Because the powers that be get sensitive about things that could allow people to physically attack members of the powers that be. Or, in simpler terms: Because the person hearing the lawsuit is a judge.
I think they are smarter than you think they are. I bet they would laugh this argument out of the room. Try getting all guns banned in the US by arguing that they endanger judges.
There have been countless examples of police organizations using surveillance in ways beyond their initial use -- so certain people like the mayor or judges might think "the police would be too dumb to try to use this against somebody like me", but if the system is essentially a dragnet where they store all the data, then they do actually track the judges and public officials in reality since the data would be stored -- just because they aren't accessing it today doesn't mean they can't in the future -- a FOIA request might be used to request all of the mayor's movements over the past year. Just the request itself may cause the mayor or other officials to want the program to be disbanded because they realize it can be used to mine information about where public officials are moving. What if the mayor threatened to cut funding to the police, so they decide to mine the dataset to see if they can find something in the database that would make the mayor look bad that they can leak to the press, etc. So it should force the issue of saying what data gets stored and the legality of collecting it in the first place on literally everybody vs. particular people of interest. Its only a matter of time before you have something happen like, "hmm, the mayor seems to be spending a lot of time at a random apartment in one part of town... oh look who is this random woman that lives there that is most definitely not his wife... hmmmmm what should we do with this information"..
Sadly, the ACLU today would support surveillance if someone made the argument that it could be used to track “racists and Nazis”. It’s a shame what has happened to the institution. I stopped donating a few years ago because it’s been captured by ideologues whose ideologies incompatible with civil liberties.
For this to change, more people who share an aversion to mass surveillance have to get involved in politics.
There are lots of people like this, but they are either apolitical, apathetic, hopeless, don't want to get their hands dirty, think politics is beneath them, that their resistance would be ineffectual, or they are too busy with other things.
Given the scope of human experience now encompassed by "politics", that's not sustainable.
Or as someone else once put it:
"130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform."
I wasn't suggesting doing nothing, nor was I suggesting fixing everything. I was critiquing your trite suggestion to "get involved in politics."
What? Vote? Write letters? Bitch on the internet? All that does is make people feel better about the system as it rolls over them.
The system has more power over our lives than at any other time in history because people act in the ways the system permits them to act. I don't have the answers, but for sure it isn't going to be more of the same.
As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've managed to hold on to.
So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.
Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office.
Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public.
On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too.
The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead.
(As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)
"Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public."
Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office.
Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.
Interestingly, there was a three-month extension of the three Patriot Act provisions, included in a House resolution to prevent a government shutdown. It's bad that these things are linked in the same resolution to begin with, and it leads to an unnecessarily hard choice for politicians. Even someone wary of mass surveillance can't just say no to keeping the government open. Often, this is how a lot of this stuff gets passed.
Why are the two disparate things so often tied together in the first place? Similarly today, we see Republicans tying together the repeal of section 230 with the extra stimulus money demanded by the president. It really makes no logical sense why these things are bundled together as one bill, either.
> It really makes no logical sense why these things are bundled together as one bill, either.
It makes perfect logical sense for a majority-government party which wants to quash scrutiny from the opposition, while also ensuring support from its own dissenters.
Why are they tied together? Because someone proposed an amendment to the bill, and enough people voted for it for the amendment to pass. Then politicians don't have to put their name on voting for the extension to the "Patriot" Act. But some of them still voted for this. With some research, they could be named and shamed.
That's an outdated understanding of how the Senate works in the McConell era. No one voted for amendments. Nowadays these things are worked out behind closed doors by Republican leadership and then sprung onto the schedule with as little opportunity for debate as possible.
This type of surveillance doesn't reduce crime rate, and your vote on the matter is meaningless if the people doing the surveillance are LYING to you about what that surveillance entails.
How do you know it does? The pro-surveillence side needs to put forth positive evidence. The precautionary principle is the only just, non-authoritarian option for situations like this. I know the targets are mostly in neighborhoods that you probably don't frequent, but those people have the same rights you do, and that includes the right to reasonable privacy.
They do publish evidence. Seems to increase the "closure" rate by 5-10%. It's not perfect data, because they are only flying during the day, so crime committed at night may just be harder to solve.
Yes, even in Baltimore, where both violent crime and property crime are less than half what they were 25 years ago. Crime won't usually hit an all-time-low every single year, but it was much higher in the past than the present.
>According to the wiki page on this, the murder rate is now 3 times high than 1977 (start of data on the table).
From the link[0] I posted previously"
"Lastly, we turn to another place where crime and violence spiked in 2015: Baltimore. This year, Baltimore’s story continues to be a mixed one. The total number of crimes reported in the city fell by almost 6 percent compared to 2018 (through the last week of November), with violent crime falling by about 2.5 percent. Robbery, burglary, theft, and auto theft decreased modestly, while reported rape fell dramatically — with law enforcement documenting nearly 26 percent fewer offenses."
As I said, crime is down in Baltimore. Continuing to say say "crime is up in Baltimore" doesn't make it true.
