dogthing
Posts: 98
Joined: 9/30/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Politesub53 The scandal shouldnt be the fact the guy is illegal. It should be the fact that he has been bailed for serious crime twice alread this year, but still released. The same thing happens in the UK, on a fairly regular basis. Innocent till proven guilty and all that, but what about the safety of the general population. The main problem in the UK has been the politicians. Blair and the Tories were competing for headlines for ten years to try to prove who was the toughest on crime and the causes of crime, and while they were happily chasing Daily Mail headlines and whipping up public outrage, they let the basic infrastructure go all to hell. Blair and the Conservatives would both tell you that in order to cut crime we have to crack down hard, and lose some of our civil liberties, and mount initiatives, and increase surveillance. Crime was our fault. But Blair was never really arsed to look after the basic boring everyday functions where the state was supposed to have a duty of care. The Soham murders showed that, while we were told that we all have to be watched more carefully and put onto lists of potential offenders, police and the Home Office weren't even bothering to make sure that information on actual criminals was being shared properly. Some Interpol guy recently said that UK policy was a joke. Interpol have a database of wanted criminals that the French check 700,000 times a month. You enter France, they check whether you are already a wanted mass murderer. Ditto, if they arrest you or pick you up on some other charge. Any time the security services check someone's ID, they check if there's a warrant out for them. In the UK, we only check the database fifty times a month. Total. That probably means that we have one conscientious civil servant somewhere in the country doing their job the way it ought to be done, and generating those fifty hits. Either we haven't told the other guys that the database exists, or we haven't wired their terminals up to it. The Interpol guy was saying that it was pathetic. You cross the UK border by plane and everyone makes a big fuss about your little bottle of water, but nobody bothers to check your passport against the "wanted criminals" database. It's nothing to do with human rights legislation or stupid European restrictions, its just that the people running the Home Office have been more interested in media coverage tha making sure that the system works. The emphasis is on media perception and campaigns and initiative rather than making sure that people are doing the boring paperwork properly. http://www.theregister.com/2007/07/09/interpol_database_terror_criticism/ Politicians like to prioritise fund new things that get them on TV. It helps them get elected. They don't care so much about basic maintenance of the essential systems they've inherited from someone else.
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