I'm disgusted. How would one go about ensuring that their social couldn't be used to create an account with this much liability? Would freezing a credit line be enough?
Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.
Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.
It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.
That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
Only SSN is not public information. They are not published, but the records are public if you go to the right place in person and ask the right questions. (sometimes you have a "need to know" before they will tell you, but it isn't hard to find one)
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.
I felt the same way, and made a CashApp account, but I don't think it matters. It didnt say anything about the fraud account having her email address. It just had her name and they inputted her social. I don't think there's anything you can do but pray.
How I would like this to go so wrong for Cash App and the Prosecution. 10's of millions in fines but we all know the system protects these Corporations and shitty prosecutors. In the end she will have lost years of her life, her savings, etc with no restitution.
Some legislators - perhaps honest idealists, perhaps those being paid more by lawyers specializing in such lawsuits - do work at getting such laws passed.
Nah people routinely sue local governments and police and win hefty settlements when it's determined that those organizations negligently damaged them in this sort of way. There was a lady in New York a while back who was held on armed robbery charges for like 18 months and it ended up she was set up by her PI ex-boyfriend who was friends with the cops. She lost her business, her job and all that time with her daughter as well. She sued afterwards and won some mid-single-digit-millions sum that I would argue is low (because honestly while that's probably life changing for her, it's not punitive enough for the police department), but it's not nothing.
Consider the story a PSA, for folks who still believe that Trust and Justice are somehow part of the American Way. Maybe use it as a teaching tool with your kids, too.
Admitting to guilt, even when innocent, is not normal behavior among a normal population. As evidence, the topic of this thread, and probably you and me, and not some unknown elements in a story by NPR.
> Aside from the paltry number of trials in the federal system, states including Pennsylvania, Texas and New York have trial rates of less than 3%. In Santa Cruz County, Ariz., there were no trials from 2010 to 2012, the report said.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
You are arrested for a crime you didn't commit. The prosecution charges you with a serious crime with punishment of years in prison. You lawyer can't guarantee you'll be found not guilty and you'll be in jail for a least a year until the trial because you can't make bail. The DA then offers a plea bargain to a lessor crime with several months in prison.
Lots of innocent people would, and do, plead guilty to the lessor crime.
Talk about naive. The vast majority of innocent people would never plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit. Don't apply such things to normal people with better intelligence.
If you cannot afford a lawyer, and the prosecution offers you a choice:
a) Go to trial. Lose your job. Get life altering debt. Spend a year or more stressfully fighting. Have your movements controlled, maybe be imprisoned. And THEN maybe you get proven innocent. Then there's a risk you get found guilty and face severe consequences.
b) Say you are guilty. Promise to pay a couple grand. You go home to your family tonight. Keep your nose clean and we'll seal the record in three years.
Again, it doesn't happen to tons of people or to normal people. Quit reading Reddit headlines and look around you unless that is the type of people in your life. Certainly not mine or anyone I know
Sad that Block Inc get to profit from frictionless signups, and outsource any costs to innocent people in the form of jailtime.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.
In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
> The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician
Sounds exactly like how things work with Attorney Generals for the states and the feds, as well as with many county attorneys in the US, especially the larger ones.
The large, large majority of cases in the US are prosecuted by career lawyers, not elected officials.
> Sounds exactly like how things work with Attorney Generals for the states and the feds, as well as with many county attorneys in the US
Sure, in the same way that Australia is exactly like Greenland.
Even in relatively populous New York the org chart distance between your criminal prosecutor and an elected politician is significantly smaller than in England. Somewhere smaller there's an excellent chance that an elected politician has direct influence over the choice to prosecute you and that's unavoidably corrupting.
Is it as bad as the mistake of leaving the Pardon Power with an elected politician? No. That was unconscionable back when the the "First Black President" was a white guy named Bill and he used it to pardon crooks and family, and of course it's still unconscionable today when people just straight up pay Donald to get out of jail. But elected prosecutors is still pretty bad.
> This varies a lot by state, btw.
Almost everything does. On a good day that's an opportunity to learn what works and all improve. But those good days are fewer and further between than ever.
This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
I mean cases where the state might decline to prosecute the politically powerful.
You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?
If you have a specific case you can just (well, I can't easily but a lawyer will know how without having to go re-read documentation they didn't look at for years) get the court records for that case and see what happened to it. The CPS claims they can't answer a FOIA "what happened to these cases?" type query because once the CPS owns the case it's just another case, but if you had a particular case in mind that's not a FOIA situation you just look at the court records.
From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.
Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.
Police never thought to subpoena the ISP for the IP address associated with the cashapp login? This seems like an egregious omission in the investigation. Even if it were a VPN, you could subpoena her email to find payment receipts to the provider, etc. Even that may not necessarily prove guilt if there are no logs. That's all an enormous leap of evidence to assume the account is genuinely hers, especially given how endemic identity theft is.
So how exactly does Cash App verify users that signup for new accounts? If the process is so lax, shouldn't they be forced to temporary block it? To say nothing about money laundering charges, that would be raised against any bank in such situation.
If they don't do any verification, and I'm not sure how they would in countries like the US, then any fraud case or attempt to claw in money from random people should be thrown out of court by any reasonable judge.
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
I've signed up for a few bank accounts purely online. And if you give them your SSN and enough other information, they're able to pull all your credit reports, in real time, and then do verification based on them, that tends to be quite effective.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
The problem is, if you have a SSN and enough other information, you can pull a credit report and answer all the rest of the questions for opening an account.
Cash App is owned by Block, and Block has an existing banking license (an Industrial Loan Company chartered in Utah in 2021), and has a new license application is progress (a National Trust Bank Charter filed just last month). I happen to know that internally Jack was saying things like "we are a bank", and "we can use this license to do all sorts of banking things."
Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.
All of the associated information tied to your SSN has also been leaked multiple times. Just having it should not be considered any kind of "proof" of identity in 2026. This should be an easy argument for "reasonable doubt" by any defense attorney.
I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
This happens to me frequently, I have an OG gmail account which a bunch of people have associated with their own accounts. The problem is the provider will verify a phone number, and once that's validated, will accept an email address, even if it's wrong. Two financial entities have accepted my email address tied to other people's account: Chime, and Venmo. There's no way to fix this since they all presume I am a customer of theirs, so the path to fix is to do it in their app. It is incredibly frustrating, more so when it's people who handles money do it. They should know better! The "We are not a bank (therefore not covered by banking regulations)" does so much work to cover their shoddy practices.
Same story with Gmail here, and unfortunately over the years it has simply become my primary. I'm still undecided on how I want to handle my own domain+email.
Someone opened a Venmo account using my gmail and immediately started moving thousands of dollars in small transactions, and my only options were to a) take ownership of the thousands of dollars of small transactions that were now associated with my unverified email or b) get my email banned???? Eventually I got an email saying the Venmo was disabled due to suspicious activity, hope that doesn't bite me in the ass in the future.
What if I wanted to sign up for Venmo in the future? Why do I need to create another email address to use their product in the future when they didn't even verify it in the first place? How are they allowed to run their billon dollar business like this?
I'm the recovery account to at least two accounts of real people with the same name (the people are real, despite the uncommon name). Don't bother reporting it via the link in the mails, it does nothing. I'm not even sure this isn't some Google shenanigans either.
Well, now you get to the absolute travesty that is:
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
The good thing is that you can keep the free credit monitoring services running until you die, because inevitably a new security breach will offer you free credit monitoring before the previous one expires. /s
I think I currently have two overlapping ones going.
This is more general issue in the USA. How do you prove who you are? Your driver license / identity card doesn't have a chip, so given enough information about someone else you can sign up as them.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
This is so backwards that it doesn't even compute in my brain.
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
> Meanwhile, authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation. She has refused, saying she is innocent.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
They give a shit about their conviction rate. And maintaining a comfortable relationship with their local police department(s). Very little else.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
We like convictions because there's a hell of a lot of actual crime that is never punished. Just my circle of friends has suffered car break-ins, burglaries (no suspects), grand theft auto (never recovered the car), and devastatingly, a rape on school property. Most crimes aren't investigated, despite real damages, and the couple that were never saw a conviction.
So then is your need for "justice" satisfied by rounding up a bunch of unlucky people and convicting them? To me it seems like you're just describing the other side of the exact same coin where the justice system isn't doing its job.
I mean it's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right?
Don't they also hate to lose though? This seems an unlikely case for a prosecutor to win. If it were a civil case, sure, the standard is much lower there, but for a criminal case the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
You need evidence from Cash App and likely other third parties like ISPs. You ideally would have an expert to testify about the limitations of the prosecution evidence.
Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.
Sometimes the public defenders actions are indistinguishable from collusion with the prosecution. The window to appeal can close before your sentence is over.
Often a lawyer that doesn't want the case because the pay is lower than private work, and also if the defendant loses their case they must pay both the lawyer and the court their fees and hours.
Which is why there's a push to accept a plea deal. Innocent people can easily end up accepting a plea deal after a day in jail, and pushy investigators trying to get out a confession.
>The DA (District Attorney) is elected, so they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics.
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
You're not entirely wrong but I think that description of the situation is rather heavily colored by partisanship. Being lenient about a very limited subset of crime that "the system" is particularly ineffective at dealing with (to the point that it is arguably racist/classist/etc) is viewed favorably by certain (primarily urban) demographics. When you have broad support for an elected official who is exercising a great deal of discretion to not enforce the law that should trigger fundamental changes to the system as opposed to impeachment.
Think the Philly DA situation is a bit more unique and interesting. Yeah, agree, he was one of the first progressive DA's elected in recent times, and he is in many ways light on crime. But he just got re-elected by a 75% in 2025 for a third term. That's incredible and think there is a reason for this.
Am no expert on him, but as we're all talking about here, the legal system is really messed up. Yeah, there are a lot of terrible processes and laws that get in the way of justice, and a lot of the things his office did made a lot of sense.
Probably one of the biggest was the "Elimination of Cash Bail for Low-Level Offenses." The cash bail system for minor crimes really screws poor people, who can't make bail for things like shoplifting, and have to stay in jail until their pre-trial. (it's often something like $1000, which for middle-class people is not a big deal at all). But imagine a teen who had to stay out of school for a month or even two just because they stole something for $20 and his family can't put together $1k. The teen gets behind in class and stops trying, and this becomes the start of getting further and further behind in life. And a similar situation happens with poor working-class people for a minor crime, they can't pay bail, so they are in jail and can't work. They are often fired or just get into debt because they're not drawing a salary.
I don't know about anything about open drug markets, but think overall what the Philly DA seemed sensible (and just looked briefly and it seems like the crime statistics turned out well in Philly, but that could be from a number of things).
It's a feature of the US hatred of the homeless and lack of mental health care for the poor. The affected people end up clustered in cities because that's where the money is, and in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles because that's where they won't freeze to death in winter.