Why not support lowering crime rates even more? Comparing the crime rates in Baltimore to other western countries, there's still plenty of room for improvement.
>Why not support lowering crime rates even more? Comparing the crime rates in Baltimore to other western countries, there's still plenty of room for improvement.
Where, exactly, did I say we shouldn't "support lowering crime rates?"
It’s hard to reduce crime rates when you constantly manufacture new types of victimless crimes and create lucrative black markets to incentivize participants to use assault, intimidation and murder in the course of business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore I'm pretty sure rape, murder, burglary, and assault aren't victimless. Feel free to educate yourself, it looks like the rates of these horrible crimes are going upwards.
Let me educate you on causative factors. Many homicides are the byproduct of the war on drugs. Drug use itself is a victimless crime.
During prohibition the national murder rate was incredibly high. When alcohol was legalized suddenly the murder rate plummeted.
You see, when you take a popular substance and make sale/distribution illegal, you create an opportunity for those willing to take the risk to get rich making and selling said substance.
But the problem with getting rich that way is now you have a bullseye on your back. your place of business is loaded with cash and valuable substances. It’s hard to put cash in banks without risking arrest, and you can’t call the police if someone threatens or steals from you. But you can easily afford your own guns, and your own security.
And when someone tries to kill you or steal from you or rat you out, you just kill them. After all, the prison sentences for trafficking are just as bad as the ones for murder, so you won’t be making things worse for yourself.
And the good news is you have plenty of money to pay others to do lots of crimes to protect your business and markets. Enough to buy your own corrupt cops even. Not only will they top you off, but they’ll be happy to no knock raid your competitors.
All of this is equally true for pimps (why hire willing sex workers when unwilling are cheaper? After all you going to jail either way, make no money while the sin shines), and bookies, and gambling operations, etc, etc, etc.
Police can't really face any consequences for lying, so why wouldn't they?
On an individual level it doesn't matter even if the lie is in a courtroom for the purpose of turning a murder into justified deadly force! Why wouldn't an organization of police lie even more when they know full well neither the org nor the individual officers will be punished?
Even in this story the truly disturbing part is this:
> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit eventually ruled in BPD’s favor in the case.
ACLU is appealing the decision, but where are the obstruction / perjury / contempt charges for all the individuals that lied?
In the current system maybe. All things can change, laws especially.
But there seems to be heavy bipartisan support federally/executively for mass surveillance in the US so good luck with getting your privacy protected nationally.
Your best hope is some local policy changes at the state or municipal level in Baltimore or Maryland. Which may inspire change elsewhere.
Yes -- if you or anyone else is a concerned citizen please look into your local district attorney and your state's attorney general.
Make sure your DA knows that if they aren't willing to indict criminal cops they will be out of a job. We just did this in Los Angeles! No clue how far the new guy will take it, but he definitely understands that this was a referendum on the previous DA's near-absolute refusal to even consider indicting police misconduct.
Things can change, but only in ways that are beneficial to the system. Corporations and governments at every level now have more power over human affairs than they have at any other time in human history.
The headline says "lied about" but I think it should be updated to "lied to a judge about" - that's perjury! Nothing in the article about them being charged :(
Lets spend that spy plane money on mental health professionals and stuff that actually helps people and lets us not use the police for everything all the time.
Instead of “defund the police” how bout “legalize victimless behaviors”?
If cops weren’t tasked to police what you put in your body and what you do with other consenting adults, we’d need far fewer of them and we’d probably appreciate the remaining cops a lot more.
It seems like the more I read about the police, the more I realize that in their current form, they are unnecessary. For general policing, as in keeping the population safe and dampening crime, they don't need spy planes, they need legs; they don't need pistols, they need communication skills; they don't need body armor, they need to earn the trust of the people that pay them.
If 99% of police encounters don't involve violence, then 99% of police don't need to be equipped for violence. We need 1% of high speed, low drag, well funded SWAT teams, and the rest can just trudge around on foot.
Police should be able to pack heat and use it pursuant to local laws. They should be able to fly whatever planes they want but in compliance with the same laws (including ones about intercepting communications) as everyone else, They are a civilian police force so they should get the same rights as other civilians. The double standards are the root issue.
You aren’t totally wrong, but your view is a recipe for disaster because sooner or later most cops are thrust into that 1% scenario, and they need the ability to defend themselves and you.
The better solution is to eliminate the drivers of friction between honest citizens and cops, especially those traffic create more violent encounters. No knock warrants, the war on drugs, civil forfeiture, vice squads and the criminalization of victimless crimes, the “trafficking myth” war on sex workers, etc.
Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers. Remember when they looked at 2 years of body-cam footage for one of their highest earners and came out the other end with 32 counts of assault, false imprisonment and generalized misconduct? [1]
>Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers.
Baltimore is #11 on a list of most violent cities in the world[1]. There are children and good people trying to live in those crime-ridden neighborhoods. The police is not the problem. I feel for the cops there because you can't take one of the most violent cities in the world and expect to police it like Sweden. As such, I wish they maintained their surveillance program because it works and it would result in more perps being taken out of that victimized community.
