161–170 of 231 posts
In the about page, this author states that they produce "original reporting and commentary on the criminal justice system and civil liberties." I really think it is a mistake to blur that line. These days it feels like you can pretty reliably predict what narrative a journalist will present on any given story based on their individual poltics. How can you reasonably expect to be viewed as an objective reporter of fac…
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You have it backwards. The person didn’t change, they were always like that, long before money. Our system selects for them and rewards them, and when they attain those rewards they use them to further express themselves as the person they always were.
This is the truth of the matter - everyone else got off the train at millions or a small billion; the only people who ride it all the way to trillions are the pathologies.
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Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.
Yikes. Vastly outweighed by the ruination of journalism by politics.
The existence of the fourth estate is the existence of a political actor in tension with the others.
Since the bodycam rollout however, we're inundated with videos of justified police actions, over and over again. Proving that most criminals are indeed retarded, unable to follow simple commands and escalate minor stuff into full violance, necessitating the use of force against them.
Balko now of course sees bodycams as propaganda or "copaganda".
Utterly biased "reporting", starting with an agenda and then trying to prove the point by any means possible.
Go Gary.
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How is carjacking Kia’s fault? Kia had a problem with immobilizer anti-theft devices not being installed plus a well documented trivial way to “Hotwire” certain models. This would simply be car theft. It was a well documented (via social media) technique that lowered the skill level needed to steal a car to basically the ability to sit through a 30s TikTok. Is it that it’s a “gateway crime” to full on carjacking? You…
Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off. Carjackers (at least in Chicagoland) don't generally post up in parking lots waiting for victims; they're highly mobile. (I have two carjackings on camera from behind my old house, where we had a Nest camera. One thing I learned from that: anybody who thinks carrying a firearm is a realistic…
Oh, I misunderstood the term. I thought you meant randos who steal cars.
This strikes me as the sort of violent crime that should be aggressively followed and punished.
> No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area
Drones?
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Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off. Carjackers (at least in Chicagoland) don't generally post up in parking lots waiting for victims; they're highly mobile. (I have two carjackings on camera from behind my old house, where we had a Nest camera. One thing I learned from that: anybody who thinks carrying a firearm is a realistic…
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off Oh, I misunderstood the term. I thought you meant randos who steal cars. This strikes me as the sort of violent crime that should be aggressively followed and punished. > No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area Drones?
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off
Ah yeah, I forgot about this part. Makes sense. I also happen to have two (well, 1.5 - only caught the drive-away for one of them as the actual carjacking happened down the block) carjackings on my home cameras in the immediate post-COVID era. It happened in a similar manner here in one of the "very safe" neighborhoods of Chicago with burner cars. One of the burners was another stolen Mercedes - so I guess it's likely turtles all the way down until a KIA.
> Drones?
We have giant human-operated ones here in Chicago (helicopters) with at least one in the air seemingly all the time (according to my desktop ADS-B display). These coupled with the various traffic cameras spread all around seem to do a fairly effective job of tracking a stolen car if the police care enough to respond in time. Of course it's limited in the number of "chases" and available manpower.
Not sure why drones haven't made more of an entrance to this space. I think partly police union/labor issues, and partly the size of a drone needed to be useful enough (station keeping and response time) for the task would tend to look at lot like military surveillance drones. I vaguely remember some noise about about CPD trialing something like this, or it could have simply been "partnering" with Federal agencies during various recent protest activity. These are MQ-9 Reapers and similar drones in the class and they have been deployed over the city in recent memory.
I'm not sure giving CPD that capability is a great idea overall. If they end up having one or two drones in the sky 24x7 as a matter of course, surveillance concerns and abuse opportunities multiply. At least with the helicopters there is a large manpower and financial cost involved, and it's usually very obvious when one is deployed in your area due to noise.
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I enjoyed this long post about how changing the culture in a DA’s office is bad and should not be attempted
Because that's definitely what I said.
>The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency.
Your whole point is (aside from Chicago and San Francisco being interchangeable to the extent that Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin are functionally the same person) “if you don’t keep your ideological detractors happy and employed then you’re doing a bad job.” That’s just another way of saying that culture change isn’t feasible
The Chesa Boudin DA "misrepresentations" document, linked towards the end of this story, is weak, bordering on Trumpian. It highlights as "misrepresentations" cases where Boudin simply disagrees with Lim about a statement of opinion (whether his office was suitable forthcoming, organized, or deflecting). At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not re…
Anyway, possibly poorly-worded title aside, it is made clear that Lim was receiving information from someone that clearly was violating HIPAA laws.
Here is the text:
Dion Lim Violates HIPAA Rights of a Victim of Violence & Invades Her Privacy
• Dion Lim released an x-ray of the victim of a stabbing—without the victim’s permission, in a clear violation of the victim’s HIPAA and privacy rights.
o She claimed online that she had her grandson’s permission, but there is no indication he was authorized to grant consent on her behalf—and he was not the one to provide the photo, which she made clear in a tweet explaining she showed the x-ray to him, “and explained the decision to share it” as part of pressure to ensure the case was prosecuted.
▪ This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
• In connection with that same case, Ms. Lim posted video of the brutal stabbing.
o Despite the DA’s Office’s press release referencing the victim’s request for privacy (which was reiterated at the May 7, 2021 press conference in which Ms. Lim was present), she has not taken down this post.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
The only way to read that sentence as an accusation of Lim violating HIPAA would be to read it and conclude that she was both “an unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA” and also the reporter that the unauthorized source shared the information with (in violation of HIPAA, the law)
Calling the whole document “Trumpian” is kind of extreme when the criticism is “There’s an ambiguous phrase in it and I will not be addressing the clarifying language a couple sentences away from it” or “I think this lawyer meant ‘statutes’ when he wrote ‘rights’ which I imagine makes him wrong”