25-02-2006, 09:25 PM
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#36 (permalink)
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Uber Member
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Woking
Posts: 32,087
Party: Libertarian Party
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A bit more from a criminology professor.
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100n...name_page.html
Quote:
If I swore in public - as has happened - and if an officer fined me, I would regard this as an outrageously disproportionate response, and so would most people.
Why should a teenager swearing among his friends within accidental earshot of a police officer be fined, when identical behaviour in the pub, school, workplace or social security office is not?
In practice, the kids and adults swearing directly at the police as they go about their business on weekend evenings in most Welsh cities, are hardly ever fined or arrested. Twenty years ago, the behaviour was little better.
Like fining people for spitting or throwing away chewing gum in the street, it may work in places like Singapore. But in Mexico City they would end up having to pick bullets out of police officers' bodies. In Cardiff or Newport, perhaps an assault on police.
Fines should be proportionate to the ability to pay, and standardised fines hit the poor hardest. This may be attractive as a deterrent but it is inequitable to charge a multi- millionaire or a royal the same amount as someone on social security for swearing (or for any other offence).
And Western Mail readers would be the first to complain if we allowed people to pay off the fine at 50p a week.
There is a danger that such laws could be used as a mechanism of penalising people we just don't like, who are easy targets, rather than focusing on offenders who commit more serious crimes.
It is the apparent arbitrariness of (mostly unseen) discretion that makes it so resented among young people.
And anyone who is determined not to pay and is jailed for swearing could end up as a folk hero, rather than a folk devil, in the eyes of those he or she cares about.
The Welsh forces were praised for their sensible approach to Asbos - let's be just as sensible about swearing.
Dr Michael Levi is a professor of criminology at Cardiff University
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