Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online • Hacker News Board

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#111

Post by geierdmtr » Mon, May 16, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #105

gdix wrote: post #59

So the subtext here is that the cops are racist, right? How would the police know the seller of the Macbook was black from the Craigslist post? How did her son know it was a weapon pressed against his back? How could the handcuffs possibly have cut his wrists? Handcuffs don't have, like, blades on them that just cut you as they're hanging off your wrists. Seems like something added to punch-up the narrative. And then…

I used to have a healthy sense of "surely we have gotten over that racism stuff"... when I was a teenager. You can't know it is a weapon. It is on your back. I've never been handcuffed, but they can hurt. I have, however, been surrounded by cops taking folks home. Some friends of the dude I was dating, and we happen to have different skin colors. 4-5 cop cars, lights, drug dogs in a small public housing parking lot.…

sounds all too familar.. where did you move to?

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#112

Post by talmand » Mon, May 16, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

lsiebert wrote: post #47

djrogers wrote: post #12

Wow, I am really looking forward to finding g out more about this. What agency were they with? How often do they do this? Was it random or targeted, and if the latter at the person or device? Side note - he wasn't arrested, he was handcuffed, had a weapon stuck in his back, was detained, had an illegal search performed on his possessions, and all by purported law enforcement officers who refused to identify themselve…

I'm not so sure he wasn't arrested, legally speaking. If he had resisted I certainly suspect he'd have been charged with resisting arrest. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/arrest

Resisting arrest means you haven't been arrested yet. If he was already under arrest then he couldn't resist it. He was being detained. If he were under arrest then there's procedure to that which has to be followed. But while being detained if one were to be argumentative then it could change from being detained to being under arrest, which then resisting arrest comes into play.

But that's just arguing over semantics that typically don't come up at the court hearing. People get charged with non-relevant crap all the time to trump up the charges.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#113

Post by talmand » Mon, May 16, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #46

djrogers wrote: post #12

Wow, I am really looking forward to finding g out more about this. What agency were they with? How often do they do this? Was it random or targeted, and if the latter at the person or device? Side note - he wasn't arrested, he was handcuffed, had a weapon stuck in his back, was detained, had an illegal search performed on his possessions, and all by purported law enforcement officers who refused to identify themselve…

Side note - he wasn't arrested, he was handcuffed, had a weapon stuck in his back, was detained, had an illegal search performed on his possessions, and all by purported law enforcement officers who refused to identify themselves. I have some news for you. Arrest means nothing but detained/held/stopped. Most people imagine an arrest action has something formal to it, like having your rights read or someone announcing…

There is a procedural difference between being detained and being arrested.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#114

Post by TheCoelacanth » Mon, May 16, 2016, 3:00 PM UTC

redcap wrote: post #41

segf4ult wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what country are you in where things like this don't happen?

From Australia, live in Japan. Having a gun pointed at you by police would not happen in the situation described.

Instead they will just arrest you and torture you into confessing.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#115

Post by Veratyr » Mon, May 16, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

brbsix wrote: post #107

hoppa_liza wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still need to identify themselves as the police. What they displayed is mob behavior; armed people threatening and going through a person's possessions.

There's no need for an undercover officer to identify themselves as such. They're free to lie and manipulate (to an extent). It would kind of defeat the purpose otherwise.

There's definitely a need if they intend to wield their authority as a police officer. Random people on the street can't just come up and handcuff me and go through my stuff.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#116

Post by Veratyr » Mon, May 16, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

pravda wrote: post #11

gsklee wrote: post #4

I once dreamed of immigrating to the US and working in the Bay Area... but it's become apparent to me now that there's something inherently wrong with that country. I guess I'll go to Australia or Canada instead.

Canada is cold. Australia is expensive and its government is corrupt. But getting to the point, you really shouldn't allow isolated acts like this to influence you. You're much more likely to be killed by the next earthquake in the Bay area then you are to be killed by dopey police officer.

> Australia is expensive

How so? Wolfram Alpha puts Sydney at ~1.2x the cost of living of LA: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=move+from+Los+Angeles+t...