>And what about the victims of false imprisonment due to a wholly corrupt police department?
What about them? False imprisonment is a problem, but not at the scale of the crime in that city. Baltimore had 350 homicides and 2000+ robberies/assaults/rapes, and thousands more thefts and property crimes [1].
Let me pose a question to you: At what point do we start focusing on victims of crime again? All I hear is about police reform, and about criminal rights. Who stands up for the good people living in the violent neighborhoods of St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore etc.? When will the focus be set on the victims in those neighborhoods? Do the people there have a right to not be victimized? Who enforces those rights? A 7 year old girl was killed by a stray bullet in Atlanta recently[2]? What is the ACLU doing for her, her family, and other such families?
>working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.
Maybe the fact that Baltimore cops are forced to deal with the worst of humanity in one of the most violent cities in the world plays a role here? Maybe you need to lower the crime rate before you can expect policing to improve?
The only thing the police provide victims is a deterrence for criminals and for some, perhaps, a sense of justice and closure. Beyond that, there is nothing more the police can do for victims. Victims need laws passed to help their communities from turning to crime in the first place or laws that decriminalize so called victimless crimes. Part of those changes means funding schools and small businesses and tax abatement for those in most need. So now, while we are talking about funding we look at the city budget. Lo and behold, police departments take a lot (in some cases a plurality) of total tax revenue that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence. That is why we talk about defunding police. That is the context in which we are focusing on victims. The police create many victims on their own and currently have no internal way to fix that problem.
>When talking about policing, the only thing it provides victims is deterrence for criminals. Beyond that, there is nothing more the police can do for victims.
What about taking criminals out of the community and locking them away in prison? Would that not help? Because that's what this surveillance program would do. It allows the police to view footage after the crime occurred and track down the perp. It wouldn't help that victim, but it would prevent the next one.
>Lo and behold, police departments take a lot of tax money that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence and so that is why we talk about defunding police.
False choice. You don't need to defund the police to fund whatever program you want. And you make it seem like there is some magic social program just waiting to be funded that would solve criminality but the evil police budget is what prevents it from being implemented. As if!
I never said it was the only way. You made it a false choice in your mind.
Locking people up is a deterrence but it creates many criminals by putting them in depraved conditions for extended periods of time, then depriving them of employability and then as an insult, charging monthly fees for probation or other post-incarceration monitoring.
The last thing I want to point out is how often the police victimize people and create new victims. It's incredibly common.
You wrote: "police departments take a lot (in some cases a plurality) of total tax revenue that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence. That is why we talk about defunding police."
Where is the evidence that the police budget is what is preventing social programs to be funded? That is a fiction driven from the inane sloganeering around 'defund the police'. You can fund any program you democratically pass and that has nothing to do with police budget. That's the false choice you're putting out there .. that somehow you have to choose between 'funding the police' OR funding social programs.
Here's the reality, we're spending billions on social programs. There are no silver-bullet social programs that we know will lower crime rate.
>It's incredibly common.
Uh huh. Care to quantify that? Because I think you're basing this on nothing.
The counterpart to your argument is that the police brutality hasn't really made much of an impact to crime in Baltimore, certainly not a positive impact. Indeed, the homicide clearance rates in Baltimore are pretty poor, which means the police aren't putting the criminals in prison, and your support for police brutality isn't real support for the innocent crime victims but only lip service.
> Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers. Remember when they looked at 2 years of body-cam footage for one of their highest earners and came out the other end with 32 counts of assault, false imprisonment and generalized misconduct? [1]
That's police brutality.
Your reply:
> The police is not the problem. [...] Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police due to documented police brutality is at least indirect support for police brutality. Beyond that, your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime would imply more direct support for police brutality, especially since you seem to justify their actions as "tough policing," which I fail to understand in any way other than a polite euphemism for "police brutality."
Please indicate how the policies you support, i.e., "tough policing" differs from police brutality. As I said in my previous comment, I fail to see how "tough policing" is anything other than a polite euphemism for police brutality.
You can't stop straw manning me, can you? Please indicate where I showed support for 'tough policing'?
The only policy I argued for was this drone program because that has real potential in getting criminals out of the community.
The argument about 'tough policing' is not one of support, nor is it a justification of any police brutality. Police officers should be held responsible for breaking the law and 'police brutality' is against the law. All I argued is that the type of policing you get is a result of the environment. I made this argument as a counter argument to the trope that somehow policing causes crime and if we can just fix policing that crime will magically go away. That's not how it works. You can put as many regulations as you want (and police are already highly regulated - for good reason), but you're not going to get easy-going Nordic-style policing in one of the most violent cities in the world. You're also not going to lower crime rates either. Again: that's neither support for, nor a justification of police brutality.
On a careful review of your comments, you indeed never actually stated support for "tough policing," so I will retract that portion of my statement.
