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CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

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Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#141

Post by praneshp »

ajross wrote: post #71
praneshp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely yes, in this case. I'd prefer the officers went home to their families. If you want to go around pointing your phone at everything, you need to stop and think about the consequences.

Genuinely confused about this morality. Why is it more correct that the officers "went home to their families" than that this innocent guy died in front of his? I mean, I can understand arguing that sometimes protective violence is necessary and accepting that tragedies happen. But you're literally taking a side here and saying that police lives are more important than ours. Why?

I wasn't trying to take sides. One set of people were doing their jobs, another person was doing something without thinking about consequences. I don;t hold this opinion in general, for example when someone videotapes police in a city street.

Several people were pissed off about privacy violations when Google glass was becoming popular. I'm trying to apply the same principle here. Yes, ideally the guy shouldn't have died, but if I have to take sides I'm supporting the cops doing their jobs over the person doing something without full knowledge of the situation. Shoot first, ask later, was a perfectly good response in this situation, IMO.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#142

Post by ad_hominem »

icebraining wrote: post #56
pizzetta wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not excusing the incident but the fuller story is a little more complicated than the police shot someone just because: "The incident happened Thursday when Sanchez's next-door neighbor, Ben Ledford, was allegedly "firing up to 100 machine gun rounds at a home across the street, killing a dog inside the house," CBS Sacramento reported. Ledford surrendered to police, but officers fired at Sanchez after they saw him sta…

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.

The news article was wrong, it wasn't a machine gun. It was a semi-automatic rifle, hardly different than the rifle that Anders Breivik used to kill scores of people in Norway.

An example of actual machine guns used would be the rifles used by French citizens to kill over a hundred people in the Bataclan theater (AKMs). They also used hand grenades and high explosive (TATP) suicide belts. In the Charlie Hebdo attacks, besides machine guns they also had an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade).

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#143

Post by praneshp »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #120
golergka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making this argument with full information. Police acting at the scene didn't have this luxury. It is very easy to tell what others should have done in a situation that they perceive as life and death.

The point is they're scaredy cats who jump at shadows and create deadly situations out of things that aren't. If they want me to care that they perceive things as life-or-death, they need to adjust their perception. Being scared of your shadow holding a gun and pumping a house full of rounds isn't something I'm going to think is reasonable, even if you were really scared. Soldiers in literal warzones facing trained a…

Well the person they were arresting was not quite normal. At least some part of your comparison is incorrect.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#144

Post by maxerickson »

bmelton wrote: post #138
maxerickson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is in a US legal sense. (The National Firearms Act doesn't analyze the tactical utility of the weapon, just whether it fires multiple rounds per trigger pull or is easily converted to do so)

> It is in a US legal sense You'll need to cite that. It is not in any jurisdiction I'm aware of considered to be a "machine gun". "Readily converted" is a legal term that is defined by the BATFE, and AR-15s are saleable to the public expressly because they are NOT considered readily convertible to firing multiple rounds. If they were, they would be barred from regular sale per the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.…

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/atf-national-firearms-act-...

That's the specific part I guess, not "the AR 15".

Once it has been modified to full automatic fire the ease of conversion also isn't relevant.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#145

Post by ninjin »

soheil wrote: post #126
lohengramm wrote: post #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 himse…

A book you might enjoy reading: Civil Disobedience [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Disobedience-Essays-Thrift-Edit...

Haven't read the work, but it appears that Project Gutenberg has a freely available version.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#146

Post by praneshp »

i80and wrote: post #76
praneshp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely yes, in this case. I'd prefer the officers went home to their families. If you want to go around pointing your phone at everything, you need to stop and think about the consequences.

I'm fairly sure you're being ironic, but I don't think it comes through in text very well.

Nope! I'm still learning to say potentially offensive things in a non-offensive way, so maybe that didn't come across well.

(Unless you are sarcastically saying that I must be trying irony.)

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#147

Post by simonh »

IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #134
stinkytaco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely think you should be able to record the police. But following them around is potentially unsafe for everyone involved. It's also a good way to harass good people out of the profession (the worse a job is, the more you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill it). In addition, it absolutely can be a misdemeanor to harass people, government employee or not. No one deserves to be insulted. The problem…

How is following police unsafe for everyone involved?

