Violent Crime Reduction Bill

My Lords, I share the condemnation of the noble Baroness of happy slapping, but I wonder whether her amendment is sufficiently tightly drawn. Obviously, what she has in mind is those who video rapes, muggings or fights outside a pub in which several men kick another man in the head while he is lying on the ground, and so on. In such cases, her amendment would be entirely justified, but there is no requirement in the amendment for the criminal offence to be a serious one. This may sound far-fetched, but suppose that a particularly unpleasant individual lived in a street who was disliked by all his neighbours and someone videoed him creeping out late at night to deposit illicit rubbish in someone else's recycling bin, or something like that, and all the neighbours got together to laugh at that individual’s misdemeanours being revealed. More pertinently, perhaps, what about, heaven forbid, another 9/11? Let us suppose that someone were to video an al-Qaeda plane crashing into a skyscraper on Canary Wharf and hand the video over to the police, assuming that no one else had videoed it. Surely, it would not be wrong for him to keep it to show to his family and friends time and time again, just as—whether or not it is right for them to do so—people enjoy seeing a replay of the 9/11 tragedy when planes crashed into skyscrapers. It may be wrong of them to do so, but I suggest that millions of people do. I fear that that would be automatically caught unless more discretion is given to the prosecuting authorities to ignore such things. Even if the video were handed over to the police for the purposes of trying to track down and prosecutethe individuals concerned, it would still be an offence for the person who took the video to keep it for the purposes of replaying it to his family and friends.