Wednesday, 14 April 2010

CCTV: Great In Government Hands!

But awful, just awful, in the hands of the public, according to CiF contributor Khaled Diab:
One of Dewinter's latest stunts was to post CCTV footage of an apparent attempted break-in – carried out unsuccessfully with comical incompetence by a young man who appeared to be an immigrant – on his website.
Oh, noes!
Moreover, the release of such footage can do the young man in question – who may never have done anything illegal before – harm that is not proportional to the crime he has allegedly committed by stigmatising him in public.
We wouldn't want to stigmatise burglars, or burglary, would we..?

4 comments:

Chuckles said...

This is the sort of thing that gives crime a bad name.

It may just discourage the young fellow enough that he never advances enough to qualify for a Darwin Award.

patently said...

I'd say that posting a video of him "breaking into a home" is exactly and precisely proportionate to the crime of, err, "breaking into a home".

It's the usual level of punishment meted out that is disproportionate, not this one; disproportionate merely means "out of proportion", not necessarily "excessive".

Mac the Knife said...

I wonder what Khaled Diab would have to say on the topic of Nick Hogan.

Just musing of course...

JuliaM said...

"It's the usual level of punishment meted out that is disproportionate, not this one; disproportionate merely means "out of proportion", not necessarily "excessive"."

It's 'CiF', I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't in Arabic to start with...