Think some of it this as we don’t have a strong safety net in the US. But also read that is because cities are just so expensive. Yeah, for people making something like $40k/yr it’s much easier to fall into major debt. Had a couple of roommates who went through this, staying financially solvent in the city was a huge deal. It seemed like they were constantly treading water.
But, agree that we as a country can strengthen to safety net, probably good for us as a whole.
Rule 3.8. Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor.
The prosecutor in a criminal case shall:
(a) refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause;
...
COMMENT
[1] A prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate. This responsibility carries with it specific obligations to see that the defendant is accorded procedural justice and that guilt is decided upon the basis of sufficient evidence. Precisely how far the prosecutor is required to go in this direction is a matter of debate and varies in different jurisdictions. Many jurisdictions have adopted the ABA Standards of Criminal Justice Relating to the Prosecution Function, which in turn are the product of prolonged and careful deliberation by lawyers experienced in both criminal prosecution and defense. Applicable law may require other measures by the prosecutor and knowing disregard of those obligations or a systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion could constitute a violation of Rule 8.4.
Isn't the onus of proving the violation is on the complaint? So now she has to fight two cases and one of them is against someone who wields lot of power in the other case? Not saying we shouldn't hold the prosecutors' feet to fire but there are practical considerations.
A bar complaint isn't something you fight. It's a strongly worded letter to their manager that may have professional consequences.
One complaint may not have a "they're disbarred". It could result in a slap on the wrist and a note in their file. Multiple ones that show a system of abuse of discretion would be a different story - that would be handled by the state bar itself.
It's not stated in the article, but quite often when you look into these extraordinary miscarriage of justice stories in the US you find out what race the victim is, and then it becomes clear what's happening.
At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
We are all ears if you'd like to start that conversation. Make a page/blog post and submit it here, and accept ahead of time whatever fallout may arise from doing so. If the benefits outweigh the risks, or if you simply are at a point where the risks do not matter.
"If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems."
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
But they do tend to have better speedy trial definitions and such. Although it seems they are rolling back bail reform (which may have been too lenient, but they didn't find a middle solution). And it seems they still have ex parte protection from abuse orders, which are notoriously abused in divorce cases.
Yes but it only gets worse as you go to red states which are “tough on crime”. Which basically just means they put as many people in prison as humanly possible, and for as long as possible.
I agree, but the "tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction" is actually a "tough conversation about taxing the sh*t out of everyone who makes more than $150k a year". Most of our problems are downstream of our extreme inequality and the way it incentivizes dysfunctional and antisocial behavior across the board. So it's going to be an even harder conversation to have than you think.
And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)
>All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse
You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.
Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
> This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...
Not in a criminal court, or really anything where the government is the counterparty. Philosophically it’s because those things are part of your “civic duty” as a citizen like taxes. Realistically it’s because the demographics of people getting the money would be unpalatable to the public. Recidivism is high, some large portion of it would go to people with prior convictions.
The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.
I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.
I agree about the rationalization, I tried to imply that with air quotes.
> municipalities paying the full cost of policing
Since we're talking realpolitik, this will never happen. In a first principles sense, it won't because it's unpredictable at the locality level (how do you set tax rates for FY27 without knowing what you'll pay out for this?). In a realpolitik sense, it won't because a) people don't like their taxes going up and would rather bank on it not happening to them, and b) the police will throw a shit fit and refuse to work when they realize they have to consider property damage while doing their jobs, and that the public will be _pissed_ if they crash a cruiser into a parked car while LARPing John Rambo.
> Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well.
Good luck and godspeed. The latest stats say 56% of US adults read at or below a 6th grade level, so say it slow and in monosyllabic words lol
Not only does the US not care about justice, they favor the government, always. In a federal conviction you used to have forever to file an appeal, but that was determined too expensive (because people could utilize it) so they made it 10 days. But that was too short. So they made the fair compromise between 'an appeal should always be allowed' and 10 days, and made it 14 days for defendants (but 30 days for government because you know, the government has more limited resources than someone sentenced and being moved across country in prison transports between detention centers to their assigned prison).
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
Unfortunately the court system is such that it would collapse under the load if everyone actually exercised their right to a trial which heavily incentivizes plea deals
That is a different problem. In this case it should be clear that the prosecutors have messed up and won't admit it, maybe to save their carriers. They are going after someone innocent because it is the easy target while the real criminal is at large.
Partially. The prosecutors and DAs are motivated by conviction rates. The delays in the court system are a bludgeon to encourage that end. Just like identity theft in itself, no-one is motivated to fix the system but the ones being fucked by it, who are the least able to do so.
Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
"Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?"
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
Check out Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate. The writing is poor and it’s one of the only sources that dares suggest that the Enron executives were victims but regardless, there are points relevant to exactly what you’re asking about.
If only a reverse plea deal gambit were realistic. Counter with an offer to accept $10k and an apology for malpractice in exchange for her not going after those involved. Unfortunately a decent chunk of the justice system here doesn't appear to have any real accountability for poor conduct.
Are there cases or jurisdictions where the outcome is not binary (guilty, not guilty), but has three options: innocent, indeterminate, guilty? With "innocent" leading to some fine, penalty, or even worse, for the prosecution team. That would obviously imply the option for plea deals both ways, and would give the prosecutors a more interesting incentive structure :)
>Smith later discovered why she had been arrested: a scammer had tricked someone into sending $1,000 to a Cash App account, one that was in her name but controlled by a criminal.
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
> she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
Let's not pretend this is an every day occurrence that happens to everyone. It's a one-off oddball situation. I'm not even sure we have all the details considering the sources.
You need to get off the internet immediately--especially reddit. Normal people wake up in the morning, put their clothes on, go to work, and come home. You're reading about people who are not the normal everyman and applying it to all persons (and all of the USA). Quit doing that.
There's 330 million people here. You, being not from here, only find out about what's exceptional, not what's normal. This case made the news because of how bad it is. It this was common, it wouldn't have made the news.
Playing devil's advocate here, how should this actually be handled? If the police show up (not saying they did all the due diligence they should have) to arrest you for a crime and the person says "Nope, wasn't me."...is that sufficient for police to drop everything and walk away?
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
Typically an investigation involving a digital crime lab that understands what they are doing. For example tying the digital traces to the actual suspect. If there are no ties to IP addresses or devices then it gets really tricky.
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
> the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
For starters in this case, extradition shouldn't really work like that. There is no reason a suspect cannot be held somewhere close to their home (ie near their family), with police from the distant jurisdiction doing the traveling to question her etc. Doubly so if she's able to post bail.
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really away around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for attorneys, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (the rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still being attacked).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
I like the theory of this comment. The actual numbers probably wouldn't work, but the theory is sound.
The payment for wrong prosecution would create a back pressure on the justice system which is currently only possible via media reporting, something generally only accessible to the powerful or otherwise sympathetic defendant. We'd need a category of dismissal which is "innocent", where a judge determines not only is the person "not guilty", but that actually, with proper investigation and application of thought, the prosecution could have determined innocence beforehand themselves. This should come with the payment and automatic complete expungement of all records, and an entry in the local newspaper of the declared innocence of the defendant.
Then the last piece of the puzzle would be outlawing police and prosecutor unions, and firing police and prosecutors who have poor records of sending "innocent" cases to trial. This would serve to create a pressure towards correct prosecution.
Abstractly I would say not guilty means innocent. But having just sat on a jury for a drunk driving case where the defendant seemingly did do what was alleged but yet the key evidence was excluded in limine (for philosophical reasons that I consider very good), I see where you're coming from.
The difficulty then becomes addressing the perverse incentive of "innocent" vs "not guilty" (I don't love your terms but I'm just reusing them), where a local judge is incentivized to declare merely "not guilty" to save the city money. While things are always going to come down to the frailty of human judgement, it seems like this might be a setup to "change things" while the status quo doesn't actually change.
I'd also question why there really needs to be two separate categories. Most of the harm in this case is coming from elective overzealous actions by the police. If they had to pay for damages they caused to any "not guilty", then they'd work to reduce those damages (no extradition, lower/no bail, etc). For the case that I was on, the damages would seemingly be limited to one night at the police station, and attorney fees. And the attorney's fees were only necessary due to the prosecution insisting on bringing a case it knew it wouldn't win. So if the defendant is truly "not guilty" (as we the jury quickly found), then why should the defendant be on the hook for those costs-as-punishment ?
* authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation.*
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
Absolutely. I actually went to trial many years ago because a DA wouldn't back down, he thought I'd bend. I didn't. We literally had video footage of the culprit, it clearly wasn't me and clearly WAS someone else. The DA waited until the day before we were to pick a jury to drop the charges, just a few days before trial. After, the DA even said to me, "I'm a dangerous man to make an enemy of." I think I was 20, so obviously I was cocky and snapped back "So am I," and stormed off. I not live a thousand miles away from that crappy little town.
Seriously. And what kind of moron did the D.A. he think was that he would take a criminal conviction on his record by pleading guilty, when he had video evidence of his innocence!! Just to avoid embarrassing the D.A., a stranger to him?
When I was 19 and told the DA I'd be fighting my case and proving my innocence, I watched a vein pop out of his head. He got the better of me though, his dad was the mayor and the judge was in his pocket and they facilitated an absolutely mockery of a trial despite zero evidence, and my public defender was in on the racket and refused to allow me an appeal, and the jail refused to give me new counsel.
This same DA has a reputation for assaulting prostitutes and just got sworn in as the parish judge. I guess playing fair would have hurt his career because my understanding is to be a judge out there you have to demonstrate crookedness.
Because the DA has a win/loss ratio to maintain. If it drops too low, how is he ever going to run for governor? It's all about power using it to protect their career.
Being a DA should disqualify you from ever working in politics, especially democratic politics! Looking at your Harris! Liberals know that you forced a lot of people to stay locked up after they should have been freed because she fought a federal order as DA. Fuck whatever her fake liberal accolades were.
As people have said, they hate losing a case and will try to tempt you into a plea deal that seems like less hassle than anything else and "make this go away." But I'm stubborn, always have been. I made a fool of him in court by his reckoning because I challenged his authority and won.
I'd like to see a three way verdict: guilty/not guilty/innocent.
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
They used to have this in Scorland - Guilty, Not Guilty and Not Proven, with the last two legally having the same affect (ie being aquitted) but I believe Not Proven was abolished at the start of this year.
I believe the problem was that in practice it became He Totally Did It But The Evidence Sucks So He Gets To Walk Free, and was increasingly interpreted as such. In the public's eye, everything besides a Not Guilty meant you did it.
so then if you're not guilty, so not actually innocent, you're like... kinda guilty, right? you could still end up on the no-fly list, or the sex offenders list, or what have you.
"Your honor, I was innocent of that prior crime and it shouldn't be used to enhance the sentencing of this current case, nor to influence the jury's perception."
"I'm sorry, it says you weren't found guilty; it doesn't say you were innocent."
Now extrapolate this to your friends or potential employers.
