The 19yo narrated the encounter by captioning the videos he posted. That put him in legal jeopardy as he expressed opinions as fact, according to the lawsuit.
That's what their claiming at least, but it's a lot different in how that actually gets interpreted once in court so it'll be interesting to see the filings and their reasoning in how they should be interpreted as fact instead of opinion, and how they claim that the statements are false too.
Many police investigations depend on absolute control of evidence. Border and Customs especially depends on this and somehow have succeeded to this day in maintained regulations and laws that block you from accessing recording devices or recording when in the indoors secondary inspection. And of course that is the place where they fabricate all their lies and warrants.
The things border agents get away with make an absolute mockery of the constitution. They have the ability to seize and search devices (phones, computers) without a warrant within 100 mi of the us border or international airports.
I also distinctly remember a story during the Portland protests of unidentified government agents (later revealed to be border patrol) throwing people into unmarked vehicles. I fail to see how that's any different than kidnapping. It's certainly how security services the world over 'disappear' their citizens.
I am usually 100% for peaceful protest over violent resistance, but in such a circumstance I don't think any jury in the land would convict someone of killing such an agent that refused to identify themselves.
> I don't think any jury in the land would convict someone of killing such an agent that refused to identify themselves
I think you give juries too much credit, and maybe voir dire in general.
The prosecution would simply hammer on the fact that they "murdered a cop" and how they don't dispute the fact they killed them, they have the murder weapon, etc. They'd bring up crying relatives of the deceased. They'd bring up the defendant's prior criminal history if one exists, or find old social media posts critical of LE or the government. And they'd go right up to the line of perjury without crossing it, asking half a dozen people from the same department about "department policy" around identifying yourself.
Not to mention they'd almost certainly ask for a change of venue to a more LE-friendly area of the country. So you end up with some young kid from an urban area on the coast on trial for killing a cop in rural Colorado or Nevada or something. It's unlikely that goes well for them, especially if they don't have the funds for a bulldog defense attorney.
Yeah, juries tend towards the stupid side because competent people likely have lives that would be seriously impacted by a major trial.
As far as I'm concerned plainclothes officers should not be allowed to make arrests outside exigent circumstances. The target is likely to feel they are under criminal attack and very well might respond with lethal force.
I have no problem with a plain clothed officer making an arrest if they CLEARLY identify themselves as officers when making the arrest. Those agents didn't. They refused questions of whether or not they were law enforcement and were literally loading people into unmarked vans.
I am quite frankly shocked that there wasn't violence in response to that.
I wouldn't consider myself a gun nut by any stretch, but how is the appropriate response to people who won't identify themselves trying to load you into the back of an unmarked van not violent-quickly-approaching-lethal force?
Anyone with knowledge in the area will tell you that if you're the subject of an attempting kidnapping (or carjacking or anything in that ballpark) your number one goal is to not get taken to another location. Whatever you have to do, don't get taken somewhere else because it's definitely going to be something more favorable to the assailant.
I too am shocked that this didn't end in violence and serious injury or worse.
I mean the folks this happened to in Portland were probably not well trained at all and have some sense of self preservation. They had to know quickly they’d be killed if they produced a weapon
I was on a jury a few months ago for the first time and it seemed like a reasonable cross-section of society. I don't know if I'll go so far as to say smart people are more likely to have professional-level jobs than dumb people, but professional-level jobs are not going to fire you for going to jury duty for a couple days with quite a bit of notice (I got my notice ~2 months before my time in the jury pool). While it didn't seem any "stupider" than society as a whole, it was also very clear when folks gave the prosecutor or state-called witnesses more weight than the defendant or the defense witnesses.
And most trials aren't major. There were 5 or 6 trials at the courthouse that week, and only one was estimated to take more than 3 days. Ours took a full day but I still got home before my wife.
Yes. But Hawaii isn't special. That vast majority of the US population lives 100 miles from an border because the vast majority of the population is by the coasts. The great lakes count too. So almost all of the large cities in the USA are constitution free zones.
> Border and Customs especially depends on this and somehow have succeeded to this day in maintained regulations and laws that block you from accessing recording devices or recording when in the indoors secondary inspection. And of course that is the place where they fabricate all their lies and warrants.
As a paramedic, I've routinely taken prisoners from our county jail (run by the Sheriff's Office) to hospital. One thing that always got me, when we were in the sally port, and wheeling our gurney into the receiving area, the big printed sign on the door in, telling officers to "Turn off all body cams and recording devices in this area."
The sign isn't up there for us. And if we do actually treat a patient, we do so in the medical room, not the intake area. The sign references the intake area. Sorry, that distinction may not have been clear in my initial post.
My guess is that there may be different standards for release of jail footage versus officer body cam footage.
I'm sure their argument would be that it's a cost saving measure, "why pay for storage of body cam footage when the area is already camera covered", but to me that seems like a convenient side effect, more than a core rationale.
I predict they will lose and a video criticizing their arguments in the court case will appear on YouTube and receive millions of views.
Even if he loses, a video that simply quotes court documents and offers opinion could attract a lot of views and cause a lot of outrage towards the officers and the system.
Not sure why you are preoccupied with this being a video - that’s just the medium. There is already, rightly, a lot of scrutiny with how much law enforcement is allowed to get away with and the public is very receptive to this message at the current moment. This information combing to light is enough to effectively make a case to the public.
The headline suggests that the footage of the arrest is what the cops are claiming is an invasion of privacy.
But the claim is about the accompanying comments/captions, some of which talk about things that don't happen in the video and didn't happen during the interaction.
In this case, the two are intrinsically connected. I get what you're saying. I also think "Cops are suing a teen for invasion of privacy based on his narration of a viral video of their body cam footage of his arrest" is a little unwieldy.
The right to record the police in public is well established now, and the claims the police are making (that technically Nathan Winter of the Newton Police Department is not a "convicted" domestic abuser, he's just an "accused" domestic abuser with a judge issuing a protective order against him) seem more likely to defame them than a brief caption in the teen's posted arrest video.
FWIW those DV TPO are handed out like candy and not evidence of anything. David Letterman had one for bit because a lady (he didn't know, in a different state) accused him of sending her secret abusive messages through his TV program. It's kind of insane to depend on that for an opinion let alone stuff like constitutional rights.
Fixing people's opinions is very difficult because they are mostly made emotionally and the idea of a person being harassed or abused is emotional fire while the idea of an innocent person accused (especially since they are often people of "power") is often met with apathy at best.
Many people just support removing constitutional rights, and consider sometimes removing them from some people to be an improvement in that direction even if it's not total victory.
An emergency protective order is usually given with no verification because it's much better to give one out incorrectly then to fail to give when you you should have.
But those are only pending a court date, a few weeks at most. A "real" one is issued by a judge after interviewing both parties (or by default if one doesn't show up) and those are very reliably real. I don't know anything about the letterman thing. If it was an emergency one yeah you don't want to read too much into it. The real ones though are very reliable indicators that something fucked up went down.
> The real ones though are very reliable indicators that something fucked up went down.
Any numbers on how much more reliable they are after the initial order kicks you out of the spousal home and asks you to get a lawyer while navigating being homeless and losing access to assets in your house and any evidence inside? It's hard to believe the short hearing a couple weeks later with pretty low standard of evidence with you now at a severe disadvantage is that much more accurate.
Are you speaking from personal experience? Because I've lived through exactly that, and I still understand protective orders as one of the most effective ways to prevent intimate partner murders.
You're using armchair logic, which can justify anything. giraffe_lady already said:
> I've lived through exactly that
So your 100% snarky comment about how she's not a practicing lawyer and therefore can't know anything about it is pretty off key, especially when you're literally quoting "don't be snarky". You're both swiping at each other; don't quote the rules at someone when you're not applying them to yourself.
Where did I say: "she's not a practicing lawyer and therefore can't know anything about it?"
To preface: I had/have absolutely no idea if "she" is a "she," what she is, where she is, her level of professional expertise or profession.
I am human, I don't know everything, everywhere: the distinct possibility exists that whatever jurisdiction this individual is in has laws, customs unbeknownst to me.
This person insinuated that I was "talking out my ass," implied my hard-earned knowledge and experience was obtained from a "mens rights subreddit" as a way to dismiss my statements.
What happens often is this causes the escalation. Trying to make this into a reddit issue and claiming information backing up your point is everywhere is weak and you lose credibility. Produce the studies or let your argument devolve into hearsay
> I still understand protective orders as one of the most effective ways to prevent intimate partner murders
I don't see how that makes them a reliable indicator that something went down. That could be true even if 99% of restraining orders were against innocent people.
Based on whatever fake text message screenshots, sob story, crying children, paid witnesses can convince the judge that some potential threat exists beyond a preponderance of the evidence.
Yes. Assuming you're willing to purjure yourself, this is basically the full time job of a family court judge and they're much more practiced at figuring it out than a normal person would be.
You'd be hard pressed to find a person with less confidence in our "justice" system than I have. And as I mentioned in another comment, I have, unlike almost everyone else here, actually been on the receiving end of a misuse of this system. I still find it overall pretty reliable and the best mechanism we currently have for reducing intimate partner violence, one of the most common ways for women to be murdered.
It's civil court: can you please give me some Lexis cites on any case you are aware of for someone being prosecuted for perjury incident to evidence forged in a PPO hearing?
I've witnessed 100+ of these hearings: they are a disgrace to our justice system. Evidentiary standards are a joke, and thankfully, get absolutely smoked upon appeal 9/10 times - instant suppression.
It's wonderful that they may have helped you at one point.
You keep citing this "intimate spousal murder" schtick with zero non-anecdotal citations (try proving a negative.) Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
> It's wonderful that they may have helped you at one point.
That's not what they said, you're misreading.
> Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
I did a very quick search using neutral terms for studies on this. Here are the first three I found.
> PO victims had police incident rates that were more than double the matched group prior to the PO, but dropped to the level of the matched group during and after the order. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151113/
> Results showed significant reductions in threats of assault, physical assault, stalking, and worksite harassment over time among all women, regardless of receipt or nonreceipt of a protection order. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448307/
> Permanent, but not temporary, protection orders are associated with a significant decrease in risk of police-reported violence against women by their male intimate partners. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195163
That last one had a pretty good study size - 2691 women.
I don't think it's incredible that a protective order could stop an expanding pattern of abuse and violence before it becomes severe enough for a murder to occur. You say "someone willing to commit murder", and it's probably true that if the culprit is already very willing or actively intending to commit a murder, a protective order is useless. Abusers cannot be placed into permanent "murderous" and "non-murderous" groups, though.
https://jaapl.org/content/38/3/376 . I also note that in your comments on this article you have asked people multiple times for sources, but don't provide anything other than your own anecdotal experience as contrary evidence.
> Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
Others have talked about how abusers don't always intend to commit murder, but there's also something to say about enforce-ability. Suppose someone yells and screams at you and threatens to hurt you. You call the police. Unless you've got injuries or recordings, what are the police going to do? Without hard evidence it's just a he said/she said and is unlikely to even end up with charges. Even if you have recordings, unless it's a specific threat that isn't a crime. But you then go to a court for a TPO. This person shows up again, screaming and yelling and threatening you. You call the police and they show up. Now all you have to do it point to the person standing in your front yard, and point to the TPO, and that's the case.
> this is basically the full time job of a family court judge
> You'd be hard pressed to find a person with less confidence in our "justice" system than I have.
I was "mandated" into "optional" pretrial mediation by a District Court when my stepdaughter was in a car accident.
