Photographing the Sunset? Paedophile!
From the British Journal of Photography:
One day after Malcolm Dike took pictures of a sunset from his window, two Community Support Officers questioned him over claims that he could be a paedophile.
A member of the public reported Dike’s actions to the police, as his flat overlooks a youth centre, and it was feared that Dike was taking pictures of kids. ‘It was absolutely outrageous – I have been taking photos for years and never had any problems before,’ Dike told the Daily Mail. ‘My home overlooks the Oasis Youth Centre and apparently whoever complained was afraid I might have been taking photos of the children. That was completely untrue, of course, but the police have no right to come round here asking questions anyway.’
I’m floored. This paranoid, busybody behaviour is setting us against one another in ways we’ve never previously conceived. In the last 10 years many of us have come to the opinion that photographers are either terrorists or paedophiles, and that photography should be tightly controlled (or prohibited) – all without a shred of evidence to back such attitudes up. We prohibit photography on public land, we assume that anyone photographing a building wants to blow it up (and terrorist photography scouts are an as-yet undiscovered phenomenon), and anyone with a camera near children wants to take sexually objectifying pictures of them. I’m fed up with said ‘member of the public’ and sickened by the tin-pot police substitutes who actually gave this more than a second’s thought.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Alas, it’s all to common and I don’t see an end in sight.
Common sense and a mutual respect between the policymakers and the policy-upholders and followers has completely gone out of the psyche of the average Briton. I suspect that this is in part due to the fact that respect for people going about their own business is now completely absent from all UK agencies. I think that this has been fostered partly by constant indoctrination regarding paedophiles and terrorists and the concurrent media sensationalisation of each and every one of these events.
After all, firemen rescuing cats from trees no longer sells papers.
MY advice to anyone wanting to win a general election and truly get the people on side: –
Eliminate the quangos; restrict the number of people who can come into your home and the circumstances under which they can do so. Take down most of the CCTV cameras and show a little respect Maybe then, the public will respond in a way that is required to prevent the UK from going right down the pan.
I’ve said so before: we live in an age where the government has become obsessed with creating solutions and then trying to retrofit them into problems which haven’t yet arisen. They do this because they don’t know how to solve the intractable problems or simply can’t, and the people driving this culture are political professionals – people who don’t understand that this political culture has consequences. I’m sure Alan Johnson really believes control orders are good things – Jacqui Smith didn’t understand why the Damian Green affair was in any way wrong.
And you’re right – we desperately need to challenge the CCTV culture rather than come up with new wheezes to extend it (working on a post on that now), must get ACPO’s advice against the ECHR’s ruling on the DNA database better understood by more people, and to get a different culture developed of mutual respect rather than constant paranoia. New Labour indulged in rampant criminalisation for reasons known only to those who pursued that agenda – it’s destroying us all. I wonder what ‘Dave’ has to say about that.