Hundreds of police officers disciplined for looking at porn at work
Recently, statistics showing how many police officers were reprimanded after being caught looking at inappropriate material on the Web at work was revealed. The statistics also reported the number of police officers caught using the police database for personal reasons.
According to the Daily Mail, hundreds of police workers have been reprimanded in the U.K. for looking at inappropriate material at work. Inappropriate material includes pornography and social networking sites such as Facebook. Apparently, approximately 439 officers and staff members have been caught. Some have been fired while others were disciplined in some other way.
Some officers have been fired for abusing the police database by using it for personal reasons, such as looking up someone’s background information. These figures were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
The report outlined the number of officers caught from each police force or area. Apparently, South Yorkshire was the worst with around 53 members caught looking at inappropriate sites. There were also reports of an officer uploading an unauthorized video onto a commercial Web site.
After analyzing the reports coming out of about 47 police stations, it was found that on average nine members of the police force have been punished for inappropriate use of the computers and Internet.
There are those such as Matthew Ellicott, chief executive of the TaxPayer’s Alliance who blames the technology for allowing officers to even go to the sites in the first place. Others such as Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation have expressed surprise at the alarmingly high numbers.
The reports of police officers using the system to find background information for personal reasons is a bit concerning. It is a scary thought that those that are supposed to be keeping the law may be abusing it. It is unclear if the police department will take extra measures to curb such behavior in the work place going forward.
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January 6th, 2010
Think about this sort of thing when you see the backscatter xray machine in your local airport. Sure, the image displayed to the agent may have your face blurred, but the image the machine takes doesn’t. And that’s the image that will be stored for an unspecified amount of time for forensic analysis should something happen. And that stored image will be accessible by government employees, some of whom (like the police above) won’t adhere to the policies in place.