"Sure, LorenPechtel wasn't proven guilty of murdering 500 orphans as accused, but he never fully proved his innocence with a detailed and corroborated minute-by-minute log of his activities for the past 5 years. So maybe he did it!"
It's innocent until proven guilty. Not guilty until proven innocent. A third category would be abused to high heaven, and the courts already engage in far too much abuse.
Except for plea bargains, where it is often "innocent until bullied into accepting a plea deal as the better option - even when you didn't do it". No need to prove anything there.
I am currently in the court system defending my innocence regarding a recent incident which I can't currently discuss, and the officer who charged me was literally bragging about how most of the charges would get "pled down"; he was openly and deliberately frontloading me with bogus extra charges hoping some would stick if I did a plea deal for the rest. He told me that if I talked back to him, he'd give me an assaulting an officer charge just because he could get away with it. The corruption is baked into the system from top to bottom.
There are sort of other options like an Alford plea where, my understanding is, the prosecution knows you didn’t do it, you plead guilty anyway and they tell you to just fuck off.
Or if the jury acquits, they are asked whether it was reasonable for the state to prosecute the case. If ≥50% say no, criminal charges are automatically brought against the prosecuting attorney and judge for malicious prosecution.
Serious question.. when you do get picked up for something like that and you invoke your rights for silence. How do you get council? Do you already have a number, do you already have a relationship with a defense attorney? How do you navigate that?
The state has to appoint you one if you don't have one. And given that you have to invoke your exercise of your silence anyway, throw it in there. So something like, "I am invoking my right to silence and require an attorney." ought to do it. Having one ready can definitely be helpful. And while a DA is ideal, any lawyer should do, as they'll either be able to do enough work to get you out of there to find a good attorney, or get a real defense criminal attorney involved. If you do have a prior relationship, keep their card in your wallet and point them to that when you invoke your right to silence.
I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).
I've thought about this and I don't understand why we can have plea deals which are so radically different from the potential punishment if found guilty. Like, if the state thinks you did it and offers you a $1000 fine, how is it reasonable to potentially go to jail for 6 years if found guilty?
The state already showed that it believed that the crime was only worth a $1000 fine.
Maybe there should be a rule that whatever plea deal offered should be the maximum punishment possible if you're found guilty.
I was in a jury pool for a case where the DA was attempting to prosecute petty vandalism to pressure a young adult over a minor crime ($500 worth of graffiti) because they wanted cooperation on another larger crime.
It wasn't going anywhere. When I finally got called up to voir dir I explained that I thought the real crime was sequestering 300 people for a day over $500. I suggested we collect $2 from each person in the jury pool (far less than we paid for parking that day) and cover the alleged damages and not only be done for the day, but have achieved some real measure of justice.
Lets just say the judge didn't agree and I got let out of voir dir.
> let's start with the ones above $1,000 first, hm?
The criminals start with the ones below $1,000 and then progress above. If you start punishing it earlier, you won't have to deal with as many above $1,000 crimes in the first place.
If you can’t pay for your next meal $20 might as well be $2 thousand or $20 thousand. Thats why overdraft fees are exploitative.
A person doesn’t steal a sandwich from 7-11, not get caught, then suddenly realize they can drain unsuspecting grandmas’ bank accounts by implementing a long con through masquerading as a long lost nephew through Facebook.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that some big box stores like Target and Walmart allow shoplifters to get away with petty crime but save all evidence of these crimes to one day prosecute once the total shoplifted goes above the threshold of petty crime. Sometimes, these people would be goaded into this lifestyle by people who have agreements with Loss Prevention teams. Everyone wins except the shoplifter.
Doesn’t that prove actually that the act of theft is not some calculated needs based negotiation in need of “the right threshold” to deter crime?
Like fare hopping, first half of my life i thought how unfair that i have to drone away as a tool of society and pay like a shmuck meanwhile these freeloaders have happily escaped the matrix.
second half of life i realized being unwilling or unable to pay $2.50 for public transist is an issue between that person and their life situation. If that’s what they need, I support the subsidy.
safe transit is important exactly for the people who barely have a few dollars for transit. subsidized tickets are the way to go. by enabling and allowing fare evasion for those who need it unfortunately allows those to get in who don't need to.
The interesting thing about thresholds is that antisocial behavior models itself to the threshold, whether by conscious awareness or by an evolutionary pattern.
The pair is accused of stealing around $3,200 worth of merchandise, primarily meat, seafood, and produce, from one or more Safeway locations across 14 separate incidents.
obviously if someone is a repeat offender then as they cross the threshold, chop-chop, straight to jail, charge them with the whole batch of crimes together.
it doesn't mean keep no records of crimes and don't respond at all.
Question: do you advocate for police to maintain dossiers on people's activities in order to arrest them once some combination of those activities cross the threshold? Like KYC for shoplifters? Do you think these records should be jurisdictionally/geographically limited?
I assume police already stores dossiers on reported crimes.
Initially it's a report. Place, time, allegation, supporting evidence.
The question is how much (automated) detection ought to be allowed, what's the retention period, and so on.
Flock is a bad trade-off, but that doesn't mean there's no point in collecting data. If every datum is a semi-tangible report, then the sensitivity/specificity has quite a good change of being high (especially compared to dragnet surveillance with post-hoc data fishing).
By the way, the stat you mention counts consensual arrangements as wage theft, probably the large majority of it (e.g. hiring illegal immigrants for under the minimum wage). Calling that "theft" is a rhetorical move, much like libertarians calling taxation "theft": it borrows the moral weight of stealing for something that's legally and morally quite different.
I'm saying that much of what's called "wage theft" isn't theft in any normal sense of the word. It's the equivalent of calling employees who take long bathroom breaks or slack off on the clock "wage thieves." Do employees slack off on the job? Yes. Do corporations hire contractors when labor regulations forbids them to? Yes. Is either one comparable to theft? No.
Almost never. The larger the corporation the more strictly the rules are followed. I have worked for fintech startups and have some horrifying stories that would absolutely never fly at a larger company.
Wage theft is a real crime and you don't get to rename it because your feelings are somehow hurt. Calling taxation "theft" is just vapid right wing mccarythism. Rich people paid mccarthy money to lie over and over again because at the time it was illegal to broadcast those lies on tv or radio. But a senator was immune and could lie all they wanted.
You are never going to be right about anything if you actually think what you posted makes any sense.
Sure, I was just pointing out why the stat is misleading. If you only counted cases that meet the legal definition of the crime of "wage theft," the figure would be much, much lower. That's also my issue with the term itself: it lumps in situations most people wouldn’t consider anything like theft.
Perhaps there are alternatives other than "small crimes go unpunished" and "people make false admissions of guilt, pressured by the ruinous cost of the justice system, 300 jurors needed for a single trial"
If we've got a Lamborghini justice system, delivering amazing performance to people with a spare $250k and doing nothing for anyone else - some would say that's not the right price/performance trade off.
Ignoring smaller crimes just because they're under $1,000 isn't the answer. things can quickly spiral. How many times do you wake up to your car scratched window broken or whatever and would be ok ?
Yes, I'm trying to say it's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other ways you could organise a justice system, many of which would lead to more just results.
For example - a fixed price system. 8 hours wages from the two parties to the dispute buys 30 minutes with one judge and two lawyers. More than enough time to deal with a minor matter like a scratched car. Or if you prefer a continental-style inquisitorial system, you can lose the lawyers and have 90 minutes with a judge. The fees mean judges and lawyers take home 5x the average salary.
I wouldn’t want to live in a place where innocent people are forced under threat of financial destruction to make false confessions for crimes they didn’t commit, but here we are.
MTA already has a half-price program for low-income people. I agree fare jumpers don't need jail but they need some punishment. Otherwise it's unfair to law-abiding people.
There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.
Or make the transportation free, then you don't have to worry about policing infractions and instead spend the low effort policing money on cleaning, security, and improvement.
There's an argument that making people pay a fare improves cleanliness and security to an extent. I don't know if there are studies about it. But it's a persuasive argument.
I don’t find this claim persuasive in the least. I could just as easily assert without evidence that fees reduce cleanliness because patrons feel they’ve prepaid for their messes to be cleaned up, and security because resources that could be applied to safety and reducing crimes against patrons are used to enforce fare collection and secure methods of payment instead.
So we capture and enslave the conductors and everyone needed to run that free operation? Sounds like an excellent plan. A free, slavery based transportation system.
What exactly is your definition of free? Do you mind explaining your thought process on that?
I am genuinely curious because I simply lack the ability to understand that meme I keep encountering; that things that cost money should be free.
Is it just that you want others to pay for things you like, do, have, or want? Or do you just not really have an idea of where things you like, want, do, or have come from and that things can't be "free" like they were when you lived with your parents?
I am genuinely baffled by this type of mentality. I actually understand my cat better than I understand this mentality, because the human is supposed to have higher order thinking skills that appear to be wholly absent.
I thought we were making it free? Are you paying for this idea since it is going to be free to me? Where and when do you sign up to pay for it so it can be free to me?
Hi! Like most people in the world, I don't normally respond to bad faith arguments like the ones you have posted in this thread regarding enslaving people for providing a "free" (clearly tax-funded) government service. Responding below the dead comment to let you know that. Have a good weekend.
I take your comment in the sardonic humor it conveys, hopefully it matches your intent.
The robber barons built libraries. Yes, it took some heat off of their reputation, but, they weren't idiots and neither were the people for whom they were driving wages down or driving prices up. They and municipal orgs of the time and other civic minded groups built libraries and schools because society is better off have more education. Capitalism, done right, actually can have good outcomes.
In a similar vein, healthcare makes people healthier as a general outcome. "Socialized medicine" (more properly understand of as healthcare as a publicly-provided good) enables a more healthy population -- business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.
Public transportation in dense areas should be seen similarly. More efficient, lower pollution when expanded and widely available, easier to police, less of the nasties like PM2.5 from tires and asphalt, less road deaths, and so forth.
> business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.
As we can see now - capitalism would prefer "stupid", way productive robots running 24/7 in a dark warehouses to a healthier, more productive population. Lighting savings are already cover most of difference (/s but only so slightly).
The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.
Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.
> It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare
Are you making a case that a violent person, who ignores the stringent laws of society against violence, will diligently follow the laws of society requiring $2.50 prior to riding public transport?
Your argument is like saying I won't put a basic privacy lock on my gym locker because, you know, a creep wanting to sift through my things is going to do it anyway.
There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim. If a transit system insists on fares, it is likely they are watching out for fare dodgers which increases the risk of getting caught even before the offender gets a chance to offend.
> There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim
Are you making the case that a society unable to protect its denizens from violent offenders in broader society will be able to protect its denizens on public transport from those same violent offenders through the application of a $2.50 fare?
I’m saying that knowing that you’re being (potentially) being watched for fare evasion has a deterrent effect on wanting to commit a crime.
How many times have you heard of road rage incidents which deescalate as soon as one party realises that they are being recorded by a dashcam? People’s behavior under surveillance is different from their private behavior.