Given that our GDP per capita is 1.25x US I think that we're about even. Also as someone moving from Melbourne to the SF Bay, there are areas within each country that are very far apart. Melbourne is far cheaper than the SF bay.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#117

Post by dwaltrip » Mon, May 16, 2016, 5:06 PM UTC

gsklee wrote: post #4

I once dreamed of immigrating to the US and working in the Bay Area... but it's become apparent to me now that there's something inherently wrong with that country. I guess I'll go to Australia or Canada instead.

Don't get swept up by anecdotes. And also remember the inherent negativity of the news. (Not to say there isn't any problem, of course)

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#118

Post by jamie_ca » Mon, May 16, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

schwarrrtz wrote: post #22

pravda wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is cold. Australia is expensive and its government is corrupt. But getting to the point, you really shouldn't allow isolated acts like this to influence you. You're much more likely to be killed by the next earthquake in the Bay area then you are to be killed by dopey police officer.

> Canada is cold. Not sure if you're being sarcastic here... In Vancouver, the summers are gorgeous without being sweltering. The winters are mild. Affordability is definitely an issue, but if you work in tech then it shouldn't really be a problem.

Well... on the one hand, 50% of Canadians live south of Portland OR. On the other, the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor that contains most of those people is notable for sever swings in temperature. I lived a little ways northeast of Toronto for a few years, and survived temps of -20 and 38 C.

Very happy to be back out west (especially with the glorious weather we've been having this month).

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#119

Post by joesmo » Mon, May 16, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #102

joesmo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your fist mistake is expecting anyone in America to care about your suffering. Your second mistake is not realizing that the cops don't give a shit about your money or your color once they've targeted you. Yes, they certainly do prefer to target individuals of color because that's been their primary objective in this country for its entire existence and before it was even founded as a country. But make no mistake abo…

Your fist mistake is expecting anyone in America to care about your suffering. There you are wrong, starting with e.g. reporter Radley Blako and his readers, and extending to large swaths of the white or thereabouts population who buy books like Arrest-Proof Yourself ( http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp... ) This was reified for me in ~2008 when a local cop played a game of chicken with his…

I too had a cop play chicken with me in his SUV while I was peacefully standing on the sidewalk. I'm not surprised to find out it's happened to someone else. There were actually at least a dozen people there. Anyone else would have been charged with attempted murder. For the cop, it was just another day at the office.

Radley Balko is one brave writer, that's for sure. But even he's just going to write about the atrocities here after the fact. Maybe what I should have written is not that no one cares, but that very few people do, and they cannot change anything. Even Balko does not realize the full extent of the problem of living in a police state like this, probably because he doesn't recognize it as a police state. And while his assessments of what exactly is wrong with our police in "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces", for example, are spot on, his solutions are lame. He understands the hate that communities in the US have for police, yet suggests that more foot patrols will help. We are way, way beyond that. Without strict liability laws and restrictions on police, there is no fixing this. While cops can get away with murder, there will be no fixing this. If having justice, which includes not murdering innocent people, is not enough of an issue for Americans to change this system of horrific, Holocaust-scale imprisonment, it really does seem like almost nobody cares.

Re: Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

#120

Post by joesmo » Mon, May 16, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #103

joesmo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your fist mistake is expecting anyone in America to care about your suffering. Your second mistake is not realizing that the cops don't give a shit about your money or your color once they've targeted you. Yes, they certainly do prefer to target individuals of color because that's been their primary objective in this country for its entire existence and before it was even founded as a country. But make no mistake abo…

While most everything you say is true, that is a terrible attitude. Becoming a negative, hate-filled cynic is the easy way to mentally cope with the situation, but it doesn’t help and actually only makes it worse by accepting it. Acknowledging these things as true but still expecting people to behave like civilized people, and speaking out when they don’t, is much harder, but it needs to be done if anything is to imp…

I expect civilized people to behave in civilized manners, but police are not civilized in this country--they have too much power and no consequences. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and what's more absolute than being able to murder pretty much anyone you want and get away with it? That's not a person, that's a fucking tyrant with a badge and expecting someone like that to behave in a civilized matter is what leads one to be beaten up or murdered and your relatives wondering why the cop got a nice, paid vacation for murdering their son. I'm just speaking from purely a pragmatic, survivalist point of view. If what you say works for you, that's great. But after having almost been murdered by an officer for peacefully having a conversation on a sidewalk, I can no longer believe these creatures are even fucking human anymore. And a lot of America thinks this way because a lot of people are oppressed and targeted by police here.