Live data from Hacker News

CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

trisquel.info

81–90 of 284 posts

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#81
Seems like the guy calls himself a "copchaser" and is used to actuallly chase police officers, annoyingly record their action and make sure to insult them while teaching them a lesson about how to do their job. And he calls all that "standing his ground".

I am sure police officers can be jerks or even completely criminals, but this guy really seems to be crossing the line of common sense.

Source: the YT channel himself posted https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgnVXppkmzBKfTOwe-KqAJQ/vid...

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#82
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Police don't have a good statistical basis to assume that a given encounter will require deadly force.

Oh really... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per... I bet you will find a correlation between the rankings on this list and those of police brutality. That's the price paid for right to bear arms.

Yes, really. The presence of vast numbers of firearms in the country isn't the relevant statistic, it's the frequency with which police face situations requiring the use of their firearm. The latter barely happens.

Are US police at a relatively much higher risk of encountering an armed suspect than police in countries with less firearms? Hell yes! Is that rate of encounters "high". Nope.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#83

Filming police isn't against the law in the US, so that wasn't the charge as the clickbait title states. If the guy wanted to be forthright he could have listed the complaint(s) that are on his summons instead of making up a different scenario. This guy's obviously looking for trouble; filiming police for no good reason; getting himself arrested for no good reason; then going online and being deceptive about it to ge…

He says pretty early on that what he actually got was a disorderly conduct charge.

Edit: Hey -> He

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#84
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excusable in a war zone, not in a policing action. Then again a man firing 100 machine gun rounds would be almost unheard of in any other developed country, so maybe the US does qualify as a war zone.

There is a bit of truth to that. England and Wales had about 10 murders per million people last year, versus 50 per million for the U.S. The cities that show up in the news, like Baltimore, are at about 500 per million people. To put that into perspective: Baltimore, a city of just 620,000 people, had a roughly comparable number of homicides as the entirety of England and Wales, a country of 56 million people.

Wikipedia[0] seems to indicate that Baltimore is about on par with Venezuela and Lesotho, as far as murders per capita go, matching the US Virgin Islands' rate quite well.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#85
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US police receive large amounts of hand down military equipment and are routinely armed. Some US citizens are routinely armed, so the potential for lethal harm is much greater in any scenario. US domestic policy has encouraged the police to be at war (vs crime, drugs etc). US domestic policy has encouraged a criminalization of large amounts of petty stuff (truancy / three strikes policies) which encourages this. This…

Also, a lot of cops themselves are ex-military, a consequence of maintaining decade-long wars.

It's too bad that more of them don't have better military training where you are trained to not start shooting wildly in stressful and dangerous situations. Being a cop is not that dangerous of a job in America. Being a farmer or a roofer is far more deadly. Being a dog catcher is a more dangerous job than being a cop, and you don't hear story after story of them shooting indiscriminately at dogs. Cops should not be killing and injuring so many people, and the only way that is going to stop is if they are held accountable.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#86

Filming police isn't against the law in the US, so that wasn't the charge as the clickbait title states. If the guy wanted to be forthright he could have listed the complaint(s) that are on his summons instead of making up a different scenario. This guy's obviously looking for trouble; filiming police for no good reason; getting himself arrested for no good reason; then going online and being deceptive about it to ge…

He did. He says it was disorderly conduct, and that it will likely be changed anyway. The whole point is that the disorderly conduct charge was "trumped up" because he was filming them. I don't really see the title as click bait at all. I'm not saying we're hearing the whole story here, either, but I think it's a little extreme to call this click bait. And if it bothers you so much, why didn't you explain the charges in your comment?

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#87

Why are the us cops such raging douche nozzles? After every interaction I've had with a cop in the us, I left hoping they get shot soon. I've never seen cops in other countries be like this.

I only met cool cops in the US (perhaps because they saw I was a foreigner). However, I do agree that in Europe you don't feel threatened at all by them, and that doesn't seem to be true in the States. There seems to be a trend in the US to treat everyone like criminals by default, while in Europe until they think you've done something wrong they're extremely nice (as they should). Although you were downvoted, it wou…

Although you were downvoted, it would be interesting to understand why that is.

I'm guessing he was down-voted for the language, not the meaning.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#88

This sounds very much like one side of the story. "I was essentially arrested for filming a police checkpoint in Manchester, New Hampshire" I don't want to defend the police, but that sounds like there is a lot of information missing here. Why was he filming the police? What did other people do at/to/near the checkpoint? Was he alone or part of a group or even a mob?

> I don't want to defend the police Why not? Is it now politically incorrect to give the benefit of the doubt to people who literally put their lives on the line to serve the community and keep people safe?

> the benefit of the doubt

Police lost that benefit a loooooong time ago. Respect is earned; covering up bad behavior and criminal activities is a reputation that deserves scrutiny and suspicion. They can regain the benefit of the doubt only after their reputation is free of blatant murdering innocents, officers that engage in criminal acts are reliably prosecuted, and the culture that encourages escalating confrontations to violence is fixed.

> put their lives on the line

Police work isn't particularly dangerous compared to many other jobs. It's not even in the top 10.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/04/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-fo...

Regardless, modern police culture encourages pushing all of the danger onto other people when they treat everyone as if they were violent.

> keep people safe

That's not always the case. Police incite a lot of unnecessary violence. Also, the SCOTUS has ruled that Police do not have a duty to actually prevent anything. They usually show up afterwords and write reports/etc. Generalizations are problematic; obviously some people do try to keep people safe, but reality is more complicated.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no good people, only good systems. The German people didn't turn into monsters in 1938 and become decent people at the end of 1945, they were just participants in a broken system. The Rwandans didn't suddenly become the worst people in the world for a few months in 1994. Perfectly decent people are capable of utterly abhorrent things if their environment is sufficiently toxic. US police officers aren't bad…

> "There are no good people, only good systems." Nice quote. Can you recommend some reading on this topic?

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo is a satisfactory primer.

https://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-Peo...

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#90
post #80
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it's necessary to shoot at all, aiming to kill is even more rarely the right thing to do.

In real life, there is only "do not shoot the firearm" and "shoot the firearm with the intent to kill". There is no practical aiming to disable or similar with a lethal firearm. There's no difference between the two, and no distinction to be drawn.

Thank you for mentioning this. One minor adjustment I'd make to the above statement is "shoot the firearm with the intent to stop". This is a small, but important distinction. It doesn't change anything with respect to how the firearm is used (e.g., point of aim). At least from the perspective of police use of deadly force, the goal isn't to kill, it's to stop the person from continuing to be a threat. The outcome may be that the person does die, but if the person is stopped and doesn't die, that's an acceptable outcome once the decision has been made to use deadly force.
Post reply on HN