Poll: Paris Brown, should she have gone?

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

There is a reason juvenile records (outside of felonies) are sealed once the person turns 18. Teenagers, for want of a better word, are idiots. They don't think "Gee, I should not post that on Twitter/Facebook, because it will still be available in the future when I've matured". You can say she was an idiot, and you'd be right. But 3 years makes a huge difference. You (and by "you", I mean anyone in favor of forcing a resignation/firing her) are basically saying a senior in high school should be punished for something they said as a freshman. No. Just..no.

Unfortunately she was 17 when she got the job so the 18 year seal-off wouldn't have affected her anyway.

I know. I was just using that as a launch-off for my point, which was that you can't hold a teenager to the same standards of conduct as you would a mature adult, because generally, the teenager will be less mature. I'm not saying all teenagers are the same, but look at it this way. There are a lot of 19-21 year olds who are, for want of a better word, party animals. Should we punish them for that behavior years down the line, regardless of how they conduct themselves when they mature further?

It depends on the job, in theory most employers wouldn't discriminate against someone with a 'rambunctious' past. The reality however, those with wild backgrounds can and have been passed over, especially when there is a large pool of prospective employees to choose from.

However an ambassador for the police should be held to higher standards, for example in New Zealand any sort of drink driving conviction will automatically disqualify you from enrolling to become a police officer. Her tweets are a little more ambiguous since they are just her talking about the abuse of drugs rather than an actual conviction but there are apparently a number of them and were posted in a public forum, wherein lies the problem.

You have a point. I'm not saying they should have ignored the tweets completely. Just not totally judge her on them. I mean, they gave her the job, then when that came up, fired her. Shouldn't they have let her performance speak for itself at that point? If she had broken the law, and could be proven to have done so, that would be one thing. But she's being basically punished for saying something online a few years ago. That's a bit much, in my opinion.

 

[Yopaz]

Tweets from a 14 year old are retarded? Call the press! Oh, someone already did...

Seriously, we're taking this way too seriously. However I will agree with the OP that I don't think the position she was filling is that important to have in the first place.

The fact that we are now being judged for the stupid shit we said when we are 14 on the other hand worries me. I know I have changed my views a lot since I was 14, hell, I've changed quite a bit since I was 18.

 

[Agent Cross]

I can't say with certainty in this case, but most tax paid (i.e. government/municipal) positions ask if you have been involved in illicit activities in the past. If she was asked and said no, like most people do, she should be immediately fired. Even if her records are sealed, this is a matter of public interest. So they would be unsealed. The point is moot though if she was never arrested for drugs/alcohol. Even if she was, she would've had to have the courts seal her record, which isn't always feasible.

In this age of social media. I think when you become a teenager schools should offer some sort of class, or at least a guide that details the ramifications you can face when using social sites. Depending on your choice of profession, some college professors will go out of their way to warn you about ruining your job prospects by being careless on Facebook/Twitter.

Case and point. My sister-in-law is a RN. She was turned down for a better paying job that she was offered, after the company did their due diligence and discovered some of the bile that she had spewed on Facebook several months back. I don't blame them. She was even warned by several of her co-workers of the negative effects of a future employer discovering her comments.

IMO. This girl just learned a very important life lesson.

 

[ThatDarnCoyote]

It's pretty much a cardinal rule of working for any organization, that you do not make the organization look bad in public. This is doubly true if you are working for a law enforcement agency. And it's triply true when your job is basically to do with public relations.

How can she function in that role now? How can she expect to be taken seriously when, for instance, she tries to do outreach to minority or immigrant youths, or to LGBT types, and all the slurs she tossed out on her Twitter get brought up?

She can't. If this is an important job (and I'm frankly not convinced it is) find someone else.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

While I think the whole idea of it was a waste of time, effort and money, so my choice is basically this:

"good, now scrap the job it's a waste of tax payer's money"

I will say that

A)Being a whiter than white little cherub doesn't really stand her in good stead for dealing with the yoof of today, she'd be pretty much as clueless as Chief constable McFlatfoot.

B)You ever seen what cops do off duty (or even on duty)?

C)14 FFS. She was 14. And yeah, maybe you weren't like that at 14, but then refer to point A).


*Looks up*

Okay, well, I'm going to be blunt about a few things that SNIP

Holy shit...I agree with Therumancer.

 

[Raven's Nest]

Her trial by media was harsh and wrong. Most of the papers reported it without mention of the age of her tweets, which are embarrassing to say the least but really aren't anything particularly concerning. You hear that kind of crap everywhere amongst youth and, shall we say, some of the more scum-like people in our society.

She was a stupid, frustrated girl back then and I've no doubt she still is. She did the right thing by stepping down, nobody could possibly do a great job at that age under such scrutiny, but it shouldn't have been caused by the fierce reaction of the press.

I don't personally believe her appointment is really one that deserved a full time wage, and the police really ought to have done more to recruit a more suitable candidate. If the police have learned anything by this, is that a lot of the causes of youth anti-social behaviour seems to stem from the very attitudes Miss Brown expressed throughout her youth. They see migrant workers as a threat to their futures and that all sense of restraint or personal responsibility is completely absent these days.

 

[RedLister]

Im a Kent man (23) and i wonder why this little toddler was even given a job at all. There are alot of good youth (yeah i know shocking eh? put away dat tar brush) Out of all the good ones they had to pick this airhead? Least the taxpayer won't have to pay for another half baked plan from the tories. Well if they go with the 2nd option of action.

 

[lemby117]

"good, now scrap the job it's a waste of tax payer's money" or "the poor girl has been hounded out over something she did when younger".

I personally fit into the 2nd option.

Just for the record her salary would have come out of the Senior Police Commissioners Salary, that said however we DO pay for the police commissioner.

OT: I'm a bit of option 3 and 2, on the one hand I think it's unfair to push this girl out of a job for stuff she posted 2 years ago, but on the other hand somebody so young should not be put in such a political environment.

 

[Yuno Gasai]

I think it was right of her to step down simply because so many people wouldn't understand that the tweets she posted were three years old, and that she didn't necessarily share the same viewpoints now. She made a legitimate point in that she felt that pressure from the media would have prevented her from fulfilling her duties in that post.

That being said, I do think that the tweets she posted that were picked up and highlighted by the media would have alienated Paris from other teenagers who were from the groups she was essentially slagging off (LGBT, ethnic minorities, etc). The media cunningly neglected to mention the age of her tweets, so for all they knew, those were her current thoughts. Would you want to speak to someone from the police if you knew they were openly against your sexuality or race?

The issue with giving any youngster a position in the police service is that it is such a public-centric role that you really do have to watch what you say everywhere. This isn't something that the majority of people understand - if you work for the police, you will be under scrutiny, end of. You can't afford to have lapses of judgement and to post the odd questionable remark here and there, you just can't.

I can appreciate what the Commissioner was trying to achieve by creating this role in the first place, but I'm not convinced it's the smartest of ideas given the age group they're targeting.

 

[somonels]

Had this happen 20 years prior nobody would know. It's a good little reminder as to what the internet is.

We were all little shits at 14.

But not all of us shat in public.

 

[CriticalMiss]

It's good that she resigned although she is a perfect ambassador for the alcoholic drugged-up teens of today so maybe she should have been given a raise instead? The fact she was breaking the law at a young age kind of goes to show she is/was irresponsible and didn't care for the law. Throw in some anti-social behaviour and you have someone who isn't exactly a shining beacon of hope.

I think the role itself is a crap idea too, the cops won't give a damn what the ambassadors say and the kids probably won't come up with any good ideas anyway. Better to spend the money to hire more people to put on the street stopping the crims.

 

[petrolmonkey]

"good, now scrap the job it's a waste of tax payer's money" or "the poor girl has been hounded out over something she did when younger".

I personally fit into the 2nd option.

Just for the record her salary would have come out of the Senior Police Commissioners Salary, that said however we DO pay for the police commissioner.

Actually I think it was something like £5,000 that came out of the police commissioners salary, so still £10,000 straight from the tax payer, and another 5 that was already being spent. As I understand it.

But that is all beside the point, yes she should have gone, not because of what she did but because of all the bad PR, thanks to the tabloids, which shouldn't have occurred in the first place, but thanks to them a 17 year old has had her name dragged through the mud and no doubt has no self esteem thanks to a pack of baying journalists calling for her to be sacked all in the name of a story. It would have been in the public interest had she had any real powers but it's a fairly pointless job/title that no one will take seriously anyway.

 

[Tom_green_day]

As a British 17 year old

From the same position as this dude, I've got to say that I don't want someone like her, who makes stupid tweets like that (and who uses twitter at all) to represent an age and nationality where we don't do that thing much. Either get someone who is normal, obeys the law and respects other people, or get rid of the job. We don't even need someone for this role, it's not like there's a huge problem with communication between the police and people of my age.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

I have a question:

Who out there dug through three years worth of tweets to find incriminating ones?

Did they just write a program to search for keywords on the slim off chance she tweeted one? Did a follower/ex-follower who remembered the tweets from 3 years ago pass the information to the media? Or was someone genuinely there digging through the minutiae of potentially thousands of tweets to find something incriminating?

Because most twitter users I've seen (I don't use it myself) post roughly 2-20 tweets per day. That's (assuming that every day is tweeted and that it has been exactly 365*3 days time since the tweets were made) between 2,190-21,900 banal tweets about the everyday life of a bored 14-17 year old.

I say banal because I highly doubt her tweets had anything of interest to anyone other than herself, family or friends.

OT: I think that the trial by media was unfair seeing as she had no real platform to defend herself from against several country wide, high distribution papers but that she had no option but to resign. The media have vastly misrepresented her past views as her current views, whatever the truth of that, and completely compromised her ability to carry out her job.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

Very, very relevant.


I don't really thing the media scandal really is all that fair since she really couldn't defend herself in any way, and I very much don't think judging people on what they did when they were younger is a good thing, but in general it's probably would have been best to delete the tweets as soon as she started to work to prevent these sort of problems.

Side note: Who was the one who played internet detective and discovered the tweets? It would be nice to know.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Yes she should've resigned or been fired. Why? Because her opinions her racist/homophobic opinions aside at least one of those is a blatant admission of what I assume is illegal activity (not sure of the laws in the UK).