On the other hand, you did say at the very beginning, and I will quote your words here:
> Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
which I am honestly not sure how it is meant to be interpreted, if not as a statement of support for "tough policing" (at least in theory, since any policy that generally priotizes ensuring the criminals are caught over police not violating their moral, and constitutional, obligations is very likely to result in police violating those obligations).
>which I am honestly not sure how it is meant to be interpreted
Here's how: we have entire movements preoccupied with spreading FUD over any policy that aims to curb crime. We have movements preoccupied with letting violent criminals out of prison (trust me, there is no way to reduce the prison population without releasing violent offenders).
This story is an example of this. Look at the facts: Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the world (not just in Maryland, not just in USA, in the effin world).
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out. Who is standing up for them? I don't see ACLU lawsuits to protect their rights - do you?
There is an attempt to curb this by introducing a drone program to attempt to provide some relief for this by improving police investigative powers and catch more criminals. And this program is the opposite of 'tough policing'. ACLU and other organizations focus lawsuits on this program to get rid of it (not to create common sense policies around, but to get rid of it) - why? Because they care more about safeguarding criminal rights, then the rights of citizens to safety.
It's fucked up and that's what I mean by "Victim-rights trump criminal-rights."
Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the world (not just in Maryland, not just in USA, in the effin world).
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out.
If you make it excuses for any and every instance of police brutality—which you’ve demonstrated you’re willing to do—you are effectively supporting police brutality. That is obvious, and for you play naïf when someone points it out is an act of bad faith. Please stop doing that.
Allowing cops to commit crimes doesn’t help victim-rights, it creates more victims and more citizens unwilling to assist police.
Did you read the article? Prosecutors didn’t make up the charges against this officer, they have documented video proof. There is no reason to arrest and assault bystanders, none.
I believe the vast majority of cops are doing their jobs legally and honestly. But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t, or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
I did. ACLU is trying to prevent this program from restarting after a trial run.
>or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
Where is the evidence that 'public trust' is the reason for the high crime rate? What if the causality is reversed ... what if high crime rate is what breeds tougher policing because you know, police are human, and it has to mess you up being exposed to the worst of humanity, every.single.day, working in one of the most crime filled city in the world.
> But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t
Sure, nobody disagrees with that, but to be clear, that won't fix the crime rate in Baltimore.
Every bystander he harassed or assaulted is going to dislike the police even more, and help them even less. When police detectives go to them for help solving a crime, how often will they refuse to testify because of their distrust of the cops?
It’s a fantasy that the solution to high crime areas is tougher policing.
You can try to bust all the low level drug sellers on street corners to stop consentual drug use, but some will run. So you violently arrest anyone who runs, but done if those don’t have drugs or are just scared kids. Now those kids and their families hate you.
Soon dealers get smarter and only hold cash in their person. So you start frisking everyone out on the street or driving in these neighborhoods and take their cash, using civil forfeiture. But some of those people are honest citizens and you stole their paycheck, or the cash they were going to buy a car with, and they and their families now hate you.
You start getting warrants to enter homes of people you are told are dealing dope. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes you find something else to justify it, sometimes they were just regular folks it’s just a mistake. But they all end up hating you for it.
Sometimes the drug dealers flush the drugs while you politely wait at the door so you start getting no knock warrants and just burst in the door screaming at them, and shooting their dogs (you know, for safety). Sometimes it’s the wrong address or a false top, and the family now hates you even more, as you killed their dog man.
Sometimes the residents are armed and in the shock and confusion think it’s a home invasion and shoot back and you shoot them. If they survive, they hate you.
Then one day one of your brother officers is gunned down on the street, during the middle of the day, in that tough crime neighborhood you are “pacifying”.
When you roll up there are a hundred residents standing there staring at his corpse, but when you ask all you get is hard looks and “no-one saw nothing”.
>It’s a fantasy that the solution to high crime areas is tougher policing.
I didn't argue that. I said that tough policing is a natural result of high crime areas because cops are humans and are affected by the environment they are in. I read an article about Facebook and YouTube content reviewers getting PTSD after only a few weeks of work looking at despicable images.
Imagine being a cop with decades of experience policing one of the most violent cities on the world, seeing what the worst of humanity does to innocent people, knowing that the next stop may be your last. My point is: there are limits to what you can do with policing in such an environment.
Sure .. get rid of all the bad cops you want. File any lawsuits to protect rights of criminals you want. None of that will make the crime go down and safeguard the community.
Airline pilots are human, too. We do not accept their mistakes. Accepting racism, cruelty, and violence because those are human defects will not improve public safety.
Imagine being a cop trying to do your best to treat honest citizens fairly and honestly, and show them that you are there to protect them, and need their help and cooperation to find criminals.
Then another cop goes into your neighborhood best, and starts threatening, intimidating, and even assaulting and falsely arresting honest citizens for filming, spectating, not producing ID, or just looking like a suspect they are after.
How easy is your job now? Those residents know who the drug dealers and actual criminals are.
Your perspective is like saying the US didn’t need Vietnamese villagers help to fight the NVA. I guess we must have won there didn’t we?