The mediator, who said she was a Family Court judge when introducing herself, among several other problematic things, attempted to write a mediation agreement where -I- was purportedly binding not just myself but my insurance carrier to several things, with language like "FireBeyond agrees that Insurer or himself will pay X by date Y. He agrees that he and insurer will be in default if they do not", etc. And when I stated that I had no authority to agree on behalf my insurance carrier to binding agreements, she was frustrated and exasperated that I was correcting her/objecting to her language.
I've also lived in a place where it was settled Family Court precedent that men could be (and were often found to be) liable for child support for children that were not theirs, in marriage or out, by virtue of the fact that they were in a relationship with the mother at the time of birth and beyond (regardless of awareness of progeny).
Please do not mistake this for a lack of sympathy for what I see as unacceptable levels of intimate partner violence and our poor handling of it, because as a paramedic who sees far more of it than I should, I am not. It is difficult at times to find a nuance with which to criticize the family court without coming across MRA/incel/redpilly.
> A "real" one is issued by a judge after interviewing both parties
A judge who doesn't want something bad to happen, under any circumstances. Therefore, they are extremely likely just to issue a PPO "just because."
> The real ones though are very reliable indicators that something fucked up went down.
TPOs/PPOs are absolutely not reliable: In most states, they are civil and issued subject to a preponderance of the evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. Evidence is not subject to any verification or real evidentiary standards: you could fake text message screenshots all day long and net a PPO before you ever had an issue with perjury.
FWIW: someone with ill/violent intent couldn't care less about a random status violation that would pale in comparative severity to whatever other crime they wanted to commit.
> FWIW: someone with ill/violent intent couldn't care less about a random status violation that would pale in comparative severity to whatever other crime they wanted to commit.
Violence in general and domestic violence especially are not always premeditated. What starts as an attempt by the abuser to hash things out can devolve into violence. A protective order can stop abusers from making the attempt in the first place, and when there is an attempt they can help the victim get more immediate help from law enforcement.
And of course nothing calms an abuser down like being set loose without a proper conviction, now with the ire of being dispossessed perhaps rightly of children and home.
Convict and jail them, with the full rights and penalties that go with that. Not this halfass paper shield against an otherwise free person.
> And of course nothing calms an abuser down like being set loose without a proper conviction, now with the ire of being dispossessed perhaps rightly of children and home.
Absolutely, some murders do seem to be triggered by protection orders. Presumably those cases would also occur when they are charged with a crime with cooperation from the victim. Are we going to instead consider pretrial detention for all cases of accused DV? And wouldn't that have all of the same issues with a lower standard of evidence but infringe even more on their rights?
Edit: I should clarify, when charges are filed we should consider pretrial detention. Unfortunately there are tons of reasons why DV victims often end up not wanting to press charges, or when someone is charged, not wanting to cooperate with prosecutors. Creating a situation where their only avenue for safety is pressing charges and cooperating with authorities creates its own set of issues and I feel they still deserve some level of safety even if they don't cooperate with criminal charges.
About everywhere I've lived police will absolutely arrest and book upon probable cause of criminal DV and they're often required to by law or policy.
Yes we should absolutely consider pretrial detention. In my state refer to ARS 13-3883 and note it pertains to criminal justice instead of civil, which are significantly different with different standards than an ex parte civil order.
If someone is an abuser by all means take advantage of criminal justice system .
> Are we going to consider pretrial detention for all cases of accused DV? And wouldn't that have all of the same issues with a lower standard of evidence but infringe even more on their rights?
I think we should.
The reason permanent orders are handed out like candy is because the judge wants to err on the side of caution. It's the same reason cops are more willing to use force when they have a taser than when they have a gun - there's no consequences for doing so.
Make there be real consequences for wrongly issuing a protection order, and you'll have fewer wrongly issued protection orders.
Why not just address the point? Its a casual opinion informed by basic research on domestic violence. I didn't feel like I needed a citation for "sometimes violence is impulsive" but here we are I guess.
This is absolutely correct; not sure why you are being downvoted. TPOs are often issued without the targeted party being contacted or having a chance to defend themselves. PPOs tried in family court do not have a “reasonable doubt” requirement; they are regularly granted without substantive evidence or signs of physical abuse. No judge wants to read about somebody being killed after they denied the PO.
A quick graph analysis of the upvoters/downvoters on each comment and then clustering those across historical posts would probably elucidate this reason.
> No judge wants to read about somebody being killed after they denied the PO.
A judge or magistrate suffers no penalty for issuing a PPO but can suffer great ridicule when this exact situation happens: how is it not obvious that this would perversely inflate the numbers?
Another example is J. Cole's song Neighbors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nfVWiXY3WY. I went to his concert for this album and he spoke on how frustrating it was to rise out of extreme poverty and reach the pinnacle of the music world and still have to be subjected to traumatic incidents with the police. There was zero evidence for this raid and they still destroyed his property and disabled his cameras.
According to the article, The issue is not that the police were recorded or put on YouTube. It's that the YouTube video had captions on it from the 19 year old. It is the content of those that is still an issue.
From the article, the judge has dismissed most of the claims but some have been allowed to be moved forward.
> Captions in the YouTube video that the counterclaim quoted read that [...] Galanakis had been “kidnapped then raped by the NPD all night.”
> In two decisions in May and September, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher dismissed almost all of the officers’ claims. Locher deemed most of Galanakis’s captions as “non-actionable statement[s] of opinion” or “rhetorical hyperbole,” which are both considered non-defamatory. This included the caption where Galanakis said he was “raped” by the police department, which Locher said was “distasteful,” but non-actionable.
False claim of rape is distasteful but non-actionable? I don't get that.
Most likely because these were captions on the cops' bodycam footage, so viewers who watched it probably did not get any impression that he was claiming to be literally raped.
Yeah, no. In the context, it's an obvious hyperbolic metaphor. Nobody was meant to believe that it referred to real rape, no reasonable viewer would have believed that, and most likely nobody did believe that.
Xbox live rape claims are obvious hyperbole because neither party was ever in the physical presence of the other. In this case it's different, because the accuser was arrested by the police so the police did have the opportunity to rape him. Since that opportunity actually existed, I don't think the claim is obvious hyperbole.
I think nobody would believe the claim in the context of xbox live, but many people are inclined to believe it in the context of an unlawful arrest. Even one of the replies to my first comment about this seems to believe the claim. (He's now been flagged for this. What guideline did he violate? I hope he wasn't flagged because his perspective lends credence to my perspective that accusing cops of raping you after a baseless arrest is not obvious hyperbole.)
from my perspective, he used rape as hyperbole to describe general harassment... it's incredibly distasteful, but you'll hear something like "your team got raped" as a barb in sports or gaming
There's a clear contextual difference between a ball game and a bogus arrest. In the latter, he was deprived of his freedom and placed at the mercy of the police with few if any witnesses.
> The only counts Locher has not dismissed are defamation and invasion of privacy against the officers related to Galanakis' claim that Winters had been convicted of domestic abuse. “Nathan Winter of the Newton Police Department convicted of domestic abuse after beating up his ex girlfriend,” Galanakis wrote in one caption. A subsequent caption stated that Winters had “beat the shit out of” his girlfriend. Though Winters had a protective order filed against him, the counterclaim states that he has not been charged or convicted of domestic abuse. Locher agreed that on this basis claims of defamation and false-light invasion of privacy for both Winter and Wing (because of the implication that Wing did nothing to discipline Winters) can proceed.
Most important part of the article as far as I can tell. Everything else was dismissed.
These two cops are quite disgusting, especially Winters. I remember seeing this video when it originally went viral, and the 19-year-old seems calm and coherent. The only reason I think you could mistake him for drinking is his normal speech pattern has a kind of 'slur' to it. Nothing he did seemed wrong, just what they initially pulled him over for re: his headlights, which he had a consistent explanation for. They're just power hungry cops who wanted to fuck with someone.
Does defamation require the person to knowingly spread false information? As my understanding is that if they had heard of the protection order and misunderstood what that meant they wouldn't be guilty of libel.
I'm not sure if that's true, or if it would also apply to defamation.
> Does defamation require the person to knowingly spread false information?
IANAL but there are certain criteria that must be met from what I understand. Knowing the statements to be false is one of them, but then there is intent and motivation as well as actual damages.
The reason that intent matters is that I could say something like: "Jeff Bezos is the type of guy that murders cats for fun."
The above is an opinion that is using colourful language. However, it COULD be construed as a statement of fact. So if Jeff Bezos* wanted to sue me for defamation, he would have to make the case that I was making a statement of fact which I not only knew to be untrue, but that I also knew was likely to cause reputational harm that would lead to financial damages.
* - And I'm asking to put aside the fact that Bezos is a public figure which raises the bar even higher, since people are more likely to talk about public figures and thus it is more likely and reasonable to get the facts wrong, to share personal opinions in ways that could be confused as factual statements and it is much less likely to cause the individual damages since most reasonable people kind of "get" this.
In the US, you can get hit for defamation even of a public figure if you made the statement with "reckless disregard for its truth or falseness". You don't have to know for sure that it's false. Either knowingly lying or "reckless disregard" is "actual malice".
Private citizens need to prove actual malice to collect punitive damages, but mere negligence is enough for compensatory damages. That's for knowledge about the statement itself; I'm not sure what you have to know or intend about how much damage you'll do.
That's constitutional standards; there may be state-to-state variations that impose more conditions.
On edit: corrected; even for a non-public figure, it needs to be negligently false, so having taken reasonable steps to verify it should immunize you. But of course this kid clearly did not do this.
You might get away with claiming that "convicted" was a mistake, or with claiming that you thought the restraining order was essentially the same thing (it's not; in some places those orders can be issued almost without even being requested). But you'd be on a lot firmer ground if you walked it back as soon as you were corrected.
However, when you get to the point of specifically say the guy "beat the shit out of" his ex-girlfriend, you'd better have a good reason for believing that. Or if you have an iffy reason, you better say what the reason is, not just state the conclusion as fact. It sounds like the kid had no idea what was actually going on.
A restraining order for domestic abuse being referred to as "best the shit out of" sounds like a pretty bog standard simplification to me. After all colloquially how else do you define domestic abuse?
Exaggerating for emphasis doesn't usually qualify for negligence.
When I legally separated from my ex-wife in California, as I recall we had to check a box not to get restraining orders. Otherwise restraining orders would have been issued, I think against both of us, without either one even having to make any claim about any abuse or any risk thereof. Check the wrong box, automatic restraining order.
That may not be what's meant by "protective order", but at a minimum you should be able to get a protective order against somebody who, for example, threatened violence without actually doing it. That might be evidence of a bad temper or bad judgement or just general assholeism, but that is a long, long way from "beating the shit out of" somebody. Well out of "emphasis" range.
On edit: Oh, and really you could get the order just by saying that the person threatened you, whether they really did or not. So the order is really only proof that there was an allegation, not even so much as a nasty word.
Being wrong is not sufficient for a defamation case.
All of these mistakes make the statement wrong and not factual but that isn't enough for a defamation case.
My point is if it was a simple mistake or misunderstanding that is enough to prove it wasn't negligence.
Verifying a article about the thing existed while misrepresenting that thing is likely not negligence unless that misrepresentstion was extreme.
Certainly "killed his girlfriend" would be negligent but if you misunderstood the thing in a minor way that isn't negligence just because you are wrong.
(To be clear the statement was certainly objectively false for multiple reasons)
So you're saying that a reasonable person similarly situated to this 19-year-old might be sure enough that "is under a protective order" equals "beat the shit out of his girlfriend" that they would allege the latter in public without further verification?
