agoreira

Bit like me, been driving for around 40 years, only ever been stopped twice, once in Spain, and once in UK. Spain was years ago during the Ryder Cup, the Guardia were fine, very polite, and UK was when I was pulled over for driving way, way over the speed limit, and the nice lady police officer apologised as she gave me a speeding ticket. So no, absolutely no problems with the police whatsoever.

bil

Great, isn't it? One of our right on women posters now wants to jail people on the basis of a facial expression?

Plus the tired old canard that prisons are too soft.

Trouble is that too many people are incapable of looking at the problem rationally. Prisons in the US are far worse than the UK ones, and they are currently banging up a bigger %of their population than we are.

Prison should primarily be a place where people should be put to keep them away from society, because they are a danger to society.

People who commit non violent crime should be made to repay their debt to society properly. At the moment we take someone who has comitted a crime, we don't make them reimburse their victims, we lock them up in an institution that costs more than the RItz per day, and at the end we have a person that is likely to be even more antisocial and criminalised than they were when they were caught.

Where precisely is the sense in that?

rugbymatt

Who got 5 years?

bil

I've not had any problems with any police in any country.

What's that got to do with it? I don't hate the police per se. It's the bent ones that I hate.

jimenato

That's what I was thinking, and in jail? I don't think licinius lets the facts or the truth get in the way of his prejudices.

whitelinen

Nor the fact that an appeal has yet to be heard.

Still it gives certain people here more opportunity to air their dirty washing and knock the majority of law abiding public.

HBG

I try and tip-toe through life now, it’s much easier. I was reminded of it only today, only a couple of hours ago.

A Spanish bar reopened recently, having been closed for five years. We went to sit on the terrace because it was the only one with a sun shade, some daft arsonist has been going around the area setting fire to the others.

The owner’s brother gave me a funny look when he served us and asked if I had been in the bar five years ago when a couple of men ejected a mad Russian customer who had been touching up women customers – and the bar owner had not yet been compensated for a broken window, a rather big window.

I shook my head vehemently but asked my wife to drink her coffee as quickly as she could. That window cost a thousand Euros to replace, and it was boarded up for years.

whitelinen

Should have had insurance.

bil

and it gives the hard of thinking room to stand, unfortunately.

HBG

They're Spanish.

bil

You must have thrown that guy pretty damn hard to get him thru the window....

Bomber Harris

Go and try it, it is possible provided you are alerted early enough.

Yes, we need to build more jails or model them on USA jails so they are less like holiday camps. Let's think, JSA is what, about £60 a week, out of which you have to pay rent utilities and feed yourself, jail is all inclusive and you get paid a nominal wage provided you do more than sit on your backside watching TV.

And you responded;
You're contradicting yourself, you say your view wouldn't be different if someone had been killed in this incident then say you agree with locking people away who are a danger/menace, or don't you consider killers to be a danger or menace?

We know you’ve never made a secret of your belief that all old bill are corrupt (as 50% of your posts are about this), but it’s a bit off accusing them of something that didn’t happen. The UK borders are manned by the UK Border Agency and HMRC, albeit I grant you the police do have a presence at the control for those ENTERING the UK except when they are present to stop a known criminal leaving the country to escape justice.

What rubbish, anyone with half a brain can avoid trouble. There were thousands of students protesting and it was only a small percentage that acted like football hooligans.

Either you don’t understand the meaning of the word alas or are you actually saying you miss the hooliganism?

You keep saying people can’t get out of the way of a falling object despite evidence to the contrary and hint that the speed of a falling object is too great but haven’t quoted a speed to substantiate your belief. For your info a falling object travels at 32 feet per second squared. In case you lack the capacity to understand what that means, it means at the end of the first second it is travelling at 32FPS, and the end of the second second it is travelling at 64FPS, the third 128FPS ad infinitum until wind resistance stops it accelerating any further and it has reached its terminal velocity. Others have posted that it was an 8 storey building so it would have been falling for around 3 seconds. Scientific tests have established that the average person has a reaction time of 0.7 seconds, I would hope that police officers would have reaction times faster than average because of the nature of their employment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve said that before. Try telling that to those who have had a beating from the Spanish police and especially to the poor sod who got beaten up by them a couple of months ago, an incident that was witnessed by one of the forum members who posted about it on here, you were conspicuous by your absence on that thread. But then again you’ve never allowed the truth to interfere with your belief.

Prisons are there to house that portion of the population who refuse to abide by the laws of the land whether their crime involves violence/danger or not. If someone does not want to comply with the laws of society they have no right to live among society, that is the purpose of prison, to remove that person from society.

.

bil

So we should ignore the fact that the harsher prison sentances and treatment in the US has resulted in them locking up even more of their people than we do?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some kind of bleeding heart liberal.

For persistant criminals who won't conform, as far as I am concerned, you can render them down for soup, or use them for spare parts.

I just disagree with locking up nonviolents at a horrific cost to us all, which mostly doesn't reform them, but makes them worse.

whitelinen

so what?

HBG

Right at this time, the police are trying to identify people involved in the student riots by publishing lots of photographs, including a person running down the street with a container on fire (I think it’s a woman) and some clown kicking that ancient Rolls Royce containing Prince Charles and his new wife.

If those people are identified, they will be given exemplary sentences to stop the next student riots. I don’t see much wrong in that, out of control riots should not happen in a civilised society.

But, as the initial title of this thread implies, I worry about those idiots being grassed up by their mothers. The subject may have been nearly flogged to death, but it’s an important one, in my view.

We all have mothers and most of us adore them, and even if we don’t, they’re all we’ve got.

There should be a law to stop mothers grassing up their children.