I think the issue is loitering. Target and Costco can remove people from premises who loiter, but a public transportation system might not be able to do that *assuming no loitering statutes for the stations are in place.
I would personally be surprised if violent attacks are differentiated in rate between the two.
It's not always. I think there are cases where it should be. A transit center probably should have some wait areas, but generally should not be for loitering. Similar to airport pickup/dropoff.
Loitering is well defined topic, I think if we bog ourselves into a semantic wrestling match we'll lose valuable time from our lives for little value trying to convince the unpersuadable.
So I'll only go as deep as a quick search for "loitering definition" -- the first hit aligns to what I hold as my personal understanding:
Loitering is the act of standing, lingering, or waiting around idly in a public or private place for an extended period without a clear, lawful, or obvious purpose.
Are you pretending to be a space alien unfamiliar with how crime works on Earth? OK, let me spell it out for you.
Various forms of crime require previous periods of observing the target. For example, if you want to rob a shop, you want to know how many employees are inside, whether most of the leave at a certain time for a lunch and leave one of them in the shop alone, whether they leave together at evening or again one of them stays behind and closes the shop. Similarly, if you want to assault a person, you wait until you find someone walking alone, and make sure that the rest of the group is not walking a few meters behind them. If you sell drugs, you need to stay on the street, waiting for the customers to approach you. etc.
On the other hand, there are almost no good reasons to stand for one hour in front of the shop, observing what goes on inside. There are almost no good reason for a group of adult men to stand in front of a school at evening. Etc.
I am not saying that anyone who stands at a weird place should be immediately arrested. But it makes sense for other people to be concerned about that, and call the cops, who will ID the people who stand there, and tell them to go away. Which they cannot do if standing there is perfectly legal. Hence, the "crime" of loitering.
Why not? Surely you can have defined intervention protocols and standards of care for mental health that don't require violence to initiate. Also, mental health issues is not equivalent to "poor."
I feel like you've argued from a false dichotomy -- we can't do X because of bad things, so we have to put up with Y and bad things.
One made me call my Dad to spite my psycho mother who dragged me tothe Station thinking the cop was gonna scare me straight ratherthen the outcome of him seeing her insanity and pleading with me to stay in contact with the only responsible adult in the room who wouldnt screw me over for the rest of my natura life
I think public transport should be free. That solves the whole problem because it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with and the fares are disproportionally hard on the lowest earners.
Free public transport takes away money that can be used to improve service for everyone. Someone on minimum wage would prefer a bus they can actually use to get to work rather than having to buy/maintain a car because the free bus only comes once an hour.
Go have a look what percentage of the operating costs are covered by fares in your city. I wouldn't be surprised if the costs relating to fare enforcement were more than the revenue from fares.
You aren't taking into account that transport agencies can raise a lot of funding based on yearly revenue so multiplying fares out in terms of the debt that can be serviced yearly can easily reach billions which can be used for capital investment.
I can't tell what you're saying; are you saying that "yearly revenue from fares is big", even when someone says "fares aren't the major revenue source, and sometimes doesn't even exceed the cost to implement"?
The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter. And then it isn't safe to use anymore. You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.
> The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter.
Perhaps there's something broken about a society that has a significant homelessness issue. The free public transport isn't the problem, it's likely that society has a surplus of citizens that prevent economic progress and/or the deployment of solutions known to be effective against homelessness.
It's unfortunate, but one problem with free public transport absent other changes is that then it becomes de facto free shelter, which degrades the service for people using it as transport.
to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...
Shelter should be, but doesn't need to be housing. When people fear that public transportation becomes shelter they're not arguing houses will be built in train stations.
Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.
homeless people are already trying to build that but the so-called "protectors of law and order" keep showing up with bulldozers for some reason, as if they actually want people to be sleeping on public transportation instead of in their own private tents. This is probably because they get paid proportionally to how many people they catch sleeping on public transportation.
People sleeping in their own private tents on public land in urban areas is as much of a problem as people sleeping on public transit is. I want protectors of law and order to catch and arrest people sleeping in tents in public parks just as much as I want them to do so for people using public transportation as shelter. If there isn't enough law enforcement resources to do both and it's necessary to prioritize, then I would reluctantly say to prioritize public transit, simply because public transit is more enclosed and so it's harder to quickly get away from people who are a threat on it. But ideally we'd do both.
people don't want to live in shelters. they don't provide enough safety or privacy. being out on the street feels safer. any housing must at least provide a private room and bathroom. and ideally not have all those people concentrated in one place.
an important factor in improving your life is integration in society. but that only works if you live among people already integrated, not if everyone around you is also not integrated.
the same reason why it's hard for people to escape poverty uf everyone around them is poor too.
Why shouldn't we have exactly the ambitions you're using as an argument against change? I support all of those proposals. The richest nation in history could do all of that easily if there was the will to do so.
If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.
> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...
Aren't half of these wrong?
NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.
You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.
They are wrong but also unrelated to the issue of free public transport and hence include trade offs which don’t directly affect public transport.
Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)
> Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?
There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're actually trying to do until after it's already done.
"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're a lobbyist. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.
Homelessness only partially overlaps with what British authorities euphemistically refer to as "street lifestyles". The people you see blacked out in the gutter or ranting wildly on a subway car are disproportionately likely to be homeless, but their behaviour is not the result of homelessness - many of them do in fact have a stable home and most of the rest would continue to behave in an antisocial manner even if they were adequately housed.
The problem of persistent disorderly conduct by a small minority of highly disturbed people is either an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue, or a fairly straightforward carceral issue.
you can't possibly know that, in the world we live in. Not conclusively - the amount of other factors at play and the ubiquity of those factors - crushing social stratification, pay-to-live capitalism, the overwhelming pressure on people to produce or die (meaning that learning to produce is on them to figure out, and quick, or else.) If you had an example of a society where these things were not at issue, you could more easily make a statement like "their conduct is an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue or otherwise they just need to be punished enough".
It's quite possible that these people would have turned out fine if they grew up provided a path to integrating into society that was less burdensome. It's possible you're right, too, but without controlling for confounding factors there's no way to know.
I think the argument is that it should be illegal to pass out lying across 4 subway/metro/tube seats.
And that is because it is not polite to take up more than the minimum space needed. (Like using seats for your bag, or putting your feet on the seat across from you.)
Yes, although the punishment shouldn't be the same as for crimes like eg. theft.
As for why, two main categories of reasons. First, for the good of the person themselves. By making it illegal, the state then has the authority to compel some sort of action. For a first 'offence' this could simply be sleeping it off in the 'drunk tank' (or in a hospital bed if necessary). For repeat offences, an escalating scale of compulsory treatment. Basically if a person is regularly passing out in gutters, it's likely only a matter of time before they kill themselves, so being nudged, then coerced, then ultimately compelled into treatment would likely benefit them. Of course, this relies on avenues for treatment rather than simple punishment being available.
The other reason is for the rest of society. People do not want to walk down streets where people are passed out in gutters. They will either feel compelled to try to help - which can be, or at least feel, risky, given that intoxicated and/or mentally ill people can be unpredictable - or they may feel badly for not doing anything. Regardless, if it's a regular thing, it will encourage people to avoid the area where they're likely to encounter such things. That will impact local businesses, residences, etc., leading to an overall decline of environment and services for everyone.
> That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society.
It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.
After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."
We don't actually have the technology to build housing on the cheap for the most marginalized people in society, who would trash that housing without intensive and expensive and very often coercive support from some kind of social worker. One of the biggest reasons many homeless people avoid the homeless shelters that do exist for the most distressed people in our society, is because the other most distressed people in our society living in the same shelter are prone to stealing from them or physically harming them. And another reason is that they want to irresponsibly use drugs in a way that makes them a potential threat to others and so is banned by the shelter.
Because working people deserve the ability to travel to work in dignity. Without sleepers taking the seats, intense body odors, being screamed at by mentally ill, stepping over shit, blood, meth heads falling on the tracks, and other unspeakable crimes. Yes, we've seen this in Los Angeles.
What you are talking about would require much more than a roof.
It's nice to have an opinion but free public transport causes many issues and isn't great policy, it actually means transport agencies have less money to invest and take out debt on as system use increases which is a very bad position financially. The same issues actually apply to roads as well and are a reason things like congestion taxes are a good idea.
Fares typically make a negligible contribution to the overall costs of operating the system.
Public transport in the state of Queensland, Australia charges a flat fare of 50 cents. They only reason they charge anything at all is because they want the trip data for route planning purposes.
Free public transport solves many issues and is a great policy.
The notion that transit agencies need to be funded via fares is nonsense to begin with, but it looks even wackier when one looks at how roads are funded.
Absolutely not. People don’t appreciate free things psychologically. When they don’t appreciate it they trash it: vandalism, littering will all become bigger problems.
To prevent this effect, you have to have a well educated population first. That’s actually an even more difficult problem to solve.
Roads aren’t really free: you need a car or at least a bike.
Sidewalks are free, but they are usually unpleasant or inaccessible. In places where that isn’t true, they absolutely get trashed by litter; some even spit on the sidewalk.
Libraries are seemingly free, but getting a library card often requires you to provide several forms of proof of address, including evidence of paying rent or property taxes. So they aren’t truly free.
Libraries are free. (Well, at least most public libraries. There are private libraries for personal use, institutional libraries for internal use, subscription libraries which require membership fees, and others.)
I've visited libraries in a half dozen countries, where I'm not even a taxpayer. I just walked in.
Some services at the library might not be free, including book checkout or making photocopies.
But if you want to make that distinction, then walking around your neighborhood isn't free because in most place you need to wear clothes, and clothes aren't free.
FWIW, I've walked a lot of forest roads without a car or bike. And the biggest littering problem on our sidewalks, by weight, are the escooter riders who simply leave their machines parked in the middle of the sidewalk.
The problem isn't that the sidewalks are free to use, the problem is one of regulation and enforcement.
That's why libraries are both free and well-loved - they librarians regulate the free space.
In the Phoenix Metro area, the fares are capped, so you never pay beyond the cap for daily, weekly, or monthly fares.
If you ride and pay your fare twice, then every ride after that, for the rest of the day, is free. That is very nice. So if you commute and you have a transfer, and you're taking 4 rides per day, then you're saving half of that in fares.
In the old days, you would pay a cash fare and the bus driver could issue a paper transfer ticket. The transfer would be good for a few hours. So your fare was basically per-ride. But the system couldn't track people paying cash fares like that, so there were no free rides without the transfer ticket. Now, with pre-loaded cards or fares on the mobile app, you can track all that stuff, and reload when necessary.
For disabled people or whoever qualifies for "Reduced Fare", your fare costs half ($1.00 instead of $2.00) and so your daily maximum is only $2.00. A really good deal.
technically, possessing two transfer tickets from the same day could be used as proof that you paid enough for the day.
vienna has day tickets that cost as much as two single tickets but you can only buy them on a strip of 8 which you can use one day at a time over an unlimited period
That’s already the case in reality. The NYC Subway’s $3 fare is quite low for example. Just like roads are taxpayer subsidized public transport are usually also subsidized.
