Anti social behavior orders?
Are You In Favor Of Asbos?
by minimus 15 Replies latest jw friends
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blondie
Why?
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stillajwexelder
passing laws is piss easy - enforcing them is another matter
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minimus
Because some Europeans are suggesting that Tony Blair's enforcing of this is similar to making England a Nazi state.
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blondie
As Britain curbs bad conduct, critics fear a 'nanny state'
Government's behavior orders draw criticism
By Alana Semuels, Globe Correspondent | October 23, 2005
LONDON -- Most people who read the British newspapers know about the mother who walks around her house in her underwear, the man who likes to sunbathe in a pink thong, and the woman who threw a rhubarb at her brother during a family spat.
All three received antisocial behavior orders from the courts, which told them to cease actions that could be considered alarming or distressing to others. Their names were published in the papers, as were their offenses, and they joined thousands of others throughout the country who have been ordered to change their ways.
Antisocial behavior orders, or asbos, are the backbone of Prime Minister Tony Blair's respect agenda, which he has addressed with renewed zeal since Parliament returned from summer recess Oct. 10. While the orders have been around since the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, police and local officials have been given more power in the past two years to issue and enforce them.
The orders prohibit a person from engaging in a specific behavior -- provoking neighbors, disgusting beachgoers, or throwing vegetables. Violating the orders can land a person in jail.
The Labor government says the orders help protect the public from hooligans who are terrorizing neighborhoods.
Tabloids publish stories weekly about crime; there seem to be hundreds of elderly women getting attacked on buses and couples fearful of venturing outside at night.
But civil rights groups say that they are increasingly concerned that the orders are being used to stop relatively innocuous behavior, and that the respect agenda is blowing things out of proportion. Some accuse Blair of creating a ''nanny state."
The Council of Europe's human rights commissioner warned this summer that some aspects of ''asbo-mania" might be violating human rights law.
Graham Bourne, a musician who received an order earlier this month for playing loud music and fighting with his partner in a posh London square, told the court, ''Asbos belong in Nazi Germany."
Alex Gaskell, legal officer for Liberty, a human rights organization, said the orders are targeting eccentric behavior as antisocial, and in some cases, criminal.
Neighbors are encouraged to keep ''asbo diaries" recording disturbing behavior that can be presented in court.
When the government decided to keep track of complaints of antisocial behavior for one day in 2003, more than 60,000 were tallied -- including litter on sidewalks and illegally parked cars.
''Asbos seem to arise from situations that are a neighborhood dispute. The trouble is, who wins seems to be who complains to the council first," Gaskell said. ''The court is surprisingly ready to accept evidence."
People can ask the police, the transport police, some landlords, or the local council -- the equivalent of a city council -- to file for an antisocial behavior order in the courts.
About 97 percent of requests are granted, according to AsboConcern, an alliance of organizations troubled by the number of orders.
''There is an element of moral panic," said Matt Foot, a solicitor with London law firm Birnberg Peirce & Partners and coordinator of AsboConcern. ''I think there is a hysteria about this that in my view is out of sync with the nature of the problem."
The British Crime Survey found that incidents of vandalism, noisy neighbors, and loitering teenagers had fallen since 1992, while the overall crime rate dropped by more than 40 percent over the past decade.
There were 4,649 antisocial behavior orders issued between April of 1999 and December of 2004, according to the most recent government statistics, although the government's focus on the issue suggests that the figures for 2005 will be higher.
But even as the media publicize the most ridiculous-sounding antisocial behaviors -- the elderly man who was prohibited from being sarcastic, the teenager who was banned from using the word chicken, the boy who had to stop wearing hooded sweatshirts -- the orders are being embraced by many across the country.
A poll this summer suggested that 5 percent of Britons strongly oppose the orders.
In Camden, an innercity borough of London that has given out more asbos -- 172 as of the end of September -- than any other area of the city, council members say the rates of antisocial behavior and crime have dropped and residents are less worried about crime.
Some, like David Austin, 42, a security doorman at the Camden pub The Griffin, support the orders. His brother was killed a few years ago by hooligans whose faces were caught on a surveillance camera, but no arrests were ever made.
''There's no discipline," he said. ''There's no law and order. England's getting as bad as New York was in the 1970s."
But others question whether Britain is truly in the midst of a moral decline.
They see a touchy country in which neighbors spy on neighbors, crying foul at the slightest provocation.
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minimus
That's what I was reading, Blondie.
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Sam the Man
The media are guilty of hyping the 'hoodie' story up. I can write and write and write about this Minimus, but all I shall say to you is this: End game of the illuminati.
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Sam the Man
Damn...well, I am using Firefox.
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nilfun
Once the order has been made, the suspect can be jailed for up to five years for any breach, however tiny. Thus, and I'm not making this up, a man who had an anti-social behaviour order prohibiting from being noisy had to appeal to Harringey magistrates to get him out of prison for the 'crime' of belching on a communal fire escape.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1273847,00.html