Lastly Dirty Harry, they aren’t criminals rights, they are our rights.
Then it needs to secede from Maryland and the whole union so they can use their holistic solutions to policing. Our constitution does not support the way the police act.
> Baltimore is #11 on a list of most violent cities in the world[1].
If the police were better at their job I imagine more people would be willing to look the other way. You don't get to violate people's rights and fail to keep them safe.
I feel that mass surveillance for law enforcement will not work until public, judiciary and law accept that Police like all people make errors. It shouldn't be a herculean task to reverse a wrongful arrest or file charges for a use of excessive force by law enforcement officer.
Courts should ultimately decide if the officer did this out of malice/incompetence and penalize accordingly.
The American public is already too biased in favor of LEO, to judge by trial outcomes.
Law enforcement should be held to a higher, not lower standard than ordinary people. That will make the job tougher, but if it that makes it too tough for an individual, they don't have to work there.
I experienced this myself at a DUI trial where the sole prosecution witness, a cop, clearly lied about being run off the road by the defendant, and other aspects of the case. Defence counsel demonstrated that the stretch or road where the cop claimed to have been run off the road had no shoulders, had guard rails close to the road, and had trees hemming-in the road.
I ended up hanging the jury. My fellow jurors were frighteningly willing to unquestioningly accept a patent liar's testimony because he is a cop.
Makes sense why I was dismissed from jury duty in Baltimore. One of the questions I was asked was if I would believe a police officer's testimony to be true just because he was a cop.
Could you elaborate on the question asked and how you answered? While I wouldn't exactly be surprised, the idea that a lawyer for either side could just blatantly fish for sympathetic jurors seems like a wild miscarriage of due process. It doesn't seem clearly morally distinct from e.g. simply paying jurors to convict.
I'm pretty sure this is an incredibly common subject during voir dire. While this is probably more on the benign side of questioning, I remember being asked if anyone had negative interactions with law enforcement. I'm less confident, but I'm pretty sure followup questions were more specific to trusting law enforcement's testimony.
I've been through multiple jury selections where they've explicitly asked if I'd be willing to convict based solely on the word of a police officer, with both lawyers seemingly expecting the answer to be yes.
> The ACLU and local activists are currently suing the BPD in an attempt to prevent the AIR program, which was a six-month pilot, from starting up again in Baltimore or anywhere else.
I may no longer fully agree with what ACLU has turned into in recent years (despite their legendary past of unquestionable defense, which now apparently HAS conditions thanks to the social media whining era, which is sadly unsurprising in 2020), I fully respect what they are doing here.
This sounds like the police were caught in the act and a perfect moment for pro-privacy lawyers to nail them in court.
Does anyone have a link to a article about the use of the 'Persistent Surveillance Systems' to investigate crime in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), the plane would fly back and forth over El Paso (Texas).
The story was a female Mexican police officer had been ambushed, and with the use of the spy plane, the US was able to back-track the routes of the ambushers, and the routes all led back to (cartel headquarters) house on the outskirts of town.
I'm as libertarian as they come, but I've also lived in Baltimore and know how incapable the city is of controlling its crime. Baltimore's homicide clearance rate in 2019 was 32%. Not only does that leave its residents living in fear, that also represents an outrageous injustice against victims whose deaths are written off as business as usual.
Baltimore residents have a right to set their own destiny, but if they reject innovations in crime control that at least have a chance of being effective, I'm sure they'll spend the next 30 years like the last 30: getting absolutely nowhere. I spent decades desperately hoping and expecting Baltimore to turn the corner. It's an absolutely beautiful city with a rich history and many world-class cultural and educational institutions. But it hasn't changed (except even more murders over the last 50 years) and won't ever change if it doesn't control its crime.
Frankly, the city already has many hundreds of street-level "blue light" cameras all over the place. To me, those are far more problematic and intrusive with respect to privacy than aerial surveillance. I'd much rather be an anonymous pixel on a giant map than a person whose recognizable features are video recorded and stored on a government street level security camera. To me, blue light cameras are both more problematic and fundamentally less effective. And yet, that's what the city has already accepted as a worthwhile privacy trade off.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThere are lots of people like this, but they are either apolitical, apathetic, hopeless, don't want to get their hands dirty, think politics is beneath them, that their resistance would be ineffectual, or they are too busy with other things.
That has to change.
Given the scope of human experience now encompassed by "politics", that's not sustainable.
Or as someone else once put it:
"130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform."
The choice is between doing nothing and doing what you can within your limited, fallible, human means.
Even the giants of history have failed to fix everything, but even small people have managed to make a difference.
The problem is that too many people capable of making a difference don't even try.
What? Vote? Write letters? Bitch on the internet? All that does is make people feel better about the system as it rolls over them.
The system has more power over our lives than at any other time in history because people act in the ways the system permits them to act. I don't have the answers, but for sure it isn't going to be more of the same.
So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.
Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too.
The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead.
(As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)
Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office.
Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.