Because police routinely go right into the middle of situations that are already unsafe. That's their job. Additional persons getting involved unnecessarily in those situations is a random factor that is unlikely to make those situations safer.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#148

Post by athenot »

kordless wrote: post #136
ithought wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why shouldn't they? Police departments and city officials across the US routinely lie, obsfucate and remove any sense of accountability for police officers who commit crimes or make mistakes. Look at the case of the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. The lying and stonewalling is a common occurrence. It's not just a few bad apples, it's a bad system that promotes escalation and grants power without accountabil…

> And why shouldn't they? This is a leading question, which is to say it's not a question that can be answered in a rational way. If one desires removal of choice in the conversation, they may answer it irrationally. > Look at the case of the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. The use of a separate case of an individual having choice removed, or individuals in a group removing choice for an individual, applied to…

Even if that behavior is questionable, there is at least merit in raising the argument of parity. If it is unreasonable for this man to behave like that, then why is it reasonable for men vested with the authority to enforce the law for the peace of society?

If we can succeed in proving that this man's behavior is contradictory with what we want for society, then it should follow that the same applies to the police force.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#149

Post by Broken_Hippo »

vidarh wrote: post #70
richardwhiuk wrote: post #25

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…

> US police are highly trained to stop a criminal with force, and rarely focus on de-escalation. I think this has the largest part of the blame, even though I agree with a lot of the rest you wrote too. I live in the UK. We called the police in conjunction with an ongoing assault near our house. About five minutes later there were at least 8 police officers on the scene, slowly and calmly surrounding the suspect. Nob…

I've been surrounded by cops a few times when I was younger.

Once I was taking a guy home, plus a couple of his friends. He lived in a housing complex. I got surrounded by cops with guns and drug dogs. They insisted that it was a crack-infested area (public housing) and they found out, "white people do it too". I was let go, but I don't know what happened afterwards.

Another time - I'm not even sure why I was pulled over. I was sitting in a park and a park employee told me the park was closed and I had to leave. Nevermind the dude and his son looking in the telescope or the sign saying it was closed a couple hours later in the evening. Anyhow, I eventually left and had the guy following closely, flashing his headlights behind me. Not knowing the park well, I ran over a small patch of grass. But I left. A little down the road, I was pulled over and surrounded by cops, guns drawn. I still have no clue why this was the case. They pulled the person I was with out and talked to them seperately, but in the end let us go.

My ex tried to commit suicide. One of the cops told me it was part my fault, commented on my messy house, swore there was a meth lab there, and wanted to search my house. The ex wound up being schizo-affective, and years later I still hate that cop.

I've never quite understood this stuff. I suppose racism had a bit to do with it, as I've never really cared what color skin someone had, but it doesn't explain the last story. The worst thing I did back then was smoke pot. I've never even had a speeding ticket nor been in a fistfight. Ever.

In stark contrast, I've had my bags searched coming back to Norway from Amsterdam and got treated like a person. I've never been so relaxed around a cop. It was weird. And I don't feel like a target as much here like I did in the states.

Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police

#150

Post by codezero »

pnathan wrote: post #132

Interesting how the prevailing mood on HN is very much pro-cop. Kind of surprising for a hacker forum. You don't really see what a system is made of until you stress it: filming police is one way to stress the LEO system. It's an unfortunate reality that it often does not produce good results.

I think this is generally because of the audience here – I know there's a solid international contingency, but the US one is likely biased by privilege and hasn't experienced police corruption/harassment first hand like lots of less privileged people have, so they assume bad cops are an outlier and not part of an institution which props them up.

I was definitely one of those people until recently, and it unfortunately took an incident I was directly involved in to change my mind, now when I hear someone else's story about police harassment/abuse, I put the burden on the police to explain why it was justified, not on the victim as to why it wasn't. It took a long time for me to have this POV, I expect it will take others who haven't had first-hand experience with bad law enforcement a long time too :/

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