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Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

ilga.gov

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Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's helpful to remember: for every law you like and want promoted to the federal level, there's another law you probably don't like that someone else thinks would be great to promote to the federal level. Although moving states to flee terrible laws is a burden, it's not as much of a burden as fleeing your entire country. Laws should be as local as practically possible.

> Laws should be as local as practically possible. You guys are every lawyer's dream. Yes, please, continue believing you're following some great American tradition of strong local government by submitting to the whims of your local Boss Tweed and the five judges in your county, I play golf with them once a month. Oh, you have a legal problem and need to navigate the rats nest of weird local laws? Great, you can choo…

This is being downvoted I guess for its tone, but I think the point is a good one: Laws that apply over a large jurisdiction are easier and cheaper to comply with. Maybe a good example of this is laws surrounding alcohol; I think it's kind of crazy that a winery in CA trying to ship an order back to a tourist's home has to understand and comply with local and municipal laws on the other side of the country and knowing which counties are dry and where their specific boundaries are ... which creates real cost and complexity that each of those businesses contends with, and higher prices get passed on to all consumers.

When companies decide the complexity is too high, they sometimes just have to target the most stringent law that they can reasonably cover, e.g. car companies meeting CA emission standards can make CA the defacto national standard. A buyer in Texas is presumably paying a higher price for a car designed to meet a law in another state. It would be more democratic if there was just a national standard.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You guys are every esthetician’s dream. Yes, please continue believing you’re following some great skincare tradition by submitting to the whims of your local sephora and the five skincare instagram influencers in your local county, I play volleyball with them once a month. Oh, you want a tattoo and need help to navigate the lawyers nest of weird local tattoo parlors? Great, you can choose from one of three instagram…

You guys are every fast food worker's dream. Yes, please continue believing you're following some great culinary tradition by submitting to the whims of your local drive-thru and the five foodie Instagram influencers in your local county, I play dodgeball with them once a month. Oh, you want a custom T-shirt and need help to navigate the crafters' maze of local thrift stores? Great, you can choose from one of three Instagram crafters that know the local thrifting scene as it applies to your fashion statement. I play dodgeball with them too, and (coincidentally) we all make $15 an hour.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#153
post #85
post #58

Slightly OT: I noticed Colorado, Connecticut, New Mexico, and New York City either ended or limited qualified immunity in recent years. (In other states similar efforts faltered, apparently thanks to police unions and politicians in their pocket [0]) Via the article: > Fifteen months after the Colorado bill was signed into law, there is so far little evidence to support any widespread negative effects on police reten…

I’m not at “defund police” levels of dissatisfaction but I do believe they have fundamentally lost the moral authority to self govern. I think internal affairs should be disbanded and we go straight to the FBI without passing IA.

"and we go straight to the FBI"

Because they are so much better, right?

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#154
post #91

Am I the only one that is OK with CCTV + facial recognition? Seems like a great way to tackle crime without having to involve potentially deadly encounters with police. Ya there are ways it could be abused, but I assume I have no privacy (as does the law) when I am in a public space. A lot cheaper than cops too. Put laws and systems in place to keep the data secure and require warrants to access the data. (No lethal…

People need to be able to operate outside the constant surveillance of the state. Our society is not built for 100% compliance, and that's where we go if we have constant tracking.

For one, many laws are enforced with discretion and rightly so. Second, people need to coordinate action against their government from time to time.

No, phone data and localized CCTV are not equivalent.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#155
post #58

Slightly OT: I noticed Colorado, Connecticut, New Mexico, and New York City either ended or limited qualified immunity in recent years. (In other states similar efforts faltered, apparently thanks to police unions and politicians in their pocket [0]) Via the article: > Fifteen months after the Colorado bill was signed into law, there is so far little evidence to support any widespread negative effects on police reten…

I would love to see an equivalent to cpdp.co for every city. The notion of publicly humiliating authoritarian thugs masquerading as civil servants offers a glimmer of hope for the atrocious state of policing in the US.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#156
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of like how Naperville has APC's, but also somehow is "The Safest Place in America". (That title is a fraud, btw, and the result of systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. But they indeed don't have much of a gang violence problem - just major drug problems which go unaddressed.)

systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way. I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.

It happens at multiple levels in this case, in order to keep the area's super-low crime stats.

I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground.

I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before.

My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town.

Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#157
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not at “defund police” levels of dissatisfaction but I do believe they have fundamentally lost the moral authority to self govern. I think internal affairs should be disbanded and we go straight to the FBI without passing IA.

"and we go straight to the FBI" Because they are so much better, right?

It's a matter of incentive. Sure, the Alphabet Agencies aren't intrinsically good, but they have little motive to protect the misconduct within local police precincts.

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#158

As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. Hearing about successful push back and positive legislation is good. A quick bit of Googling, I can't find any evidence of weapons a being placed on police drones in Illinois, so this seems preemptive, which is good to see! (Our own police force has many of its own problems)

How do you balance this concern with the level of crime? Wouldn't be more excusable for a Johannesburg PD to be better equipped than Brighton?

With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town.

But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#159
post #83
post #51

Can we get a federal bill with the same prohibitions? It would be absurd if the right to be free from fear of automated death from the skies is left to a patchwork of state and local restrictions. Irresponsible arguments that I would totally not be surprised to hear to push in the opposite direction: - If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones. - Somet…

What are good counters to these arguments?

I'll add to abeppu's arguments.

> If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones.

If criminals have guns, police should have body armor and maybe also guns. If criminals have automatic guns, police should not have automatic guns because 99% of their job has no connection to those encounters and they are a huge force that interacts with the public constantly, so treating it at an occupying force is a terrible idea. Armed drones don’t fight each other. Having armed drones doesn’t protect police, or anyone, from armed drones that criminals may or may not have.

> Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?

Taking the life of a fellow citizen is a huge amount of power given by the government. If the government can take citizen’s lives with no risk and no locality, there can be no accountability. Real people going out and enforcing the law is a check, as imperfect as it is, on what laws and how far the government can go. If a warehouse of drone operators outside of DC can open fire on protestors in Albuquerque, there is no accountability.

> Currently, when law enforcement uses deadly force, one of the strongest defenses is that in the moment, an officer felt that their own life was at risk. A drone operator has no such fear and therefore no bias towards using weapons prematurely.

DOJ investigations show again and again that shootings are the result of systemic issues within the police force. Just as one example, the Clevand PD was investigated after the Tamir Rice murder and found a pattern of excessive force, substandard training, and unconstitutional practices. From the report. "The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk…We found that CDP officers too often use unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution. Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it. Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs." The DOJ specifically states that Cleveland PD use excessive force, including deadly force, at a "significant rate" and that excessive and deadly force was a pattern, and not isolated incidences. [1]

Making it that much easier for police to use “unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution” is not going to make things safer for anyone.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...

Re: Illinois prohibits weapons, facial recognition on police drones

#160
post #38

Drone means flying drones here. What about land based robots? Can they still put a shotgun on one of those to blow away a suspicious package? Can they still use a robot to breach a door? Can they use facial recognition software on footage recovered from a land based drone?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/robot-delivered-lethal-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...

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