In the past few years bodycams have become ubiquitous, and they haven't reduced misconduct. I wouldn't be surprised if they've increased civil payouts for police misconduct, but I'd rather have my life and health than my survivors get a few million bucks.
The police just turn off their bodycams when they want to do something illegal, it isn't really transparency unless there are serious questions any time the camera is turned off or footage mysteriously "goes missing" from a computer.
> Not that we actually defunded them, but we have sharply reduced the quantity of policing (not usually through official policy as much as pressure on police departments to sharply reduce discretionary, proactive policing) which is what 'defund the police' aimed to do
> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
I've read similar in other papers as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.
Maybe you mean "there isn't evidence that the reduction in policing is caused by 'pressure'", which seems kind of absurd considering the near-decade of nationwide protests. What's the alternative hypothesis? That police around the country spontaneously and abruptly reduced their discretionary policing and it's merely a coincidence that it happened following major protests aimed at reducing the quantity of policing?
I think that was close to the original intent of "defund", as in reallocate funding for policing into different areas (and in some cases, I've heard more specifically splitting up police work into more granular area i.e. responding to mental health incidents vs. domestic abuse vs. a break in).
But the "defund" quickly ran away into "remove all funding", which of course is a lot more radical and less palatable for any but the further left. Also doesn't help that it made an easy strawman for opponents to this kind of reform to prop up and spread.
Definitely curious if anyone else has a different experience/chronology of events.
Defund was probably a bad choice of word, and reform a better one ? But if people can only deal with single-word manifestos, then you re bound to misinterpret.
I think this is ahistorical. Progressives were pretty clear that they believed American policing was fundamentally, irredeemably, and universally racist--that was the whole crux of the BLM movement, and if you believe that, then you aren't going to content yourself with mere reform (if you think police are racist, then you probably aren't going to advocate for "requiring more training for dealing with mentally ill citizens" or similar reforms). Moreover, when moderate Democrats (fearing for the upcoming election cycle) tried to say "what progressives really mean is 'reform'", progressives responded with "no, we really mean defund/abolish".
"Reform" is too easy to silently crush. Oodles of police "reforms" have achieved precisely nothing at mitigating the widespread use of violence by police against the people. "Defund" argues that the institution itself is fundamentally broken and that we should be solving many of the problems that police are tasked with today through organizations that don't have the authority to execute people.
How many organizations have been improved throughout history via removal of funding? Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?
The point that some of these groups were trying to make (but failed miserably in their messaging) was that cities with well funded police departments often skimp on social services.
> Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?
The idea is that you remove half the police work load, hire half the officers, and use that savings to assign that removed work load to more appropriate people like social workers, unarmed traffic enforcement, etc.
It was a stupid chant that resulted in a stupider outcome.
It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.
People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.
So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.
Completely agree. There's a huge swath of moderate "non-sexy" solutions that the public could get behind--in 2020, something like 90% of Americans favored police reforms according to Gallup, which necessarily includes a bunch of Republicans. We could have got some combination of "require more police training", "reorganize internal affairs", "weaken police unions", "end qualified immunity", etc but instead progressives prioritized their personal catharsis to the detriment of everyone, but especially the communities of color who have to suffer the most from the crime surge, who never wanted a decrease of policing in the first place (80% of black Americans opposed de-policing in 2020), and in whose name progressives demanded a reduction in policing.
No doubt "defund the police" implies using some of the funds for social programs, but you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe that it doesn't mean "reduce the amount of policing" particularly when the slogan was chanted in tandem with demands to remove or reduce police from communities of color and so on. The main thrust of "defund the police" was to reduce the amount of policing, which is what we got, and crime has surged as predicted (especially in communities of color, 80% of whom didn't want less policing, but it was demanded in their name anyway). Moreover "disarm cops so they learn to deescalate" is not markedly better than "reduce the amount of policing", but rather it seems differently predictably awful.
Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services.
> And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.
As an example... I was standing in the street to meet my kids... my wife called the cops for no reason and 4 cars showed up in about 60 seconds... they ended up giving me a criminal trespassing warning even if I was on public property
They do like to hide though so you can't see their presence
The previous city I lived in had a population of about 20k and they had two armored military vehicles (mrap / Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles)
They are trying to get to a police state without the majority of people noticing... In the end, it will break the economy.
> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
This doesn't make sense. Why would "crimes keep decreasing" explain a surge in "homicide and total crime"? Are you sure you understood the linked paper correctly?
If the judicial and legislative branches were doing their jobs properly, and if the public had some due diligence about knowing what is the proper role of government, and if the media were truly aimed at educating people on the pertinent facts, then these agencies wouldn't be a problem, they'd be properly checked. But assuming we're not going to fix any of those things, then certainly it can hypothetically be an improvement to abolish this or that agency, if it's become even more corrupt than the surrounding political infrastructure.
> (homicides are up like 60% compared to the pre-BLM days).
Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.
According to the FBI, there were 22,900 homicides in 2021 and 14,249 in 2014. If a ~60% increase isn't the right figure, what do you think it is, and how did you arrive at your conclusion?
The stat has had huge ripple effects, especially in poorer urban communities. Checking the homicide rates on the FBI data explorer shows an increase of 50% which gels with my 60% ballpark figure (rates accounts for population increases in a way my homicide increases figure doesn't).
Can you name the cities that actually defunded the police? Blaming post-COVID crime trends on BLM is just lazy interpretation of data. Most of what you’re saying here is blatantly wrong, there is no post-2014 crime surge, in fact crime was much worse in the decade before and has been oscillating around a mean since: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/crim.... Why lie when the data is public?
It is impossible to see 2014 as anything but a deviation from the mean rather than some bizarre starting point for BLM ruining the country when you look at the data for more than 5 minutes.
As for your proposed solutions, every single drop of funding sent to police departments goes towards their further militarization. There are many small rural towns with tanks now. Anti poverty programs have never been popular in the U.S. No neighborhood wants to host the abuse prevention or mental health centers. So where do we go?
Criminologists disagree with you. Not only did homicides increase following 2014, criminologists believe it is caused by BLM protests.
> For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.
> “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”
> All 10 cities that saw sudden increases in homicide had large African American populations, he said. While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.
> “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.
A single criminologist whose work has mostly focused on his own cities crime is now being used to establish that "criminologists disagree." You would have a great career in TV journalism!
You're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher, cherrypicking years that seem significant to you, and using it to draw conclusions about trends across the country when the data set itself acknowledges that individual cities and even blocks within those cities skews data all the time. Again, it's lazy data analysis.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, Rosenfeld is far from the only researcher observing this phenomenon.
Here's Vox on Travis Campbell's research:
> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.
> We estimate that these [police shooting protests] caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
Note that these are both nationwide studies. I'm not sure what you mean by "cherrypicking years that seem significant to me", but yeah, looking at policing and crime before and after BLM protests seems pretty germane to understanding the effect those protests have on policing and crime.
> you're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher
I think it's more likely that crime researchers better understand the limits of crime data sources than you do, and they probably aren't as lazy as you propose. But by all means, publish your rebuttal (and please link it here so I can read it)!
Rethink and reform. We still need services that address:
* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).
* Intelligence gathering
* Cyber security
They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).
We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
I made no comment about it being right or wrong, and I don’t know whether the grandparent is a trump supporter or not.
The more interesting question is to consider why Trump would hold this view, especially if you disagree with him on other things. Perhaps you don’t have the same assumptions about the reasons why as he does.
We do know that at least two FBI agents were found to have conspired against him during his first campaign.
We also know that an FBI attorney falsified information to get warrants against his campaign advisor.
We know that the FBI urged the media to actually censor negative news about his political opponents.
It would be difficult to them trust such an organization to them perform fair investigations against you after those occurrences, regardless of one's political party.
I don’t know the veracity of the claim that the FBI told the media to censor negative news. The media was definitely on guard for being manipulated following the DNC/Podesta email hacking and use of media by Russia in 2016. And so were our counterintelligence agencies. It’s literally their job.
Could be wrong, and not about to get into a back and forth about the politics involved, but I thought that Deputy Assistant Director Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation and eventually canned from the FBI, and FBI attorney Lisa Page was let go because of the content of the messages between them regarding Trump and Flynn that surfaced during the course of some hearings.
If memory serves, another FBI lawyer plead guilty to altering a document sent to the secret FISA court so a false justification would exist for someone in the new administration to be surveilled. I think the lawyer got a suspended sentence instead of prison.
Not focused either way on Trump, just thought that there actually was something to the GPs post.
Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?
> Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?
No. The FBI reached out to Facebook to let them know how Russia tended to try to influence US citizens with fake news or by amplifying fake aspects of real news using social networks, including Facebook.
A lot of folks thought this was bad because it led to Facebook not amplifying (not removing, not blocking, just not promoting) the Hunter Biden laptop claims, because the story met the hallmarks of what the FBI pointed out to the team. It still does.