... and it's not a "minor" misunderstanding. The accusation is grave and the distinction is at the center of it.
Yes, I do. And while the US protects "I bet you X beats his wife", it does not protect "X beats his wife".
And "accurate descriptions of legal procedures" have nothing at all to do with the most serious allegation. The serious allegation is the beating, not the conviction.
I don't know exactly what the kid said, and the case is probably going to turn on really close parsing of both his words and the manner and context in which he presented them.
If he baldly said "this guy beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he made a statement of fact. Not a statement of opinion. Not "from what he did to me, he seems like the type". Fact. Even if the cop had truly been convicted of, say, battery as part of domestic abuse, the kid would have had no way of knowing exactly what that battery consisted of. Saying the cop had "beaten the shit out" of his girlfriend would still have been speculation on the kid's part, regardless of any conviction, let alone a protective order.
There are no complicated legal technicalities there. The kid had no knowledge of the detailed facts of the domestic abuse case, and he knew he had no knowledge of the detailed facts. He wasn't only ignorant of the legal finding. He was ignorant of what actually happened.
It is negligent to present your speculations as facts. Negligence means not exercising the care expected of a reasonable person in a similar situation. Pulling something out of your ass and presenting it as true is not reasonable care. It was done in a video after the fact. He had time to reflect, so there's no possibility of mistake "in the heat of the moment". And there's no "I did it because I'm an idiot" escape from being found negligent, either. People are often negligent because they're idiots.
Now, if he had said "the cop was convicted of domestic abuse, which I assume must mean that he beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he would have been presenting a reason for his conclusion. In that case, so long as didn't suggest that that wasn't his only reason, the truth of the conclusion would cease to matter. He wouldn't be considered to be presenting "the cop beat his girlfriend" as fact; he'd be presenting it as an inference to be drawn from the fact of the conviction. Then the audience would be expected to be able to make their own determination about whether that inference followed from the presented fact.
At that point, the question would be whether the kid was negligent in claiming that there was a conviction, because that would be the actual statement of fact he'd be offering. You might get away with claiming that was a mistake, but before you get there you have to show that he made it clear to the audience that the "conviction" was the reason he said that the cop had "beaten the shit out of" his girlfriend.
Then you'd have to argue that he couldn't be expected to know the difference between a restraining order and a conviction. Which is still not exactly open and shut, because a reasonable person might go find out before publishing a video like that. Not taking that reasonable care might make the statement about the conviction negligent and therefore defamatory. Because in fact reasonable people a lot younger than 19 tend to know the difference. A complete moron is not a reasonable person.
Or he could have done both: "The cop beat the shit out of his girlfriend, and of course that led to his being convicted". In which case there'd be two statements of "fact", each of which could be considered separately.
>After all colloquially how else do you define domestic abuse?
The article doesn't mention what she got the protective order for, and there are several possible reasons that do not involve any physical abuse. Even domestic abuse does not necessarily mean he beat her.
Looking at the document about protective orders that Iowa distributes, it seems like protective orders in Iowa are not some casual thing. They require court hearings and can't be filed against random strangers (like that Letterman incident referenced elsewhere in this thread.)
One thing I wonder about is if the plaintiffs thought about what this could end up meaning for them during discovery if they go forward with the suit. My understanding is that since evidence and statements around this would be central to the case and relavant to the truthfulness of the teen's claim or the teen's belief in it that he should be able to use that as part of his defense too. That could make any potential criminal trial more difficult for the cop since anything revealed here wouldn't be sealed or otherwise restricted as part of the public record.
Defamation of a public figure requires knowing that the statement was false, or reckless negligence of the truth.
Defamation of a non-public figure requires negligence of the truth.
Assuming the cop can be considered a non-public figure they would need to prove that the statement was made without a lot of consideration for the truth.
Given there is nuance here as to the details of the case it is going to be hard to win a defamation case here.
A layperson misunderstanding the difference between a court order and a conviction likely isn't enough to justify damages.
Smells of using the courts to punish someone by forcing them to lawyer up.
> Smells of using the courts to punish someone by forcing them to lawyer up.
Though the publicity seems to be making it backfire for the police. I can imagine him getting a pro-bono lawyer based on the publicity. And the details of the protective order leaking out, etc. Streisand effect.
This fits an old adage of cops, "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
This is what that means, it's common for cops to punish people by simply forcing them to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to beat charges they know won't stick. DAs go along with it because they know cops can destroy their career if they stop providing cases/evidence.
I don't think they implied that's the only time a DA would do that, just why they would maybe do it in this situation.
Why would a DA want a case that can be beat or dismissed? At best it's more work taking away time for real cases, and it's possibly a defeat if it goes to far, which they definitely don't want. All to punish someone the DA has no reason to care about because it wasn't even anything to do with the DA's authority or the authority of their job?
A corrupt DA might knowingly prosecute an innocent person if they think they can make it stick because winning a car is good for thrm, but why would they go out of their way to do something possibly detrimental without reason?
Well the reason could be doing the police a favour because you
like them just as easily as doing it because they've threatened you.
I guess if the DA is worried about the police punishing them by not supplying you
good cases, or whatever else, enough to give in to that then it's kind of irrelevant whether they would also want to do the favour anyway for a cop they liked (or just for the principle of supporting your crime-fighting sibling agency) or not. But it's possible that a DA who feels confident that the police wouldn't treat them differently in the future if they said no (or who didn't care about that threat) might still say yes for the different reason of thinking that police always need backing up / that if they disliked this guy enough to fuck with him then it must be because the guy deserves it.
Yes, but outlining one way in which DA's might feel pressured to do what the police prefer even if it's not strictly supported by the law does not "imply that the only time DAs participate in gratuitous punishment of citizens is when cops threaten their careers". It only implies that's one way or reason why they might do that.
That may seem pedantic, but I think it's very important when it comes to having useful and rational discussions. If anyone isn't seeing that, replace "DA" with a minority if your choice and "gratuitous punishment of citizens" with any other negative behavior, like theft or crime, and try to explain what the difference is between the statements. If we can't follow the same rational when assessing behavior of groups we have favorable or unfavorable predisposed opinions towards, then we can't even discuss effectively.
Defamation requires negligence (if the plaintiff is not a public figure) or actual malice (if the plaintiff is a public figure). In every case you'll ever hear about, the plaintiff is a public figure, and I don't doubt the police officers will be ruled public figures here.
Actual malice in the legal sense has nothing to do with the regular meaning of those words in English. It instead requires that the defamer have seriously entertained doubts about the truth of the statements, and published them anyways.
In this case? I'd have a hard time finding them defamatory were I on the jury. One of the statements is alleging that the cop is a "convicted" domestic abuser, where the truth is that he has a protective order placed against him in relation to alleged domestic abuse yet has never been charged nor convicted. Another statement is alleging that the cop is "on the slow spectrum" on social media, which--honestly, I'm surprised the judge didn't toss that on motion to dismiss, it's pretty clearly typical hyperbolic puffery.
All it takes to get a protective order is a allegation.
It is a common tactic that women use in divorce to file false domestic abuse or child abuse claims. It's called a "silver bullet divorce". Unfortunately abuse of the legal system like this has made it necessary to be skeptical of claims of domestic abuse without evidence.
Sure, there's actually a chasm of difference between a protective order and a full criminal conviction. That's enough to meet the falsehood requirement of defamation.
However, to demonstrate actual malice, you have to demonstrate that the defendant knew of just how different the two things were, which is frankly a pretty tall ask.
> However, to demonstrate actual malice, you have to demonstrate that the defendant knew of just how different the two things were, which is frankly a pretty tall ask
If I was a defendant in such a thing, I'd point to numerous cases where police departments have claimed, and courts have agreed, that police are not expected to be experts on the law.
"If law enforcement officers can be held by the court to not have to have a nuanced understanding of the law, how could I possibly?"
A comparison is not relevant. The threshold is whether or not the person making the claim knew, independent of anything anyone else in the world does or doesn't know, and the burden is on the other side to prove that they did.
That's a little reductive. If that were so, there'd barely be a need for defense in our criminal system, just "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you've heard the prosecution's case - do you believe they've established guilt?". Instead, regardless of the ostensible burden, statements like this by the defense work to erode any claims of "beyond reasonable doubt".
You're conflating the civil and criminal judicial systems when the reality is they're quite separate, and defamation has its own special corner of the civil realm where plaintiffs have a very steep hill to climb.
They don't have no fault child custody though, which IMO is a most important part of the divorce. In practice by far the biggest money prize in a higher income divorce is a big child support award, and there you want to fault the spouse as much as possible to turn your kid into a cash cow to "maintain living standards" while in your disproportionate custody.
> Actual malice in the legal sense has nothing to do with the regular meaning of those words in English. It instead requires that the defamer have seriously entertained doubts about the truth of the statements, and published them anyways.
How is that different from the ordinary English meaning? Or does American English differ from British English in this regard?
From the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:
"the intention to do something wrong and esp. to cause injury: "
I understand that the law might not take this into account right now, but if cops get some qualified immunity from lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs, it seems a fair trade to me that they should similarly be restricted in some ways from suing members of the public who criticize them in the course of their jobs.
The first thing I thought when reading the title was that if a police officer sues a citizen in this manner they should immediately and irrevocably lose any qualified immunity status for the same incident. If the PO didn't do anything wrong and they actually do have a case against the person, they should lose nothing by no longer having QI.
I have seen the footage of that stop alongside body cam footage from the officers on YouTube, but I hadn’t seen the version released by galanakis. Even without commentary, it looked like a bad arrest to me. The officers refuse to use a breathalyzer at first, choosing a field sobriety test (which is known to have many problems) first. At one point the officers said something to the affect of “he’s a smartass” as part of their decision to arrest.
But in the USA, anyone can be sued for anything. This is how the system is designed. I could sue you for posting this comment and claim that it's defamatory to the Pope, and I would get my (hopefully extremely brief) day in court.
How am I suggesting abandoning 1A? I'm assuming you are talking about the "speech" part of that rather than religion, press, or assembly.
Firstly, I'm specifically saying there should NOT be consequences to him from what he said to the cop. That's bogus, unprofessional, and terrible.
But that said you also have responsibility for your speech that goes along with the freedom. Do you think people should just say every single thing that comes to their minds to their peers at work?
If not, then are you (as you suggest about me) saying people should abandon their 1A rights at work?
Or would you (much more sensibly IMHO) say that if you go around being a dick to people then it's going to affect the way they treat you and the boss you keep insulting isn't going to feel full of love toward you and want to promote you.
Telling somebody to use their free speech responsibly (which is what I am doing) is not in any way the same thing as telling them to abandon their right to free speech.
> it's not going to make them want to be nice to you.
Is it so much to ask for professionalism from law enforcement? "We beat your team" is not enough to warrant violating anyones rights - it's not even that impolite in general.
> Is it so much to ask for professionalism from law enforcement? "We beat your team" is not enough to warrant violating anyones rights - it's not even that impolite in general.
No it's not too much to ask, and we should not only ask but demand professionalism from them.
And please re-read the very first part of my comment, because I never said anything remotely close to it being "enough to warrant violating anyones rights" (in fact I said the opposite, that the arrest was BS).
Now, requiring cops to be superhuman and completely immune to having any emotions affect their highly subjective judgment, is never going to work. At least not until we replace the humans with AI. Humans are not capable of completely rational thought, in fact we're almost entirely the opposite: we make decisions emotionally, and then justify them rationally. Asking a cop to cease being human is a recipe for failure and goes against what we know about neuroscience.