It's definitely why roads and parking are congested! People don't value access to roads properly, that's a big part of why driving became the default mode of transit.
The main reason why we should charge money for transit is because it makes it easier to kick off people who ruin it for everyone else. It's not important that transit covers its costs, it's important because requiring payment filters out people who don't value it.
It fucking sucks to be on a train with a homeless guy shouting threats into the air, or with a bunch of teenagers blasting music and intimidating other passengers. Once on the way back from work once, there was a guy watching porn at full volume in a car with children at the other end. Sure, you can say "call the police!" but it's much harder to place cops everywhere (purely expensive) than it is to just send out some ticket inspectors (who generally justify their own salaries).
I was being sarcastic, to be clear. Though it's funny that people clearly cherish parking over most other things in this world, but are willing to pay nothing for it.
You're right about fares being a useful tool to filter for antisocial behaviour. After becoming a parent I became a lot less tolerant of horrible behaviour on trains and buses. Luckily I rarely encounter it here in the Netherlands (Ireland was worse, but still not atrocious, depending on the area)
Then charge them cleanly and don't artificially try to inflate charges. It is the duty of any jury to let someone off when they feel its malicious prosecution.
Police, Prosecutors, and Judges all openly use their discretion. Each of them could have quashed the charge before it got to a jury. The jury is the last line of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges love to call it "jury nullification" but its the same power that police, prosecutors, and judges use multiple times a day.
The only crime I see is that police arrested an innocent person on false evidence, prosecutors charged someone based on false evidence, and a judge is actually allowing this case to proceed all based on evidence that everyone knows is false.
Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.
Fined maybe? But jailed is a bit too much. There are poor people who jump the turnstile who are not violent nor a nuisance, why make the assumption that anyone who jumps the turnstile is that bad actor you describe? I jumped the turnstile a few months ago (more like I crawled under in a frenzy like an idiot), I was running late for work, found out my card had to be refilled but there was a line at the machine and the train was approaching the station. Am I a violent criminal? If I got caught it would be fair to fine me but would you jail me?
As far as nuisance and violence on public transportation, that's a different problem that I agree it has to be dealt with. Apparently police don't do anything about it, they instead hunt for fare jumpers...
No the punishment should be harsher, not for an hour but 40-60 hours, or fine of $1000-2000. Otherwise they will never learn to respect rules. Especially in the subway where you cannot "accidentally" jump over the turnstile.
I regularly see how people are not paying the bus fare (here in Russia). And the only reason why they do not pay is because the punishment is light (fine of ~25 USD) and chance of being caught and actually prosecuted is close to zero. So paying does not make economical sense.
That’s a great idea, just get people to voluntarily sign up to pay for things like that for the criminals. Like you said, take the $2.50 one way several times a day, every day for one person, times however many people do that out of your income since you want to pay for it.
I am no fan of this rotten and illegitimate government or the fake and imitation justice system, but what do you think happens if every thug can just jump fare and get away with it, because if you had $1000 per month taken out of your paycheck every month, in sure you’d be singing a different tune.
Public transit is subsidized in a lot of the world. Subsidized is good. Free though.. free is a problem. A good or service that someone doesn't have to pay for becomes valueless to them, despite it still costing someone (sponsor, owner)/something (corp, gov).
Examples:
A free Christmas party, where the cost of the convention center/catered dinner/wine on the table/entertainment was about $110/pp. Those costs were all paid in advance (you might be able to exceed catering, wine is probably fine but at a different rate.. but otherwise you're stuck with the bill/contract), but when tickets were free the no-show rate ("didn't cost me anything") was about 30%. We switched to $20/ticket, and yes there were grumbles about the company being cheap, but the no-shows fell to around 8%.
There's free sections of transit in our city (not the whole system). Most of the disruption and police call-outs happen in this section.. open drug use, screaming at/threatening other passengers or making them feel unsafe, making a home, thefts & pickpockets (does a thief buy a ticket? Perhaps if they spend 6 hours a day "working" and don't need the hassle of being checked for a ticket), even violent crime (stabbings, beatings, one gun situation). An unfortunate side effect of that is we have one of the worst riderships in part because people don't feel safe on transit, and when discussions of subsidies/improvement/expansion come up ridership is basically the only KPI. ("Oh only 12% of the city uses it, let's not further invest").
In the off chance this is a genuine question, this thought experiment is always resolved with "reasonable payments are only effective if many people contribute, and that is probably okay".
Consider the extremes:
- No one does anything. The cause fails. No one goes broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced.
- One average citizen donates everything to a worthy cause. No one else donates. The cause fails and the donor is broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced.
- Everyone donates a small fee to a worthy cause. The cause achieves its aim. Some people do not benefit, and are modestly inconvenienced.
The choice, when given these two extremes, is clearly to decide by some consensus whether the interests of many (who would otherwise be modestly inconvenienced) outweigh the interests of the few (who would be modestly financially inconvenienced).
But it assumes the cause is truly worthy, the money is handled faithfully, and the survey method is fair and accurate.
$500 was the damages that they were caught doing. Not the total damages they caused. If every "empathetic" person volunteers to pay $2 every time someone wants graffiti on their property removed, regardless of how often graffiti keeps reappearing, then maybe the DA wouldn't feel a need to prosecute.
What? after reading your first sentence many times it’s basically saying you’re of the mind that a criminal very likely has way more crimes that we’ve just haven’t seen so they should be prosecuted heavily for the one we did see just to make sure we get our prosecution-bang for the buck?
Not sure where you got that idea. No where did I express interest in punishing the perpetrator for anything more than what they were caught. My point is that their "solution" to justice does not solve vandalism the way that it they think it does.
Hot take - the criminal should pay the jury if they're clearly guilty and wasting everyone's time. And the judge. And if they resisted arrest, the cost of the extra police work.
Having society (a group of unrelated jurors) to pay for the crimes of an individual (however minor you perceive them to be) is not justice.
That's why you got kicked out.
Ironically, one of the leading arguments against capital punishment is how expensive it is. Including all the legal costs of appeals and reappeals, it's approximately 1 to 3 million dollars per convict (in the US).
People executed in the first half of 2025 spent an average of 24 years on death row. In practice, it's a life sentence plus execution. I believe the $1-3M figure is on top of this.
Replacing life in prison with exile would be a good move. It's just as safe, costs taxpayers a lot less and they get a second chance in another country.
Doesn't stop them from leading a gang over the phone, but that's better than recruiting new members in prison who are probably more violent than someone off the street.
Jury duty is the single dumbest thing I have ever done in my adult life. Nobody wants to be there, and half the jurors were falling asleep. When we got to the deliberation room, everyone wanted to GTFO as quickly as possible and we just went by our feels. In the end, everyone loses. Millions of dollars wasted... on perception of justice. What a freaking joke.
This is partially fixed by making The People of the State of __________ pay for the lawyer of the defendant's choosing. It imposes real costs to the state in these cases.
There's an argument that the cost of prosecution is one reason for the proliferation of offenses and increase in sentence lengths.
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses where people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh.
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.
> If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges.
I'm not quite understanding this. What is there to be gained by raising the stakes? Doesn't it make defendants even more determined to seek justice?
Justice is unavoidably somewhat a "roll the dice" situation.
Suppose the threat is 10 years in Jail. You reckon there's a 1-in-a-million chance they can convict you since you're innocent and they have no evidence. The plea offer is $100 fine. That's a good deal, not taking it on principle is a stance I admire but it does not make good logical sense.
What the US needs is a strong incentive for prosecutors not to take cases they expect to lose. That wouldn't really fit with the rest of the US "justice" system though.
The sad thing is that speed in apprehension and prosecution has been shown to be the most important element by far for deterrence. Marginal deterrence effects of harsher sentencing for most crimes is basically nil at this point. The complexity of plea deals and the incentive they create for defense attorneys to drag things out breaks the perceived cause+effect dynamic, at least for typical criminals. The system just becomes this juggernaut where both guilty and innocent people alike feel it's utterly capricious.
At least until the recent tough-on-crime regression almost everybody agreed the system is too harsh. Even conservatives were on board with lighter sentencing. But unsurprisingly that broad public support didn't persist for long because the structural incentives of the system push it toward greater dysfunction. Without structural changes lighter sentencing alone just makes it more profitable for criminals to roll the dice. The complexity of the system evolved with the harsher sentencing, but can't change back as easily as sentencing policies, so we fall back to the old equilibrium that slowly gets worse along every dimension--fairness, cost, deterrence, etc.
IMO low level offenses like shoplifting would be better served by a quick cheap ass kicking on the spot by the police with no charges filed. You get the deterrent effect without the massive waste of resources.
Before the advent of the modern carceral approach that's not unlike what we had. You got flogged 3 times or stood in the stocks for a day. Though at least there was process--the sentence was imposed by a judge, not a cop. The benefit there was you weren't disappeared for days or months on end, completely destroying your life.
>This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
Is this actually true? The way the techspot article was laid out certainly implies that prosecutors knew about all the contradicting evidence, but they offered a plea deal. However, if you read the article carefully it doesn't mention any interaction with the prosecutors or that the contradicting evidence was presented to them.
It's not that hard to imagine that the legal system is set up to protect the comfort and careers of the people who have to be in court every day, and not necessarily the 99% of people who are in there for a handful of days - total, across a lifetime - because they had a bad day or two, or were unlucky, or need help that society is as-yet unequipped to give them. It does not surprise me that the letter and spirit of the law have a tough time surviving the practical realities of being administered, day-in-and-day-out, by fallible and self-interested human beings.
> This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
I iamgine bullshit easy plea deals also get you nice numbers for a "tough of crime" image for political clout even if some of the most vile crimes get some of the lightest sentences imaginable
Please bargains should not be allowed. Rewarding someone for not going to trial is equivalent to punishing them for insisting on their ancient legal right to a fair trial. If the prosecution wants to make a deal with someone in exchange for testimony then they can request a lighter sentence after the defendant is found guilty, but they should still be required to prove guilt.
Yes, I know the legal system doesn’t have anywhere near enough resources to take every case to trial. Don’t care. Give the system more resources or prosecute fewer people or some combination of the two.
That is the theme. A jury trial is inherently risky. While conceptually a good idea, you are betting the outcome (and your future) on a bunch of folks without any legal training - and who did not manage to get out of jury duty.
And so the prosecution heaps on threats of years and years of prison time, or "take this little plea bargain". They still get their "conviction."
its sad peoples job security or toxic work culture can cause innocent people to rot in jail. humans really suck at being human.
the app providers dont want to admit fraud is running over their platform. the justice department cant admit any mistakes either.
Its a problem which will only get worse as the economy declines. And as the economy declines, more places get breached because more criminality and at the same time less money to secure things.
I cant see this getting any better which is kind of terrifying.