From what I’ve read, it seems to be cloud hacked data placed in a laptop and deliberately turned into a partisan repair shop in an attempt to wash that it was hacked just like DNC/Podesta stuff.
Thus the media treated it as hacked attempted manipulation.
That said, everyone knew about it and it’s not exactly news that Hunter Biden, like many in that world, was trading off his father’s position and had a drug problem. Indeed, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was targeted by our enemies to be compromised. Any high level executive’s kid with a drug problem is low hanging fruit for kompromat.
“Even if we assume the crazy sounding laptop repair shop story were 100% true, we had partisan political operatives shopping a story to journalists about the supposedly scandalous revelations cribbed from the contents of someone's stolen email communications and electronic data in the midst of a presidential election campaign homestretch. The fact that some of the information has since been authenticated by the nYT or WaPO as belonging to Hunter Biden doesn't change anything. The Clinton emails that were dumped by Wikileaks in 2016 were also authentic. Didn't make them any less stolen or render their release combined with the gross misrepresentation of their contents to feed unsupported narratives less problematic, nor did their authenticity make it any less a part of a Russian influence operation.”
Trump fired people that investigated him for any weak reason he could. He fired multiple FBI directors. Investigations aren’t a conspiracy as you get a day in court and Trump had many of his team go to jail after being convicted in a court.
The Russia collusion fiasco cost the FBI so much credibility. The moment I saw them raiding Trump's Florida residence, even if justified, I just rolled my eyes.
regarding, an FBI attorney falsified information to get warrants:
> In spring 2017, Mr. Page, denying he was a Russian agent, told reporters that he had provided information to the C.I.A. about Russia. An F.B.I. agent who was preparing to sign a factual affidavit to accompany the fourth wiretap application asked Mr. Clinesmith to obtain clarity about whether the C.I.A. considered Mr. Page a “source.”
That led to Mr. Clinesmith’s interactions with a C.I.A. counterpart, who sent back an email referring to Mr. Page’s status as an American citizen and citing the memorandum from August as a place to find more information.
Based on that exchange, Mr. Clinesmith told the agent that the C.I.A. had explicitly said Mr. Page was “never a source,” something his C.I.A. contact later denied saying. When the agent wanted to see it in writing, Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into the email before showing it to his colleague. The agent was satisfied and signed the wiretap affidavit without adding any disclosure about Mr. Page’s relationship with the C.I.A.
The problem is that partisanship and racism made it OK to investigate left-wing and black leaders on spurious grounds. However, eventually a right-wing leader managed to ignore the law blatantly and importantly enough to be investigated : and at that point the right turned against the FBI.
There's no principle, only partisanship. Kind of a disaster for the rule of law.
Right wing, left wing, meh. To me (i.e. Opinion), it's difficult at times to distinguish between the two when looking at the highest echelon on each side.
I think my slide into cynicism regarding humans who achieve power, regardless of their stated political philosophies and alignments, started after finishing "The Dictator's Handbook". I read here some posts advocating getting rid of this or that, or saying we should do it "this way", but even though I agree in a wishful kind of way, it's just not how human beings are wired... No matter how virtuous a system may be, it seems to take only the inevitable one or two odd instances of corruption to start the rot that will bring it down.
I like to think of it as wishful thinking. I fantasize about winning the lottery, too.
>> The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level...
Yeah, agreed. I couldn't point to a single instance where an attempt to eliminate corruption did not eventually spawn unintended (bad) consequences. Working to manage it seems to be the best alternative.
> The problem is that partisanship and racism made it OK to investigate left-wing and black leaders on spurious grounds.
The major trend in these comments is the FBI and the government were bad, and are still bad, and the only solution is to dismantle them, but these commenters are too late. Where were these revolutionaries in 1968? Hoover died in 1972 and so did his fascist policies.
But you nailed it. While the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, institutional racism in executive agencies was still the rule rather than the exception.
I think it is interesting how that contrasts with minority member success stories in entertainment. In this[1] rehearsal take for a track on Franklin's debut album, we can hear fascinating avant garden social hieracrchy.
Remember that in 1960, even though first developed in the 1940's, multitracking was cutting-edge technology, and multitrack decks were still rare. The modern recording process of scratch track replacement and instrument isolation and separation hadn't yet been developed. Music performances were recorded live in the studio with all the musicians performing in the same tracking room, playing simultaneously together with or without being physically separated by gobos ("go betweens"). Franklin sits at a piano, playing and singing simultaneously, with her own single microphone, and the Ray Bryant Combo itself probably only had one microphone, with both ultimately mixed down to mono. There is no monitoring for the artists, no headphone mixes, and everyone still has to be able to hear everyone else, and Franklin has to play and sing above the accompaniment to be able to hear herself. Hammond speaks from the control room over a PA in the tracking room in deference to Franklin.
But what it is abundantly clear is that, judiciously but humbly so, Franklin is in charge. Columbia Records and producer John Hammond put a young 18yo black woman in charge of a band's and her own studio performances in late 1960," while 8 years later the government is still notably racist and paranoid.
In any regard, while institutional racism still exists in government, it is a shadow of its former ubiquity, except perhaps in unsophisticated rural sheriffs departments. In comparison of then to today, the FBI is now one of the more enlightened agencies, even with only about 20% of its agents minority members. Institutional racism remains, but it has become the exception, and racist policy and language and acts are held to scrutiny; participants are held accountable and extirpated from the ranks.
He and a large number of his supporters contest that, and believe he should run again. Independent polls suggest he would have a good chance of winning.
He is probably the only person who might actually get to enact this policy, whereas nobody in the current administration is even talking about it.
It could be more relevant if he were actually president, I suppose. This is just speculation about something that would be nearly 3 years away at best.
I similary don't care about what the president in 2029 thinks.
If you think being concerned about Trump, who is widely agreed to still be in control of one of the two US Political Parties, is just far off ‘speculation’ to you, then I’m very surprised you care about an old FBI dossier on Aretha Franklin.
Look you're wasting your time here, the way I think is irrelevant to you and this is some very specific hair splitting.
Anyway, I have the compulsive need to explain it.
I'm not speculating about what an ex-president would do because he's not the president, and might not ever be. There's a good chance that speculating about it is a waste of time. It's definitely a waste of time now, because the earliest he'd become president again is 3 years from now.
The FBI exists. It continues to exist. I don't think it should based on a myriad of past actions. I can write letters to congresspeople and the president about the FBI, and they're people in power now that I don't need to speculate about.
Maybe he noticed this problem before you did. Something to do with the time they offered $1M to a foreign national to find evidence incriminating him. They didn't get anything, promised FISA court they did, and enabled political opponents to tap global historical messaging databases, two-hop unlimited.
Good ideas, and ideas that I support 100%, but in practice it seems to be impossible. IIRC we still haven't gotten a full audit of the Pentagon / DOD, and a majority of their operations are probably a bit more public than the NSA's or other secretive-by-design bureaucracy.
How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible?
The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top.
It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no choice but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
How do you hold an entity accountable when that entity has the capability to destroy any single individual with no repercussions?
Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists.
I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
If you get rid of the above organizations, the local police become the organization with the capability to destroy any single individuals with no repercussions. Though they have few already, the FBI does investigate local law enforcement agencies.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
The public being informed is really the crux of the issue.
You cite transparency, which is one aspect- but the other interesting problem is the incestuous relationship that our intel agencies have with the media as well.
How much political news coverage was shaped by "anonymous sources" from these intel agencies?
I forget who it was- but I remember one retired agent speaking pretty casually about how the FBI leaks information to journalists by sharing information with retired agents that still hold their clearances.
Then we'd merely have around 10 national intelligence agencies doing shit like this, in addition to all the more local operations. It's absurd how large the intelligence community is.
I’m afraid if you were to defund some of those, like the DEA and ATF, they would just come after small time, lowest fruit criminals. They have proven they will charge people with dubious crimes. Similar to how people claim the IRS can’t tackle big time cheats and instead focus on auditing everyday people.
If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
> I’m afraid if you were to defund some of those, like the DEA and ATF, they would just come after small time, lowest fruit criminals.
That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
"return on investment" ... you realize how that sounds, right?
The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea!
Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
Without an income tax, would the spending power remain at the lower and middle class? The housing market has shown that people are loose with their money and pay any price that they can finance. Likewise, all goods will become more expensive until people can only buy the same things as today.
Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes.
This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less.
The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes.
But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
I know this is more of an emotional response than a serious proposal, but I'll take the opportunity to point out:
Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.
That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.
I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s.
And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs.
I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case.
Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
FBI targets susceptible people and surrounds them with informants that encourage the target to commit a crime, but somehow failed to take action against the 9/11 hijackers.
CIA tortures people overseas. EDIT: CIA also arms militia groups that are against, or later turn on, American interests.
NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?)
ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1]
The whole LE appararus is designed to go after opponents. That's the whole point. problem appears when "opponents" are chosen wrongly, when the government does not represent the people.
My thought about the parent was the same, that it was sort of a truism. So I was trying to probe for what conditions or parameters would make the statement more meaningful, basically some prinicpals to assess how much big brother is the right amount of big brother. We all agree oversight is good sometimes and to some extent. The question is what is that extent.
The attorney general is a political appointee of the executive branch. So... we've seen that doesn't work.
The executive branch is WAY too powerful, mostly as a result of Congress ceding its authority over the decades to avoid accountability. Separation of powers is clearly broken as a result.
It's hard to separate the FBI from J. Edgar Hoover who normalized a lot of these behaviors from the top of the agency at the beginning, so there's always been some ordinary law enforcement and overreach combined in some form.
People have internalized that HR is on the company's side, not theirs, but sometimes their goals are congruent. Everyone should look at government the same way.
What if the US government was really dominated by a small cadre of elites? One can make a good case for that thesis; it would be terrible if true, but we have to be realistic in our outlook. Someone clever said that politics is the art of what is possible.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. If we view our governments the same way we do HR as the above comment suggests, as in they have another group controlling their interests over our own, then democracy does not exist within this structure.
The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, but is unelected and unaccountable to them. This article is from 2013, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this behavior has changed:
> The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
I know this is talking specifically about informants, and you could make a case that that is necessary, but what reason is there to believe that this doesn’t extend to members of the FBI as well?
Governments are basically the mob, except that they figured out that they can exert more control over a longer period of time if they have documents that "constrain" their powers and they offer you a say in some matters.
Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their rules. If you are under their protection, they give you a little document that tells other gangs not to screw with you.
They back all of this up with guns and threats of violence, held by unelected thugs. They give you a process to prove your innocence, but the process itself is a punishment, since it is a huge resource drain to go through.
"Right of Force". At some point, freedom is restricted at gunpoint. Government works this way because it is logical that it do so.
This is why it is critical to have government established "of, by, and for" the constituency - because even in a best-case scenario, corruption will get in the cracks and make them bigger, etc.
I'm going to expose my political bias here: I think the only way to prevent the corruption and expansion is to keep the government small by limiting the amount of resources that are under its direct control. Just offering "of, by, and for" won't do it if there are millions of people on the payroll.
Of course, the Somali government is very small and Somali people are very free, and they aren't doing very well either.
> I would say there's a correlation between less government and worse living conditions on average
I think this is true, but I don't think the correlation is causal. Rich countries throughout history have tended to grow their governments after becoming rich by adopting social programs and trying to flex their muscle internationally. Most of Europe followed this model, as did the US.
I am not claiming that social programs are a flex. The military is a flex.
Post WW2 for the US, post-Victorian era in the UK, post-Napoleon in France, post-Tarism in Russia, post-oil-boom in Scandanavia, etc. Countries with big social programs are still great to live in, but I only mean that the social programs and big government are clearly not part of the reason why those countries became rich. The big government is caused by the wealth, not the other way around.
Agreed. Thank you for calling me out here - I also disagreed with myself when I chose "of, by, and for", and was going to use more generic words, but thought more interesting ideas may come out with the extra salt.
Somalia demonstrates exactly the problem with that approach: power vacuums don't last any longer than any other vacuum, if there's something around to fill it.
> I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%)
Does your mob allow a bunch of deductions, tax dodges, "carried interest" rates, IRA's, and other tricks to cut what the well-to-do actually pay them down to half (or less) of their headline "rate"?
EDIT: Examples so far seem to be limited, one-off "if you're patting the right guy's back" situations. Vs. the US gov't allows an unlimited number of sleazy Wall Street types to launder unlimited amounts of money through various tax dodges. This might be good evidence that the mob is smarter about collecting "taxes" than the US gov't...but it sounds like the answer to my question is "basically, no".
My wife's family paid almost nothing to the Italian mafia a hundred years ago because they gave the right people free shoes. I would say "yes."
Edit: To be clear, this was not a unique situation. A lot of businesses generally got sweetheart rates from street gangs and mobs because they helped the mob and mob bosses in other ways. The same way Wall Street financiers get a sweetheart deal because they manage the politicians' money and employ their children.
The average person can do more to influence a local mafia boss than they can to influence the federal government. Hell if you have a few dozen friends with guns you can actually stop the mafia from fucking with you for as long as they stick around.
* Edit since I'm spent on replies : Sure you can name that one favela somewhere where a few dozen were beheaded by the mob. The idea isn't that you'll win 100% of the time, the idea is you have some chance. I raise your one unnamed favela with several unnamed Mexican pueblos where cartel was run out by campesinos w/ break-action shotguns and rifles. And the mere fact you actually have a chance at winning is often enough to get a counterparty to back off.
> Hell if you have a few dozen friends with guns you can actually stop the mafia from fucking with you for as long as they stick around.
Go try this in the favela near me and report back. The last group of locals that tried that were beheaded.
I'm beginning to think there's a time limit on relatively fair and effective states, as citizens slowly begin to become almost unbelievably blind to what actual criminal states are like and start dismantling their own institutions.
The institution of the federal government has grown ever more powerful and consuming of peace-time GDP compared to non-war times of ~100+ years ago. Far from dismantling, the consolidation and growth of power of the 'effective state' has created criminals of the common populace in an ever growing compendium of laws.
In no way has the federal government been 'dismantled' as time goes on. Although arguably the constitution has been dismantled, in no small part through ever expanding interpretation of the commerce clause.
A pure democracy is if you lose you can be voted dead. In a constitutional democracy it may not be so direct: i.e. if the majority elect officials that favor say large automotive companies that are permitted to introduce externalities to the water supply that make you dead (see flint water crisis) -- or say your county elects a sheriff who is known to shoot people in 'bad shoots' and then the democratically elected officials prevent effective prosecution of these murders.
How often do “elected officials” do anything against law enforcement? Every politician in any city knows not to go against the local police department.
Governments are institutions. Considering the anarchic alternative, what we currently have is preferable. People as a group, the actual mob, cannot be trusted. They are irrational and are therefore potentially dangerous.
The trick is to safeguard against institutional rot.
This takes me back to conversations in the middle school cafeteria. When was the last time you had to bribe a US official to get basic tasks done like register your car? In places that actually have criminal governments this is the norm.
Do some research about what it's like in places where there is truly no mechanism for people to remove those in power. Look at russia and the mechanisms by which decisions are made and what means there are for the public to change them, and contrast that with all the NIMBYism which often dominates the process in the US.
A democratic government is the means by which the population prevents the monopoly on legal violence from falling permanently into the hands of any individual. It isn't perfect but it's the best option we have. Pretending we would be equally well off with a despot is nonsense.
Even in places that have reasonably good and democratic government, officials take bribes. This happens in Italy, Greece, Spain, India, and many more (almost all of South and Central America). The US and UK are pretty unique in that they aggressively prevent low-level corruption.
Stopping low-level corruption while allowing high-level corruption to pass through (i.e. with high-dollar lobbying) is IMO less democratic than at least letting those with less money buy off at least their small part of government to let them do what the high-dollar people tried to outlaw.
There is no routine bribe paying in Spain. What occurs is similar to what occurs in the US - bribes to get government contracts. Day to day bribes are unheard of and Spain is no more corrupt than the US in that sense (in fact, probably less so - I know of people having to pay small "fees" at a county sheriff's office to get some routine document processed).
Fees paid for document processing are annoying and regressive but are not bribes.
They are there to stop you from wasting department resources with requests for 500,000,000 copies of an incident report whose content you disagree with.
Umm... those are two completely different statements, not a Motte and Bailey fallacy. I am happy to defend my position that governments use force the same way mobs do, but they give you more of a say in how the force can be used and they give you some written protections (that they are happy to infringe when convenient).
Also, I never said that we would be better off with a despot or a gang or anything of the sort, as the original reply tried to claim.
> A democratic government is the means by which the population prevents the monopoly on legal violence from falling permanently into the hands of any individual
That would be nice if we had a “democracy”. Because of both gerrymandering and the design of the constitution - 2 senators per state, and the electoral college - we don’t have one.
The “majority” doesn’t care as long as law enforcement is used unfairly against “them”. There is a reason that during the protests in the US, protestors started using “White shields”. They knew how fast the population would turn against law enforcement when the local news showed them beating up on white people.
The Constitution had the House grow with increase in population. Congress stopped that growth so now lobbyists have the access.
Two Senators per State worked ok when appointed by State because Senators would get recalled and replaced if they voted against State's interests. Now the people vote on Senators and the lobbyists have the access and control.
So you’re saying it was better when the state legislators had control? That’s even less democratic.
