Why are the police obsessed.....

[R1Geezer]

with collecting data from innocents?
http://news.sky.com/s...Details%2C_It_Emerges
and why are people stupid enough to leave their personal details?

[ummmm]

Why not?

Law abiding citizens tend not to get paranoid about their personal information.

[bednobs]

surely if you are phoning to report a crime it is in your interested to you leave your name and address and how to contact you? "please help i'm being burgled" "whereabouts madam?" "sorry i can't tell you"

[Eve]

I'm with ummmm, I have nothing to hide so it doesn't bother me.

I'd happily carry an ID card.

[R1Geezer]

ahh bless Ummmm, I'm welling up here, "the old nothing to hide nothing to fear" delusion, how quaint!

[237SJ]

I phoned to report a crime about 4 years ago and the Met police asked me not only my name and address, but my age and occupation. I fail to see any reason for them needing that information

[R1Geezer]

Bednobs these are crimes being reoported by the public which are not against themselves. Have you ever called the police to report something? Eg where I used to work used to be a hotspot for agressive begging etc, myself and others regularly informed the police but I always refused to give my details.

[bednobs]

i just re-read my answer and sorry about the crap english!

[jaydah]

because its easy to store info in the virtual world

[sara3]

I dated a Police Inspector. after date one he accessed all info known about me (I don't have a criminal record.. I've never even smoked a fag!). he then gloated on date two, whilst reeling off my address, and details of anything else he'd found.

that was the last date.

[bednobs]

So how are the police supposed to get back to you to let you know what they are doing? How are they supposed to know where to look if you wont give them any details? Asking people for their details when they phone to report a crime seems quite sensible to me, as does giving them

[237SJ]

sara I`d have reported him

[bednobs]

plus i read the article, and it said "This is comprised of people who have reported crimes" it didn't specify it wasn't against themselves did it??

[237SJ]

I have no problem at all leaving my name and address. If people didn`t leave their name and address there could be any number of annonymous, malicious accusations against people for no reason. I still think it`s uncessary to leave age and occupation though.

[sara3]

237, I considered it but he turned out to be mentally unhinged, and he scared me. he's 6'5" and I'm just a diddy woman. I decided he would make a potentially very bad enemy.

but I know I should report him, in theory. I may one day.

[Eve]

I don't see what's bad about it though. I'm sure it can assist with intelligence analysis in a number of ways, patterns of crime and reporting which can be useful for helping to spot, for example, trends in fraud such as fake insurance claims and, subsequently serve as useful evidence.

I'm sure if comes into play with other useful evidence as well, like recording 999 calls and similar. Similarly tracing witnesses and people with useful information, I'd say the person calling something in could be vitally important, even years down the line in some cases.

I have no problem with the police having my details. If something happened and they needed to get hold of me urgently for some reason, I'd rather they have my contact details than not.

[ethandron]

and quite right too eddie, can't think of any good reason why that shouldn't happen.

[ummmm]

Geezer...I had a crazy woman keep accusing me of harassment. I had the police out to my door 4 or 5 times. One time at 6am.....if they didn't have my details they wouldn't know to not take the accusations seriously...

[R1Geezer]

bednobs, no doubt the database has those reporting burglaries etc, I'm talking about the crimes where the reporters I'd is totally irrelevant. They are merely doing their civic duty and couldn't care less what plod actually does, they just want to have a clear concience about reporting the crime.

[ethandron]

maybe those who are obsessed with NOT wanting their data collected could explain why they're so against it?