About the "we beat your team" not even being impolite, firstly if you watch the video, that was not the only thing he said, but also do you not see what that was about? Keep in mind this is a college football player talking to a person who previously played college football. It was standard jock high-school bullshit from a tribal person to another tribal person (he plays football, and he's extensively inquiring about the cops football past during this). It was an attempt to belittle the cop, and it's the type of petty behavior I expect from children. You can't just take the one line and strip it from all of its context and evaluate it independently. At least you can't do that if you actually want to understand how and why it was said and evaluate the situation.
Disclaimer since people seem incapable of non-binary thinking: None of this excuses the cops behavior
The kid was incredibly genial and polite for quite a while until the cop started lying and making it clear he was determined to make a false dui arrest.
At that point I don't think it was clear that the cop was determined to make a false DUI arrest. That came much later.
At that point though the copy definitely seemed convinced that the kid was drinking, but he was still working through it. It's definitely possible that had the kid maintained his original demeanor that the cop might have changed his mind during or after the tests, but after the insults and stuff there was no way for him to back out without feeling stupid and like the kid "won."
Normally I wouldn't bother saying this next part but people seem intent today on reading more into my comments than is actually there, so to be clear, none of that justifies the cop's behavior and arrest. The cop was being a petty emotional asshole and his conduct was disgusting and despicable.
For what it’s worth, I think you were very clear on the cop being in the wrong. I just disagree that the kid’s fairly mild attitude was in any way out of line or inadvisable, especially given how polite he was for so long. I think it was very obvious the cop was pushing a BS narrative from the beginning and I certainly would have had a hard time holding my tongue about it. When you haven’t been anywhere near alcohol and are stone cold sober and a cop claims your eyes are bloodshot and watery and you’re slurring your speech and, most egregiously, that they can smell alcohol on your breath, you know you are getting railroaded.
>but "he's a smartass" was a pretty fair assessment.
>cops are humans and if you stoop to personal insults it's not going to make them want to be nice to you.
Ugh, I actually cringed a bit while reading this victim blaming. No one deserves to be arrested because they were a smartass, or because they called someone a rookie. Holy moly.
If you read through the end, the claims were thrown out, except the claim that the officer was abused his wife, which there is some question of whether that's actionable.
Seems like the court is doing the reasonable thing.
It seems they were able to parse out all of the claims and readily dismissed the vast majority of the ridiculous stuff that the cops were claiming, while acknowledging that the assertion that the officer was a "wife abuser" could veer into defamation was plausible and merits a trial (where both sides are perfectly entitled to build their case). Seems reasonable!
Well, first and most obviously, I suspect the teen that's being sued probably does not consider this recourse "reasonable", so "all parties involved" is probably untrue.
But mostly, two armed men terrorized a 19 year old and are now attempting to sue this 19 year old for the meany-mean things that 19 year old said while being terrorized. Is that reasonable, really, to anyone?
If someone is robbing your house and you say they probably beat their wife, should the robber be allowed to sue you? Other than a badge, what's the difference between these two scenarios?
Legally, I think he’s right. Most of what the kid said was just harmless blowing off steam. But publicly claiming someone did something like best their wife when their is no proof is potentially defamation. The judge took the correct action.
The law should work the same for and against everyone, regardless of how much you like them.
Juries and Judges are the real wildcard. How would they interpret this?
> But publicly claiming someone did something like best their wife when their is no proof is potentially defamation.
Studies have shown that 40% of cops beat their wives, and other research suggests that DV doesn't get reported at all roughly half of the time, so the number of police officers beating their wives is going to be much greater than 40%. For any random police officer you could claim they beat their wives and be right more often than not. It's not an entirely unfair assumption to start with. This officer's ex had a protective order against him granted by the district court which was then extended on at least three occasions. It might not be proof of abuse, but it's pretty strong evidence.
My guess is that this kid found information about the protective order and just got his terminology wrong, assuming that there was a conviction when there wasn't one. It's statistically likely that he wasn't wrong and abuse was taking place. Seems like the courts could give some slack to the teenager whose rights were violated by a corrupt cop who likely abused his ex even if there was never a conviction.
That’s not the point of statistics like that. We don’t assume guilt because something is plausible.
That is the same as going around calling every man who looks creepy a pedo. You might be right once in a while, but that doesn’t entitle you to smear people without facts.
I'd agree that it would be totally wrong to throw this cop in jail for beating his ex without actual proof. A teenager's youtube video isn't a courtroom though and shouldn't require the same standards for proof. I'm just saying that it's a lot less unreasonable to accuse this cop of beating his ex than it would be to pick a random person on the street and accuse them of the same.
He was clearly wrong about the conviction, there's a pretty good chance he wasn't wrong about the abuse. Maybe that's a good enough standard of evidence to demand from the youtube video of a justifiably pissed off 19 year old? It'd be best if he uploaded a correction, or even a corrected re-upload of his video, but I think it's fair to say that this kid has been screwed over by the legal system enough already. He should probably get a pass for getting the fact about the conviction wrong and not maintaining the highest levels of journalistic integrity in the youtube video documenting the violation of his rights.
I think the point isn’t the ruling but more so it’s the message the cops are sending to everyone else who might do similar things in the future. Imagine the intimidation knowing police officers are battling you in court, you know, those people who work for the same city that the entire courthouse staff does, who they see all the time as part of their jobs, and have long standing mutually “protect our own” relationships with.
Cops work in the public. If the cop was charged with beating his wife or even just had the cops called (how would calling the cops on a cop work when they are coworkers?), that would also be public. There’s no invasion of privacy then. If it’s not true, it’s libel not invasion of privacy.
Is it a stretch to think these police officers are trying to make things as painful as possible for this teen, even if they know a court is going to eventually throw them out, because he called them out on their outrageous behavior?
Well ... it surely isn't an isolated incident. Seems like this town has quite an authoritarian streak.
A man showed up at a Newton city council meeting to share his thoughts about Galanakis's arrest during a public comment period.
He criticized the town's mayor and police chief -- and they had him arrested!
Criticizing the government in a public forum expressly designed for public commentary is probably the most iron-clad protected of First Amendment speech, but the town must think they operate well above the Constitution:
> Is it a stretch to think these police officers are trying to make things as painful as possible for this teen, even if they know a court is going to eventually throw them out, because he called them out on their outrageous behavior?
Yes and no. I mean police are on a power trip even if you do everything they say but as soon as he called the cop out and called him stupid (in any encounter that wasn't with a cop I might have used harsher language to describe the person in question) I'm sure it didn't help. But that's the problem, it didn't help but I honestly don't think he could have said/not said/done/not done anything to placate the cops.
This kid is 19 years old, he gets pulled over later at night on his way home trying to follow the law the best he knows how (headlight out, using brights to have some light), the cops expect him to know the law about having your brights on when I've never heard of such a law (mind you cops don't need to know the law themselves as they prove more often than not but they expect a 19 year old kid to), then they shine bright lights in his face and expect him to know exactly where his registration is? And that's all within the first few minutes.
The rest of the video that I watched it's more of the same, a power tripping cop gives confusing and contradictory instructions to someone who has never done this before and expects the system to work since he has done nothing wrong. Good thing the cops set him straight at a young age so he won't make the mistake of thinking they are there to "serve and protect" (yes I know they don't actually have to do either) or that the system works in any way, shape, or form.
It's telling that this is what these bastions of society spend their time on instead of what should be slam dunk cases where someone's phone is stolen and they can tell the cops exactly where it is or similar solvable thefts that they don't bother with. What a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Since racial profiling is arguably a factor in police interactions with the public, let me just start with the fact that I'm a plain old white male. I was raised to show deference and respect to authority figures. I've had more than one teacher tell my parents, when I was in middle school and high school, that I was very polite.
All that said, I noticed a huge difference, once I got past about age 30, in how police treated me. When I was in my late teens and early to mid-twenties, cops — young cops, particularly — often seemed to want to try to see if they could rile me up and escalate. (Of course, I never took the bait.) I suspect there is some deep-seated primate behavior going on.
I wonder about a possible iatrogenic explanation for police being tyrants. I bet there's a case to be made that simply being educated on how tyrannical behavior works could help to cause it to happen in the first place. In fact, it almost seems like you'd HAVE to go through that in order to get a grip on the problem in the first place. This is pure armchair psychology, Can someone straighten me out? Is there something to this?
I'm having trouble parsing this line of thought. Are you suggesting that merely talking about tyranny is inducing tyrannical behavior; that not talking about the elephant in the room could make the elephant disappear?
Taking it a step further: should police not be educated about corruption laws, or should corruption laws simply not exist?
The reality of abuse from cops, politicians, managers, HOA presidents, faculty deans and virtually any position of partially unchecked power is that these positions attract exactly the kind of person who would abuse that power.
The fact of the matter is, the more cooperative, non-violent, honest and nice society is in general, the more viable it is to be a machiavellian, narcissistic and power-hungry parasite. These traits are innate parts of the personality of each of us from birth, and some of us get a lot more than others. It's generally not a very good thing for one's future prospects to have these traits. The risk of having everyone sniff you out and turn against you is high, and gets higher the less sophisticated you are.
But even relatively unsuccessful little tyrants (HOA presidents are the perfect example of this) are more than capable of inflicting actual damage on others. If you're someone like this, and you have a tendency for violence on top of it, becoming a cop is an attractive prospect because most of these traits aren't particularly punished in that profession and sometimes are actively beneficial to your career.
Perhaps unintuitively, the real solution to this problem is to attract normal people to fill these roles. This is particularly true for politics, where most normal people rightly evaluate that the risks of a career in politics are much higher than the reward. Normal people see the reward of a career in politics as essentially an interesting job and the ability to make things better for a community. This is motivating, but not as strong as the motivation of people who are in it for the power.
> But even relatively unsuccessful little tyrants (HOA presidents are the perfect example of this) are more than capable of inflicting actual damage on others.
I happen to know someone that accurately fits this description. Fortunately, he galvanized the community into replacing him & reversing his policies.
The local police department is ticked at the guy too because concerned parents keep reporting him for photographing their little kids in the pool, “he is not a pedophile but he has been playing hall monitor too much, trying to gather evidence of townhouse community borderline rule breaking”.
Poor guy, he has so poisoned the discourse that no one will ever take action on his reports.
> These traits are innate parts of the personality of each of us from birth
So because I wasn't born with it I can't become machiavellian tyrant? Surely there's management or police training that can grant people the necessary skills and credentials, no?
> A subsequent caption stated that Winters had “beat the shit out of” his girlfriend. Though Winters had a protective order filed against him, the counterclaim states that he has not been charged or convicted of domestic abuse
As much as i hate cops (qualified immunity), i hate this guilty until you are proven innocent in court but always guilty in court of public opinion about anything related to female directed domestic violence/r4p3/assault/red flags laws to take your property away without due proces etc even more.
Im not saying he didn't do it, im just saying these things need to be private until its likely true (quick determination), then posted.
Same way the asylum system in the us works where you can show a credible threat to cbp at the border than years later you get the actual court case to get the final approval.
Teach you kids to avoid the cops at any cost. Their resources are limitless and they will use them to destroy your life. Follow their orders and accept any traffic violation with a smile. I am white and my family is law abiding and we have taught our kids from a young age to just make sure they stay away from them and avoid them as much as they can. This advice was given to me by an incredibly successful lawyer (Family friend) a very long time ago.