You realize that the “states interest” back in the 60s was the continuing of Jim Crow laws in the South. How many Trump supporting states would have recalled Senators in the 2020 for not agreeing to give him the Presidency?
It would have been untenable as the country grew. Originally, a representative shouldn’t have represented more than 30K people. If that had continued, we would now have 10,000 representatives.
You could always reduce the size of the government like conservatives want - at least until they realize that for the most part, conservative states are smaller more rural states that are a net beneficiary of federal income taxes.
As it is now, the lobbyists and special interests have control.
30,000 sounds like real representation, would make gerrymandering pointless, and the lobbyists would find it difficult to control even 1/5 of the 30,000. I support this bigger government! They can do zoom calls, meet regionally, or meet in a baseball stadium.
If instead we optimize this democratic republic for cost, then a king will do.
You earlier brought up gerrymandering, electoral college, protests and your "white shields". Now you avoid the solution to the present day lack of representation, a solution which would make gerrymandering and lobbyists irrelevant in the House, by undoing the cap on the House. You instead want to go into 1930s whataboutism with an unexplained reference to Trump.
We can fix this together and everyone could have better representation in the federal House. Neither of the big parties, nor you, will discuss it. America is addicted to arguing for their team, while the lobbyists and special interests feed at our tax trough.
> You instead want to go into 1930s whataboutism with an unexplained reference to Trump.
It’s not whataboutism or about Trump. When it came time to certify the electoral votes for the election, there was a huge push for Republican representatives and senators not to certify the votes because of the “stolen election” much of that came from state houses. If the states (not the voters) could arbitrarily recall representatives, many of the Republican representatives who did do the right thing wouidnt have.
Besides, there is all types of coercion that could happen remotely that wouldn’t happen when everyone is one place.
In exactly the same way that monads are like burritos. If thinking that makes it easier to start learning more about the concept, that's great. If instead it stands in for learning, that's bad.
On the other hand, I do have this strange desire to learn Spanish by claiming that Spanish is exactly the same as English. Then I'd take all the critiques as edge cases until I'm able to argue the same point in Spanish.
I don’t know why people are surprised by this. Sociology has the concept of Monopolization of Violence. In feudal times violence was undertaken by many institutions, but we as a society decided to monopolize it to reduce overall amount of violence a single individual is expected to face
> Governments are basically the mob, except that they figured out that they can exert more control over a longer period of time if they have documents that "constrain" their powers and they offer you a say in some matters.
That's just about explicit permission. All kind of shit also happens via implicit permission (nobody does anything about cops doing it and so is normalized) or no permission.
They also have the seemingly unique and blatantly unconstitutional power to imprison you for ""lying"" to them.
The actual wording/charge is "providing false statements", which means anything that they can later suggest is untrue.
This is why you should never, ever speak with anyone associated with the FBI even if they are being "friendly".
Say they knock at the door and have questions for you about your shady neighbor down the street. You're not the one under investigation, so what's the harm in talking to them right? Well officer friendly asks the innocuous question of if it was raining last Thursday. You tell them that it was. As it turns out, it was not raining last Thursday and your honest-but-wrong answer means you are now able to be charged with "lying to the FBI".
In practice, they knew it wasn't raining last Thursday and the question was a trap. By answering incorrectly officer friendly can then threaten to charge you at a later date, except there's an out! _You can become an informant!_. By agreeing to spy on your neighbor for the mafia they'll spare you federal inditement. You're now an "asset" that they can work for as long as they please and you have no legal recourse.
EDIT: To expand upon this, lets say it wasn't last thursday but was in fact 60+ days ago. They have a text message from you to your wife saying how beautiful/sunny the day was, because despite being "end to end encrypted" your iMessage private key is stored on Apple servers because you clicked the default CTAs during iCloud setup to enable iCloud backup. They _know_ it was not raining and have "proof" you knew it was not raining, because you texted your wife how nice and sunny it was. You honestly don't remember at the time you were questioned, maybe you think you're 100% telling the truth. Maybe you're confused, and are thinking of the thursday prior where it _was_ raining. None of that matters, they have you on a federal felony and you're their asset now.
The 'best' part about this power is they don't record their interrogations. All of the 'truth' from the interview is recorded on paper by the FBI agents.
Do you have any credible examples of any of this actually happening?
The only times I've ever seen this card played is as punishment for deliberately misleading agents and wasting their time, not getting inconsequential facts wrong.
...like the high-profile Gabby Petito murder case, where Brian Laundrie's parents lied to investigators to conceal their son's whereabouts after the murder. Or that other recent one where a woman faked her own kidnapping and started a national manhunt for herself and her nonexistent kidnappers.
Read some of Ken White's older writings, he's been complaining that there's no materiality requirement to 18 USC 1001 for years and that it's been used to manufacture new charges via questioning.
There's also the matter that FBI policy is NOT to record interviews, so there's only an FD-302 saying you lied and nobody can see what you actually said, only what the FBI heard.
One of the comments points out that Martha Stewart was convicted for a basket of charges completely unrelated to the securities fraud that she was indicted for in the first place. Among them: two counts of lying to federal agents.
The FD-302 thing is nothing new; anybody adjacent to CPS or domestic violence will have seen the equivalent take place in therapists' offices. Client and/or therapist can rehearse abuse stories with no accountability whatsoever.
Gen. Flynn was prosecuted for something the FBI claimed he said in an FBI investigation that he didn't say, and the FBI slow-walked producing the exculpatory evidence.
Is any judge going to convict someone of lying to the FBI for getting the weather wrong? I find it ridiculous that the FBI are going around developing assets by tripping up people with inane questions like this.
You can beat the charge, but sorry your life got ruined, you lost your job due to federal charges, lost your security clearance, your wife left you because it's impractical to raise children with dad in jail and siphoning all the family money to lawyers, you have an arrest record, and now you're on the top list for officers to fuck with at every oppotunity they get.
Remember, they only have to 'win' once, you have to 'win' every time.
"Send us an email about your neighbor once a week or we drag you through the court system as slowly as we can" will work on 90% of people id bet even if everyone involved knows Noone is actually going to prison
I don't believe this is the case, but I am also not a lawyer.
The _actual_ wording of 18 USC § 1001 is "[...] knowingly and willfully" "(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; [...]" [0], not simply "providing false statements."
The DOJ must show that the statement was false, the fact is material to the case, that you knew it was false when you made it, and that it does not fall under the exceptions carved out by DOJ policy [1]. That is very different from what you're claiming.
In your example, the rain on Thursday must actually be important to the case and you must knowingly be attempting to deceive the federal investigators. Your honest-but-wrong answer does not mean you are now able to be charged with providing false statements to a federal criminal investigator under 18 USC § 1001.
That's all well and good for the DOJ, which has virtually unlimited time and funding with an army of lawyers. No so much for regular Joe who is caught in the position OP discussed.
The threat of legal action alone is enough to scare _most_ people in this country because they simply can't afford it.
By that logic, if the law doesn’t actually matter, a regular police officer could also simply threaten the same thing, and there’s nothing differentiating them with the FBI. In both cases it would scare most people because they can’t afford it.
That is the current state of the US law enforcement (2022).
What's interesting about extortion by law enforcement, is that they are not held accountable for describing things that are not true. It's not extortion, if a hypothetical situation is presented as an investigatory method and goes no further.
That's a risk not worth taking, by what measure can one gain by speaking with any LEO?
The folks who have do not carry a fear of prosecution because they can afford to remove themselves from any danger. However; those who do not, suffer under the obfuscated rules of law.
I did not make any claims that one should speak with LEOs. I was merely pointing out that the parent's claim was at best a misunderstanding of the law.
Beyond identifying yourself to LEOs, Don't Talk To The Police [0] without your lawyer present.
I have personally been threatened by FBI agents with threats of being charged for "making false statements" to compel me to divulge information on an investigation. I believe it may be a common tool in their playbook based on how quickly they utilized it.
Holy cow, that sounds terrifying. How did you handle it? Had you already made statements prior to the threat that (in hindsight) were bait/designed to trap you?
Feds are shifty bastards. I had one come to my house. When I refused to speak, and I started shutting the door, they stuck their hand in so they could claim assault if I shut it. Fortunately I was using my hand to close it, rather than slamming it as I normally do, and I was able to stop it before it hit their hand. We stared at each other in silence for a solid minute and they left. Fucking weird.
Martha Stewart was investigated for securities fraud, but only was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements. It is entirely possible that if she had just refused to talk to the feds she would have not been charged with anything.
It is the case. They weaponize "lying" to the FBI and can get you several years in federal prison just for that. It is a common tactic in banana republics and the USA (something we are quickly approaching). They then use this as leverage to get what they want out of you.
Not a lawyer but I thought perjury was false statements under-oath, like in a trial. That's a very different matter than being wrong in a casual interview with the cops/feds.
