241–250 of 289 posts
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Police are just humans, they have their biases and grudges and bad days like everyone else. But the power they hold means those bad behaviors can harm you quite a bit, in the same way it can help you when you need it.
Exactly, and that's why you need to invest in training and guiding them, in holding them accountable for missteps and bad behaviour. The point of police is not to give untrained regular people unchecked power over others.
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Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, though. There will always be something wrong. The point is to address it and reduce how often it goes wrong. I'm not denying these incidents are terrible; they are. And even if you do address them and punish the perpetrators, you'll still occasionally have police officers that do the wrong thing. But that doesn't mean it's pointless to hold police accountable, or to train them…
'We should hold police accountable and train them better' is orthogonal to 'you shouldn't talk to or interact with the police if you can help it'. You do the first to reduce the probable number of- let's say 'possibly evil police'. You do the second to reduce the probability of being damaged by 'possibly evil police'. Being for the first idea doesn't give a reason to be against the second idea. In fact, if your goal…
My goal is not merely to not get fucked by the police, my goal is a better, safer society.
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I recommend everyone watch this video. It's geared towards lawyers. If the police are asking questions with any level of suspicion at all, don't talk to them. Even if you do not lie, and are innocent, the things you say can still be used against you. Summarizing: 1. There is no way it can help. 2. If your client is guilty (or even innocent), they might admit guilt with nothing in return. 3. If your client is innocent…
The police in the past actually wanted me to come in and talk to them about an issue someone had reported. I came in and they surprised me with the line "My partner is just setting up the camera in the other room if that's okay". I was quite surprised and shocked that they wanted to record what they made sound like a friendly chat. I of course refused to give any kind of statement under video and instead just spoke p…
Realize too that a great many officers now don body cameras. If you aren't willing to say it on video, do not say it. No matter what they tell you, police officers are not capable of private conversations. Every conversation with a cop is a conversation between a person and a government. It might be recorded. The cop can take notes. They cop can get back to their car and relate the conversation to a camera, creating very powerful evidence. There is no concept of privacy when talking to police.
When people say "nanny state", this is possibly a more literal interpretation than I ever hoped to see. "You feeling all right? Maybe take a time out and calm down".
I guess my annoyance is based on the same issues I have with facial recognition, fingerprinting, or any "databases": if I have committed no crime, police should not have my information, know where I am, or maintain information on me.
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I recommend everyone watch this video. It's geared towards lawyers. If the police are asking questions with any level of suspicion at all, don't talk to them. Even if you do not lie, and are innocent, the things you say can still be used against you. Summarizing: 1. There is no way it can help. 2. If your client is guilty (or even innocent), they might admit guilt with nothing in return. 3. If your client is innocent…
The other day I was reading about Miranda rights and I didn’t realize it wasn’t a thing until the 60s. It was heavily pushed and publicized by lawyers to make it a necessity to have lawyers at every step of the way. There is some debate about how harder it is to get convictions because of the Miranda rights. I’m not trying to say anything about how important the rights are when people go through the process, I just t…
The important bit is "if the police are asking questions with any level of suspicion at all". Every person has to do their own personal risk assessment, and maybe you don't always know whether you're under suspicion, but if the police want to talk to you and you have any reason whatsoever to think that you're under suspicion, you're rolling the dice by agreeing to talk to them without a lawyer.
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I believe the reason for this is the idea that it's a massive waste of the public's time and resources for you to refuse to reveal evidence which could have stopped the prosecution well before it went to trial.
Yes, most of Europe/the World uses a "civil law" system which is much less adversarial than the U.S. & U.K.'s "common law" system.[1] Fun fact: because of their French (and to a lesser degree, Spanish) influence, Louisiana's laws still follow a civil law system. [1] https://www.apprendre-le-droit.fr/anglais-juridique/what-is-...
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incar...
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My neighbors live 200 yards away, they won't hear anything.
And you do realize your case is special, right? In urban settings, it's more like a dozen.
“Information about people believed to be “at risk” of becoming criminals or victims of harm is shared between civilian agencies and police and is added to the database when a person is being evaluated for a rapid intervention intended to lower their risk levels.” Remind anybody else of precrime from minority report?
First of all I want to say that I don't agree with the collection of this data. ...however there is an important distinction with Minority Report in that people were convicted of crimes based on premonitions. If this data was instead used to support at risk people - like how disruptive kids at school are often given support to help enable them to grow into better people - then I'd be more sympathetic with the motives…
For example, the sex offender registry has been ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court to be a public safety measure, not a punishment, and thus exempt from scrutiny under the Eighth Amendment. The new frontier in sex law enforcement will be mandatory registration for those considered to be "at risk" of sex offenses. This is already a thing in the UK: a man acquitted of rape was nevertheless considered at risk of committing rape by the cops, and they petitioned for and got an order from a judge compelling the man to register his name, address, and all online contact information with the police.
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In most of the world the police could beat you to death with video evidence and they’d get away with it. Competent, professional more or less upright police are not the worldwide or historical norm. In most of the world the police are the biggest gang. Police in the US are the very model of probity, courtesy and professionalism compared to almost every country in the Western Hemisphere, never mind African, Arab or As…
The policing can very so much in the US. You have regions where cops will try to seize money / property from innocent travelers as part of county funding instead of raising taxes. The punishments can vary so much. Private prisons create this profit incentive to jail more people. Prisions should be a cost center not a profit center.