The bodycam video is so incredibly heavily edited and manipulative. I struggle to understand how anyone can watch it and not feel like they are being overtly manipulated (and also start to heavily doubt the narrative being pushed).
For example, what happens between 14:26 and 14:31 and 14:50-14:57, and 15:44-16:33?
Or, we might ask ourselves, why does this interaction seem incredibly one-sided? Before people say "nothing could possibly justify", consider what might have happened between 14:26 and 14:31 and 14:50-14:57, and 15:44-16:33, which is literally the entire premise of the arrest (and omitted from the video).
Is that true? Do you have a link to corroborate that claim? Quickly checking, I wasn't able to find anything that indicates the full bodycam footage is in fact public record.
FWIW, all government records are by default public record thanks to the FOIA. The government can try to make exceptions and redactions, but even when they try to block it, they are forced to release related information in court in discovery. The only exception to this in recent memory is the SCOTUS refused to hear an NSA case due to sensitive material because they knew lots of stuff would be become public record.
> The lawsuit claims that such statements caused the officers “to suffer: pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of community reputation, loss of employability, [and] loss of time and inconvenience bringing this action.”
How ironic. That the opinions of someone on a YouTube video can cause someone as fortified as a police officer such anguish. Listening to them describe the damages you would think these officers were wrongfully arrested or something.
Extra-judicially maintaining the status quo is a prevalent practice in small town America. The song is referencing that, of course, but the behaviour here is quite typical of it.
Essentially, if you're in a small town in America, the question isn't whether you have rights. What is law and what will happen to you are distinct.
Uh huh. And how is that behavior exclusive to a small town?
This same exact thing could have happened in a town of any size. Cops harass teenagers everywhere.
This has no relation to the themes of that song which discusses how antisocial, illegal behavior like rioting, theft, assault, etc which is permitted in urban centers will not be tolerated in smaller communities.
In a big town, there is a higher chain of command. The higher up won't be too happy with this incident and will fire the cops. In a very small town, the cops are the chain of command and as a result will fight it.
Tangentially related, but incredibly important given the footage of this interview and its importance in civilian oversight of the U.S. government: never talk to the FBI unless it’s recorded.
And they will never be recorded, which means you should never talk to the FBI.
They have a long standing policy of refusing to allow any interview to be recorded. Instead, they fill out a 302 report after the interview with a “written record” of what was said.
Unless you’re comfortable with your freedom relying on the honesty of the agent sitting across from you, an agent whose incentives are to close cases, do not talk to the FBI.
The second caveat is that you should probably get a lawyer if anyone from law enforcement wants to talk to you in any way that is more complicated than a speeding ticket.
Similarly, don't sign any papers or agree to anything without a lawyer present. You aren't smarter than the people whose job it is (on paper) to enforce the law (even if in practice, many police officers in the US don't seem to know or care to enforce it). Things you might be able to "coax" out of an individual officer get thrown in the bin anyway and your statements will be read in the worst possible light if given half the chance.
Your lawyer is paid to understand the law (and if they're any good, they'll do what they can to protect you).
That advice goes double if it's any three letter agency.
>…never talk to the FBI unless it’s recorded. And they will never be recorded, which means you should never talk to the FBI. They have a long standing policy of refusing to allow any interview to be recorded.
I remember hearing or reading a suggestion that many US policing problems would be solved overnight if the law would simply mandate officers to wear dorky uniforms. The “militarized badass in aviators” image attracts the wrong type of people to the job, while a dorky uniform would mean that only those who actually wanted to serve the public would remain. I have no idea if it would work, but I always liked the idea.
This was for years actual policy in the UK, where most of the cops are unarmed. Using Land Rovers as police cars was considered too military, for example.
Sunnyvale, California, has a combined police and fire department. They train their people for both and they move back and forth. Emergency medical services is in there, too. At one time, their cops wore red blazers with the city insignia.
But consider that Sunnyvale, California has the benefit of a very upscale demographic, no gang activity, low organized crime, etc. What works for one place will likely not apply elsewhere (e.g. no one-size-fits-all solution).
Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.
Police will always need some SWAT and borderline military teams. The question is whether the average street cop needs to be weapon-wielding law enforcement, and I suggest the answer is no.
The danger level goes down when it's known that a cop's power is in their reinforcements. The individual cop would be little danger and doesn't need to be shot.
> Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.
Arguably that should be addressed by a different organisation than the folks who enforce traffic laws and investigate petty theft. The state guard, perhaps?
We do have an Association for Drug Enforcement, but having one government entity cover every bit of gang activity in the nation seems like a lot of effort.
So in Ireland, as mentioned elsewhere, our normal police wear a hi-vis Star Trek uniform, and aren’t generally armed. We also have a few specialised branches for organised crime, terrorism, etc, though; some of those _are_ armed, and have significantly scarier uniforms, and much more extensive training. Same organisation, but totally different role.
Forcing cops to double as firefighters helps a lot to keep undesirable officers out. It forces all cops to be in firefighting shape, which is significantly more difficult that the average police requirements. It also means cops need to be willing to run into burning buildings, which is more danger than the average cop would ever face.
In Utah, at least, all cops are required to also be EMTs. I think understanding a lot about how the body works and how to save a life might also have an effect on how you respond to some events, but I don't know.
Sort of depends on if they have a duty of care and are required to intervene medically.
I think George Floyd is a good case study for reform; Chauvin and all officers should be required to assess for medical emergencies at all times basically and take at least some level of medical action when necessary. So Chauvin should have been required to check for consciousness and then provide aid once finding Floyd to be in medical distress.
What Chauvin and fellow officers did was already in violation of policy. The problem is that they didn’t care, and having extra rules in the policy may help others but not George Floyd. If it weren’t for cameras things would’ve turned out better for those police officers.
> FOLLOWING A DISCUSSION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS RELATED TO POLICE-COMMUNITY RELATIONS, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE RATIONALE BEHIND, AND RESULTS OF THIS CALIFORNIA EXPERIMENT. IN 1969, THE MENLO PARK POLICE FORCE CHANGED FROM THE TRADITIONAL MILITARISTIC UNIFORM TO BLAZERS AND TIES, MORE IN KEEPING WITH CIVILIAN MODES OF DRESS. RANK WAS NOT EXHIBITED, NIGHTSTICKS WERE DISPENSED WITH, AND GUNS WERE WORN BENEATH THE BLAZER. RESULTS OF THIS NEW POLICE IDENTITY INCLUDE PEER GROUP ISOLATION, INCREASED INVOLVEMENT IN EDUCATION, INCREASED RECRUITMENT OF INDIVIDUALS WITH COLLEGE DEGREES, AND A DECREASE IN PERSONNEL TURNOVER. A 1971 COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE MENLO PARK POLICE AND TWO OTHER DEPARTMENTS IN THE AREA INDICATED A DECREASED NEED FOR A SYMBOL OF AUTHORITY AND IMPROVED POLICE-COMMUNITY RELATIONS IN MENLO PARK. DESPITE ATTITUDINAL AND BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES, THERE WERE NO DIFFERENCES IN GENERAL PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT MEASUREMENTS. (AUTHOR ABSTRACT MODIFIED)
Its a cute theory, but police need to be respected to do their job. A dorky uniform is contrary to that. A police force that is not respected will lead to escalation of violence.
We might not like what I wrote, but's basic human phycology.
For certain types of people, respect can only be achieved via intimidation. Or mean the same thing.
Edit: I think people are completely misunderstanding this post. I made a general statement about humans. Not about policing, not about a country. Just an observation that certain types of people only seem to understand/respect violence.
If that were true, the appropriate solution would be deploying intimidation techniques against those people, not wearing a uniform that does it to everyone
Worked fine in England with _every_ type of criminal, when police were basically wearing a giant tit on their heads.
Respect isn't given to people who look movie-tough-guy-cool, it's given to people who know what they're doing.
When one of the earlier police commissioners was asked why the police don't carry guns, he replied that it would put too much distance between them and the public. The police in the U.S.A. seem to actively be going for that distance.
> it would put too much distance between them and the public
It's not just one person's opinion, either. The British police is (supposed to, it's stretching further from it under the endless cuts) adhere to Peelian principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
Sorry, I don't respect people who murder innocent civilians without cause or due process. Or people that can arbitrarily seize any amount of your property, forever, with no possible recourse.
Or really tacticool guys in general. They're pretty much always absolute assholes.
longer training too. a two year college degree in policing feels like the minimum. we do that in Canada. Actually train police officers in de-escalation techniques, and in some amount of social work adjacent stuff, like how to deal with people with mental health problems, domestic situations or drug abuse problems in a more intelligent manner.
This also filters out ppl who don't have the attention span or the brain cells to do that, which is a good thing. We also have separate non police folks for parking violations and other more menial stuff.
I agree regarding training: Police officers are expected to deal with all members of the public, some of whom have disabilities or other challenges which should be accommodated accordingly. Having enough police who are sufficiently trained would seem essential.
In the little village of 2000 near me, the 4 cops dress in all black and have a black-on-black motif for their vehicles. Literally, it is black text on a black car with some grey and gold outlining. I'm pretty sure it makes them feel like badasses as they ticket drivers for tinted windows or missing the obscured 35 mph sign a quarter mile after the highlighted and lit 45 mph sign.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadI also distinctly remember a story during the Portland protests of unidentified government agents (later revealed to be border patrol) throwing people into unmarked vehicles. I fail to see how that's any different than kidnapping. It's certainly how security services the world over 'disappear' their citizens.
I am usually 100% for peaceful protest over violent resistance, but in such a circumstance I don't think any jury in the land would convict someone of killing such an agent that refused to identify themselves.
I think you give juries too much credit, and maybe voir dire in general.
The prosecution would simply hammer on the fact that they "murdered a cop" and how they don't dispute the fact they killed them, they have the murder weapon, etc. They'd bring up crying relatives of the deceased. They'd bring up the defendant's prior criminal history if one exists, or find old social media posts critical of LE or the government. And they'd go right up to the line of perjury without crossing it, asking half a dozen people from the same department about "department policy" around identifying yourself.
Not to mention they'd almost certainly ask for a change of venue to a more LE-friendly area of the country. So you end up with some young kid from an urban area on the coast on trial for killing a cop in rural Colorado or Nevada or something. It's unlikely that goes well for them, especially if they don't have the funds for a bulldog defense attorney.
As far as I'm concerned plainclothes officers should not be allowed to make arrests outside exigent circumstances. The target is likely to feel they are under criminal attack and very well might respond with lethal force.
I am quite frankly shocked that there wasn't violence in response to that.
Anyone with knowledge in the area will tell you that if you're the subject of an attempting kidnapping (or carjacking or anything in that ballpark) your number one goal is to not get taken to another location. Whatever you have to do, don't get taken somewhere else because it's definitely going to be something more favorable to the assailant.
I too am shocked that this didn't end in violence and serious injury or worse.
And most trials aren't major. There were 5 or 6 trials at the courthouse that week, and only one was estimated to take more than 3 days. Ours took a full day but I still got home before my wife.
Would that mean all of Hawaii is within that 100 mile limit?
As a paramedic, I've routinely taken prisoners from our county jail (run by the Sheriff's Office) to hospital. One thing that always got me, when we were in the sally port, and wheeling our gurney into the receiving area, the big printed sign on the door in, telling officers to "Turn off all body cams and recording devices in this area."
Why?
My guess is that there may be different standards for release of jail footage versus officer body cam footage.
I'm sure their argument would be that it's a cost saving measure, "why pay for storage of body cam footage when the area is already camera covered", but to me that seems like a convenient side effect, more than a core rationale.
Even if he loses, a video that simply quotes court documents and offers opinion could attract a lot of views and cause a lot of outrage towards the officers and the system.
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-cau...
But the claim is about the accompanying comments/captions, some of which talk about things that don't happen in the video and didn't happen during the interaction.
The right to record the police in public is well established now, and the claims the police are making (that technically Nathan Winter of the Newton Police Department is not a "convicted" domestic abuser, he's just an "accused" domestic abuser with a judge issuing a protective order against him) seem more likely to defame them than a brief caption in the teen's posted arrest video.
Convince someone that they'll never be the "other" and rights become a far away theoretical concept.
But those are only pending a court date, a few weeks at most. A "real" one is issued by a judge after interviewing both parties (or by default if one doesn't show up) and those are very reliably real. I don't know anything about the letterman thing. If it was an emergency one yeah you don't want to read too much into it. The real ones though are very reliable indicators that something fucked up went down.
Any numbers on how much more reliable they are after the initial order kicks you out of the spousal home and asks you to get a lawyer while navigating being homeless and losing access to assets in your house and any evidence inside? It's hard to believe the short hearing a couple weeks later with pretty low standard of evidence with you now at a severe disadvantage is that much more accurate.
I didn't intend to upset you. How many of these cases have you tried? Where do you practice, exactly?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> I've lived through exactly that
So your 100% snarky comment about how she's not a practicing lawyer and therefore can't know anything about it is pretty off key, especially when you're literally quoting "don't be snarky". You're both swiping at each other; don't quote the rules at someone when you're not applying them to yourself.
To preface: I had/have absolutely no idea if "she" is a "she," what she is, where she is, her level of professional expertise or profession.
I am human, I don't know everything, everywhere: the distinct possibility exists that whatever jurisdiction this individual is in has laws, customs unbeknownst to me.
This person insinuated that I was "talking out my ass," implied my hard-earned knowledge and experience was obtained from a "mens rights subreddit" as a way to dismiss my statements.
By preventing the situation prior to the escalation, the more serious events don’t happen as often.
I don't see how that makes them a reliable indicator that something went down. That could be true even if 99% of restraining orders were against innocent people.
Why? Based on one party being able to tell a more convincing story than another?
You don't need any of that. Allegations are enough.
You'd be hard pressed to find a person with less confidence in our "justice" system than I have. And as I mentioned in another comment, I have, unlike almost everyone else here, actually been on the receiving end of a misuse of this system. I still find it overall pretty reliable and the best mechanism we currently have for reducing intimate partner violence, one of the most common ways for women to be murdered.
I've witnessed 100+ of these hearings: they are a disgrace to our justice system. Evidentiary standards are a joke, and thankfully, get absolutely smoked upon appeal 9/10 times - instant suppression.
It's wonderful that they may have helped you at one point.
You keep citing this "intimate spousal murder" schtick with zero non-anecdotal citations (try proving a negative.) Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
That's not what they said, you're misreading.
> Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
I did a very quick search using neutral terms for studies on this. Here are the first three I found.
> PO victims had police incident rates that were more than double the matched group prior to the PO, but dropped to the level of the matched group during and after the order. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151113/
> Results showed significant reductions in threats of assault, physical assault, stalking, and worksite harassment over time among all women, regardless of receipt or nonreceipt of a protection order. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448307/
> Permanent, but not temporary, protection orders are associated with a significant decrease in risk of police-reported violence against women by their male intimate partners. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/195163
That last one had a pretty good study size - 2691 women.
I don't think it's incredible that a protective order could stop an expanding pattern of abuse and violence before it becomes severe enough for a murder to occur. You say "someone willing to commit murder", and it's probably true that if the culprit is already very willing or actively intending to commit a murder, a protective order is useless. Abusers cannot be placed into permanent "murderous" and "non-murderous" groups, though.
Why are you holding other people to higher standards than yourself, when making equal if not stronger claims?
> Can we please see some formal, peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that someone willing to commit murder is going to be deterred by a DUI-equivalent?
Others have talked about how abusers don't always intend to commit murder, but there's also something to say about enforce-ability. Suppose someone yells and screams at you and threatens to hurt you. You call the police. Unless you've got injuries or recordings, what are the police going to do? Without hard evidence it's just a he said/she said and is unlikely to even end up with charges. Even if you have recordings, unless it's a specific threat that isn't a crime. But you then go to a court for a TPO. This person shows up again, screaming and yelling and threatening you. You call the police and they show up. Now all you have to do it point to the person standing in your front yard, and point to the TPO, and that's the case.
> You'd be hard pressed to find a person with less confidence in our "justice" system than I have.
I was "mandated" into "optional" pretrial mediation by a District Court when my stepdaughter was in a car accident.
The mediator, who said she was a Family Court judge when introducing herself, among several other problematic things, attempted to write a mediation agreement where -I- was purportedly binding not just myself but my insurance carrier to several things, with language like "FireBeyond agrees that Insurer or himself will pay X by date Y. He agrees that he and insurer will be in default if they do not", etc. And when I stated that I had no authority to agree on behalf my insurance carrier to binding agreements, she was frustrated and exasperated that I was correcting her/objecting to her language.
I've also lived in a place where it was settled Family Court precedent that men could be (and were often found to be) liable for child support for children that were not theirs, in marriage or out, by virtue of the fact that they were in a relationship with the mother at the time of birth and beyond (regardless of awareness of progeny).
Please do not mistake this for a lack of sympathy for what I see as unacceptable levels of intimate partner violence and our poor handling of it, because as a paramedic who sees far more of it than I should, I am not. It is difficult at times to find a nuance with which to criticize the family court without coming across MRA/incel/redpilly.
A judge who doesn't want something bad to happen, under any circumstances. Therefore, they are extremely likely just to issue a PPO "just because."
> The real ones though are very reliable indicators that something fucked up went down.
TPOs/PPOs are absolutely not reliable: In most states, they are civil and issued subject to a preponderance of the evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. Evidence is not subject to any verification or real evidentiary standards: you could fake text message screenshots all day long and net a PPO before you ever had an issue with perjury.
FWIW: someone with ill/violent intent couldn't care less about a random status violation that would pale in comparative severity to whatever other crime they wanted to commit.
Violence in general and domestic violence especially are not always premeditated. What starts as an attempt by the abuser to hash things out can devolve into violence. A protective order can stop abusers from making the attempt in the first place, and when there is an attempt they can help the victim get more immediate help from law enforcement.
Convict and jail them, with the full rights and penalties that go with that. Not this halfass paper shield against an otherwise free person.
Absolutely, some murders do seem to be triggered by protection orders. Presumably those cases would also occur when they are charged with a crime with cooperation from the victim. Are we going to instead consider pretrial detention for all cases of accused DV? And wouldn't that have all of the same issues with a lower standard of evidence but infringe even more on their rights?
Edit: I should clarify, when charges are filed we should consider pretrial detention. Unfortunately there are tons of reasons why DV victims often end up not wanting to press charges, or when someone is charged, not wanting to cooperate with prosecutors. Creating a situation where their only avenue for safety is pressing charges and cooperating with authorities creates its own set of issues and I feel they still deserve some level of safety even if they don't cooperate with criminal charges.
If someone is an abuser by all means take advantage of criminal justice system .
Note: not legal advice
I think we should.
The reason permanent orders are handed out like candy is because the judge wants to err on the side of caution. It's the same reason cops are more willing to use force when they have a taser than when they have a gun - there's no consequences for doing so.
Make there be real consequences for wrongly issuing a protection order, and you'll have fewer wrongly issued protection orders.
Comparison of impulsive and premeditated perpetrators of intimate partner violence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19039796/
Premeditated versus "passionate": patterns of homicide related to intimate partner violence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30100045/
A quick graph analysis of the upvoters/downvoters on each comment and then clustering those across historical posts would probably elucidate this reason.
> No judge wants to read about somebody being killed after they denied the PO.
A judge or magistrate suffers no penalty for issuing a PPO but can suffer great ridicule when this exact situation happens: how is it not obvious that this would perversely inflate the numbers?
From the article, the judge has dismissed most of the claims but some have been allowed to be moved forward.
> In two decisions in May and September, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher dismissed almost all of the officers’ claims. Locher deemed most of Galanakis’s captions as “non-actionable statement[s] of opinion” or “rhetorical hyperbole,” which are both considered non-defamatory. This included the caption where Galanakis said he was “raped” by the police department, which Locher said was “distasteful,” but non-actionable.
False claim of rape is distasteful but non-actionable? I don't get that.
This is a result of the 1st amendment. Sometimes it's both.
I think nobody would believe the claim in the context of xbox live, but many people are inclined to believe it in the context of an unlawful arrest. Even one of the replies to my first comment about this seems to believe the claim. (He's now been flagged for this. What guideline did he violate? I hope he wasn't flagged because his perspective lends credence to my perspective that accusing cops of raping you after a baseless arrest is not obvious hyperbole.)
Most important part of the article as far as I can tell. Everything else was dismissed.
These two cops are quite disgusting, especially Winters. I remember seeing this video when it originally went viral, and the 19-year-old seems calm and coherent. The only reason I think you could mistake him for drinking is his normal speech pattern has a kind of 'slur' to it. Nothing he did seemed wrong, just what they initially pulled him over for re: his headlights, which he had a consistent explanation for. They're just power hungry cops who wanted to fuck with someone.
I'm not sure if that's true, or if it would also apply to defamation.
IANAL but there are certain criteria that must be met from what I understand. Knowing the statements to be false is one of them, but then there is intent and motivation as well as actual damages.
The reason that intent matters is that I could say something like: "Jeff Bezos is the type of guy that murders cats for fun."
The above is an opinion that is using colourful language. However, it COULD be construed as a statement of fact. So if Jeff Bezos* wanted to sue me for defamation, he would have to make the case that I was making a statement of fact which I not only knew to be untrue, but that I also knew was likely to cause reputational harm that would lead to financial damages.
* - And I'm asking to put aside the fact that Bezos is a public figure which raises the bar even higher, since people are more likely to talk about public figures and thus it is more likely and reasonable to get the facts wrong, to share personal opinions in ways that could be confused as factual statements and it is much less likely to cause the individual damages since most reasonable people kind of "get" this.
Private citizens need to prove actual malice to collect punitive damages, but mere negligence is enough for compensatory damages. That's for knowledge about the statement itself; I'm not sure what you have to know or intend about how much damage you'll do.
That's constitutional standards; there may be state-to-state variations that impose more conditions.
On edit: corrected; even for a non-public figure, it needs to be negligently false, so having taken reasonable steps to verify it should immunize you. But of course this kid clearly did not do this.
However, when you get to the point of specifically say the guy "beat the shit out of" his ex-girlfriend, you'd better have a good reason for believing that. Or if you have an iffy reason, you better say what the reason is, not just state the conclusion as fact. It sounds like the kid had no idea what was actually going on.
Exaggerating for emphasis doesn't usually qualify for negligence.
That may not be what's meant by "protective order", but at a minimum you should be able to get a protective order against somebody who, for example, threatened violence without actually doing it. That might be evidence of a bad temper or bad judgement or just general assholeism, but that is a long, long way from "beating the shit out of" somebody. Well out of "emphasis" range.
On edit: Oh, and really you could get the order just by saying that the person threatened you, whether they really did or not. So the order is really only proof that there was an allegation, not even so much as a nasty word.
Being wrong is not sufficient for a defamation case.