Do you have any examples of laws about "giving false statements" to local police? Seems like a rather blatant 1st amendment violation.
I understand your point. I am undecided about the overall impact. I have spent my life in two countries. One is a dictatorship where the culture is basically to tell the cops the truth to avoid trouble. Not great but the net effect is the country has less crime. Less murders, less armed robbery and it is a pretty safe. Just don't say anything about politicians. The other country has a culture of not cooperating with the cops. Basically someone can be shot in a street full of people and not a single witness will come forward. The net result this country is far more dangerous and you need to be careful when out and about. None of them are perfect because humans are not perfect.
Let's be real. If they want to mess with you, they don't need to play weird games with you. They're not genies, and they're mostly unaccountable to anyone not their bosses or highly connected individuals. They can not pass go, collect $200 anyway, and mess with you directly.
For sure they could. My only real defense is that I'm just not that interesting I think.
It sure would be nice to live in a country where we could have reasonable certainty that agents of the people's collective will (government) would act in good faith, and were bound by reasonable laws ensuring so.
In general you shouldn't talk to law enforcement because they're allowed to lie and lying to them is a crime, whether we're talking about police or FBI.
Um, yes - bad cops are bad, and there are plenty of bad cops. Very bad.
Might anyone point to an example (current or historical) of a large, complex, socially diverse society which has managed to tightly control actually-serious crime, while also managing to keep the "bad cop stuff" well below the level which America has been stuck with in the past ~half of a century?
A randomly selected citizen has a smaller chance being abused by the police in any rich country and nearly any poor country.
People can point to horrible police misconduct cases in other countries, but you need an immense amount of police misconduct to reach American levels.
Here's a list of the top ten countries ranked by police killings per year. Note this isn't adjusted by population. Note also that the other countries on this list aren't the sort you'd expect to produce good statistics.
Philippines — 6,069+ (avg 2016-2021—includes only deaths during anti-drug operations)
Brazil — 5,804 (2019)
Venezuela — 5,287 (2018)
India — 1,731 (2019)
Syria — 1,497 (2019)
El Salvador — 1087 (2017)
United States — 946 (2020)
Nigeria — 841 (2018)
Afghanistan — 606 (2018)
Pakistan — 495 (2017)
Why did you specifically select
the portion of that list that doesn't include the US? It shows the US is far worse than any rich country, as I claimed.
Malta is notably an anomaly: I can't think of any other rich democracy where journalists reporting on on government links to organized crime get killed by car bombs.
As an aside, I find many of these numbers to be very untrustworthy. For example, India has the note, "Includes 1,606 deaths listed as occurring in "judicial custody," but not due to police, military, or intelligence agency activity." Out of 1,731 deaths in 2019. Syria, "Syria is involved in a civil war".
Malta and Luxembourg had one (1) killing each. Statistical outliers, and all that.
I agree completely, and thought it important enough to note up top.
As a general principle I believe this kind of data should either be rigorously analyzed in depth or analyzed as little as possible. That's why I originally posted raw numbers: I think raw numbers are the only responsible way to do this kind of internet forum surface-level analysis. It's too easy to trick intentionally or unintentionally with statistics.
It's obvious the US is an outlier from the raw numbers, there's no need to get fancy.
I chose the metric of police killings carefully. In a non-tiny democracy with a police violence problem there are enough that it's not dominated by outliers, but few enough that it's feasible for a few reporters to spot check the data. They're also notable enough a large portion of the incidents generate some publicly available commentary, often in local press.
(In non-tiny democracies without a police killing problem it might be dominated by outliers, but the raw numbers make the fact killings are rare obvious)
In the US, for example, the FBI collects statistics even they acknowledge are poor quality. The Washington Post has a project to monitor publicly available information and enter police shootings into a database, and they generally find publicly available proof of about twice as many shootings as are entered into the FBI database.
The main takeaway I wanted people to take from the data I posted is that there's nearly no country like the US close to it. Either way you read Malta & Luxembourg that's true, so there's no need to get fancy (and I think further analyzing that single stat without country-specific expertise would be questionably responsible).
I thought about saying I expected underreporting from the less democratic poorer countries but I decided I didn't want to spend the time reading their methodology to be confident in that. It's possible they've already attempted to correct for that, possibly even too much in the other way. The definition of police is also complex: Whether a unit is police or military is often historical chance.
> ...the other countries on this list aren't the sort you'd expect to produce good statistics.
But those expecting the U.S. to produce good statistics, will just as likely be disappointed (or happy... depending on point of view). Dare we wonder why that is so?
"Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police..." (oops, that looks "inconvenient" for accurate reporting).
"...the initial findings of coroners or medical examiners downplayed or omitted the role of the police when a Black man was killed..." Dare we wonder if under full reporting, if that 3.5 times more likely to be killed would go even higher.
Wait until you find out about the DHS. Unlike interactions with the FBI, it is illegal to record them*. They do not wear body cams. You have no right to a lawyer when interacting with them. They can jail you without charging you or accusing you of a crime. They can search you without probable cause or a warrant. They can put you in cuffs, take you to a hospital, and lie to doctors that you have drugs up your ass, all without a warrant, and then you'll be sent thousands in medical bills for medical services you didn't consent to**. They can stop you on the road without reasonable suspicion / PC / a warrant. They consistently have the among the worst human rights record and hire the lowest quality candidates, and arguably have the least oversight of any of the large federal law enforcement agencies.
*at the border, where most people have this interaction with their child organization CBP.
I think he's talking about the domestic operations. I would agree that the CIA and their sister organizations who operate internationally fit the description as well. Can't torture someone, well, take them to a friendly place where your buddy can torture them. Need to plant some FUD on a person? "an anonymous source in the intelligence community said that X did Y in Z." Unelected, Unaccountable and unchecked in every way.
>Can't torture someone, well, take them to a friendly place where your buddy can torture them.
That reminds me of the technical equivalent with five eyes, and I've never managed to figure out how that is _not_ treason.
Oh, domestic organization X can't spy on you because of that pesky constitution, but they can "allow" a hostile agency from another country to do all the spying (and vice-versa) then "share" information.
Seems pretty clearcut, our domestic agencies are conspiring with a foreign power to defraud US citizens of their constitutional rights. People should go to jail for that, but somehow it's all considered legal
I was curious what they had after ~1974 so looked at the file, and roughly 200 pages of the 270 total are a 2005 incident where a fan sold/uploaded bootleg recordings of her work. As an aside, it's amusing to see screenshots of webpages complete with ancient online ads that appear to have been printed out then scanned in the report. And another aside, I believe they redacted the soft drink offered to the fan during questioning, which the fan refused.
Besides that she played a show with Journey in a venue that supposedly had mob connections in the 80's.
I wonder if they ruled her harmless after 74 or a different organization took over/the documents have a different classification.
That's not what my comment said. People are mad because they like Trump, he was investigated by the FBI , therefore anything negative that comes out about the FBI is amplified. It lets Trump supporters pretend it's not about him.
The FBI following civil rights activists had been known for years. They tracked MLK for example
Yes, every country has intelligence agencies. Aligning them with kgb implies they’re bad guys, which certainly Russian citizens can make the reverse claims.
This doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is akin to a Facebook meme post without the image.
The CIA, FBI & Military industrial complex seem to actively work towards their own interests, separate from the democratic will of the citizens of the US.
It is hard to view this as anything but the 'deep state'. If the US was not the preeminent leader of the 'free world', American intelligence agencies would be viewed as global terrorist organizations.
This is unsurprising given American history, in particular the history of the FBI. It began as an so the DoJ had investigators in certain cases where they otherwise wouldn't (eg on reservations) but it really began with the Mann Act [1]:
> In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution
The reality however was that it was used to prosecute interracial marriage [2]:
> Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the law was invoked over and over again to punish black men for their relationships with white women—affairs that challenged the racial status quo. Rooted in fears of women’s growing mobility and racist characterizations of the sexual appetites of non-white men, the law was designed to protect women against the supposed scourge of “white slavery,” a term used to refer to sex trafficking in the early 20th century.
Later there's a dark history of the FBI's involvements with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm-X, the Black Panthers and a bunch of other black leaders and movements.
275 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] thread> Not that we actually defunded them, but we have sharply reduced the quantity of policing (not usually through official policy as much as pressure on police departments to sharply reduce discretionary, proactive policing) which is what 'defund the police' aimed to do
> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
I've read similar in other papers as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.
Maybe you mean "there isn't evidence that the reduction in policing is caused by 'pressure'", which seems kind of absurd considering the near-decade of nationwide protests. What's the alternative hypothesis? That police around the country spontaneously and abruptly reduced their discretionary policing and it's merely a coincidence that it happened following major protests aimed at reducing the quantity of policing?
But the "defund" quickly ran away into "remove all funding", which of course is a lot more radical and less palatable for any but the further left. Also doesn't help that it made an easy strawman for opponents to this kind of reform to prop up and spread.