Interestingly, there was a three-month extension of the three Patriot Act provisions, included in a House resolution to prevent a government shutdown. It's bad that these things are linked in the same resolution to begin with, and it leads to an unnecessarily hard choice for politicians. Even someone wary of mass surveillance can't just say no to keeping the government open. Often, this is how a lot of this stuff gets passed.
Why are the two disparate things so often tied together in the first place? Similarly today, we see Republicans tying together the repeal of section 230 with the extra stimulus money demanded by the president. It really makes no logical sense why these things are bundled together as one bill, either.
It makes perfect logical sense for a majority-government party which wants to quash scrutiny from the opposition, while also ensuring support from its own dissenters.
https://www.baltimorepolice.org/sites/default/files/General%...
Except crime rates are at their lowest points in decades[0].
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/take...
From the link[0] I posted previously"
"Lastly, we turn to another place where crime and violence spiked in 2015: Baltimore. This year, Baltimore’s story continues to be a mixed one. The total number of crimes reported in the city fell by almost 6 percent compared to 2018 (through the last week of November), with violent crime falling by about 2.5 percent. Robbery, burglary, theft, and auto theft decreased modestly, while reported rape fell dramatically — with law enforcement documenting nearly 26 percent fewer offenses."
As I said, crime is down in Baltimore. Continuing to say say "crime is up in Baltimore" doesn't make it true.
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/take...
No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore
> Continuing to say say "crime is up in Baltimore" doesn't make it true.
I could say the same.
Where, exactly, did I say we shouldn't "support lowering crime rates?"
During prohibition the national murder rate was incredibly high. When alcohol was legalized suddenly the murder rate plummeted.
You see, when you take a popular substance and make sale/distribution illegal, you create an opportunity for those willing to take the risk to get rich making and selling said substance.
But the problem with getting rich that way is now you have a bullseye on your back. your place of business is loaded with cash and valuable substances. It’s hard to put cash in banks without risking arrest, and you can’t call the police if someone threatens or steals from you. But you can easily afford your own guns, and your own security.
And when someone tries to kill you or steal from you or rat you out, you just kill them. After all, the prison sentences for trafficking are just as bad as the ones for murder, so you won’t be making things worse for yourself.
And the good news is you have plenty of money to pay others to do lots of crimes to protect your business and markets. Enough to buy your own corrupt cops even. Not only will they top you off, but they’ll be happy to no knock raid your competitors.
All of this is equally true for pimps (why hire willing sex workers when unwilling are cheaper? After all you going to jail either way, make no money while the sin shines), and bookies, and gambling operations, etc, etc, etc.
On an individual level it doesn't matter even if the lie is in a courtroom for the purpose of turning a murder into justified deadly force! Why wouldn't an organization of police lie even more when they know full well neither the org nor the individual officers will be punished?
Even in this story the truly disturbing part is this:
> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit eventually ruled in BPD’s favor in the case.
ACLU is appealing the decision, but where are the obstruction / perjury / contempt charges for all the individuals that lied?
But there seems to be heavy bipartisan support federally/executively for mass surveillance in the US so good luck with getting your privacy protected nationally.
Your best hope is some local policy changes at the state or municipal level in Baltimore or Maryland. Which may inspire change elsewhere.
Make sure your DA knows that if they aren't willing to indict criminal cops they will be out of a job. We just did this in Los Angeles! No clue how far the new guy will take it, but he definitely understands that this was a referendum on the previous DA's near-absolute refusal to even consider indicting police misconduct.
A better way to say it is that there aren’t enough honorable police departments firing enough dishonest cops.
And in this case they will argue that misleading != lying.
AKA "Defund the police."
If cops weren’t tasked to police what you put in your body and what you do with other consenting adults, we’d need far fewer of them and we’d probably appreciate the remaining cops a lot more.
BTW what exactly do cops police what consenting adults do with each other these days? Honest question.
If 99% of police encounters don't involve violence, then 99% of police don't need to be equipped for violence. We need 1% of high speed, low drag, well funded SWAT teams, and the rest can just trudge around on foot.
The better solution is to eliminate the drivers of friction between honest citizens and cops, especially those traffic create more violent encounters. No knock warrants, the war on drugs, civil forfeiture, vice squads and the criminalization of victimless crimes, the “trafficking myth” war on sex workers, etc.
They didn't get that idea themselves, though.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/12/an-office...
Baltimore is #11 on a list of most violent cities in the world[1]. There are children and good people trying to live in those crime-ridden neighborhoods. The police is not the problem. I feel for the cops there because you can't take one of the most violent cities in the world and expect to police it like Sweden. As such, I wish they maintained their surveillance program because it works and it would result in more perps being taken out of that victimized community.
Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Sorry, working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.
What about them? False imprisonment is a problem, but not at the scale of the crime in that city. Baltimore had 350 homicides and 2000+ robberies/assaults/rapes, and thousands more thefts and property crimes [1].
