Pete - I agree that legally "everyone who is charged with anything is presumed innocent until proven guilty - publishing the fact of the charge does nothing to change that", but the way the police use words in the UK at the moment is, as you rightly say, "wholly inappropriate and inapplicable" in a lot of cases. Choosing to call a complainant a "victim" is one thing that they now seem to do regularly. It seems that they are actually assuming that everyone that is charged will be found guilty... It is a question of semantics, but I think that they way that they choose to use certain words is deliberate and intended to cause a particular train of thought amongst the general public... And don't even get me started on their abuse of the "police bail" system...
As soon as someone is charged (if made public) there will be a stigma attached to that person, possibly for ever if found guilty or not... i can see no reason at all for naming someone unless found guilty, apart from the wants of the voyeuristic society we live in here. Everyone likes to speculate and draw their own conclusions, despite the outcome of a trial and the fact that generally they are not privy to all the evidence. Its human nature but in what way is it in the public interest or beneficial to any fucker? as i said earlier mud sticks and no matter how innocent one is there will allays be some that cast doubt on this and it destroys lives. I have seen it first hand.
Allegations are precisely that, allegations - no more and no less until they are proved or disproved. Anybody can allege anything - alleged offences, alleged victims, alleged offenders. The media, especially the gutter press, are appallingly bad about reporting allegations as though they were established facts. Therein lies the problem.
But why do you need or want an audience when you are contacting someone? Surely an email or text directly to the person you wish to speak to is good enough without this increasingly common need people are developing to share everything they do and say with the world! Or maybe it is just a desperate attempt by a lot of sad people who want to make out their life is substantially more exciting than it really is.
If you know them already to extent to have their contact details yes. Saying that on facebook you get to find people you did not contact for years. There are people out there that I for one lost contact when I moved here to find out that they now live in UK and for some reason FB suggested I might know then (common contact, town of birth and so on.....).
FaceBook is one of those things that can be just as useful as you want it to be or just as useless as you think it is. For instance, I think that the locking wheelnut socket from a Ferrari 458 is a perfectly useless trinket - however, for someone who actually owns a Ferrari 458, it might have a use. A Halfords 150-pc toolkit contains loads of useless pieces of metal if you don't do any of your own mechanicking ... but its usefulness will increase the more jobs you do yourself. See how that works?
I use facebook. Great place to vent frustration and thought dump. Better than listening to the voices in my head.
Why do the people who decry Facebook think that everyone on there wants to share every detail of their lives? Is it because, perhaps, they have never actually used it and get their view of it from the tabloid media? I use it because it's an easy and convenient way of sharing a few details of what I'm doing, sharing a few jokes, and generally keeping up to date with what friends are doing. It fills a couple of minutes a day and helps keep me in touch with people that I don't see on a regular basis... Some people live their entire lives on social media - the vast majority of people don't. It's all a question of moderation.
But going back to the original point, and taking up what Pete has said in post #43... Allegations are exactly that - so why do the police feel the need to publicise (unproven) allegations on a social media site? Who gains from it ?
Perhaps the police hope to elicit more allegations from other alleged victims. If just one person makes an allegation about some well-known figure, he may be able to defend himself against the accusation; but if numerous allegations of various offences are made by different people, the defendant may find it impossible to fend them all off. He is likely to end up being convicted of at least one or two things, even if the events were long ago and the evidence is flimsy.
Hence the current "historical sex abuse" witch-hunt amongst b-list celebrities... But - in this case Pete, we're talking about drink-driving. There is no complainant, just the police. Now, I'm not saying that there's much chance of anyone getting off a charge like that - you fail the breath or blood test, then it's pretty certain that you're going to get convicted. Which brings me back to my question - why publish a list of people charged, and not wait until they have actually been convicted?
Assume then, when they are sacked or other negative outcomes but actually they found not guilty, they'll sue the police for damages