Definitely curious if anyone else has a different experience/chronology of events.
"Abolish the police" is the message of a much smaller group.
And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
The idea is that you remove half the police work load, hire half the officers, and use that savings to assign that removed work load to more appropriate people like social workers, unarmed traffic enforcement, etc.
Cost per officer doesn't have to change.
It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.
People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.
So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.
Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services.
> And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.
As an example... I was standing in the street to meet my kids... my wife called the cops for no reason and 4 cars showed up in about 60 seconds... they ended up giving me a criminal trespassing warning even if I was on public property
They do like to hide though so you can't see their presence
The previous city I lived in had a population of about 20k and they had two armored military vehicles (mrap / Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles)
They are trying to get to a police state without the majority of people noticing... In the end, it will break the economy.
This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...
Here is the murder rate graph - note that the most recent year is flagged as not fully reported yet.
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
Up 60% isn't far off, depending on when "pre-BLM days" starts, but it takes a big leap to connect it to BLM.
Also, if you look at the rate since the early 90's we are doing quite a bit better, so you get to pick your favorite trend line.
My 60% figure was grabbing the homicide count in 2014 from the FBI UCR (14,249 per https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-....) and comparing it with the stats from 2021 (22,900).
EDIT: even more, unfiltered data directly from the FBI crime DB: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
It is impossible to see 2014 as anything but a deviation from the mean rather than some bizarre starting point for BLM ruining the country when you look at the data for more than 5 minutes.
As for your proposed solutions, every single drop of funding sent to police departments goes towards their further militarization. There are many small rural towns with tanks now. Anti poverty programs have never been popular in the U.S. No neighborhood wants to host the abuse prevention or mental health centers. So where do we go?
> For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.
> “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”
> All 10 cities that saw sudden increases in homicide had large African American populations, he said. While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.
> “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...
I have more links, but I don't have time at the moment to dig them up.
You're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher, cherrypicking years that seem significant to you, and using it to draw conclusions about trends across the country when the data set itself acknowledges that individual cities and even blocks within those cities skews data all the time. Again, it's lazy data analysis.
Here's Vox on Travis Campbell's research:
> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.
Source: https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...
Here's Harvard's Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi
> We estimate that these [police shooting protests] caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
Note that these are both nationwide studies. I'm not sure what you mean by "cherrypicking years that seem significant to me", but yeah, looking at policing and crime before and after BLM protests seems pretty germane to understanding the effect those protests have on policing and crime.
> you're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher
I think it's more likely that crime researchers better understand the limits of crime data sources than you do, and they probably aren't as lazy as you propose. But by all means, publish your rebuttal (and please link it here so I can read it)!
> You would have a great career in TV journalism!
Tragically, I have a face for radio. :/
* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).
* Intelligence gathering
* Cyber security
They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).
We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
The more interesting question is to consider why Trump would hold this view, especially if you disagree with him on other things. Perhaps you don’t have the same assumptions about the reasons why as he does.
We also know that an FBI attorney falsified information to get warrants against his campaign advisor.
We know that the FBI urged the media to actually censor negative news about his political opponents.
It would be difficult to them trust such an organization to them perform fair investigations against you after those occurrences, regardless of one's political party.
According to who? Trump?
Investigating leads is conspiring against you?
I don’t know the veracity of the claim that the FBI told the media to censor negative news. The media was definitely on guard for being manipulated following the DNC/Podesta email hacking and use of media by Russia in 2016. And so were our counterintelligence agencies. It’s literally their job.
Not focused either way on Trump, just thought that there actually was something to the GPs post.
Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?
No. The FBI reached out to Facebook to let them know how Russia tended to try to influence US citizens with fake news or by amplifying fake aspects of real news using social networks, including Facebook.
A lot of folks thought this was bad because it led to Facebook not amplifying (not removing, not blocking, just not promoting) the Hunter Biden laptop claims, because the story met the hallmarks of what the FBI pointed out to the team. It still does.
Out of curiosity (honestly), how does it?
Thus the media treated it as hacked attempted manipulation.
That said, everyone knew about it and it’s not exactly news that Hunter Biden, like many in that world, was trading off his father’s position and had a drug problem. Indeed, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was targeted by our enemies to be compromised. Any high level executive’s kid with a drug problem is low hanging fruit for kompromat.
“Even if we assume the crazy sounding laptop repair shop story were 100% true, we had partisan political operatives shopping a story to journalists about the supposedly scandalous revelations cribbed from the contents of someone's stolen email communications and electronic data in the midst of a presidential election campaign homestretch. The fact that some of the information has since been authenticated by the nYT or WaPO as belonging to Hunter Biden doesn't change anything. The Clinton emails that were dumped by Wikileaks in 2016 were also authentic. Didn't make them any less stolen or render their release combined with the gross misrepresentation of their contents to feed unsupported narratives less problematic, nor did their authenticity make it any less a part of a Russian influence operation.”
> In spring 2017, Mr. Page, denying he was a Russian agent, told reporters that he had provided information to the C.I.A. about Russia. An F.B.I. agent who was preparing to sign a factual affidavit to accompany the fourth wiretap application asked Mr. Clinesmith to obtain clarity about whether the C.I.A. considered Mr. Page a “source.” That led to Mr. Clinesmith’s interactions with a C.I.A. counterpart, who sent back an email referring to Mr. Page’s status as an American citizen and citing the memorandum from August as a place to find more information. Based on that exchange, Mr. Clinesmith told the agent that the C.I.A. had explicitly said Mr. Page was “never a source,” something his C.I.A. contact later denied saying. When the agent wanted to see it in writing, Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into the email before showing it to his colleague. The agent was satisfied and signed the wiretap affidavit without adding any disclosure about Mr. Page’s relationship with the C.I.A.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/kevin-clinesm...
The problem is that partisanship and racism made it OK to investigate left-wing and black leaders on spurious grounds. However, eventually a right-wing leader managed to ignore the law blatantly and importantly enough to be investigated : and at that point the right turned against the FBI.
There's no principle, only partisanship. Kind of a disaster for the rule of law.
I’d have a lot less of a problem with some of these federal agencies if they’d prosecute the criminals in their own ranks.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-truth-social-fbi-mar-a-...
[Edit: Added a link for those who don’t follow news about trump.]
I think my slide into cynicism regarding humans who achieve power, regardless of their stated political philosophies and alignments, started after finishing "The Dictator's Handbook". I read here some posts advocating getting rid of this or that, or saying we should do it "this way", but even though I agree in a wishful kind of way, it's just not how human beings are wired... No matter how virtuous a system may be, it seems to take only the inevitable one or two odd instances of corruption to start the rot that will bring it down.
This seems to be based on the premise that there could ever be a system that was somehow perfectly free or corruption to begin with.
I think that’s far fetched. I think all human systems are messy and are going to contain some instances of corruption.
The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level that cancels out the benefits of the system as a whole, or not.
I like to think of it as wishful thinking. I fantasize about winning the lottery, too.
>> The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level...
Yeah, agreed. I couldn't point to a single instance where an attempt to eliminate corruption did not eventually spawn unintended (bad) consequences. Working to manage it seems to be the best alternative.
Yeah - I tend to agree.
The major trend in these comments is the FBI and the government were bad, and are still bad, and the only solution is to dismantle them, but these commenters are too late. Where were these revolutionaries in 1968? Hoover died in 1972 and so did his fascist policies.
But you nailed it. While the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, institutional racism in executive agencies was still the rule rather than the exception.
I think it is interesting how that contrasts with minority member success stories in entertainment. In this[1] rehearsal take for a track on Franklin's debut album, we can hear fascinating avant garden social hieracrchy.
Remember that in 1960, even though first developed in the 1940's, multitracking was cutting-edge technology, and multitrack decks were still rare. The modern recording process of scratch track replacement and instrument isolation and separation hadn't yet been developed. Music performances were recorded live in the studio with all the musicians performing in the same tracking room, playing simultaneously together with or without being physically separated by gobos ("go betweens"). Franklin sits at a piano, playing and singing simultaneously, with her own single microphone, and the Ray Bryant Combo itself probably only had one microphone, with both ultimately mixed down to mono. There is no monitoring for the artists, no headphone mixes, and everyone still has to be able to hear everyone else, and Franklin has to play and sing above the accompaniment to be able to hear herself. Hammond speaks from the control room over a PA in the tracking room in deference to Franklin.
But what it is abundantly clear is that, judiciously but humbly so, Franklin is in charge. Columbia Records and producer John Hammond put a young 18yo black woman in charge of a band's and her own studio performances in late 1960," while 8 years later the government is still notably racist and paranoid.
In any regard, while institutional racism still exists in government, it is a shadow of its former ubiquity, except perhaps in unsophisticated rural sheriffs departments. In comparison of then to today, the FBI is now one of the more enlightened agencies, even with only about 20% of its agents minority members. Institutional racism remains, but it has become the exception, and racist policy and language and acts are held to scrutiny; participants are held accountable and extirpated from the ranks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5tYO7eKt6A
He is probably the only person who might actually get to enact this policy, whereas nobody in the current administration is even talking about it.
How could it be more relevant?
I similary don't care about what the president in 2029 thinks.
Anyway, I have the compulsive need to explain it.
I'm not speculating about what an ex-president would do because he's not the president, and might not ever be. There's a good chance that speculating about it is a waste of time. It's definitely a waste of time now, because the earliest he'd become president again is 3 years from now.
The FBI exists. It continues to exist. I don't think it should based on a myriad of past actions. I can write letters to congresspeople and the president about the FBI, and they're people in power now that I don't need to speculate about.
So we have the intangible, and the tangible.
My point is that Trump may not be president now, and it seems you see that as a binary.
He is currently head of a large political organization that pre-dates the FBI which made him president once and may do so again.
Currently serving Republican politicians are calling for the FBI to be defunded because they support him.
https://news.yahoo.com/republican-calls-defund-fbi-boost-090...
He hasn’t stopped existing, nor has the organization that supports him any more than the FBI has.
We simply disagree that one is tangible and the other is not.
In any case, there is a huge gap between writing to your congress person to complain about past FBI abuses, and ‘defund the FBI’.
Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management.
If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?
How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible?
The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top.
It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no choice but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists.
I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
You cite transparency, which is one aspect- but the other interesting problem is the incestuous relationship that our intel agencies have with the media as well.
How much political news coverage was shaped by "anonymous sources" from these intel agencies?
I forget who it was- but I remember one retired agent speaking pretty casually about how the FBI leaks information to journalists by sharing information with retired agents that still hold their clearances.
If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea!
Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes.
This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less.
The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes. But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.
That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.
I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s.
And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs.
I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case.
Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
Not just "defund", but "abolish".
They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc
CIA tortures people overseas. EDIT: CIA also arms militia groups that are against, or later turn on, American interests.
NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?)
ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1]
DEA is all about the failed war on drugs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_Siege
[2] https://www.usacarry.com/ar-pistols/
That's a glib statement that applies so widely that it's not really relevant.
The executive branch is WAY too powerful, mostly as a result of Congress ceding its authority over the decades to avoid accountability. Separation of powers is clearly broken as a result.
People have internalized that HR is on the company's side, not theirs, but sometimes their goals are congruent. Everyone should look at government the same way.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-in...
The important part to consider:
> The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
I know this is talking specifically about informants, and you could make a case that that is necessary, but what reason is there to believe that this doesn’t extend to members of the FBI as well?
Here is a more recent article about this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi...
Every year, I pay the US government protection money at a higher rate than the mob demanded (~35% vs ~15%). They mark their territory, control who enters and exits, and demand compliance with their rules. If you are under their protection, they give you a little document that tells other gangs not to screw with you.
They back all of this up with guns and threats of violence, held by unelected thugs. They give you a process to prove your innocence, but the process itself is a punishment, since it is a huge resource drain to go through.
The FBI are the most visible thugs.
This is why it is critical to have government established "of, by, and for" the constituency - because even in a best-case scenario, corruption will get in the cracks and make them bigger, etc.
Of course, the Somali government is very small and Somali people are very free, and they aren't doing very well either.
I would say there's a correlation between less government and worse living conditions on average
I think this is true, but I don't think the correlation is causal. Rich countries throughout history have tended to grow their governments after becoming rich by adopting social programs and trying to flex their muscle internationally. Most of Europe followed this model, as did the US.
Edit. Are you claiming social programs are created to flex your country? Do you have proof of this?
Post WW2 for the US, post-Victorian era in the UK, post-Napoleon in France, post-Tarism in Russia, post-oil-boom in Scandanavia, etc. Countries with big social programs are still great to live in, but I only mean that the social programs and big government are clearly not part of the reason why those countries became rich. The big government is caused by the wealth, not the other way around.
Does your mob allow a bunch of deductions, tax dodges, "carried interest" rates, IRA's, and other tricks to cut what the well-to-do actually pay them down to half (or less) of their headline "rate"?
EDIT: Examples so far seem to be limited, one-off "if you're patting the right guy's back" situations. Vs. the US gov't allows an unlimited number of sleazy Wall Street types to launder unlimited amounts of money through various tax dodges. This might be good evidence that the mob is smarter about collecting "taxes" than the US gov't...but it sounds like the answer to my question is "basically, no".
Edit: To be clear, this was not a unique situation. A lot of businesses generally got sweetheart rates from street gangs and mobs because they helped the mob and mob bosses in other ways. The same way Wall Street financiers get a sweetheart deal because they manage the politicians' money and employ their children.
What a ridiculous comparison
* Edit since I'm spent on replies : Sure you can name that one favela somewhere where a few dozen were beheaded by the mob. The idea isn't that you'll win 100% of the time, the idea is you have some chance. I raise your one unnamed favela with several unnamed Mexican pueblos where cartel was run out by campesinos w/ break-action shotguns and rifles. And the mere fact you actually have a chance at winning is often enough to get a counterparty to back off.
Go try this in the favela near me and report back. The last group of locals that tried that were beheaded.
I'm beginning to think there's a time limit on relatively fair and effective states, as citizens slowly begin to become almost unbelievably blind to what actual criminal states are like and start dismantling their own institutions.
In no way has the federal government been 'dismantled' as time goes on. Although arguably the constitution has been dismantled, in no small part through ever expanding interpretation of the commerce clause.
If you lose your dead, that's not the case in a democracy
Governments are institutions. Considering the anarchic alternative, what we currently have is preferable. People as a group, the actual mob, cannot be trusted. They are irrational and are therefore potentially dangerous.
The trick is to safeguard against institutional rot.
So's the mob. It's why they call it "organized" crime.
Do some research about what it's like in places where there is truly no mechanism for people to remove those in power. Look at russia and the mechanisms by which decisions are made and what means there are for the public to change them, and contrast that with all the NIMBYism which often dominates the process in the US.
A democratic government is the means by which the population prevents the monopoly on legal violence from falling permanently into the hands of any individual. It isn't perfect but it's the best option we have. Pretending we would be equally well off with a despot is nonsense.
They are there to stop you from wasting department resources with requests for 500,000,000 copies of an incident report whose content you disagree with.
Bailey: Even some Western governments have issues with low-level corruption.
Also, I never said that we would be better off with a despot or a gang or anything of the sort, as the original reply tried to claim.
That would be nice if we had a “democracy”. Because of both gerrymandering and the design of the constitution - 2 senators per state, and the electoral college - we don’t have one.
The “majority” doesn’t care as long as law enforcement is used unfairly against “them”. There is a reason that during the protests in the US, protestors started using “White shields”. They knew how fast the population would turn against law enforcement when the local news showed them beating up on white people.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Two Senators per State worked ok when appointed by State because Senators would get recalled and replaced if they voted against State's interests. Now the people vote on Senators and the lobbyists have the access and control.
You realize that the “states interest” back in the 60s was the continuing of Jim Crow laws in the South. How many Trump supporting states would have recalled Senators in the 2020 for not agreeing to give him the Presidency?
You could always reduce the size of the government like conservatives want - at least until they realize that for the most part, conservative states are smaller more rural states that are a net beneficiary of federal income taxes.
30,000 sounds like real representation, would make gerrymandering pointless, and the lobbyists would find it difficult to control even 1/5 of the 30,000. I support this bigger government! They can do zoom calls, meet regionally, or meet in a baseball stadium.
If instead we optimize this democratic republic for cost, then a king will do.
We can fix this together and everyone could have better representation in the federal House. Neither of the big parties, nor you, will discuss it. America is addicted to arguing for their team, while the lobbyists and special interests feed at our tax trough.
> how would that have worked in 1939
About the same as 1839 and 1937 and 1938.
It’s not whataboutism or about Trump. When it came time to certify the electoral votes for the election, there was a huge push for Republican representatives and senators not to certify the votes because of the “stolen election” much of that came from state houses. If the states (not the voters) could arbitrarily recall representatives, many of the Republican representatives who did do the right thing wouidnt have.
Besides, there is all types of coercion that could happen remotely that wouldn’t happen when everyone is one place.
In exactly the same way that monads are like burritos. If thinking that makes it easier to start learning more about the concept, that's great. If instead it stands in for learning, that's bad.
On the other hand, I do have this strange desire to learn Spanish by claiming that Spanish is exactly the same as English. Then I'd take all the critiques as edge cases until I'm able to argue the same point in Spanish.
God is love.
Love is blind.
Ray Charles is blind.
Ray Charles is God.
The actual wording/charge is "providing false statements", which means anything that they can later suggest is untrue.
This is why you should never, ever speak with anyone associated with the FBI even if they are being "friendly".
Say they knock at the door and have questions for you about your shady neighbor down the street. You're not the one under investigation, so what's the harm in talking to them right? Well officer friendly asks the innocuous question of if it was raining last Thursday. You tell them that it was. As it turns out, it was not raining last Thursday and your honest-but-wrong answer means you are now able to be charged with "lying to the FBI".
In practice, they knew it wasn't raining last Thursday and the question was a trap. By answering incorrectly officer friendly can then threaten to charge you at a later date, except there's an out! _You can become an informant!_. By agreeing to spy on your neighbor for the mafia they'll spare you federal inditement. You're now an "asset" that they can work for as long as they please and you have no legal recourse.
EDIT: To expand upon this, lets say it wasn't last thursday but was in fact 60+ days ago. They have a text message from you to your wife saying how beautiful/sunny the day was, because despite being "end to end encrypted" your iMessage private key is stored on Apple servers because you clicked the default CTAs during iCloud setup to enable iCloud backup. They _know_ it was not raining and have "proof" you knew it was not raining, because you texted your wife how nice and sunny it was. You honestly don't remember at the time you were questioned, maybe you think you're 100% telling the truth. Maybe you're confused, and are thinking of the thursday prior where it _was_ raining. None of that matters, they have you on a federal felony and you're their asset now.
https://thehill.com/homenews/286849-fbi-didnt-record-clinton...
The only times I've ever seen this card played is as punishment for deliberately misleading agents and wasting their time, not getting inconsequential facts wrong.
...like the high-profile Gabby Petito murder case, where Brian Laundrie's parents lied to investigators to conceal their son's whereabouts after the murder. Or that other recent one where a woman faked her own kidnapping and started a national manhunt for herself and her nonexistent kidnappers.
There's also the matter that FBI policy is NOT to record interviews, so there's only an FD-302 saying you lied and nobody can see what you actually said, only what the FBI heard.
One of the comments points out that Martha Stewart was convicted for a basket of charges completely unrelated to the securities fraud that she was indicted for in the first place. Among them: two counts of lying to federal agents.
The FD-302 thing is nothing new; anybody adjacent to CPS or domestic violence will have seen the equivalent take place in therapists' offices. Client and/or therapist can rehearse abuse stories with no accountability whatsoever.
But how many times do they use it to control/ruin/subjugate people you and I have never heard of? Who speaks up for them?
Remember, they only have to 'win' once, you have to 'win' every time.
The _actual_ wording of 18 USC § 1001 is "[...] knowingly and willfully" "(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; [...]" [0], not simply "providing false statements."
The DOJ must show that the statement was false, the fact is material to the case, that you knew it was false when you made it, and that it does not fall under the exceptions carved out by DOJ policy [1]. That is very different from what you're claiming.
In your example, the rain on Thursday must actually be important to the case and you must knowingly be attempting to deceive the federal investigators. Your honest-but-wrong answer does not mean you are now able to be charged with providing false statements to a federal criminal investigator under 18 USC § 1001.
0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
1: https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-42000-fraud-against-the-gove...
The threat of legal action alone is enough to scare _most_ people in this country because they simply can't afford it.
The folks who have do not carry a fear of prosecution because they can afford to remove themselves from any danger. However; those who do not, suffer under the obfuscated rules of law.
Beyond identifying yourself to LEOs, Don't Talk To The Police [0] without your lawyer present.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Great writeup on the topic
Do you have any examples of laws about "giving false statements" to local police? Seems like a rather blatant 1st amendment violation.
It sure would be nice to live in a country where we could have reasonable certainty that agents of the people's collective will (government) would act in good faith, and were bound by reasonable laws ensuring so.
Might anyone point to an example (current or historical) of a large, complex, socially diverse society which has managed to tightly control actually-serious crime, while also managing to keep the "bad cop stuff" well below the level which America has been stuck with in the past ~half of a century?
People can point to horrible police misconduct cases in other countries, but you need an immense amount of police misconduct to reach American levels.
Here's a list of the top ten countries ranked by police killings per year. Note this isn't adjusted by population. Note also that the other countries on this list aren't the sort you'd expect to produce good statistics.
Top 10 Countries with the Highest Rate of Police Killings (per 10 million residents — U.S. ranks 33rd):
Mexico, Rwanda, Sudan, and Mali rank 34-37
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
Edit: The closest rich countries are
- Malta, at ~2/3 the US
- Luxumberg, ~ 1/2
- Canada, ~1/3
Malta is notably an anomaly: I can't think of any other rich democracy where journalists reporting on on government links to organized crime get killed by car bombs.
Malta and Luxembourg had one (1) killing each. Statistical outliers, and all that.
As a general principle I believe this kind of data should either be rigorously analyzed in depth or analyzed as little as possible. That's why I originally posted raw numbers: I think raw numbers are the only responsible way to do this kind of internet forum surface-level analysis. It's too easy to trick intentionally or unintentionally with statistics.
It's obvious the US is an outlier from the raw numbers, there's no need to get fancy.
I chose the metric of police killings carefully. In a non-tiny democracy with a police violence problem there are enough that it's not dominated by outliers, but few enough that it's feasible for a few reporters to spot check the data. They're also notable enough a large portion of the incidents generate some publicly available commentary, often in local press.
(In non-tiny democracies without a police killing problem it might be dominated by outliers, but the raw numbers make the fact killings are rare obvious)
In the US, for example, the FBI collects statistics even they acknowledge are poor quality. The Washington Post has a project to monitor publicly available information and enter police shootings into a database, and they generally find publicly available proof of about twice as many shootings as are entered into the FBI database.
The main takeaway I wanted people to take from the data I posted is that there's nearly no country like the US close to it. Either way you read Malta & Luxembourg that's true, so there's no need to get fancy (and I think further analyzing that single stat without country-specific expertise would be questionably responsible).
I thought about saying I expected underreporting from the less democratic poorer countries but I decided I didn't want to spend the time reading their methodology to be confident in that. It's possible they've already attempted to correct for that, possibly even too much in the other way. The definition of police is also complex: Whether a unit is police or military is often historical chance.
But those expecting the U.S. to produce good statistics, will just as likely be disappointed (or happy... depending on point of view). Dare we wonder why that is so?
"Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police..." (oops, that looks "inconvenient" for accurate reporting).
"...the initial findings of coroners or medical examiners downplayed or omitted the role of the police when a Black man was killed..." Dare we wonder if under full reporting, if that 3.5 times more likely to be killed would go even higher.
More Than Half of (U.S.) Police Killings Are Mislabeled, New Study Says (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/police-killings-underc...)
*at the border, where most people have this interaction with their child organization CBP.
**Actually happened to me.
If you're within 100 miles of the border or the oceans. That covers something like 2/3rds of the U.S. population.
This kinda reads like a description of the CIA. How many of these have you got there?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
That reminds me of the technical equivalent with five eyes, and I've never managed to figure out how that is _not_ treason.
Oh, domestic organization X can't spy on you because of that pesky constitution, but they can "allow" a hostile agency from another country to do all the spying (and vice-versa) then "share" information.
Seems pretty clearcut, our domestic agencies are conspiring with a foreign power to defraud US citizens of their constitutional rights. People should go to jail for that, but somehow it's all considered legal
There is a fixed number of people who can have their rights violated before the population doesn’t have confidence in law enforcement.
And thats what we are seeing now.
How is this any different than local law enforcement?
I’m not saying you are implying this. But it’s strange that the same people who “back the blue” locally, want to “defund the FBI”.
Besides that she played a show with Journey in a venue that supposedly had mob connections in the 80's.
I wonder if they ruled her harmless after 74 or a different organization took over/the documents have a different classification.
The FBI following civil rights activists had been known for years. They tracked MLK for example
Wall Street is our Politburo, and we split the CPSU into two parties because it gives better optics.
This doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is akin to a Facebook meme post without the image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
It's a safe assumption that the FBI was monitoring any given Black person with influence, and we might as well assume they still are.
It is hard to view this as anything but the 'deep state'. If the US was not the preeminent leader of the 'free world', American intelligence agencies would be viewed as global terrorist organizations.
> In its original form the act made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of "any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking, particularly where trafficking was for the purposes of prostitution
The reality however was that it was used to prosecute interracial marriage [2]:
> Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the law was invoked over and over again to punish black men for their relationships with white women—affairs that challenged the racial status quo. Rooted in fears of women’s growing mobility and racist characterizations of the sexual appetites of non-white men, the law was designed to protect women against the supposed scourge of “white slavery,” a term used to refer to sex trafficking in the early 20th century.
Later there's a dark history of the FBI's involvements with the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm-X, the Black Panthers and a bunch of other black leaders and movements.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act
[2]: https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johns...
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-sin...