Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison • Hacker News Board

Re: Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison

#31

Post by srl » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 2:58 AM UTC

fexl wrote: post #9

VladRussian wrote: post #5

well, at least they didn't do that to him http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ljYNgLnpxM

The guy's screaming "Dad! Dad! Dad!" ... that breaks my heart. One bystander wisely asks "How do you resist when they're on top of your back?" and then wonders why they don't just put the cuffs on him and be done with it. That's a common theme I've noticed with these incidents: the assailants keep saying "stop resisting! stop resisting!" But I imagine it's kind of hard to stop struggling and moving around when you're…

Sickening.

More sickening still: many people's reaction to this magnitude of brutality (or, actually, to any magnitude of law enforcement's abuse of power) is to rationalize it by saying that the victim was "a criminal".

The unstated logic behind this argument is that, by breaking the law, you forfeit all rights. Poppycock: Nuremberg trials.

(And yes, it is true that the victim is often not, in fact, a criminal. But that has no bearing on whether this sort of treatment should be tolerated.)

Re: Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison

#32

Post by rhizome » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 3:43 AM UTC

thirdhaf wrote: post #14

rhizome wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's the judge and the prosecutor who are on the hook more for this use of Cyberstalking (and likely ultimately terrorism laws) to umask a critic using their First Amendment rights. The prosecutor is at risk for losing their qualified immunity, since he is using his position to commit a civil rights crime.

Prosecutors have absolute immunity which is incredibly difficult to overcome. Even falsifying evidence doesn't seem to do it unless there's a "pattern of abuse" which is practically impossible to prove. http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Pottawattamie_Coun...

Prosecutors do not have absolute immunity when it comes to crimes that are only possible with their office.

If they do something bad in a case, they have absolute immunity, but if they break the law under the guise of law enforcement, they don't. Same as cops.

Re: Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison

#33

Post by gnosis » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

May a thousand parody videos bloom in response!

Re: Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison

#34

Post by chc » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 4:13 AM UTC

axusgrad wrote: post #15

This is why we defended Lori Drew's right to free speech after her cyber bullying of Megan Meiers

If you can't distinguish between a woman deviously driving a vulnerable girl to suicide and a satirist doing cartoons about public scandals, I can't imagine you've put much thought into the subject.

Re: Police: Mock us in Cartoons, go to Prison

#35

Post by DasIch » Sat, Aug 06, 2011, 4:15 AM UTC

glimcat wrote: post #13

smokeyj wrote: post #6

Cops are legal terrorists.

One of the ideas in the theory of government is that it exists to have a monopoly on violence and so forth. It's murder if you do it once, it's not if the state does it a few hundred thousand times. To an extent, police abusing power and inducing fear in the populace is "working as intended" if it keeps the state in power. But our ideals tend to be such that we think the state should function with greater respect for…

Human rights and individual freedoms are not just ideals. They are crucial checks which insure that the government doesn't go "rogue" and abuses the power it's been given.