One more reason i can think of is that if people get super afraid of these problems, then they might even start asking for mass surveilance to help prove their innocense in these kinds of things. Which again is an incentive / reasoning for higher government not to do anything about it, because it creates opportunities where current population sentiment is taking them away...
And the worst part is that once you take the plea deal, you are guilty. Both in perception and by record. So once it comes out that you plead, your employers will fire you. Makes it impossibly hard to find another job as your name comes up as a criminal. What I'm really confused about: Can't they have just checked the victim's bank records? The money would be taken out of the the Cash app and back into their own account. Or, if used for other service, there would be records of where it was spent and you could see the geographic activity.
On an entirely different note. Just wow. I know a lot of people who don't "do online" finance anything. And this kind of stuff is terrifying, because they would not even know that someone else had setup an account using their PII.
>They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
This mentality is called "prosecutor disease;"
I once said this to a former Atlanta-area DA (family-of-friend) and his first reaction was fake-revulsion; after I told him of my listenings-to-brothers' own lawfare, he conceded publishing conviction rates probably isn't good PR (but is how it works in their little Bar club).
DA then asked my friend "who is this blue collar guy?!" (when I wasn't around) – unfortunately, much of my insanity checks out...
----
>co-founder Aaron Swartz['s crimes]
Which was trying to free pay-walled, publicly-funded scientific journals; today, post-LLM-consumption, his alleged crimes seem so MickeyMouse (i.e: LLMs can reformulate all published text, across platforms, with minimal IP infringement claim).
What an incredible human. SO many young lives have been snuffed-out by Prosecutors' Disease. Wake up you inhumans.
It's similar to the Iowa courthouse break-in by hired pentesters. They had a contract for the work and very small people in the place where it occurred wouldn't let go. This kind of behavior is shameful and should result in jail time for bad-faith prosecutions.
This shit is why my hippie dippie state where it’s hard to prosecute people is actually a good thing. Sadly, more fenty street walker is a sign that cops aren’t as empowered to deprive random people of rights.
But everyone knee jerks into voting out the cool DA who drops victimless criminal prosecutions because they don’t like a fenty zombie screaming in the streets.
I happen to love my mostly low policed state for this exact reason. They’re almost never there to help you, and mostly just want to fuck you up!
Please bargains used to be considered unethical by courts and the Bar in America pre-Civil War.
We have the Reconstructionist South to thank for normalizing turning judges into form stamping Vogons and allowing prosecutors to routinely use a form of blackmail as a normal course of prosecution.
I remember reading about this story awhile back. Some young twenty something was caught with a small amount (MDMA I think?) and the ADA was pushing for him to take a deal. Before anything was inked or signed - the father of the son has his lawyer draft some legal process to the DEA/DOJ to get what sort of evidence they had on him. The ADA called the father and bitched at him for a solid few minutes about how that action will result in months of them having to do work - and at that point the deal was off and it was retribution time.
It was a very telling experience where doing things our constitution permits is considered a burden on law enforcement and prosecutors.
This is the #1 problem facing the US. Consistent application of the law is only available to those who can pay for it and far too slow even when you can pay.
These are felony charges, are there no grand juries in AZ. The defense needs to absolutely unseal the grand jury testimony, there could have been nothing but lies told in that room. Not a single shred of evidence the defendant was ever in Arizona.
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
Stuff like this feels like some kind of society-wide humiliation ritual
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/
Meanwhile in our inboxes: “We take the security and privacy of our users very seriously” and “We have no reason to believe that social security numbers in our user database were accessed.”
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] threadIt took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
I don't know enough about it to say if it would prevent the opening of a CashApp account.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
Because then nobody could keep using them like they're a password, and would have to find actually secure ways of identifying people.
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
IANAL - might any such care to comment?
A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future.
Who is going to sponsor such a law? The same representatives that are paid by the lobbyists of the corporations the laws are targeting?
Accepting plea bargains, even when innocent, to avoid the huge expense of defending yourself is the norm.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
You are arrested for a crime you didn't commit. The prosecution charges you with a serious crime with punishment of years in prison. You lawyer can't guarantee you'll be found not guilty and you'll be in jail for a least a year until the trial because you can't make bail. The DA then offers a plea bargain to a lessor crime with several months in prison.
Lots of innocent people would, and do, plead guilty to the lessor crime.
If you cannot afford a lawyer, and the prosecution offers you a choice:
a) Go to trial. Lose your job. Get life altering debt. Spend a year or more stressfully fighting. Have your movements controlled, maybe be imprisoned. And THEN maybe you get proven innocent. Then there's a risk you get found guilty and face severe consequences.
b) Say you are guilty. Promise to pay a couple grand. You go home to your family tonight. Keep your nose clean and we'll seal the record in three years.
Tons of people would choose the latter.
I'm confident you are in a bubble with very little exposure to how the majority of people live.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
Sounds exactly like how things work with Attorney Generals for the states and the feds, as well as with many county attorneys in the US, especially the larger ones.
The large, large majority of cases in the US are prosecuted by career lawyers, not elected officials.
> Americans elect far too many of these roles
This varies a lot by state, btw.
Sure, in the same way that Australia is exactly like Greenland.
Even in relatively populous New York the org chart distance between your criminal prosecutor and an elected politician is significantly smaller than in England. Somewhere smaller there's an excellent chance that an elected politician has direct influence over the choice to prosecute you and that's unavoidably corrupting.
Is it as bad as the mistake of leaving the Pardon Power with an elected politician? No. That was unconscionable back when the the "First Black President" was a white guy named Bill and he used it to pardon crooks and family, and of course it's still unconscionable today when people just straight up pay Donald to get out of jail. But elected prosecutors is still pretty bad.
> This varies a lot by state, btw.
Almost everything does. On a good day that's an opportunity to learn what works and all improve. But those good days are fewer and further between than ever.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?
From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.
I'm not a lawyer, but I always associated (perhaps wrongly) common law with common sense. I don't see much of the latter here.
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.
Bull fucking shit you signed up for a bank account, clanker
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
Someone opened a Venmo account using my gmail and immediately started moving thousands of dollars in small transactions, and my only options were to a) take ownership of the thousands of dollars of small transactions that were now associated with my unverified email or b) get my email banned???? Eventually I got an email saying the Venmo was disabled due to suspicious activity, hope that doesn't bite me in the ass in the future.
What if I wanted to sign up for Venmo in the future? Why do I need to create another email address to use their product in the future when they didn't even verify it in the first place? How are they allowed to run their billon dollar business like this?
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
I think I currently have two overlapping ones going.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
I mean it's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right?
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/right-assistance...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_counsel
You need evidence from Cash App and likely other third parties like ISPs. You ideally would have an expert to testify about the limitations of the prosecution evidence.
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
I'll applaud ignoring the open air drug market. It's a symptom, not a cause. The drug *war* is the biggest crime problem in the country.
Hamsterdam.
Bioshock -> Libertarians bad
Handmaid's Tale -> Christians bad
The Boys & Marvel -> Corporations and governments are all secret Nazis
Everything else -> Nazis bad
That's all you need, really
A symptom of what?
Am no expert on him, but as we're all talking about here, the legal system is really messed up. Yeah, there are a lot of terrible processes and laws that get in the way of justice, and a lot of the things his office did made a lot of sense.
Probably one of the biggest was the "Elimination of Cash Bail for Low-Level Offenses." The cash bail system for minor crimes really screws poor people, who can't make bail for things like shoplifting, and have to stay in jail until their pre-trial. (it's often something like $1000, which for middle-class people is not a big deal at all). But imagine a teen who had to stay out of school for a month or even two just because they stole something for $20 and his family can't put together $1k. The teen gets behind in class and stops trying, and this becomes the start of getting further and further behind in life. And a similar situation happens with poor working-class people for a minor crime, they can't pay bail, so they are in jail and can't work. They are often fired or just get into debt because they're not drawing a salary.
I don't know about anything about open drug markets, but think overall what the Philly DA seemed sensible (and just looked briefly and it seems like the crime statistics turned out well in Philly, but that could be from a number of things).
Search "Kensington, Philadelphia" on Youtube. Its pretty crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGwCbSUECw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_KO90n6KJ4
But wondering if that is also just a city thing? LA has Skid Row and just looked it up online, many metros have a Skid-Row type area.
Not saying that lenient crime policies don't make them worse, but it also might just be a feature of cities?
But, agree that we as a country can strengthen to safety net, probably good for us as a whole.
That’s why I live hippie liberal voters!
https://arcourts.gov/professional-conduct
https://opinions.arcourts.gov/ark/cr/en/item/1868/index.do#!...
One complaint may not have a "they're disbarred". It could result in a slap on the wrist and a note in their file. Multiple ones that show a system of abuse of discretion would be a different story - that would be handled by the state bar itself.
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
Blue state systems are not better run.
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
But they do tend to have better speedy trial definitions and such. Although it seems they are rolling back bail reform (which may have been too lenient, but they didn't find a middle solution). And it seems they still have ex parte protection from abuse orders, which are notoriously abused in divorce cases.
And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)
You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.
I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.
> municipalities paying the full cost of policing
Since we're talking realpolitik, this will never happen. In a first principles sense, it won't because it's unpredictable at the locality level (how do you set tax rates for FY27 without knowing what you'll pay out for this?). In a realpolitik sense, it won't because a) people don't like their taxes going up and would rather bank on it not happening to them, and b) the police will throw a shit fit and refuse to work when they realize they have to consider property damage while doing their jobs, and that the public will be _pissed_ if they crash a cruiser into a parked car while LARPing John Rambo.
> Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well.
Good luck and godspeed. The latest stats say 56% of US adults read at or below a 6th grade level, so say it slow and in monosyllabic words lol
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
The case, as per TFA, was the opposite: she wanted to get access and couldn't, and she finally managed through discovery.
You describe what she "should have preferred" (in order to have the trail), I was talking about the actual case.
For the land of the free and home of the brave ... it's incredible what you let happen.
And don't me wrong, I'm certain there are millions of good people in the USA. But the assholes are in the ascendancy. Obviously.
Stand up, or get flushed down the shitter.
And don't me wrong, I'm certain there are millions of good people in the USA. But the assholes are in the ascendancy. Obviously.
Stand up, or get flushed down the shitter.
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really away around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for attorneys, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (the rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still being attacked).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
The payment for wrong prosecution would create a back pressure on the justice system which is currently only possible via media reporting, something generally only accessible to the powerful or otherwise sympathetic defendant. We'd need a category of dismissal which is "innocent", where a judge determines not only is the person "not guilty", but that actually, with proper investigation and application of thought, the prosecution could have determined innocence beforehand themselves. This should come with the payment and automatic complete expungement of all records, and an entry in the local newspaper of the declared innocence of the defendant.
Then the last piece of the puzzle would be outlawing police and prosecutor unions, and firing police and prosecutors who have poor records of sending "innocent" cases to trial. This would serve to create a pressure towards correct prosecution.
The difficulty then becomes addressing the perverse incentive of "innocent" vs "not guilty" (I don't love your terms but I'm just reusing them), where a local judge is incentivized to declare merely "not guilty" to save the city money. While things are always going to come down to the frailty of human judgement, it seems like this might be a setup to "change things" while the status quo doesn't actually change.
I'd also question why there really needs to be two separate categories. Most of the harm in this case is coming from elective overzealous actions by the police. If they had to pay for damages they caused to any "not guilty", then they'd work to reduce those damages (no extradition, lower/no bail, etc). For the case that I was on, the damages would seemingly be limited to one night at the police station, and attorney fees. And the attorney's fees were only necessary due to the prosecution insisting on bringing a case it knew it wouldn't win. So if the defendant is truly "not guilty" (as we the jury quickly found), then why should the defendant be on the hook for those costs-as-punishment ?
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
Source: I work with a top defense lawyer in Chicago
This same DA has a reputation for assaulting prostitutes and just got sworn in as the parish judge. I guess playing fair would have hurt his career because my understanding is to be a judge out there you have to demonstrate crookedness.
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
"I'm sorry, it says you weren't found guilty; it doesn't say you were innocent."
Now extrapolate this to your friends or potential employers.
"Sure, LorenPechtel wasn't proven guilty of murdering 500 orphans as accused, but he never fully proved his innocence with a detailed and corroborated minute-by-minute log of his activities for the past 5 years. So maybe he did it!"
It's innocent until proven guilty. Not guilty until proven innocent. A third category would be abused to high heaven, and the courts already engage in far too much abuse.
The state has to appoint you one if you don't have one. And given that you have to invoke your exercise of your silence anyway, throw it in there. So something like, "I am invoking my right to silence and require an attorney." ought to do it. Having one ready can definitely be helpful. And while a DA is ideal, any lawyer should do, as they'll either be able to do enough work to get you out of there to find a good attorney, or get a real defense criminal attorney involved. If you do have a prior relationship, keep their card in your wallet and point them to that when you invoke your right to silence.
The state already showed that it believed that the crime was only worth a $1000 fine.
Maybe there should be a rule that whatever plea deal offered should be the maximum punishment possible if you're found guilty.
It wasn't going anywhere. When I finally got called up to voir dir I explained that I thought the real crime was sequestering 300 people for a day over $500. I suggested we collect $2 from each person in the jury pool (far less than we paid for parking that day) and cover the alleged damages and not only be done for the day, but have achieved some real measure of justice.
Lets just say the judge didn't agree and I got let out of voir dir.
let's start with the ones above $1,000 first, hm?
The criminals start with the ones below $1,000 and then progress above. If you start punishing it earlier, you won't have to deal with as many above $1,000 crimes in the first place.
A person doesn’t steal a sandwich from 7-11, not get caught, then suddenly realize they can drain unsuspecting grandmas’ bank accounts by implementing a long con through masquerading as a long lost nephew through Facebook.
Look what happened with shoplifters.
Like fare hopping, first half of my life i thought how unfair that i have to drone away as a tool of society and pay like a shmuck meanwhile these freeloaders have happily escaped the matrix.
second half of life i realized being unwilling or unable to pay $2.50 for public transist is an issue between that person and their life situation. If that’s what they need, I support the subsidy.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260908
obviously if someone is a repeat offender then as they cross the threshold, chop-chop, straight to jail, charge them with the whole batch of crimes together.
it doesn't mean keep no records of crimes and don't respond at all.
Initially it's a report. Place, time, allegation, supporting evidence.
The question is how much (automated) detection ought to be allowed, what's the retention period, and so on.
Flock is a bad trade-off, but that doesn't mean there's no point in collecting data. If every datum is a semi-tangible report, then the sensitivity/specificity has quite a good change of being high (especially compared to dragnet surveillance with post-hoc data fishing).
You are never going to be right about anything if you actually think what you posted makes any sense.
If we've got a Lamborghini justice system, delivering amazing performance to people with a spare $250k and doing nothing for anyone else - some would say that's not the right price/performance trade off.
Ignoring smaller crimes just because they're under $1,000 isn't the answer. things can quickly spiral. How many times do you wake up to your car scratched window broken or whatever and would be ok ?
Yes, I'm trying to say it's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other ways you could organise a justice system, many of which would lead to more just results.
For example - a fixed price system. 8 hours wages from the two parties to the dispute buys 30 minutes with one judge and two lawyers. More than enough time to deal with a minor matter like a scratched car. Or if you prefer a continental-style inquisitorial system, you can lose the lawyers and have 90 minutes with a judge. The fees mean judges and lawyers take home 5x the average salary.
That just isn't true. Not even remotely.
Persuasive to what type of people?
What doesn't work is laws that aren't enforced. Either enforce them or repeal them.
So conclusion before evidence?
At least the founders had the foresight to codify innocent-until-proven-guilty.
But if the collected fares are paying for enhanced police brutality or other deleterious second-order system behavior, it's not so cut and dry.
I am genuinely curious because I simply lack the ability to understand that meme I keep encountering; that things that cost money should be free.
Is it just that you want others to pay for things you like, do, have, or want? Or do you just not really have an idea of where things you like, want, do, or have come from and that things can't be "free" like they were when you lived with your parents?
I am genuinely baffled by this type of mentality. I actually understand my cat better than I understand this mentality, because the human is supposed to have higher order thinking skills that appear to be wholly absent.
The robber barons built libraries. Yes, it took some heat off of their reputation, but, they weren't idiots and neither were the people for whom they were driving wages down or driving prices up. They and municipal orgs of the time and other civic minded groups built libraries and schools because society is better off have more education. Capitalism, done right, actually can have good outcomes.
In a similar vein, healthcare makes people healthier as a general outcome. "Socialized medicine" (more properly understand of as healthcare as a publicly-provided good) enables a more healthy population -- business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.
Public transportation in dense areas should be seen similarly. More efficient, lower pollution when expanded and widely available, easier to police, less of the nasties like PM2.5 from tires and asphalt, less road deaths, and so forth.
Elon Musk and the whole capital serving US government is not a good outcome.
There was a fun take on it on r/comics recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1x4toay/the_day_all...
> business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.
As we can see now - capitalism would prefer "stupid", way productive robots running 24/7 in a dark warehouses to a healthier, more productive population. Lighting savings are already cover most of difference (/s but only so slightly).
The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.
Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.
Are you making a case that a violent person, who ignores the stringent laws of society against violence, will diligently follow the laws of society requiring $2.50 prior to riding public transport?
LOL
There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim. If a transit system insists on fares, it is likely they are watching out for fare dodgers which increases the risk of getting caught even before the offender gets a chance to offend.
Are you making the case that a society unable to protect its denizens from violent offenders in broader society will be able to protect its denizens on public transport from those same violent offenders through the application of a $2.50 fare?
Hmm.
How many times have you heard of road rage incidents which deescalate as soon as one party realises that they are being recorded by a dashcam? People’s behavior under surveillance is different from their private behavior.
Surveillance doesn’t require fee collection.
Is violent crime in Target stores higher than it is in Costco locations because the latter charges an admission fee?
I would personally be surprised if violent attacks are differentiated in rate between the two.
Why is loitering an issue/crime? Should it be?
What does loitering mean? Why is it a problem?
So I'll only go as deep as a quick search for "loitering definition" -- the first hit aligns to what I hold as my personal understanding:
Why is loitering a problem?
Are you pretending to be a space alien unfamiliar with how crime works on Earth? OK, let me spell it out for you.
Various forms of crime require previous periods of observing the target. For example, if you want to rob a shop, you want to know how many employees are inside, whether most of the leave at a certain time for a lunch and leave one of them in the shop alone, whether they leave together at evening or again one of them stays behind and closes the shop. Similarly, if you want to assault a person, you wait until you find someone walking alone, and make sure that the rest of the group is not walking a few meters behind them. If you sell drugs, you need to stay on the street, waiting for the customers to approach you. etc.
On the other hand, there are almost no good reasons to stand for one hour in front of the shop, observing what goes on inside. There are almost no good reason for a group of adult men to stand in front of a school at evening. Etc.
I am not saying that anyone who stands at a weird place should be immediately arrested. But it makes sense for other people to be concerned about that, and call the cops, who will ID the people who stand there, and tell them to go away. Which they cannot do if standing there is perfectly legal. Hence, the "crime" of loitering.
Are you suggesting that society can reduce crime by charging a fee to be out in public and surveilling public spaces for fare evasion?
Brilliant!
I feel like you've argued from a false dichotomy -- we can't do X because of bad things, so we have to put up with Y and bad things.
It was all very vindicating
Have targeted low fares for the poor etc.
I don't think $2.50 is what's preventing this from happening today.
Perhaps there's something broken about a society that has a significant homelessness issue. The free public transport isn't the problem, it's likely that society has a surplus of citizens that prevent economic progress and/or the deployment of solutions known to be effective against homelessness.
I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”
Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.
an important factor in improving your life is integration in society. but that only works if you live among people already integrated, not if everyone around you is also not integrated.
the same reason why it's hard for people to escape poverty uf everyone around them is poor too.
If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.
Aren't half of these wrong?
NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.
You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.
Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)
Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?
There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're actually trying to do until after it's already done.
"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're a lobbyist. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.
The problem of persistent disorderly conduct by a small minority of highly disturbed people is either an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue, or a fairly straightforward carceral issue.
It's quite possible that these people would have turned out fine if they grew up provided a path to integrating into society that was less burdensome. It's possible you're right, too, but without controlling for confounding factors there's no way to know.
And that is because it is not polite to take up more than the minimum space needed. (Like using seats for your bag, or putting your feet on the seat across from you.)
As for why, two main categories of reasons. First, for the good of the person themselves. By making it illegal, the state then has the authority to compel some sort of action. For a first 'offence' this could simply be sleeping it off in the 'drunk tank' (or in a hospital bed if necessary). For repeat offences, an escalating scale of compulsory treatment. Basically if a person is regularly passing out in gutters, it's likely only a matter of time before they kill themselves, so being nudged, then coerced, then ultimately compelled into treatment would likely benefit them. Of course, this relies on avenues for treatment rather than simple punishment being available.
The other reason is for the rest of society. People do not want to walk down streets where people are passed out in gutters. They will either feel compelled to try to help - which can be, or at least feel, risky, given that intoxicated and/or mentally ill people can be unpredictable - or they may feel badly for not doing anything. Regardless, if it's a regular thing, it will encourage people to avoid the area where they're likely to encounter such things. That will impact local businesses, residences, etc., leading to an overall decline of environment and services for everyone.
It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.
After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."
So? Let it.
If people need shelter, it's a shame we are building a ballroom instead of shelter.
What you are talking about would require much more than a roof.
Congestion taxes are completely different from ticket fees.
Public transport in the state of Queensland, Australia charges a flat fare of 50 cents. They only reason they charge anything at all is because they want the trip data for route planning purposes.
The notion that transit agencies need to be funded via fares is nonsense to begin with, but it looks even wackier when one looks at how roads are funded.
To prevent this effect, you have to have a well educated population first. That’s actually an even more difficult problem to solve.
Sidewalks are free, but they are usually unpleasant or inaccessible. In places where that isn’t true, they absolutely get trashed by litter; some even spit on the sidewalk.
Libraries are seemingly free, but getting a library card often requires you to provide several forms of proof of address, including evidence of paying rent or property taxes. So they aren’t truly free.
I've visited libraries in a half dozen countries, where I'm not even a taxpayer. I just walked in.
Some services at the library might not be free, including book checkout or making photocopies.
But if you want to make that distinction, then walking around your neighborhood isn't free because in most place you need to wear clothes, and clothes aren't free.
FWIW, I've walked a lot of forest roads without a car or bike. And the biggest littering problem on our sidewalks, by weight, are the escooter riders who simply leave their machines parked in the middle of the sidewalk.
The problem isn't that the sidewalks are free to use, the problem is one of regulation and enforcement.
That's why libraries are both free and well-loved - they librarians regulate the free space.
Don't give endless free fair, give n free fair per day.
If you ride and pay your fare twice, then every ride after that, for the rest of the day, is free. That is very nice. So if you commute and you have a transfer, and you're taking 4 rides per day, then you're saving half of that in fares.
In the old days, you would pay a cash fare and the bus driver could issue a paper transfer ticket. The transfer would be good for a few hours. So your fare was basically per-ride. But the system couldn't track people paying cash fares like that, so there were no free rides without the transfer ticket. Now, with pre-loaded cards or fares on the mobile app, you can track all that stuff, and reload when necessary.
For disabled people or whoever qualifies for "Reduced Fare", your fare costs half ($1.00 instead of $2.00) and so your daily maximum is only $2.00. A really good deal.
vienna has day tickets that cost as much as two single tickets but you can only buy them on a strip of 8 which you can use one day at a time over an unlimited period
>Absolutely not.
I think that having it very cheap compared to quality and service delivered is the best of both worlds.
The main reason why we should charge money for transit is because it makes it easier to kick off people who ruin it for everyone else. It's not important that transit covers its costs, it's important because requiring payment filters out people who don't value it.
It fucking sucks to be on a train with a homeless guy shouting threats into the air, or with a bunch of teenagers blasting music and intimidating other passengers. Once on the way back from work once, there was a guy watching porn at full volume in a car with children at the other end. Sure, you can say "call the police!" but it's much harder to place cops everywhere (purely expensive) than it is to just send out some ticket inspectors (who generally justify their own salaries).
You're right about fares being a useful tool to filter for antisocial behaviour. After becoming a parent I became a lot less tolerant of horrible behaviour on trains and buses. Luckily I rarely encounter it here in the Netherlands (Ireland was worse, but still not atrocious, depending on the area)
MTA serves NYC. People who can't even afford the subway are definitely not driving over there.
Police, Prosecutors, and Judges all openly use their discretion. Each of them could have quashed the charge before it got to a jury. The jury is the last line of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges love to call it "jury nullification" but its the same power that police, prosecutors, and judges use multiple times a day.
The only crime I see is that police arrested an innocent person on false evidence, prosecutors charged someone based on false evidence, and a judge is actually allowing this case to proceed all based on evidence that everyone knows is false.
This should just be an established way to pay your fare.
If you think free public transit should exist, do the policy and outreach work, and make it happen.
Reserve civil disobedience for injustices that truly cannot be tolerated, even for a second. Or when the democratic process is not available to you.
As far as nuisance and violence on public transportation, that's a different problem that I agree it has to be dealt with. Apparently police don't do anything about it, they instead hunt for fare jumpers...
I regularly see how people are not paying the bus fare (here in Russia). And the only reason why they do not pay is because the punishment is light (fine of ~25 USD) and chance of being caught and actually prosecuted is close to zero. So paying does not make economical sense.
I am no fan of this rotten and illegitimate government or the fake and imitation justice system, but what do you think happens if every thug can just jump fare and get away with it, because if you had $1000 per month taken out of your paycheck every month, in sure you’d be singing a different tune.
At which point no one would need to pay a fare, and we'd all still save money trying to prosecute broke teenagers trying to move around a city?
Examples:
A free Christmas party, where the cost of the convention center/catered dinner/wine on the table/entertainment was about $110/pp. Those costs were all paid in advance (you might be able to exceed catering, wine is probably fine but at a different rate.. but otherwise you're stuck with the bill/contract), but when tickets were free the no-show rate ("didn't cost me anything") was about 30%. We switched to $20/ticket, and yes there were grumbles about the company being cheap, but the no-shows fell to around 8%.
There's free sections of transit in our city (not the whole system). Most of the disruption and police call-outs happen in this section.. open drug use, screaming at/threatening other passengers or making them feel unsafe, making a home, thefts & pickpockets (does a thief buy a ticket? Perhaps if they spend 6 hours a day "working" and don't need the hassle of being checked for a ticket), even violent crime (stabbings, beatings, one gun situation). An unfortunate side effect of that is we have one of the worst riderships in part because people don't feel safe on transit, and when discussions of subsidies/improvement/expansion come up ridership is basically the only KPI. ("Oh only 12% of the city uses it, let's not further invest").
Why don’t you just write a check to your transit authority every year then?
Consider the extremes: - No one does anything. The cause fails. No one goes broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - One average citizen donates everything to a worthy cause. No one else donates. The cause fails and the donor is broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - Everyone donates a small fee to a worthy cause. The cause achieves its aim. Some people do not benefit, and are modestly inconvenienced.
The choice, when given these two extremes, is clearly to decide by some consensus whether the interests of many (who would otherwise be modestly inconvenienced) outweigh the interests of the few (who would be modestly financially inconvenienced).
But it assumes the cause is truly worthy, the money is handled faithfully, and the survey method is fair and accurate.
Doesn't stop them from leading a gang over the phone, but that's better than recruiting new members in prison who are probably more violent than someone off the street.
2. Who gets them their immigrant visa?
3. Where do they live while waiting for it?
4. You do realize most countries require immigrant visa applicants not to be convicted felons in their home country?
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses where people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh.
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.
I'm not quite understanding this. What is there to be gained by raising the stakes? Doesn't it make defendants even more determined to seek justice?
Suppose the threat is 10 years in Jail. You reckon there's a 1-in-a-million chance they can convict you since you're innocent and they have no evidence. The plea offer is $100 fine. That's a good deal, not taking it on principle is a stance I admire but it does not make good logical sense.
What the US needs is a strong incentive for prosecutors not to take cases they expect to lose. That wouldn't really fit with the rest of the US "justice" system though.
At least until the recent tough-on-crime regression almost everybody agreed the system is too harsh. Even conservatives were on board with lighter sentencing. But unsurprisingly that broad public support didn't persist for long because the structural incentives of the system push it toward greater dysfunction. Without structural changes lighter sentencing alone just makes it more profitable for criminals to roll the dice. The complexity of the system evolved with the harsher sentencing, but can't change back as easily as sentencing policies, so we fall back to the old equilibrium that slowly gets worse along every dimension--fairness, cost, deterrence, etc.
If it leaves you with a criminal conviction, I don't consider it to be "minor".
If the state wants to label me as a criminal, I should get a jury trial.
Is this actually true? The way the techspot article was laid out certainly implies that prosecutors knew about all the contradicting evidence, but they offered a plea deal. However, if you read the article carefully it doesn't mention any interaction with the prosecutors or that the contradicting evidence was presented to them.
Yes.
It's not that hard to imagine that the legal system is set up to protect the comfort and careers of the people who have to be in court every day, and not necessarily the 99% of people who are in there for a handful of days - total, across a lifetime - because they had a bad day or two, or were unlucky, or need help that society is as-yet unequipped to give them. It does not surprise me that the letter and spirit of the law have a tough time surviving the practical realities of being administered, day-in-and-day-out, by fallible and self-interested human beings.
I iamgine bullshit easy plea deals also get you nice numbers for a "tough of crime" image for political clout even if some of the most vile crimes get some of the lightest sentences imaginable
Chief public defender isn't, and in fact that position doesn't even exist.
So success in defending will never affect political careers.
There's probably arguments against the change, I dunno, I haven't thought about it. "You can't change things" isn't one of them.
Yes, I know the legal system doesn’t have anywhere near enough resources to take every case to trial. Don’t care. Give the system more resources or prosecute fewer people or some combination of the two.
And so the prosecution heaps on threats of years and years of prison time, or "take this little plea bargain". They still get their "conviction."
the app providers dont want to admit fraud is running over their platform. the justice department cant admit any mistakes either.
Its a problem which will only get worse as the economy declines. And as the economy declines, more places get breached because more criminality and at the same time less money to secure things.
I cant see this getting any better which is kind of terrifying.
One more reason i can think of is that if people get super afraid of these problems, then they might even start asking for mass surveilance to help prove their innocense in these kinds of things. Which again is an incentive / reasoning for higher government not to do anything about it, because it creates opportunities where current population sentiment is taking them away...
On an entirely different note. Just wow. I know a lot of people who don't "do online" finance anything. And this kind of stuff is terrifying, because they would not even know that someone else had setup an account using their PII.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260227061241/https://www.forbe...
This mentality is called "prosecutor disease;"
I once said this to a former Atlanta-area DA (family-of-friend) and his first reaction was fake-revulsion; after I told him of my listenings-to-brothers' own lawfare, he conceded publishing conviction rates probably isn't good PR (but is how it works in their little Bar club).
DA then asked my friend "who is this blue collar guy?!" (when I wasn't around) – unfortunately, much of my insanity checks out...
----
>co-founder Aaron Swartz['s crimes]
Which was trying to free pay-walled, publicly-funded scientific journals; today, post-LLM-consumption, his alleged crimes seem so MickeyMouse (i.e: LLMs can reformulate all published text, across platforms, with minimal IP infringement claim).
What an incredible human. SO many young lives have been snuffed-out by Prosecutors' Disease. Wake up you inhumans.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/how-a...
Podcast eps about it (with the testers):
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/179/
But everyone knee jerks into voting out the cool DA who drops victimless criminal prosecutions because they don’t like a fenty zombie screaming in the streets.
I happen to love my mostly low policed state for this exact reason. They’re almost never there to help you, and mostly just want to fuck you up!
I studied Masters in Criminology and I have to say that Justice is absent from the Criminal 'Justice' system.
We have the Reconstructionist South to thank for normalizing turning judges into form stamping Vogons and allowing prosecutors to routinely use a form of blackmail as a normal course of prosecution.
It was a very telling experience where doing things our constitution permits is considered a burden on law enforcement and prosecutors.
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Sometimes these paywalls are variable, triggering sometimes and not others.
That's not a pay wall, it's a sign-in wall.
I’ve seen this phrase maybe 10 times in the last week on this site. Is this some new hacker news trend to pull out this old cliché on everything now?
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/