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REAL LIFE NEWS: FACEBOOK PHOTO LEADS TO FALSE ARREST

by Hazed

Now this is a scary story about police incompetence and misuse of social networking...

Toronto Police who were investigating a fight in a bar between two girls asked the one who had been assaulted to identify her assailant. So she looked through some profile pictures on Facebook of people who had “liked” the bar, before picking Lizz Aston, a local artist as the perp.

That’s right, those tiny, fuzzy little pictures on Facebook were used as if they were proper police mugshots.

As it happened, Lizza hadn’t visited the bar for months, and there was plenty of evidence that she’d been at an art opening for a friend. But the police failed to carry out the most rudimentary checks: they took the identification as fool-proof evidence, and Lizz was arrested, finger printed, processed, dragged into court on numerous occasions, and had to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers fees to get the charges withdrawn.

What were the Toronto police thinking? This outrageous case shows how misunderstanding of technology, sloppy investigation and assumption of guilt can lead to a nightmare for an innocent person.

It also goes to show just how hard it to it get the authorities to admit they’ve made a mistake and do something to correct it, rather than allowing bureaucratic inertia to carry on with charges against the wrong person.

Truly scary.

Source: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2012/04/04/19591621.html

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