Spot swearing fines in bloody Victoria.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain.
Well, there is the old adage, “Nothing any good comes out of Victoria.” Now it seems that police there are being given the power, (which they love,) of fining people on the spot for swearing. There is at the moment no news regarding poor grammar and split infinitives. Legislators claim it will allow police to deal with it on the spot rather than clog up the court system.
This probably has more to do with revenue raising than keeping a bit of couth and decorum in the state, even though those Victorian bastards like to consider their bloody state to be the home of culture. Lets face it, the cost of taking it to court to fight it is probably more than the fine, even in the situation of a minimum wage earner who might barely take home that much in a week.
It is a really bad move for the justice system for these offences to be taken out of the court system. Courts provide a vital moderating influence because there is an independent arbiter to consider the facts of what in most cases happens in the heat of the moment. After proper consideration, a judge might in fact decide that the cop was in fact a cockhead or a f**kwit.
This places the average citizen at the mercy of whatever cop they get on the wrong side of. It is particularly bad news if he has had a bad day and feels like making a prick of himself, or missed out last night and is determined to make some poor bastard pay.
"Language deemed to be indecent, offensive etc etc" was the bit I had trouble with. Sounds like you could cop a fine for "f**kwit" even if you were able to pronounce the asterisks if a cop deemed it to be offensive. Hell, I reckon I can be plenty offensive without resorting to swear words.
ReplyDeleteLike you say, probably an easy revenue raiser. Oh, the AG probably thinks it'll speed up policing of the issue by keeping it out of the courts but it won't free up time for more real police work as he hopes if Vic Police finds it easier to have officers do little else all day long. It's low hanging fruit - you make it easier for the police to solve victimless technical offences committed by non-criminals and they'll start putting more man hours into that than into real crimes with real victims.
The press are mostly on about the swearing aspect, but the mention of offensive language is disturbing. To some cops, merely contradicting their idiot assertions is offensive.
ReplyDeleteYou are right in that the current revenue raiser - traffic, will now be supplemented with this shit. Meanwhile another generation is going to go through teens and early adulthood thinking the main purpose of the police is to make cunts of themselves.