Don't commit crime

That ought to work, why didn't they think of it sooner?

Most of these daft messages we have to have on everything nowadays is more of an arse covering exercise because of the 'I'm gonna sue' culture. Just like in the 'common sense is dead' post where the woman successfully sues for spilling hot coffee on herself (and my idea about the conditioner bottle). I'm sure I'd be very good at nitpicking the inaccuracies in a lot of things because I'm so logical like that, but I can't bring myself to add to the insanity (I can use that word, I looked it up; 'extreme foolishness', so ner!!), even for financial gain.

We're all treading on politically correct eggshells (no eggs were harmed in the making of this post), having to be careful about every word we say.

In my questionnaires, 90% of Police agreed that too many people use email to cover their backs, and 87% said they had to word them carefully in case they were forwarded.

It all comes down to where you draw the line, "warning...may contain nuts" on something that is nut-free but prepared in the same environment where nuts are prepared is fine, on a packed of nuts it is insulting peoples' intelligence. Carefully wording an email in case it offends staff or a member of the public is fine, having to worry about complaining to a friend about a difficult shift (as everyone has from time to time), well it just means email can't be used to keep in emotional contact with and get the support from friends and colleagues you might not get to see very often, surely this reduces officer morale. One of my comments says "I've stopped sending e-mails to colleagues wingeing about work etc as I've heard recently that our division is thinking about monitoring e-mails"; sometimes everyone needs a good winge, as evidenced in all the blogs in the sidebar and hundreds of others.

However, it seems that some people's intelligence needs insulting, though I don't know who's worse, those that try to sue because their coffee is hot and MacDonald's made them fat, or those that let them win. If they were never successful they wouldn't keep trying.

Soon we'll need signs everywhere saying 'don't commit crime', this will happen about the same time as someone is successfully let off because they weren't told not to (commit crime). These companies were silly to assume that people didn't know that their coffee was hot of their food was fattening, so who says it won't be the Police next who should have known better than to assume that ignorance of the law is no defence against it.

The spokeswoman in the article is right though when she says "If stating the obvious helps to reduce crime or has any impact at all we will do it...[w]e are not saying it is going to stop hardened criminals, but it may make someone who is nervous think twice."

I don't really know anything about actual Policing, is it the case that ignorance is becoming more of a defence? Is this part of why everything has to be so politically correct, stating the obvious in as many languages as possible?