Let me pose a question to you: At what point do we start focusing on victims of crime again? All I hear is about police reform, and about criminal rights. Who stands up for the good people living in the violent neighborhoods of St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore etc.? When will the focus be set on the victims in those neighborhoods? Do the people there have a right to not be victimized? Who enforces those rights? A 7 year old girl was killed by a stray bullet in Atlanta recently[2]? What is the ACLU doing for her, her family, and other such families?
>working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.
Maybe the fact that Baltimore cops are forced to deal with the worst of humanity in one of the most violent cities in the world plays a role here? Maybe you need to lower the crime rate before you can expect policing to improve?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore [2] https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/latest-loss-from-atlantas-ris...
What about taking criminals out of the community and locking them away in prison? Would that not help? Because that's what this surveillance program would do. It allows the police to view footage after the crime occurred and track down the perp. It wouldn't help that victim, but it would prevent the next one.
>Lo and behold, police departments take a lot of tax money that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence and so that is why we talk about defunding police.
False choice. You don't need to defund the police to fund whatever program you want. And you make it seem like there is some magic social program just waiting to be funded that would solve criminality but the evil police budget is what prevents it from being implemented. As if!
Locking people up is a deterrence but it creates many criminals by putting them in depraved conditions for extended periods of time, then depriving them of employability and then as an insult, charging monthly fees for probation or other post-incarceration monitoring.
The last thing I want to point out is how often the police victimize people and create new victims. It's incredibly common.
You wrote: "police departments take a lot (in some cases a plurality) of total tax revenue that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence. That is why we talk about defunding police."
Where is the evidence that the police budget is what is preventing social programs to be funded? That is a fiction driven from the inane sloganeering around 'defund the police'. You can fund any program you democratically pass and that has nothing to do with police budget. That's the false choice you're putting out there .. that somehow you have to choose between 'funding the police' OR funding social programs.
Here's the reality, we're spending billions on social programs. There are no silver-bullet social programs that we know will lower crime rate.
>It's incredibly common.
Uh huh. Care to quantify that? Because I think you're basing this on nothing.
Show me where I supported policy brutality?
Here's a hint: NOBODY supports police brutality.
> Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers. Remember when they looked at 2 years of body-cam footage for one of their highest earners and came out the other end with 32 counts of assault, false imprisonment and generalized misconduct? [1]
That's police brutality.
Your reply: > The police is not the problem. [...] Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police due to documented police brutality is at least indirect support for police brutality. Beyond that, your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime would imply more direct support for police brutality, especially since you seem to justify their actions as "tough policing," which I fail to understand in any way other than a polite euphemism for "police brutality."
>The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police
Where do I argue against oversight of the police?
>your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime
Nowhere did I argue that, nor do I support that.
What is wrong with you? Can you stop straw manning my position?
You can't stop straw manning me, can you? Please indicate where I showed support for 'tough policing'?
The only policy I argued for was this drone program because that has real potential in getting criminals out of the community.
The argument about 'tough policing' is not one of support, nor is it a justification of any police brutality. Police officers should be held responsible for breaking the law and 'police brutality' is against the law. All I argued is that the type of policing you get is a result of the environment. I made this argument as a counter argument to the trope that somehow policing causes crime and if we can just fix policing that crime will magically go away. That's not how it works. You can put as many regulations as you want (and police are already highly regulated - for good reason), but you're not going to get easy-going Nordic-style policing in one of the most violent cities in the world. You're also not going to lower crime rates either. Again: that's neither support for, nor a justification of police brutality.
On the other hand, you did say at the very beginning, and I will quote your words here:
> Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
which I am honestly not sure how it is meant to be interpreted, if not as a statement of support for "tough policing" (at least in theory, since any policy that generally priotizes ensuring the criminals are caught over police not violating their moral, and constitutional, obligations is very likely to result in police violating those obligations).
Here's how: we have entire movements preoccupied with spreading FUD over any policy that aims to curb crime. We have movements preoccupied with letting violent criminals out of prison (trust me, there is no way to reduce the prison population without releasing violent offenders).
This story is an example of this. Look at the facts: Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the world (not just in Maryland, not just in USA, in the effin world).
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out. Who is standing up for them? I don't see ACLU lawsuits to protect their rights - do you?
There is an attempt to curb this by introducing a drone program to attempt to provide some relief for this by improving police investigative powers and catch more criminals. And this program is the opposite of 'tough policing'. ACLU and other organizations focus lawsuits on this program to get rid of it (not to create common sense policies around, but to get rid of it) - why? Because they care more about safeguarding criminal rights, then the rights of citizens to safety.
It's fucked up and that's what I mean by "Victim-rights trump criminal-rights."
In Baltimore, the police ARE criminals. Again and again, that department has shown itself to be corrupt from top to bottom.
The victims are the citizens of Baltimore who are falsely accused of crimes and imprisoned on trumped up charges.
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out.
None of that is the fault of the police.
Did you read the article? Prosecutors didn’t make up the charges against this officer, they have documented video proof. There is no reason to arrest and assault bystanders, none.
