Back to the non arborial subject matter!

To recap, Robotic posted a link to a slashdot article about a guy who was having a private party, and was IMHO stupid enough to put it on Facebook and got 30 policeman turning up instead of 30 guests.

I've gone back to it, because today, as it seems to be every other day, there's an aricle about someone who did the same and 2-300 drunks turned up and trashed the place (googling gives you well on the way to a million, but, of course, many will be repeats).

So maybe the police were a little heavy handed, but what's wrong with them being pro-active? There was a very great risk that otherwise they would be turning up to a much nastier situation, calling for more resource.

The inference of the article was that the police were deliberately trawling Facebook, I find that a little unlikely, but if they were then that to me comes under imaginative crime prevention, not oppressive police state. I think it more likely that "they were informed by a concerned member of the public".

There are those in this thread that would take the opposite view, I think!