http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/03/police-record-people-reporting-crimes
"Speaker's Corner Article!"
Summary:
The UK police force has been storing information about people who called them to report a crime. This information has been very detailed, sometimes even ethnicity was a factor of importance to the force as well. Records seem to go back for the past twelve years and Britain's second largest force holds more than 1.5 million pieces of information. Daniel Hamilton, of the pressure group Big Brother Watch, said: "For the police to log this kind of information is not just wrong – it's dangerous. This seems to be the case as everyone can access this kind of information. People can not report crimes whilst staying anonymous.
Reaction:
To me this is a very double sided issue. On the one hand this seems to be very wrong as people could easily be the target of violence if anyone could just access this database, but it seems that this kind of information storage could be handy to see the importance of a case. At times people may just pull pranks on the force and that way the force could see whether it is an important issue or not. Obviously this is not a bulletproof system, but there are moments that such a database could come in handy. They have to make it unaccessible to 'outsiders' though.
I would expect the police to keep records of the number of times people report crimes, for some people falsely report crimes to bully their neighbours or someone else they don't like. But what would the police need to know their etnicity for? Does it matter? In my opinion it doesn't. There's black sheep everywhere and knowing one black sheep is Moroccan or Irish shouldn't make a difference.
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