I believe the vast majority of cops are doing their jobs legally and honestly. But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t, or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
I did. ACLU is trying to prevent this program from restarting after a trial run.
>or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
Where is the evidence that 'public trust' is the reason for the high crime rate? What if the causality is reversed ... what if high crime rate is what breeds tougher policing because you know, police are human, and it has to mess you up being exposed to the worst of humanity, every.single.day, working in one of the most crime filled city in the world.
> But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t
Sure, nobody disagrees with that, but to be clear, that won't fix the crime rate in Baltimore.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/12/an-office...
Every bystander he harassed or assaulted is going to dislike the police even more, and help them even less. When police detectives go to them for help solving a crime, how often will they refuse to testify because of their distrust of the cops?
It’s a fantasy that the solution to high crime areas is tougher policing.
You can try to bust all the low level drug sellers on street corners to stop consentual drug use, but some will run. So you violently arrest anyone who runs, but done if those don’t have drugs or are just scared kids. Now those kids and their families hate you.
Soon dealers get smarter and only hold cash in their person. So you start frisking everyone out on the street or driving in these neighborhoods and take their cash, using civil forfeiture. But some of those people are honest citizens and you stole their paycheck, or the cash they were going to buy a car with, and they and their families now hate you.
You start getting warrants to enter homes of people you are told are dealing dope. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes you find something else to justify it, sometimes they were just regular folks it’s just a mistake. But they all end up hating you for it.
Sometimes the drug dealers flush the drugs while you politely wait at the door so you start getting no knock warrants and just burst in the door screaming at them, and shooting their dogs (you know, for safety). Sometimes it’s the wrong address or a false top, and the family now hates you even more, as you killed their dog man.
Sometimes the residents are armed and in the shock and confusion think it’s a home invasion and shoot back and you shoot them. If they survive, they hate you.
Then one day one of your brother officers is gunned down on the street, during the middle of the day, in that tough crime neighborhood you are “pacifying”.
When you roll up there are a hundred residents standing there staring at his corpse, but when you ask all you get is hard looks and “no-one saw nothing”.
I didn't argue that. I said that tough policing is a natural result of high crime areas because cops are humans and are affected by the environment they are in. I read an article about Facebook and YouTube content reviewers getting PTSD after only a few weeks of work looking at despicable images.
Imagine being a cop with decades of experience policing one of the most violent cities on the world, seeing what the worst of humanity does to innocent people, knowing that the next stop may be your last. My point is: there are limits to what you can do with policing in such an environment.
Sure .. get rid of all the bad cops you want. File any lawsuits to protect rights of criminals you want. None of that will make the crime go down and safeguard the community.
Then another cop goes into your neighborhood best, and starts threatening, intimidating, and even assaulting and falsely arresting honest citizens for filming, spectating, not producing ID, or just looking like a suspect they are after.
How easy is your job now? Those residents know who the drug dealers and actual criminals are.
Your perspective is like saying the US didn’t need Vietnamese villagers help to fight the NVA. I guess we must have won there didn’t we?
Lastly Dirty Harry, they aren’t criminals rights, they are our rights.
If the police were better at their job I imagine more people would be willing to look the other way. You don't get to violate people's rights and fail to keep them safe.
Courts should ultimately decide if the officer did this out of malice/incompetence and penalize accordingly.
Law enforcement should be held to a higher, not lower standard than ordinary people. That will make the job tougher, but if it that makes it too tough for an individual, they don't have to work there.
I ended up hanging the jury. My fellow jurors were frighteningly willing to unquestioningly accept a patent liar's testimony because he is a cop.
I may no longer fully agree with what ACLU has turned into in recent years (despite their legendary past of unquestionable defense, which now apparently HAS conditions thanks to the social media whining era, which is sadly unsurprising in 2020), I fully respect what they are doing here.
This sounds like the police were caught in the act and a perfect moment for pro-privacy lawyers to nail them in court.
The story was a female Mexican police officer had been ambushed, and with the use of the spy plane, the US was able to back-track the routes of the ambushers, and the routes all led back to (cartel headquarters) house on the outskirts of town.
Was this all a dream?
Edit: Found the article: Persistent Surveillance Systems https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/eye-s...
Baltimore residents have a right to set their own destiny, but if they reject innovations in crime control that at least have a chance of being effective, I'm sure they'll spend the next 30 years like the last 30: getting absolutely nowhere. I spent decades desperately hoping and expecting Baltimore to turn the corner. It's an absolutely beautiful city with a rich history and many world-class cultural and educational institutions. But it hasn't changed (except even more murders over the last 50 years) and won't ever change if it doesn't control its crime.
Frankly, the city already has many hundreds of street-level "blue light" cameras all over the place. To me, those are far more problematic and intrusive with respect to privacy than aerial surveillance. I'd much rather be an anonymous pixel on a giant map than a person whose recognizable features are video recorded and stored on a government street level security camera. To me, blue light cameras are both more problematic and fundamentally less effective. And yet, that's what the city has already accepted as a worthwhile privacy trade off.