The Criminal, Misdemeanor and Misdemeanor Judge of the City Pablo Casas rejected the presentation of the lawyer Florencia Arietto, backed by the prosecutor Celsa Ramirez, to block access to the “Police Map” platform, recently put into operation charge of a group of social and political organizations to receive cases of institutional violence and make transparent the functioning of the security forces.
“Do not make room for blocking the web page due to the non-existence of a crime,” maintains the magistrate’s ruling in reference to the site promoted by the legislator of the Frente de Todos Ofelia Fernández, the Center for Legal and Social Studies, the magazine Crisis, the Movement of Excluded Workers, the Political Investigation Team, the Association Against Institutional Violence, the Grito del Sur portal, and the Coordinator against Police and Institutional Repression.
According to what was disclosed by the iJudicial site, Arietto requested that the server that hosts the page be ordered to block access to the domain, considering that “Ofelia Fernández had committed the crime of abuse of authority by creating a website with the intention of obtaining sensitive and private data, for mere statistical purposes”.
And he added that “the statistical data could be obtained using the corresponding legal tools, such as a request for access to public information.”
For the judge, “It cannot be reasonably argued that an initiative aimed at revealing and publishing public information, based on the voluntary, free and informed contribution that the affected persons or possible witnesses decide to make, could in any way compromise judicial investigations and/or administrative actions related to acts of institutional violence”.
“The purpose is precisely the opposite: to contribute to the better and more effective monitoring of this class of crimes, and to favor the better functioning of the police institution,” he specified in an extensive letter.
“To the extent that the website https://www.mapadelapolicia.com/ tends to the defense and promotion of individual rights, as well as other supra-individual legal assets linked to the regular functioning of the public administration and the legality of the acts of the persons in charge of exercising public function, it could not imply at the same time the commission of a crime against the aforementioned legal assets,” he said.
The purpose of the “Police Map”
The “Police Map” had been officially launched last July 12 as a website to identify situations of institutional violence in the district and to “counter official opacity” Regarding the information on agents, entities and police stations of the force that act in the Buenos Aires area.
For the Buenos Aires legislator, it was “ridiculous” to want to block the page since she considered that it is “an extremely democratic platform that does not represent any type of abuse, but rather aims to detect true abuses of authority and give it some type of framework.”
In his ruling, Casas added that in a context in which denouncing this kind of incident generates fear among citizens, a “black figure” of crime is produced.
Consequently, it assessed that the Map has “the potential to help complete the information from public agencies, providing an estimate of unreported crimes and providing a diagnostic tool to assess the link between citizens and the public security system” .
