181–190 of 235 posts
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Interesting, thank you. Sure, some number of police officers are racist. I've never denied that, and it's sad, as no one should be racist. In my experience, the ones who mention race first, are usually racists themselves.
> I've never denied that, and it's sad, as no one should be racist. > In my experience, the ones who mention race first, are usually racists themselves. How does one address racism without first mentioning its existence?
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This article literally documents several times SFPD used drones to surveil people who weren't committing any crimes. They sent their drones to spy on a guy who was sitting on a roof listening to music, and in another instance they sent drones to follow "suspicious individuals" who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops. This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be…
How would this be different to following a suspicious car to see what it's intent is?
First, the police have a weird habit of determining that black people drive the most suspicious cars. Does this racial profiling extend to their drone use as well? It's clear from the article that the police are using the drones in more situations than just the active investigations that they claim to use them in. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black)
Second, if you're being followed by a police car, you know the police car is there. If you're being followed by a drone, you have no idea the drone is there. From the article, the SFPD's drone policy states that operators must only record video once the drone has arrived at the scene, and they must take care not to record individuals unrelated to the active investigation. However, every video had recorded the full takeoff, flight, loitering, return flight and landing – capturing all of the people in SF going about their daily lives. One of the videos showed the drone hovering outside the windows of an apartment building while police schlepped around inside; if I lived there, would I have to worry about a drone appearing outside my window and recording me jerking it in the privacy of my own home? Would I even know it's a police drone, and would I be able to guarantee that the footage was deleted?
Third, I can pull over and ask the cop why they're following me, or (more likely) just let them pass. A drone is just going to loiter there, waiting for me to commit whatever crime they think I'm committing.
Finally, I hate to invoke the slippery slope argument here, but IMO it's warranted. It's easy to deploy drones wherever you want throughout the city; it's not easy to tail every vehicle waiting for them to commit a crime, just because you find them suspicious. If police find drones to be super effective at tailing all of the people they want to tail, why not buy more drones and just have them hover throughout the city perpetually so there isn't a square inch that goes unwatched?
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I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening. I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
Part of the problem is it leads to stuff like this: https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-... > The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her…
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The videos in question are full of actual crimes being committed and criminals being arrested. San Francisco used to not investigate or prosecute any of those crimes. Laptop stolen out of a car? Nothing to do. Now they catch video of it happening, follow the license plate, arrest the perpetrators. Catalytic converter stolen? We don’t investigate that. Yes, police have shitty track records of abusing authority and tec…
I think it's an important distinction whether crime stops happening after all criminals are locked up or after preventative measures are taken to prevent criminal activity happening in the first place. When criminals are locked up, they will get released and many of them don't have anything else to do other than returning to do crimes, with gained experience from the previous failures. But it's possible to reduce cri…
- Massive money sink that shows no results: See SF during covid and a bit after - Dystopian policies that tank crime but flagrantly violate peoples rights: see stop and frisk, El Salvador, etc
Some people are going to be criminals no matter how much money you give them. I would argue that especially in functioning countries, the returns on carrot approaches to crime reduction are magnitudes weaker than stick ones.
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So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians? I'd rather a drone follows the car until it stops and the police arrive to retrieve it and give a hand slap to the offender. I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the ER…
>the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. >If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times. Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
And what is a petty crime these days?
Within the last year in Woolston Lyttelton and Brighton: I've been assualted unprovoked, I've had the outer unit of my split heatpump stolen (for Al, $$$ to fix), I've had outdoor plumbing damaged (for Cu, $$ to fix), I've had the rim stolen[1] off the back of my parked car, last week my friend had tools stolen that they can't afford to replace.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the above petty crimes are unacceptable to me or my friends.
Nothing has been reported because that just costs time and doesn't resolve the problems.
In small groups of people society is surveillance (yes, often detrimentally). I've lived in small towns and the surveillance is extreme. Society has got worse at encouraging/enforcing good society.
I loath surveillance capitalism, but systemically I'm unsure what the answer is.
I finally gave in and installed a Eufy brand camera (my security friend used that brand and installed it, although I can't recommend the UI). I don't think that it will even help. Ironically the security friend was broken into recently and had their security camera stolen.
None of the above was motivated by hunger or good reasons: it was real scumbags for the situations I know the perp, and likely drug users for the metal thefts (or perhaps kids - two brass taps are not worth it).
[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360962317/its-bit-epidemic-m...
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I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening. I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
if you were a minority in America, you'd understand where suspicious leads to murder. so kinda understand where _you_ dont see a problem and so many other people will. Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.
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Yea, "adheres to a strict policy" could mean anything. They have policies[1] posted publicly. I wonder if any of the footage will be found to violate their policies, and if so, what accountability looks like. 1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...
Nothing in this report indicates that policy was being broken. There was a misconfiguration of the tool. They didn’t realize that the internal sharing link was publicly accessible.
But since you brought it up, SFPD should also have a policy on when they share drone footage, and I'm going to assume they violated that. In this case I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that it was accidental and they are learning from it. And I'd be a lot more concerned anyway if it were ubiquitous surveillance of ordinary citizens, not just incidental captures during scoped, presumed legitimate operations.
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How would this be different to following a suspicious car to see what it's intent is?
A few things IMO: First, the police have a weird habit of determining that black people drive the most suspicious cars. Does this racial profiling extend to their drone use as well? It's clear from the article that the police are using the drones in more situations than just the active investigations that they claim to use them in. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black ) Second, if you're being followed…
What about we keep the drones to reduce crime and just selectively never investigate black suspects?
>Second, if you're being followed by a police car, you know the police car is there. If you're being followed by a drone, you have no idea the drone is there.
There are such things as plain-clothed police officers. Not that police officers have to announce their presence to you when they are driving on a public road anyways.
> Third, I can pull over and ask the cop why they're following me, or (more likely) just let them pass. A drone is just going to loiter there, waiting for me to commit whatever crime they think I'm committing.
If they ask YOU what crime YOU'RE committing you don't have to answer. Why would they have to answer you or even admit to following you?
You say slippery slope when what I think you really mean is that it shifts the overton window of what is and isn't acceptable. That is a valid concern, but unless the police are allowed to fly drones in places where gen pop aren't allowed to, they aren't getting any special privileges from their position so I thin the point is moot. Slippery slope imo only starts when the police get NEW privileges.
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It's less like HOA and more like sharia law if I remember his background correct.
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This is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'll have to remember to tell my Ahmedi relatives from Peshawar and Gilgit that after they (separately) got out of Dodge after they heard their neighbors wanted their heads on pikes.
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>Despite their faults on macro-politics, rigidly Islamic countries are remarkably safe and peaceful at the micro level. Tehran has a half the homicide rate of Toronto! This is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'll have to remember to tell my Ahmedi relatives from Peshawar and Gilgit that after they (separately) got out of Dodge after they heard their neighbors wanted their heads on pikes.