Be Careful What You Wish For: UK to Crack Down on Street Preachers and Other People Deemed Annoying

[rug]

November 12, 2013
By Terry Firma

Fifteen years ago, tired of yobs and hooligans and a perceived decline in civility, British prime minister Tony Blair and his New Labour cabinet cooked up a nasty little legal concoction. It’s called an ASBO. The acronym stands for Anti Social Behavior Order.

These civil orders were designed to be issued to people whose unpleasant behavior was not otherwise (easily) prosecutable under U.K. law. And as long as we’re talking about things like vandalism and public urination, no argument here.

But soon, British police and magistrates were handing out ASBOs for virtually every behavior that someone, somewhere, disliked, including public cursing, loitering, using (allegedly) racist language, and “being rude to members of the public.” The standard for issuing an ASBO was astonishingly low from the start: anyone thought to be causing “harassment, alarm or distress” could find himself on the wrong end of one.

Inevitably, I suppose, ASBOs have been issued to operators of soup trucks servicing the homeless (because the clients were observed to litter), and to an 87-year-old man whose judicial order specified that he was no longer allowed, on penalty of prison, to be “sarcastic” to his neighbors. (One of the problems with ASBOs is that if you break them, you can be jailed. A 20-something homeless man in Birmingham, having repeatedly broken his ASBO against begging, was sentenced to a total of five years behind bars for an offense that itself is non-imprisonable).

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/12/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-uk-to-crack-down-on-street-preachers-and-other-people-deemed-annoying/

Hmmm, I wonder how an ASBO would work in a SoP.

[dimbear]

1. I don't much like pyramid penalties, where mopery is a misdemeanor and conspiracy to commit

mopery is a felony. Too much flexibility for over-sentencing.

[rug]

2. +10

Just for using mopery.

[struggle4progress]

3. If it were an offense here to be annoying, I expect almost everybody I have known

would have a criminal record

I many decades ago lost count, both of those I have found annoying and of those who have found me annoying

[rug]

4. There would be a Grand Jury convening here.

[dimbear]

5. Nolo contendere. n/t

[struggle4progress]

6. That could give me an opportunity to do all the things I should be doing

when I'm just goofing off here at DU instead

[Fumesucker]

7. And yet, oddly enough, the incarceration rate in the UK is a small fraction of that in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate

Go figure.

[rug]

8. The UK has learned how to nip annoying people in the bud.

[goldent]

9. UK are tough on annoyingness and the causes of annoyingness