Afroman found not liable in defamation case • Hacker News Board

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#371

Post by asveikau » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #337

> In one of the music videos, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” surveillance footage shows officers swinging open a gate, kicking down a door, and roaming armed around a living room and a kitchen. >The other, “Lemon Pound Cake,” shows one of the officers, gun in hand, pausing briefly in Mr. Foreman’s kitchen by a cake inside a glass cloche. “It made the sheriff want to put down his gun and cut him a slice,” Mr. Fore…

Seems like the Streisand effect to me. Suing him over this calls attention to the inappropriateness of police raiding his house. I hadn't heard this story and now I took away from it some embarrassing stories about the cops.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#372

Post by RajT88 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

adrr wrote: post #361

chneu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American police are trained to be afraid. They escalate situations constantly. They're trained that every traffic stop is LIKELY their last. I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.

Not even the most dangerous job in the US. Forest workers, commercial fishermen, pilots etc are more dangerous. If we're talking about gun violence, your corner market cashier is more likely to get shot, Has anyone thanked a 7 eleven worker for their sacrifice thas you can get a slurpee at 2am?

I have seen some shit go down in 7/11's at 1am. You are not kidding.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#373

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #345

ddellacosta wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed. I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."

Newspapers used to have copyeditors for this kind of thing. I thought NYT still did.

[deleted]

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#374

Post by dpark » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #239

dpark wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Police do regularly get shot at when raiding. I wonder what the ratio of police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants. I certainly believe that bursting through someone’s door with guns drawn is a high risk activity. It seems like maybe no one needed to do that in this case, though.

I think the traffic stop paranoia stems from a couple high profile incidents like (1) Brannan in Georgia (2) Darian Jarrott executed after the feds/HSI setup a drug sting but use NMSP trooper as a sacrificial lamb and then mosie their way on over after for the aftermath. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Police_Shootout_-_De... [2] https://youtu.be/NqxTf-Vz12o?t=475 I've seen police in online forums referen…

I’m not sure there’s a general trend of federal officers using state/local officers sacrificially, but no doubt these cases are hammered into officers’ minds over and over.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#375

Post by john_strinlai » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

qup wrote: post #370

john_strinlai wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ice has literally abducted citizens with no criminal record. those people are victims.

[flagged]

abduct: to seize and take away (a person) by force

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abduct

sounds like what happened to me.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#376

Post by flatline » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #255

hedora wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s willing to publicly criticize government corruption and child abuse, so there’s no way MAGA would accept him. (Both these stances came up in the defamation lawsuit and in the music video.) When he ran for president in 2024, he registered as an independent, “citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues”. Even if he is ultra right wing on seconda…

> citing inflation, the housing market, law enforcement corruption, and legalizing marijuana as key campaign issues The first two of those issues were Trump issues in his campaign and Trump rescheduled marijuana to schedule 2.

There was an EO, but that is not law. Cannabis is still schedule I last I checked. The order is to make it schedule III.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#377

Post by gypsy_boots » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

chneu wrote: post #159

NikolaNovak wrote: post #136

I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they see…

American police are trained to be afraid. They escalate situations constantly. They're trained that every traffic stop is LIKELY their last. I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.

not only trained that way, the justice system upholds this by not prosecuting police violence in any meaningful way

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#378

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #235

ceejayoz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money” That appears to have happened; they're claiming it was a miscount. > were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,” Seems fair. (And opinion, which can't be defamation.) > They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,” Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption. I'd note that the jury found Afroman not liable on all these.

Statistically speaking "murderer is black" is a sensible assumption in US [1], but I'd prefer it wouldn't be made [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The chance of a random black person being a murderer is substantially lower than the chance of a random cop being racist.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#379

Post by fc417fc802 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #289

fc417fc802 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you break in with little to no notice or with a lack of manpower or if the occupant has nothing to lose, sure. This is why no knock raids are incredibly dangerous for all involved and generally a terrible practice. With the number of officers they often have in most cases it would make more sense to start off slowly and unarmed, making an earnest attempt to communicate with the target. People won't usually choose…

If you're there to arrest people, that seems reasonable. But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it. I do have the presumption that when professionals do things that seem weird, they probably have reasons that I as an amateur don't immediately understand. I've also read enough Radley Balko to know cops often get away with doing awful and stupid things...

I'm aware, but there seem to be an awful lot of instances where "high stakes high priority evidence collection" doesn't apply.

Re: Afroman found not liable in defamation case

#380

Post by input_sh » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

jcarrano wrote: post #257

input_sh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd work the same in pretty much any European country, as in you'd record them, you'd publish that, they'd make up some lame excuse why that's not allowed, it'd go to a court, and a judge would decide who was right case-by-case? Not quite sure which part of this process do you think is even remotely unique to the US.

100% of those cases would be favorable to cops. Defamation laws are quite restrictive in Europe, much more so when it involves public officials (take a look at the Strafgesetzbuch)

Absolutely not, Germany in general cares more about privacy than any other European country, which of course extends to cops, but you cannot extrapolate anything privacy-related from Germany as a continent-wide rule.

If you really want to generalise across the continent, the most common scenario would be that you're completely within your right to film them and publish that, but then the cops would argue (using GDPR of all things) that you have to blur their faces and names before publishing. (Try to argue != succeeding automatically, that's up to the court to decide.)