Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 107 posts

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#71

Post by birdyrooster »

macspoofing wrote: post #68
birdyrooster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it was the only way. You made it a false choice in your mind. Locking people up is a deterrence but it creates many criminals by putting them in depraved conditions for extended periods of time, then depriving them of employability and then as an insult, charging monthly fees for probation or other post-incarceration monitoring. The last thing I want to point out is how often the police victimize people…

>I never said it was the only way. You wrote: "police departments take a lot (in some cases a plurality) of total tax revenue that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence. That is why we talk about defunding police." Where is the evidence that the police budget is what is preventing social programs to be funded? That is a fiction driven from the inane sloganeering around 'defund the police'. You can f…

Okay this is drivel. Waste your own time but I have other things to do.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#72

Post by Zigurd »

javajosh wrote: post #50
einszwei wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that mass surveillance for law enforcement will not work until public, judiciary and law accept that Police like all people make errors. It shouldn't be a herculean task to reverse a wrongful arrest or file charges for a use of excessive force by law enforcement officer. Courts should ultimately decide if the officer did this out of malice/incompetence and penalize accordingly.

The American public is already too biased in favor of LEO, to judge by trial outcomes. Law enforcement should be held to a higher, not lower standard than ordinary people. That will make the job tougher, but if it that makes it too tough for an individual, they don't have to work there.

I experienced this myself at a DUI trial where the sole prosecution witness, a cop, clearly lied about being run off the road by the defendant, and other aspects of the case. Defence counsel demonstrated that the stretch or road where the cop claimed to have been run off the road had no shoulders, had guard rails close to the road, and had trees hemming-in the road.

I ended up hanging the jury. My fellow jurors were frighteningly willing to unquestioningly accept a patent liar's testimony because he is a cop.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#73

Post by Zigurd »

macspoofing wrote: post #65
valuearb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to this article about the Baltimore cop arrested for 32 counts of false arrest and imprisonment. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/12/an-office... Every bystander he harassed or assaulted is going to dislike the police even more, and help them even less. When police detectives go to them for help solving a crime, how often will they refuse to testify because of their distrust of the cops…

>It’s a fantasy that the solution to high crime areas is tougher policing. I didn't argue that. I said that tough policing is a natural result of high crime areas because cops are humans and are affected by the environment they are in. I read an article about Facebook and YouTube content reviewers getting PTSD after only a few weeks of work looking at despicable images. Imagine being a cop with decades of experience…

Airline pilots are human, too. We do not accept their mistakes. Accepting racism, cruelty, and violence because those are human defects will not improve public safety.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#74

Post by macspoofing »

jcranmer wrote: post #70
macspoofing wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And what about the victims of false imprisonment due to a wholly corrupt police department? What about them? False imprisonment is a problem, but not at the scale of the crime in that city. Baltimore had 350 homicides and 2000+ robberies/assaults/rapes, and thousands more thefts and property crimes [1]. Let me pose a question to you: At what point do we start focusing on victims of crime again? All I hear is about p…

The counterpart to your argument is that the police brutality hasn't really made much of an impact to crime in Baltimore, certainly not a positive impact. Indeed, the homicide clearance rates in Baltimore are pretty poor, which means the police aren't putting the criminals in prison, and your support for police brutality isn't real support for the innocent crime victims but only lip service.

>and your support for police brutality

Show me where I supported policy brutality?

Here's a hint: NOBODY supports police brutality.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#75

Post by pstuart »

Zigurd wrote: post #72
javajosh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American public is already too biased in favor of LEO, to judge by trial outcomes. Law enforcement should be held to a higher, not lower standard than ordinary people. That will make the job tougher, but if it that makes it too tough for an individual, they don't have to work there.

I experienced this myself at a DUI trial where the sole prosecution witness, a cop, clearly lied about being run off the road by the defendant, and other aspects of the case. Defence counsel demonstrated that the stretch or road where the cop claimed to have been run off the road had no shoulders, had guard rails close to the road, and had trees hemming-in the road. I ended up hanging the jury. My fellow jurors were…

Thank you.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#76

Post by v6zfzcbq9cur »

pmoriarty wrote: post #49
v6zfzcbq9cur wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've mana…

Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the org…

This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public.

On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too.

The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead.

(As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#77

Post by [deleted] »

macspoofing wrote: post #46
alistairSH wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about the victims of false imprisonment due to a wholly corrupt police department? Sorry, working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.

>And what about the victims of false imprisonment due to a wholly corrupt police department? What about them? False imprisonment is a problem, but not at the scale of the crime in that city. Baltimore had 350 homicides and 2000+ robberies/assaults/rapes, and thousands more thefts and property crimes [1]. Let me pose a question to you: At what point do we start focusing on victims of crime again? All I hear is about p…

[deleted]

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#78

Post by jcranmer »

macspoofing wrote: post #74
jcranmer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterpart to your argument is that the police brutality hasn't really made much of an impact to crime in Baltimore, certainly not a positive impact. Indeed, the homicide clearance rates in Baltimore are pretty poor, which means the police aren't putting the criminals in prison, and your support for police brutality isn't real support for the innocent crime victims but only lip service.

>and your support for police brutality Show me where I supported policy brutality? Here's a hint: NOBODY supports police brutality.

Root comment of this thread:

> Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers. Remember when they looked at 2 years of body-cam footage for one of their highest earners and came out the other end with 32 counts of assault, false imprisonment and generalized misconduct? [1]

That's police brutality.

Your reply: > The police is not the problem. [...] Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.

The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police due to documented police brutality is at least indirect support for police brutality. Beyond that, your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime would imply more direct support for police brutality, especially since you seem to justify their actions as "tough policing," which I fail to understand in any way other than a polite euphemism for "police brutality."

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#79

Post by asdfadsfgfdda »

nobody9999 wrote: post #19
google234123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also huge support to reduce high crime rates. People will compromise some things to achieve this.

> There is also huge support to reduce high crime rates. People will compromise some things to achieve this. Except crime rates are at their lowest points in decades [0]. [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

Why not support lowering crime rates even more? Comparing the crime rates in Baltimore to other western countries, there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Re: Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program

#80

Post by pmoriarty »

v6zfzcbq9cur wrote: post #76
pmoriarty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the org…

This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public. On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere.…

"Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public."

Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office.

Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.

Post reply on HN