All of these mistakes make the statement wrong and not factual but that isn't enough for a defamation case.
My point is if it was a simple mistake or misunderstanding that is enough to prove it wasn't negligence.
Verifying a article about the thing existed while misrepresenting that thing is likely not negligence unless that misrepresentstion was extreme.
Certainly "killed his girlfriend" would be negligent but if you misunderstood the thing in a minor way that isn't negligence just because you are wrong.
(To be clear the statement was certainly objectively false for multiple reasons)
... and it's not a "minor" misunderstanding. The accusation is grave and the distinction is at the center of it.
Would you assume a viral video contained accurate descriptions of legal procedures?
Heck if he hadn't said convicted it would be protected speech. The US protects "I bet you X beats his wife".
And "accurate descriptions of legal procedures" have nothing at all to do with the most serious allegation. The serious allegation is the beating, not the conviction.
I don't know exactly what the kid said, and the case is probably going to turn on really close parsing of both his words and the manner and context in which he presented them.
If he baldly said "this guy beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he made a statement of fact. Not a statement of opinion. Not "from what he did to me, he seems like the type". Fact. Even if the cop had truly been convicted of, say, battery as part of domestic abuse, the kid would have had no way of knowing exactly what that battery consisted of. Saying the cop had "beaten the shit out" of his girlfriend would still have been speculation on the kid's part, regardless of any conviction, let alone a protective order.
There are no complicated legal technicalities there. The kid had no knowledge of the detailed facts of the domestic abuse case, and he knew he had no knowledge of the detailed facts. He wasn't only ignorant of the legal finding. He was ignorant of what actually happened.
It is negligent to present your speculations as facts. Negligence means not exercising the care expected of a reasonable person in a similar situation. Pulling something out of your ass and presenting it as true is not reasonable care. It was done in a video after the fact. He had time to reflect, so there's no possibility of mistake "in the heat of the moment". And there's no "I did it because I'm an idiot" escape from being found negligent, either. People are often negligent because they're idiots.
Now, if he had said "the cop was convicted of domestic abuse, which I assume must mean that he beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he would have been presenting a reason for his conclusion. In that case, so long as didn't suggest that that wasn't his only reason, the truth of the conclusion would cease to matter. He wouldn't be considered to be presenting "the cop beat his girlfriend" as fact; he'd be presenting it as an inference to be drawn from the fact of the conviction. Then the audience would be expected to be able to make their own determination about whether that inference followed from the presented fact.
At that point, the question would be whether the kid was negligent in claiming that there was a conviction, because that would be the actual statement of fact he'd be offering. You might get away with claiming that was a mistake, but before you get there you have to show that he made it clear to the audience that the "conviction" was the reason he said that the cop had "beaten the shit out of" his girlfriend.
Then you'd have to argue that he couldn't be expected to know the difference between a restraining order and a conviction. Which is still not exactly open and shut, because a reasonable person might go find out before publishing a video like that. Not taking that reasonable care might make the statement about the conviction negligent and therefore defamatory. Because in fact reasonable people a lot younger than 19 tend to know the difference. A complete moron is not a reasonable person.
Or he could have done both: "The cop beat the shit out of his girlfriend, and of course that led to his being convicted". In which case there'd be two statements of "fact", each of which could be considered separately.
Including the definition of reasonable person, negligence, as well as the tests involved in a defamation suit.
The article doesn't mention what she got the protective order for, and there are several possible reasons that do not involve any physical abuse. Even domestic abuse does not necessarily mean he beat her.
They were certainly wrong about the situation and I would agree by quite a bit.
My point is misunderstandings don't mean defamation alone.
https://www.iowacourts.gov/browse/files/1c1d1ecd62dc41a78794...
A TPO/EPO will be issued based on any believable story, a PPO will be issued if you can use Photoshop.
Defamation of a non-public figure requires negligence of the truth.
Assuming the cop can be considered a non-public figure they would need to prove that the statement was made without a lot of consideration for the truth.
Given there is nuance here as to the details of the case it is going to be hard to win a defamation case here.
A layperson misunderstanding the difference between a court order and a conviction likely isn't enough to justify damages.
Smells of using the courts to punish someone by forcing them to lawyer up.
Though the publicity seems to be making it backfire for the police. I can imagine him getting a pro-bono lawyer based on the publicity. And the details of the protective order leaking out, etc. Streisand effect.
This is what that means, it's common for cops to punish people by simply forcing them to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to beat charges they know won't stick. DAs go along with it because they know cops can destroy their career if they stop providing cases/evidence.
Why would a DA want a case that can be beat or dismissed? At best it's more work taking away time for real cases, and it's possibly a defeat if it goes to far, which they definitely don't want. All to punish someone the DA has no reason to care about because it wasn't even anything to do with the DA's authority or the authority of their job?
A corrupt DA might knowingly prosecute an innocent person if they think they can make it stick because winning a car is good for thrm, but why would they go out of their way to do something possibly detrimental without reason?
I guess if the DA is worried about the police punishing them by not supplying you good cases, or whatever else, enough to give in to that then it's kind of irrelevant whether they would also want to do the favour anyway for a cop they liked (or just for the principle of supporting your crime-fighting sibling agency) or not. But it's possible that a DA who feels confident that the police wouldn't treat them differently in the future if they said no (or who didn't care about that threat) might still say yes for the different reason of thinking that police always need backing up / that if they disliked this guy enough to fuck with him then it must be because the guy deserves it.
That may seem pedantic, but I think it's very important when it comes to having useful and rational discussions. If anyone isn't seeing that, replace "DA" with a minority if your choice and "gratuitous punishment of citizens" with any other negative behavior, like theft or crime, and try to explain what the difference is between the statements. If we can't follow the same rational when assessing behavior of groups we have favorable or unfavorable predisposed opinions towards, then we can't even discuss effectively.
Actual malice in the legal sense has nothing to do with the regular meaning of those words in English. It instead requires that the defamer have seriously entertained doubts about the truth of the statements, and published them anyways.
In this case? I'd have a hard time finding them defamatory were I on the jury. One of the statements is alleging that the cop is a "convicted" domestic abuser, where the truth is that he has a protective order placed against him in relation to alleged domestic abuse yet has never been charged nor convicted. Another statement is alleging that the cop is "on the slow spectrum" on social media, which--honestly, I'm surprised the judge didn't toss that on motion to dismiss, it's pretty clearly typical hyperbolic puffery.
It is a common tactic that women use in divorce to file false domestic abuse or child abuse claims. It's called a "silver bullet divorce". Unfortunately abuse of the legal system like this has made it necessary to be skeptical of claims of domestic abuse without evidence.
However, to demonstrate actual malice, you have to demonstrate that the defendant knew of just how different the two things were, which is frankly a pretty tall ask.
If I was a defendant in such a thing, I'd point to numerous cases where police departments have claimed, and courts have agreed, that police are not expected to be experts on the law.
"If law enforcement officers can be held by the court to not have to have a nuanced understanding of the law, how could I possibly?"
How is that different from the ordinary English meaning? Or does American English differ from British English in this regard?
From the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:
"the intention to do something wrong and esp. to cause injury: "
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malice
Yes, protip, abandon your rights so man children don’t get upset. This is clearly the best decision.
This comment is sick.
> This comment is sick.
Please enlighten me, what rights do you think I was suggesting people should abandon?
Firstly, I'm specifically saying there should NOT be consequences to him from what he said to the cop. That's bogus, unprofessional, and terrible.
But that said you also have responsibility for your speech that goes along with the freedom. Do you think people should just say every single thing that comes to their minds to their peers at work?
If not, then are you (as you suggest about me) saying people should abandon their 1A rights at work?
Or would you (much more sensibly IMHO) say that if you go around being a dick to people then it's going to affect the way they treat you and the boss you keep insulting isn't going to feel full of love toward you and want to promote you.
Telling somebody to use their free speech responsibly (which is what I am doing) is not in any way the same thing as telling them to abandon their right to free speech.
Is it so much to ask for professionalism from law enforcement? "We beat your team" is not enough to warrant violating anyones rights - it's not even that impolite in general.
No it's not too much to ask, and we should not only ask but demand professionalism from them.
And please re-read the very first part of my comment, because I never said anything remotely close to it being "enough to warrant violating anyones rights" (in fact I said the opposite, that the arrest was BS).
Now, requiring cops to be superhuman and completely immune to having any emotions affect their highly subjective judgment, is never going to work. At least not until we replace the humans with AI. Humans are not capable of completely rational thought, in fact we're almost entirely the opposite: we make decisions emotionally, and then justify them rationally. Asking a cop to cease being human is a recipe for failure and goes against what we know about neuroscience.
About the "we beat your team" not even being impolite, firstly if you watch the video, that was not the only thing he said, but also do you not see what that was about? Keep in mind this is a college football player talking to a person who previously played college football. It was standard jock high-school bullshit from a tribal person to another tribal person (he plays football, and he's extensively inquiring about the cops football past during this). It was an attempt to belittle the cop, and it's the type of petty behavior I expect from children. You can't just take the one line and strip it from all of its context and evaluate it independently. At least you can't do that if you actually want to understand how and why it was said and evaluate the situation.
Disclaimer since people seem incapable of non-binary thinking: None of this excuses the cops behavior
At that point I don't think it was clear that the cop was determined to make a false DUI arrest. That came much later. At that point though the copy definitely seemed convinced that the kid was drinking, but he was still working through it. It's definitely possible that had the kid maintained his original demeanor that the cop might have changed his mind during or after the tests, but after the insults and stuff there was no way for him to back out without feeling stupid and like the kid "won."
Normally I wouldn't bother saying this next part but people seem intent today on reading more into my comments than is actually there, so to be clear, none of that justifies the cop's behavior and arrest. The cop was being a petty emotional asshole and his conduct was disgusting and despicable.
>cops are humans and if you stoop to personal insults it's not going to make them want to be nice to you.
Ugh, I actually cringed a bit while reading this victim blaming. No one deserves to be arrested because they were a smartass, or because they called someone a rookie. Holy moly.
> I agree this cop is an abusive dick and this arrest is bogus and should never have happened
Everything after that first sentence is blaming the victim.
> The petty insults throughout the process about him being a "rookie" and the "we beat <your team> last week" did not help him at all.
Do you think the petty insults did help the kid?
> Of course it's not illegal to be a smartass
Does this somehow seem like me defending the arrest?
> but pro-tip for people in the future: cops are humans
Are cops not human?
> if you stoop to personal insults it's not going to make them want to be nice to you.
Do you think that personal insults make cops want to be nice to you? (assuming you don't disagree with the earlier part about cops being human).
Seems like the court is doing the reasonable thing.
It seems they were able to parse out all of the claims and readily dismissed the vast majority of the ridiculous stuff that the cops were claiming, while acknowledging that the assertion that the officer was a "wife abuser" could veer into defamation was plausible and merits a trial (where both sides are perfectly entitled to build their case). Seems reasonable!
But mostly, two armed men terrorized a 19 year old and are now attempting to sue this 19 year old for the meany-mean things that 19 year old said while being terrorized. Is that reasonable, really, to anyone?
If someone is robbing your house and you say they probably beat their wife, should the robber be allowed to sue you? Other than a badge, what's the difference between these two scenarios?
The law should work the same for and against everyone, regardless of how much you like them.
Juries and Judges are the real wildcard. How would they interpret this?
