71–80 of 133 posts
This is the kind of impact that start-ups rarely have, in spite of the 'make something people want' and 'lets go and improve the world' mission statements. Kudos to these three, it's the kind of development one would be proud to be a part of. Watching the watchers is badly needed, not just in America, elsewhere too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the poster I was replying to didn't set any constraints, its clear they meant generally. I disagree that generally officers significantly overstep their bounds.
Even if most officers don't overstep their bounds themselves, they cover for and protect their buddies who do. This makes the majority of cops bad cops.
Edit: If you had said "some" and not "majority", I'd have agreed with you. But "majority" is just cockamamey, made up BS!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder if the app becomes popular and then an officer recognizes the kid in a pull over or situation how it will influence the interaction.
A cop's going to mess with a couple of kids because he might recognize them as having created an app? That makes no sense at all.
Those databases will tell him, essentially, "This guy created a popular app that puts your job under a microscope. Also, he probably got a bunch of money for it, and may be carrying a lot of cash."
It won't actually say anything about harassing him. That will be entirely up to the investigating officer, and all the other investigating officers that he may have alerted via the aforementioned databases to watch out for cars with the same model and color.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cop's going to mess with a couple of kids because he might recognize them as having created an app? That makes no sense at all.
No, he won't recognize them. As he is running the plates and driver's license through the official public computer system, he will also be whipping out his personal phone to run that name through a few private databases, run by ex-cops, with subscription access granted only to cops and ex-cops. Those databases will tell him, essentially, "This guy created a popular app that puts your job under a microscope. Also, he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms. In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homici…
>> Actual homicide is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, but if this doesn't qualify as "significantly and often" then I'm not sure what does. Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture: Officials with the Justice Department keep no co…
That is a big part of the problem itself.
What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account
.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.
The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.
The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms. In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homici…
Don't you think you should also include crime rate in this analysis? And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.
This is the kind of impact that start-ups rarely have, in spite of the 'make something people want' and 'lets go and improve the world' mission statements. Kudos to these three, it's the kind of development one would be proud to be a part of. Watching the watchers is badly needed, not just in America, elsewhere too.
Unlike most startups, it's not going to be easy to profit from and has a good chance of suffering reprisals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, here's a food for thought: only in the US you can get shot for getting out of your car when a traffic cop stops you.
And that proves what? That I'm wrong? Hardly.
Contrast with a place like the UK, where police are not even allowed to carry guns outside of special units.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism. Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear ab…
> Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy? So that's a different claim. When he first appeared he was credible - he got published in a peer reviewed respectable journal after all, and he was actively trying to con people. Once his paper had been debunked, well, yes you're right there. There's no excuse…
Those are pretty different objections. Only one of them detracts from the theory.
I've read that we have pretty good data on how long a human can float in water of various temperatures before tiring and drowning, because the Nazis systematically drowned Jews in water of various temperatures to get the data.
I also read that relevant bits of this data are posted near beaches with cold water as a public safety measure. So far so good.
...and then of course, that there was a movement to take those signs down because the source of the data is morally objectionable. Full credit for moral purity to the let's-take-down-the-drowning-warnings people. In their own small way, they are dedicated to making the world just that much slightly worse than it was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an American expat living in the UK, so I am interested in judging things on comparative rather than absolute terms. In the UK, the police are on track to have killed 3 people in 2015[1]. In the US, the police are on track to have killed 1,200 people[2]. Adjusted for population, the US has a police homicide rate that is 79 times higher than in the UK. In some places, police violence is now the no. 1 form of homici…
Nice statistics. Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.
Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.
(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...