The county sheriff here is said to have started requiring his deputies to document any and all porn found at crime scenes and during arrests, a policy the American Civil Liberties Union is calling something close to a bid for thought control.
But Cache County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Matt Bilodeau said law enforcement has seen a gradual rise in porn tied to crimes, though he acknowledged that no explicit connection between legal porn and criminal behavior has yet been proven.
Bilodeau likened the new policy to the way law enforcement approaches gang crime. "[Gangs] have certain clothes they wear, markings on their houses, tattoos," he told reporters. "Like gangs, people who use pornography have associated traits, and we'll define them so we can link them to crimes and pornography."
Utah’s ACLU chapter head, Dani Eyer, would like to know just where the Cache County sheriff got such a notion, comparing the sheriff's edict to rummaging a suspect’s book shelf and trying to build a criminal profile based on the books he reads. "It's one thing to collect evidence to crimes,” Eyer told reporters, “but it's another thing to link thought and association to crime."
Bilodeau said porn has been linked to sex crimes in the past but an overall tie between the material itself and criminal behavior is not yet proven. All the sheriff hopes for, he said, is help identifying the exact extent of any such problem, including help “with data for lawmakers to pass laws to protect those who want to be protected.”
Eyer isn’t buying that. "If it's not part of the crime – not part of the situation they're investigating – it's getting dangerously near the thought control and association control that causes the ACLU concern," she said.
