Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#211

Post by ionised » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 10:47 AM UTC

purpled_haze wrote: post #173

prawn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with the idea of ethics education in school but strongly disagree with it having anything to do with religion!

Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? I feel strongly that it is foolish to remove the freedom to practice religion if it promotes moral and ethical behavior. Freedom to believe and have faith in something that helps society shouldn't be dissolved. That said, I'm all for having additional secular classes in ethics and morality for t…

> Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings?

Yes.

Much of our morality and ethics are innate and stem from our nature and evolution as a social species. Religion just took credit for it.

Even social groups of monkeys and rodents tend to avoid killing eachother and do what is in the best interests of the group.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#212

Post by DanielBMarkham » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 10:54 AM UTC

Try googling "Alabama Justice Project", which is the group responsible for this release.

I got three news items, 2 from today. One empty blog set up months ago. Poking around some more, I get Jon Carroll, the author of "The Henry County Report", breaking the story from the Alabama Justice Project, which he is also involved in. I see the Southern Poverty Law Center mentioned in a couple of the dozens of copy-links from this story, but nothing on their site.

I'm not saying this report is fake, or even trying to discredit Carroll. But you gotta admit this is a really weird way to break a story of such huge magnitude. Sure would be nice to have some other outlet check the facts on this. There are a lot of people implicated in this article, and the author uses phrases such as "slam shut case" which leads me to think he has an agenda. Combine that with the weird provenance? I get uneasy. We got one lone wolf and 47-thousand mainstream news outlets copying what he's putting out.

News ain't what it used to be.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#213

Post by mlloyd » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 10:55 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #8

It seems like there is a smoking gun in this case (though I didn't review the evidence thoroughly). Widespread availability of video recording and distribution has provided many more smoking guns. Certainly, there are many more incidents where no smoking gun evidence is available. For a long time, black Americans have been claiming that such things happen and were widely ignored or disbelieved. It was and is a grave…

1) Why did our society make this error?

Racism. Victims are most available in the disenfranchised of our society and black people have always been disenfranchised in our society.

2) How do we prevent making the same mistake in the future, regarding other issues?

Stop being racist. Stop disenfranchising entire segments of the population. Start investigating those in positions of power and stop the cover-ups.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#214

Post by ionised » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 10:56 AM UTC

jensen123 wrote: post #203

policestate101 wrote: post #124

America is a police state, ruled by a corrupt elite Willing to break laws, rewrite them if possible, create secret ones when needed, they will torture, murder, commit war crimes, this the country Americans reside in, only they do not want to except this increasingly glaring truth. What happens instead is people who speak out are ignored, derided, and silenced.

America is a democracy, where a majority of the population supports the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism etc.

America was never a democracy.

It was founded as an oligarchy in the guise of a constitutional republic.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#215

Post by iamsohungry » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 11:00 AM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #141

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion: 1) Police are corrupt. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. This will always be the case. Police don't fight crime, nor prevent it. They create it. If you think this isn't so you haven't had enough exposure to them. Maybe my opinion is coloured by my experience: illegal search of person, car, and house. They ransacked my house, stole money and property from me. It took…

> Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true. Usually I would never generalize the actions of a subset to the entire group, but in this case there is a key difference that justifies "(all/most) police are corrupt": the failure to clean their own house of the "bad apples". When a supposedly "good" policeman gives cover and protection to a criminal in their department instead of reporti…

It's worth noting that it's not enough for police to passively not cover for each other's crimes. It's the job of police to actively investigate crimes. When corruption is so rampant, any police department which doesn't have a well-funded internal affairs bureau with extensive prosecutorial support is not doing its job.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#216

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 11:22 AM UTC

csn wrote: post #179

jessaustin wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect physical security will be robotized before policing is. Robots could get very good at recognizing firearms held in human hands (i.e. rather than stored in a holster) and then incapacitating the owner of those hands. Once enough such robots are installed in crowded public areas, the current mass-murder-mania (and one hopes, the hysteria that has arisen in reaction) would be eliminated.

False positives would be scandalous. We would also need an unspoofable way for the AI to distinguish intent of the weapon drawing, because law-enforcement et cetera. The bot can't always already be at the scene when something happens. Anyway I know at least one company working towards this goal as we speak, but I bet they aren't anywhere near that yet: http://gimltd.fi/ (Generic Intelligent Machines)

False positives...

The only valid reason to draw a firearm is defense of life. If there are security robots around, one doesn't need to defend oneself or one's companions. (It's true that life may be threatened by tools of violence other than firearms, but robots might be trained to look for those as well.) Besides, by "incapacitate" I don't mean double-tap, rather something reversible like an enveloping foam etc.

...intent...

This is unnecessary scope creep. Firearms have one legitimate use, killing. They are not props to use to bolster one's argument, even though the current state of jurisprudence allows police to use them as such. Keep it in your pants until it's time. Cops brandishing firearms are barely less of a danger to the public than anyone else doing so.

The bot can't always already be at the scene...

It's true that many locations, at least at first, will not have these robots installed. However, those places that have them, will have enough of them to control extreme numbers of armed humans. Capital costs might be higher than human security, but robots don't need doughnut breaks. So "arriving at the scene and figuring it out" is also scope creep, and incidentally not something humans are good at either. The robots will always be on the scene already, so they'll always be ready to take action.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#217

Post by to3m » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 11:44 AM UTC

jensen123 wrote: post #206

Frondo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy. Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's…

I guess you are correct that there is a lot of racism here and there. However, there is also a lot of rabid anti-racism. For example, you'll never read an article in the mainstream press about how blacks, on average, have lower IQs than white people, although this clearly is relevant in the whole crime debate. Why are blacks more likely to commit crimes than whites? The IQ explains a lot, but mentioning it is taboo,…

The lack of any conceivable confounding factors is what really makes this explanation so intuitively compelling.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#218

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #160

jessaustin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...at root an issue of social class rather than race directly. I agree with much of the rest of your comment, and in the past I would have agreed with this as well. However, police are not inherent to the human condition. (We haven't always had police, and with luck we'll be rid of them soonish.) When police were created, it was largely for basically racist purposes, even if the "races" under consideration in many lo…

> When police were created, it was largely for basically racist purposes, even if the "races" under consideration in many locales were "Irish" and "Italian". Ok, but I think this is a reflection of different races falling en masse into different social classes. If you're in Italy and your city has natives, gypsies, african laborers, jews, and persian merchants (note: stylized example, not necessarily reflective of an…

Umm, "treating different races differently" is kind of the definition of racism.

But think it through further, please. Why do different races fall into different classes? There is more than one reason! For your average racist fuck, the answer is "because race". But TPTB are not all, nor even primarily, average racist fucks. Like "race", "class" is an invention that allows elites to control and extract rent from the rest of us. Classes seem to the average person to be more contingent categories than races, so the concept of race is used to bolster that of class. It's easier to convince a poor white dude to oppress poor black dudes than it would be to convince him to oppress poor dudes in general.

Also, don't expect policing to conform to reasoned expectations. It is more effective for its real purpose of controlling and extracting rent from the rest of society, because it is capricious and unpredictable.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#219

Post by purpled_haze » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 11:53 AM UTC

ionised wrote: post #211

purpled_haze wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? I feel strongly that it is foolish to remove the freedom to practice religion if it promotes moral and ethical behavior. Freedom to believe and have faith in something that helps society shouldn't be dissolved. That said, I'm all for having additional secular classes in ethics and morality for t…

> Do you dismiss that much of the moral and ethics we have today in our society evolved in parallel with religious teachings? Yes. Much of our morality and ethics are innate and stem from our nature and evolution as a social species. Religion just took credit for it. Even social groups of monkeys and rodents tend to avoid killing eachother and do what is in the best interests of the group.

> Much of our morality and ethics are innate and stem from our nature and evolution as a social species.

Where is your evidence for this? It would seem more evident to me that the source I am aware of through my education in history and life experience for teaching of morals and ethics has been religion.

Although many here may not be old enough to realize it, countries that are mostly secular not long ago historically speaking had much moral and ethical teaching from their religions.

Attributing this to monkeys and innate behavior may account for part, but from what I understand, you could just as easily bring up monkeys in a ruthless environment where it is every monkey for him/herself. Having an established organization or organizations that teach morals and ethics is important.

Re: Leaked Documents Reveal Police Department Planted Drugs for Years, DA Complicit

#220

Post by datashovel » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 12:10 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #46

datashovel wrote: post #32

Keep the leaks coming world! The joke is that anyone who is truly qualified to run for office doesn't want the job. I hope that the more leaks like this that come out, more qualified people will realize they can't just stand by idly thinking the system will just fix itself. I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have take…

> I imagine Snowden leaks alone have gotten far more "qualified" people engaged in civic activities than we'll ever truly comprehend, and have taken a bit of the "fear of rebellion" out of those who might not have spoken up in the past. You wish. The reactions vary from 'oh, I knew that all along' to 'well, no matter what I do, the spying will continue' and a whole bunch of shades in between. Then there are those tha…

I imagine most who were changed by Snowden leaks are not necessarily trying to be vocal about it. Instead I figure they're just doing something about it. These are the people who, even if they were part of the "I already knew what was happening" bunch, probably wouldn't have done anything about their beliefs since they were only that. Hunches without enough evidence to warrant digging too deeply about, and certainly not enough concrete data to warrant dedicating one's life to.

It's a far different thing to call out your government and demand something when there's no concrete evidence to support your claims in the first place. Now governments must take citizen demands seriously, and people can now pursue these things without fear they're just spinning their wheels, because we've seen real evidence.

It's these kind of people, the ones who realize it means nothing to talk about something unless you're actually going to do something about it, who I'm talking about. My belief is leaks like this have the power to change enough people to make a real difference in the future of civilization on Earth.

And keep in mind. I didn't mention in my original comment, but Snowden leaks are something that as far as I'm concerned could warrant being required reading in undergraduate history textbooks (core curriculum). I think it was the kind of historical event that will continue to affect Earth's inhabitants centuries after we're all gone.