass individuals. Often this takes the form of stopping ordinary people taking photographs in public by pretending that there is some terrorism threat.
From the point of view of the general public this clashes dreadfully with the police inability to prosecute their own officers even when they have been photographed in the act of assaulting a member of the public.
I have been critical of police tactics at various demonstrations but had been sympathetic during the recent student demonstrations because of the obvious violent intent of some demonstrators (fire extinguishers etc).
However, incidence such as the prosecution of Mr. Thompson, merely reinforce the negative image of the police as an oppressive organisation who take advantage of their position and are unaccountable to anybody.
I suggest that you remember that you are British officers in a country with a long tradition of civil liberty and not mindless officials from some soviet satellite state.
Stop harassing ordinary people and start effectively disciplining your own officers.
Completely ignoring the guidance given by Chief Constable Andrew Trotter ( Head of ACPO Media Advisory Group ) the police are now running a campaign encouraging the public to report photographers and “let experienced officers decide what action to take”.
Experienced officers? Like the experienced officers who arrested a guy taking picture of Christmas celebrations in Accrington? Like the experienced officers at the G20 summit who beat Ian Tomlinson?
Older readers may remember the IRA campaign of bombing in the UK in the 80s. The IRA were far more successful in bombing England than the current batch of islamists yet the police then did not resort to inducing paranoia in the population and encouraging us all to fear and spy on each other.
The truth is that the natural inclination of anyone who joins an organisation such as the police force will be to govern human behaviour by restricting everything and then allowing action by exception. That is not in accord with democratic values. Democracy requires that everything is allowed unless it is specifically proscribed.
The trouble with this police campaign is it ramps up the pressure. The police claim they will only use power to counter terrorism but we already have evidence that police are using all sorts of excuses to harrass photographers from anti-social behaviour to suspected pedophilia. Those given powers over others always abuse those powers. It’s a rule.
As yet the United Kingdom is not a police state and we do not restrict public photography. We should not allow ourselves to be frightened into giving the police authoritarian powers. Slippery slope and all that.
This is amazing. A police community support officer tries to get the details of photographer Bob Patefield. Originally the police say this is because of the anti-terror legislation but when Mr. Patefield refuses to give his details as he rightly claims that he is not obliged to the police change their excuse to anti-social behaviour. Mr. Patefield was arrested and held for 8 hours before being released without charge.
I was up in London again last night for another Christmas drink. On the way back I saw a group of police in the tube and took a photo of them. It seems that they have not taken on board the recent guidance by the chief constable of the British transport police to the Association of Chief Police Officers. His guidance states that anti terror legislation (known as Section 44) “gives officers no specific powers in relation to photography ….”.
This didn’t stop one officer yelling “YOU’RE FILMING!” at me and raising his hand in a attempt to stop me. This seems incredibly hypocritical given the thousands of CCTV cameras throughout the London Underground. The establishment seems bent on introducing more and more big brother methods for policing and it seems that the only people who, they think, should be exempt are themselves. The picture I took is not very good but I reproduce it here as a minor assertion of a freedom which the police seem intent on erasing.
A demonstration is taking place in London to protest police heavy handedness with photographers. Be there.
Just to emphasise the point the picture below shows what happens when a peaceful demonstration takes place. The police turn up and film everyone. Fucking hypocrites!
Art Photography
BBC reporting the bleeding obvious
Tags: "cunning plan”, “embussed", “going forward”, BBC, bleeding obvius, corporate newspeak, Danny Shaw, English language, freedom of information, management consultants, Metropolitan Police, misspelling, News, plan, plod, police, poor grammar, protest, spelling, tuition fee, witticism
but do they have GCSE English?
Today the BBC carried a story by their Home Affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, about a document which they had obtained from the Metropolitan Police with a Freedom of Information Request. The document was the plan which the police had prepared for the tuition fee protests which took place in London some months ago and which got out of hand.
The BBC article serves only to ridicule the author of the report for poor grammar and spelling and for having the temerity to include some mild levity in the text. The article sneers at misspelling and phrases such as “cunning plan”, “embussed” as well as vague witticisms such as the sentence “Ideally we want to be able to use our carriers (vans) again in the future”.
The United Kingdom has submerged itself in corporate newspeak over the past decade with management consultants charging over the odds to write documents which are perfect when judged for spelling, grammar, syntax, formatting, colour coding and branding but which say nothing and serve no purpose.
Well done BBC, I fully expect that the author of this plan will be reprimanded and stopped from writing documents “going forward”. Instead we can expect that, at great expense, the Met will employ some twit in a suit to write a plan full of perfect platitudes and the sum total of human happiness will have been knocked down a couple of notches.
It is OK to make spelling mistakes. The written word came before the dullards who collated the rules. It is OK to bend and distort grammar on occasions. It is OK to include a bit of levity and to use some inventive terminology. Even if one disagrees with all of this, it is definitively OK for a person employed for his policing abilities to have a sense of humour and not be a grammatical pedant.
On the morning when we woke up to a Tsunami in the Pacific and civil war in Libya the BBC reported that some plod was using poor spelling and grammar. Here’s a better story: The BBC are reporting the bleeding obvious as news!
Rate this: