© Reuters
Pedophiles guilty of lower level offenses should be diverted to mental health treatment programs rather than prisons, a senior police chief has suggested.
Chief Superintendent Gavin Thomas, president of the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales, has called for a different approach to rehabilitating those who have viewed indecent images of children online but have not committed contact offenses.
Citing the rapidly growing sex offenders' register, Thomas warned that police do not have the resources to properly monitor all of those on the list."One of the major concerns from our members is managing the register already, and it's growing. For offenders at the highest level there are visits to be made [and] monitoring access to the internet," he told the Times.
"Should we be going down the criminal justice route or, based on a proper assessment, should we be going down the health route? At the moment I am not seeing alternative thinking on how we deal with this issue as it grows and grows and grows," he said.
There are nearly 45,000 offenders on the register today, up from 32,000 a decade ago.
Comment: The sad fact is that with so many cops behaving like murderous beasts it is in a citizen's best interest not to mouth off to them and comply with reasonable requests. That a class on this subject has to be mandatory teaching in schools is an acknowledgment that we are living in a police state and in order not to be killed we'd better shut up and and behave like good, little children.