It's a good job that they had a pick-axe handle just lying around ...
'THERE'S BEEN A MURRRDER!' Plod probe Street View 'slaying'
Edinburgh cops investigating an apparent murder caught on Google Street View were delighted to discover it was a hoax perpetrated by a couple of mechanics. A concerned citizen alerted the boys in blue that images snapped by Google's all-seeing eye in the city's Giles Street showed a man beating down another with a pick axe …
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 10:00 GMT Phil W
Re: Can't help thinking
Unlikely, as any half decent lawyer would get them off, but I could see it being taken to court.
It would be exceedingly difficult for even the most pernicious of CPS prosecutors to successfully argue that they had committed a crime with their hastily staged murder scene, performed in front of no witnesses beside the Google car driver and his cameras who obviously didn't think there was a real murder in progress.
What I could really see happening on this side of the border though, is the concerned citizen who reported it being prosecuted for wasting police time.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 12:10 GMT heyrick
Re: Can't help thinking
"the concerned citizen who reported it being prosecuted for wasting police time." ... while the mechanics making the joke go directly to jail for years with no chance of parole because...
...examples MUST be set. People having a laugh without the required permits and debriefing? This sort of subversion must be nipped in the bud.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 12:19 GMT Alan Edwards
Re: Can't help thinking
> It would be exceedingly difficult for even the most pernicious of CPS prosecutors to
> successfully argue that they had committed a crime
Especially with the "victim" stood next to them, obviously very much alive. I think CPS'd have a malicious prosecution case on their hands if that got anywhere near a court.
If acting out a killing is a crime, the cast of The Mousetrap should be locked up on a daily basis.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 15:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Shame on...
The police see images of a bloke lying on the floor and somebody standing over him with a pickaxe handle. They would be negligent if they did not investigate it.
It sounds to me like they handled it proportionately. No large scale investigation, no CSI techs collecting evidence, no door to door enquiries, no closing down roads to preserve the crime scene - just a couple of uniformed coppers calling in to check everything was ok.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 10:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Nice one Lads!
If only they had a bottle of tomato ketchup around to make it really authentic!
A google car turned into my street in front of me two weeks ago, so once they upload the pictures there will be about 400 yards of me giving them a two fingered gesticulation..... If only I had a piece of paper and felt tip pen I could have given them a real message.
Mind you the driver was not very pleased with me, and pulled over and wound his window down. I gave him a few words about how evil Google are, and he had a fully prepared handout to pass to me, so I am obviously not the first to challenge them.
(and for the geeks: he had a laptop on the passenger seat, a metal " black box" on the passenger floor, and a netgear hub with 5 or 6 ports connected, cable-tied to the top of the box. The whole lot looked a bit hap-hazard, though I couldn't see in the back seats. And it was a Toyata Auris/Verso, i think)
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 10:57 GMT Dr Dan Holdsworth
Poor policing there...
If you actually visit that bit of the google maps and look back at the scene then as the google car leaves, you can see the "murder victim" first move to stand up, then in the next shot the corpse is standing, striding away back to the workshop.
Funny the police couldn't do that as well, isn't it?
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 11:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why weren't they arrested?
Acts like this upset people, create fear, lower the standing of the area, and waste police time. All crimes in one form or another.
If we don't clamp down hard on anti-social behaviour like this, we won't have a peaceful and harmonious society.
I guess this just goes to show why we need more cameras on our streets. If the police had been able to go back and view that video, they would have seen the set-up and would not have need to do anything else other than issue a warning/caution.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 14:12 GMT DavCrav
Re: Why weren't they arrested?
"Acts like this [...] lower the standing of the area[...]. All crimes in one form or another."
I don't think lowering the standing of the area is a crime, otherwise the Daily Mail would have another stick to beat immigrants with. (You see, if upstanding fellows like ourselves think that immigrants lower the standing of the area, well they must do, by definition.)
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 19:29 GMT Youngdog
Re: Why weren't they arrested?
"Acts like this upset people, create fear, lower the standing of the area"
No they don't, no they don't - aaaand no they don't.
"All crimes in one form or another"
Wrong again.
"If we don't clamp down hard on anti-social behaviour like this, we won't have a peaceful and harmonious society"
Ah - my irony detector is tingling. I think at the suggestion that a peaceful and harmonious society is achievable through the hard clamping down on things.
"I guess this just goes to show why we need more cameras on our streets...issue a warning/caution"
Oh yes I get it - well done you fooled me. Very funny indeed. What a (t)wit.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 11:44 GMT Velv
So is it a murder, or a man assisting a heart attack victim?
The Guardian had a great advert in 1986 about Point of View. Anything could have been happening.
It would have been good if the Police had conducted a "full investigation" and asked Google for the original undoctored images so they could identify the perpetrator.
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 12:16 GMT TeeCee
Modern policing.
Says something that a nice photo of a crime gets the plod out of their comfy tea room like a shot, yet it doesn't occur to them that the prospect of someone having been beaten to death on the street in broad bloody daylight without them having heard a peep is in any way odd.
Maybe if they relied on cameras less and traditional policing methods more, they wouldn't expect things like this to be possibly genuine....
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 12:36 GMT Tom Wood
Virgin Media
I found this on Street View the other day. This is outside Virgin Media's headend/depot in Leeds:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=seacroft+leeds&hl=en&ll=53.826635,-1.460538&spn=0.003175,0.006228&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.956293,102.041016&t=h&hnear=Seacroft,+West+Yorkshire,+United+Kingdom&z=18&layer=c&cbll=53.826139,-1.461179&panoid=ZpYnpZSDlgJ_R2Oudao2qA&cbp=12,57.36,,0,6.01
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Wednesday 4th June 2014 19:40 GMT Don Jefe
2050 - The StreetView Murder Revisited
I guarantee one of those atrocious 'historic forensics' shows will cover this one day and say it actually was a murder and they covered it up by doing it in front of a Googlecar.
I think the mechanic should write up a narrative to that effect as well, to be read upon his passing. Just to fuck with everybody. Hilarity, or something anyway, would ensue.
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