@noname 380626 wrote:

That’d be a tough one to prove in court surely? They’d have to get evidence that the person posting it did it with the intention of misleading the police (which is likely to be a little difficult when all it really is is the police wasting their own time by believing what they read on t’intrawebs).

Might be a little difficult for you if you rang them with a tip off about a rave and they tracked you down – then maybe you’d get it for wasting OB hours, but don’t think any court would convict a case where the OB think you posted it deliberately up on some website you thought they would probably use to send them somewhere else. Even the most up tight judge would laugh that out of their court (and some of the more mental ones would likely do the OB concerned for contempt, or wasting court time or such)….

todays cops wouldn’t bother getting it all the way to Court. They’d get the info off FB, and use it as justification for a house raid/confiscating computers/sound equipment etc, especially if there is any previous intelligence of the targets being involved in this. Or they’d look for involvment in drugs dealing or other crimes. A lot of younger English coppers I have encountered over the years think the Courts are “namby pamby” and whilst cops can no longer be as physical in a “life on Mars” sense, they do use the hassles of being bailed/having property taken to beef up their enforcment of laws outside Courts!

A new trick round here is to make people surrender their sound equipment saying “if you have your day in Court, we will make sure the charges stick”. Unfortunately this seems to be the case as two friends of mine had a full jury trial and were convicted and sent down!

people in England have already been busted for joking about crimes..

the much wider problem is the cops in England at least have the rest of society behind them. There are people in the countryside what would like to discharge live rounds into crowds of ravers and destroy equipment themselves were it not for “political correctness!”