What's the voltage across the cap? May be it's lethal, that's why they do it.
I used to be a big fan of bleeding resistors. Not anymore as, apparently, electrolytic caps don't like to be discharged, it's bad for oxide layer inside. Somebody said it's good that PN-junction has a voltage drop of ~0.6, this way ICs cannot discharge caps to zero. So, I'd put a diode in series with the resistor so voltage doesn't drop much below 0.6V.
I myself didn't verify this, but what I did notice that after charging caps to their rated voltage and waiting for a few minutes the leakage current starts to drop. So, I can believe that maintaining cap charged helps it.