Lacrosse Tribune Article - apparently a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student was ticketed for underage drinking after he was friended on Facebook, and the cop giving him the ticket had Facebook pictures of him holding a beer. He was one of at least eight people who were cited for underage drinking based on social networking sites, according to the article.
Does this seem likely to you? Are there policemen in the U.S. spending their time looking at Facebook sites just to ticket underage drinkers? Have you ever heard of this from any other source? This seems highly unlikely to me, but maybe I don’t have a very good handle on what cops spend their time on.
I can see using social sites for catching fugitives, but underage drinking? This is a crime that is taken so seriously that police resources must be used to fight it?
This doesn’t seem right to me. Wouldn’t the cop have to catch the kid in the act? And besides, a picture of someone holding a beer doesn’t prove the person is actually drinking it.
My parents have a picture of me at three years old holding an empty beer bottle, pretending to drink from it. I shudder to think what might happen if it ever fell into the hands of the law… hopefully the statute of limitations has expired!
One part of me says “Good on you,” I’ve seen too much damage done by young underage drinking. Of course I’ve seen just as much damage by older people drinking too
On the other hand I hope the case would get thrown out. I would like to think it’s a wake up call to young people. So I can see both sides
The article doesn’t say, but I suspect U of Wisconsin has a dedicated campus police force, in which case, combating under-age drinking and associated problems is basically their job description.
In anycase, its not like it takes a swat team and a million dollars to flip through facebook photos and issue some tickets.
A photo is proof of possession, to some extent, but it’s not proof of consumption. If the law is against any possession, then there might be a case. If the law is against consumption, this is going to get thrown out of court and hopefully law enforcement involved will be given the what for for wasting resources this way.
I’m hard-pressed to imagine how a photograph could be solid evidence of possession or consumption of alcohol. Of a bottle or can that is labeled as containing alcohol, or of a liquid that looks like it’s alcoholic, okay, but actual alcohol itself?
They were practicing for a play, using props and water (colored if necessary). The photograph doesn’t prove a thing. How could one get convicted if they fought it instead of rolling over and paying the fine?
You mean, prove like mathematically? like the lengths of the sides of a right triangle? probably not. But prove to the satisfaction of the court that the liquid in the beer can he was drinking at a college party was in fact beer, with alcohol and everything. Probably.
How? I mean, presuming the picture clearly shows him drinking out of a beer bottle at a party, what exactly is he going to claim? Someone photoshopped the beer bottle into his hand and broke into his facebook account to post it in his album? Someone above thought he could say he was in a play, but plays have audiences and performances and such, is he going to get a bunch of people to perjure themselves and say that they saw some play and work to make sure they agree on the details, assuming he himself is willing to commit perjury to get out of a $200 dollar fine.
They said there were several pictures, presumably they could identify the beverage as alcoholic.
I dunno; maybe if it was a campus police doing this, I can see it. I didn’t know campuses had dedicated police forces. Of course, I could be seeing this as much less serious than the campus police do, since the “kids” involved in the story would have been drinking legally in Alberta for two years already.
I attended UW-Madison, and there was a UW police department there that dealt with campus-related crimes. UW-Lacrosse is a smaller school, but Google tells me they do have University Police as well.