Studies have shown that 40% of cops beat their wives, and other research suggests that DV doesn't get reported at all roughly half of the time, so the number of police officers beating their wives is going to be much greater than 40%. For any random police officer you could claim they beat their wives and be right more often than not. It's not an entirely unfair assumption to start with. This officer's ex had a protective order against him granted by the district court which was then extended on at least three occasions. It might not be proof of abuse, but it's pretty strong evidence.
My guess is that this kid found information about the protective order and just got his terminology wrong, assuming that there was a conviction when there wasn't one. It's statistically likely that he wasn't wrong and abuse was taking place. Seems like the courts could give some slack to the teenager whose rights were violated by a corrupt cop who likely abused his ex even if there was never a conviction.
That is the same as going around calling every man who looks creepy a pedo. You might be right once in a while, but that doesn’t entitle you to smear people without facts.
He was clearly wrong about the conviction, there's a pretty good chance he wasn't wrong about the abuse. Maybe that's a good enough standard of evidence to demand from the youtube video of a justifiably pissed off 19 year old? It'd be best if he uploaded a correction, or even a corrected re-upload of his video, but I think it's fair to say that this kid has been screwed over by the legal system enough already. He should probably get a pass for getting the fact about the conviction wrong and not maintaining the highest levels of journalistic integrity in the youtube video documenting the violation of his rights.
It doesn’t. One is criminal, the other civil. Totally different standards.
That isn’t how free speech works.
Also, they weren’t generic insults. They were specific.
How about if publicly I claim: “ofslidingfeet was fired for embezzling money”? Is that covered under free speech?
Cops work in the public. If the cop was charged with beating his wife or even just had the cops called (how would calling the cops on a cop work when they are coworkers?), that would also be public. There’s no invasion of privacy then. If it’s not true, it’s libel not invasion of privacy.
You can’t have it both ways.
Well ... it surely isn't an isolated incident. Seems like this town has quite an authoritarian streak.
A man showed up at a Newton city council meeting to share his thoughts about Galanakis's arrest during a public comment period.
He criticized the town's mayor and police chief -- and they had him arrested!
Criticizing the government in a public forum expressly designed for public commentary is probably the most iron-clad protected of First Amendment speech, but the town must think they operate well above the Constitution:
https://news.yahoo.com/iowa-man-files-lawsuit-being-17554478...
No, I definitely agree. And it makes me wonder what the endgame is here. Could Abuse of Process come into play?
Yes and no. I mean police are on a power trip even if you do everything they say but as soon as he called the cop out and called him stupid (in any encounter that wasn't with a cop I might have used harsher language to describe the person in question) I'm sure it didn't help. But that's the problem, it didn't help but I honestly don't think he could have said/not said/done/not done anything to placate the cops.
This kid is 19 years old, he gets pulled over later at night on his way home trying to follow the law the best he knows how (headlight out, using brights to have some light), the cops expect him to know the law about having your brights on when I've never heard of such a law (mind you cops don't need to know the law themselves as they prove more often than not but they expect a 19 year old kid to), then they shine bright lights in his face and expect him to know exactly where his registration is? And that's all within the first few minutes.
The rest of the video that I watched it's more of the same, a power tripping cop gives confusing and contradictory instructions to someone who has never done this before and expects the system to work since he has done nothing wrong. Good thing the cops set him straight at a young age so he won't make the mistake of thinking they are there to "serve and protect" (yes I know they don't actually have to do either) or that the system works in any way, shape, or form.
It's telling that this is what these bastions of society spend their time on instead of what should be slam dunk cases where someone's phone is stolen and they can tell the cops exactly where it is or similar solvable thefts that they don't bother with. What a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Since racial profiling is arguably a factor in police interactions with the public, let me just start with the fact that I'm a plain old white male. I was raised to show deference and respect to authority figures. I've had more than one teacher tell my parents, when I was in middle school and high school, that I was very polite.
All that said, I noticed a huge difference, once I got past about age 30, in how police treated me. When I was in my late teens and early to mid-twenties, cops — young cops, particularly — often seemed to want to try to see if they could rile me up and escalate. (Of course, I never took the bait.) I suspect there is some deep-seated primate behavior going on.
Taking it a step further: should police not be educated about corruption laws, or should corruption laws simply not exist?
The fact of the matter is, the more cooperative, non-violent, honest and nice society is in general, the more viable it is to be a machiavellian, narcissistic and power-hungry parasite. These traits are innate parts of the personality of each of us from birth, and some of us get a lot more than others. It's generally not a very good thing for one's future prospects to have these traits. The risk of having everyone sniff you out and turn against you is high, and gets higher the less sophisticated you are.
But even relatively unsuccessful little tyrants (HOA presidents are the perfect example of this) are more than capable of inflicting actual damage on others. If you're someone like this, and you have a tendency for violence on top of it, becoming a cop is an attractive prospect because most of these traits aren't particularly punished in that profession and sometimes are actively beneficial to your career.
Perhaps unintuitively, the real solution to this problem is to attract normal people to fill these roles. This is particularly true for politics, where most normal people rightly evaluate that the risks of a career in politics are much higher than the reward. Normal people see the reward of a career in politics as essentially an interesting job and the ability to make things better for a community. This is motivating, but not as strong as the motivation of people who are in it for the power.
I happen to know someone that accurately fits this description. Fortunately, he galvanized the community into replacing him & reversing his policies.
The local police department is ticked at the guy too because concerned parents keep reporting him for photographing their little kids in the pool, “he is not a pedophile but he has been playing hall monitor too much, trying to gather evidence of townhouse community borderline rule breaking”.
Poor guy, he has so poisoned the discourse that no one will ever take action on his reports.
So because I wasn't born with it I can't become machiavellian tyrant? Surely there's management or police training that can grant people the necessary skills and credentials, no?
But someone like me who has a strong sense of guilt, it would take a LOT of training to not feel bad about being a machiavellian tyrant.
As much as i hate cops (qualified immunity), i hate this guilty until you are proven innocent in court but always guilty in court of public opinion about anything related to female directed domestic violence/r4p3/assault/red flags laws to take your property away without due proces etc even more.
Im not saying he didn't do it, im just saying these things need to be private until its likely true (quick determination), then posted.
Same way the asylum system in the us works where you can show a credible threat to cbp at the border than years later you get the actual court case to get the final approval.
Youtuber is an absolute loser though. Imagine getting-off on distracting people from other jobs they could be doing.
For example, what happens between 14:26 and 14:31 and 14:50-14:57, and 15:44-16:33?
Or, we might ask ourselves, why does this interaction seem incredibly one-sided? Before people say "nothing could possibly justify", consider what might have happened between 14:26 and 14:31 and 14:50-14:57, and 15:44-16:33, which is literally the entire premise of the arrest (and omitted from the video).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(Un...
It was more difficult to find that I remember without all the commentary, but here it is.
https://www.newtongov.org/CivicMedia?VID=277#player
Same for cops.
How ironic. That the opinions of someone on a YouTube video can cause someone as fortified as a police officer such anguish. Listening to them describe the damages you would think these officers were wrongfully arrested or something.
Essentially, if you're in a small town in America, the question isn't whether you have rights. What is law and what will happen to you are distinct.
Cops being pricks to teenagers happens everywhere, from small towns to urban centers or suburbs.
This counts as extra-judicially maintaining the status quo.
This same exact thing could have happened in a town of any size. Cops harass teenagers everywhere.
This has no relation to the themes of that song which discusses how antisocial, illegal behavior like rioting, theft, assault, etc which is permitted in urban centers will not be tolerated in smaller communities.
"Iowa man files lawsuit after being arrested twice for criticizing the police"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37910698
And they will never be recorded, which means you should never talk to the FBI.
They have a long standing policy of refusing to allow any interview to be recorded. Instead, they fill out a 302 report after the interview with a “written record” of what was said.
Unless you’re comfortable with your freedom relying on the honesty of the agent sitting across from you, an agent whose incentives are to close cases, do not talk to the FBI.
Similarly, don't sign any papers or agree to anything without a lawyer present. You aren't smarter than the people whose job it is (on paper) to enforce the law (even if in practice, many police officers in the US don't seem to know or care to enforce it). Things you might be able to "coax" out of an individual officer get thrown in the bin anyway and your statements will be read in the worst possible light if given half the chance.
Your lawyer is paid to understand the law (and if they're any good, they'll do what they can to protect you).
That advice goes double if it's any three letter agency.
That hasn’t been true for nearly a decade.
Here is the DOJ’s policy on the electronic recording of statements: https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-13000-obtaining-evidence
Sunnyvale, California, has a combined police and fire department. They train their people for both and they move back and forth. Emergency medical services is in there, too. At one time, their cops wore red blazers with the city insignia.
Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.
The danger level goes down when it's known that a cop's power is in their reinforcements. The individual cop would be little danger and doesn't need to be shot.
Arguably that should be addressed by a different organisation than the folks who enforce traffic laws and investigate petty theft. The state guard, perhaps?
I think George Floyd is a good case study for reform; Chauvin and all officers should be required to assess for medical emergencies at all times basically and take at least some level of medical action when necessary. So Chauvin should have been required to check for consciousness and then provide aid once finding Floyd to be in medical distress.
> Abstract
> FOLLOWING A DISCUSSION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS RELATED TO POLICE-COMMUNITY RELATIONS, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE RATIONALE BEHIND, AND RESULTS OF THIS CALIFORNIA EXPERIMENT. IN 1969, THE MENLO PARK POLICE FORCE CHANGED FROM THE TRADITIONAL MILITARISTIC UNIFORM TO BLAZERS AND TIES, MORE IN KEEPING WITH CIVILIAN MODES OF DRESS. RANK WAS NOT EXHIBITED, NIGHTSTICKS WERE DISPENSED WITH, AND GUNS WERE WORN BENEATH THE BLAZER. RESULTS OF THIS NEW POLICE IDENTITY INCLUDE PEER GROUP ISOLATION, INCREASED INVOLVEMENT IN EDUCATION, INCREASED RECRUITMENT OF INDIVIDUALS WITH COLLEGE DEGREES, AND A DECREASE IN PERSONNEL TURNOVER. A 1971 COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE MENLO PARK POLICE AND TWO OTHER DEPARTMENTS IN THE AREA INDICATED A DECREASED NEED FOR A SYMBOL OF AUTHORITY AND IMPROVED POLICE-COMMUNITY RELATIONS IN MENLO PARK. DESPITE ATTITUDINAL AND BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES, THERE WERE NO DIFFERENCES IN GENERAL PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT MEASUREMENTS. (AUTHOR ABSTRACT MODIFIED)
We might not like what I wrote, but's basic human phycology.
Escalation by whom, the police or the citizens?
Edit: I think people are completely misunderstanding this post. I made a general statement about humans. Not about policing, not about a country. Just an observation that certain types of people only seem to understand/respect violence.
Not every statement needs to be "unpacked"
Respect isn't given to people who look movie-tough-guy-cool, it's given to people who know what they're doing.
When one of the earlier police commissioners was asked why the police don't carry guns, he replied that it would put too much distance between them and the public. The police in the U.S.A. seem to actively be going for that distance.
It's not just one person's opinion, either. The British police is (supposed to, it's stretching further from it under the endless cuts) adhere to Peelian principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
> The Metropolitan Police officers were often referred to as 'Bobbies' after Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel
So _that's_ why! :D
Or really tacticool guys in general. They're pretty much always absolute assholes.
This also filters out ppl who don't have the attention span or the brain cells to do that, which is a good thing. We also have separate non police folks for parking violations and other more menial stuff.
Hello Kitty is popular enough that I worry it might encourage bad behavior