Over Thanksgiving I shot a gun for the first time. An AR15 and a Glock. The AR was fun to shoot. Kind of nerve-wracking holding a weapon that could kill someone but fun none the less.
The Glock was another story. It kicked like crazy and you could really feel the power of each shot in your arms. I didn't have any fun shooting it and I was a more than a little terrified I was going to hurt someone. Even when it was empty I had so much unease just setting it down on the table.
Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. I had an immense sense of dread just knowing how much power was behind those guns. The thought that someone was pointing it at children is just beyond my comprehension now. For what? Allegedly logging into a website?
If shes guilty, go to jail, pay the fine, whatever. But the level of escalation to even walk through the front door with your gun drawn. The level of... I don't know... disrespect? Hatred? I can't even begin to describe to someone who doesn't know just how much force and how casually its being shown.
Truly, these officers are a disgrace to Florida. The people who trained them are a disgrace. And the people who empower them to behave this way are a disgrace.
I had an identical first-time experience a few months ago. For some reason I was expecting the Glock to be way easier and less terrifying than the AR, but it wasn't. It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss.
Isn't the first thing they tell you about guns something like "don't point it at anything you don't intend to destroy"? How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? This is insanity.
After reading through the linked thread I'm taken aback by the sheer number of deaths that don't seem to get any kind of coverage in the national press (and that's only for people accidentally shot as the police were trying to kill their pet).
Considering the sheer number of killings, this can and really should be reported in much a similar way to a protracted war, as it does look very much to be an extended attack upon civilians by an armed forces of sorts.
bigyikes says >"It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss."<
No surprise. Even after years of training many, if not most, police officers miss close-up shots more often than they hit. There's a surveillance video somewhere of a security guard and a perp shooting their firearms at each other from about 3 feet apart: they miss every shot. One had a revolver and the other a semi-automatic. It is somewhat reminiscent of the "apartment scene" in Pulp Fiction but even wilder and less believable:
Shooting a target at a range is very different from drawing and shooting at real people who are moving toward/away from you, possibly with ill intent and possibly armed.
For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation.
> For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation.
This is a ridiculous rationalization that could be applied to literally anyone or anything.
What's interesting here is how much your experience is a bit counter to the actual power and destructive energy released by the two. You aren't WRONG -- the pistol is way harder to shoot. But that hides a big delta.
Essentially zero handguns produce the kind of energy downrange that an AR-15 produces.
You feel more recoil with a pistol, sure, but that's misleading in the extreme.
Because I am a giant nerd (I mean, look where I'm posting) I have a folder full of Excel docs I created to collate information to compare it for my own amusement. One of those is about ballistics.
An AR is almost always chambered in 5.56x45mm, a NATO standard caliber. The actual projectile in a 5.56 round is super super small -- like, 62 grams. But there's a LOT of powder behind it, so it delivers on the order of 1800 J.
Glocks are most often in 9mm, which is the most popular handgun round in the world. The actual bullet for 9mm is about TWICE as massive, but has so much less powder, and so much less barrel to spin up, that its downrange energy is typically less than 500J -- ie, like 28% of the AR.
But the Glock will buck in your hand, for sure. It takes training and practice to be able to hit the target reliably over and over.
An AR, though, is insanely stable for lots of reasons -- obviously, it's heavier than the pistol, but that's not all of it. There's some clever design involved. But the end result is a gun that most any trainable person can learn to shoot accurately very, very quickly. The marriage of 5.56 and the AR platform creates a weapon that's really insanely good at rapid, accurate fire.
This made it very successful as a military rifle, and makes it a serious terror in the hands of someone bent on bad acts.
For physics nerds: momentum is mv, kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. Upon firing, the chemical energy of the powder is converted to kinetic energy in the bullet. When the bullet hits the target kinetic energy is converted to tissue damage. More powder = more kinetic energy = more damage. Heavier bullet = more momentum = more recoil. That's why the Glock has so much more kick, while the AR-15 has more penetrating power and range. There are also pretty massive differences in the aerodynamics of the bullet, which probably helps the AR-15's range a lot:
But if you have the same amount of powder (chemical energy) a heavier bullet will simply move slower, resulting in the same momentum and recoil.
What makes the AR-15 easier to handle is that the gun itself is heavier, so it moves slower from the recoil. That and a few other things like dissipating the energy over a large area on your shoulder instead of the palm of your hand.
I mean, you're talking about how you went shooting deadly firearms for fun on a family holiday, and then express disbelief that police would enter a suspects house with firearms drawn.
I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so.
> I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so.
Can not be access to guns, I live in Switzerland and 'we' shoot a lot. Have a lot of firearms at home too. Yet our cops are all but trigger happy. So the reason must be another that what I think you are implying?
It seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained, and partly according to the esprit de corps and culture that has developed over time.
I agree with you and think it’s an extreme oversimplification to say that higher rate of gun ownership would lead to a more violent police force. Like the military, they are a tool that will behave and act according to the implicit and explicit expectations placed upon them from different sides.
Speaking of training and the military, the best trained personnel (Special Forces) are the ones least likely to pull the trigger. They are trained to hold back until they cannot anymore, and they are confident in their abilities. Very different from regular police. Even though the SF personnel are faced with situations far more dangerous.
Which makes complete sense - they have more training and experience and thus are more confident in their own ability to keep cool in a difficult situation and make split-second decisions, rather than what seems like low-level cops being scared to death and reactionary in their encounters. Whatever the reason for this pattern of behaviour, it's a disgusting outcome.
> t seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained,
Not doing so is grounds for dismissal in a lot of precincts. It's why we hear stories of officers doing the ostensibly "right" thing by not killing a suspect, yet face dismissal. The department training guidelines dictate a use of deadly force in a scenario, and not doing so is seen as risking the lives of officers.
This is the hill American need to climb to reduce the likelihood of death and serious injury by police. There is a lot of judicial precedent supporting such policies as part of policing guidelines, so it is very unlikely the change will come from the courts. Instead, citizens will need to work at a local level to shift training and policy towards de-escalation.
I don’t live in the US or Switzerland, but my guess is that in Switzerland, there is almost zero chance, statistically, for the police officer to be shot by suspect. In my country, I haven’t ever heard about police officer being shot, and coincidentally, I’ve never heard about a suspect being shot by the police unless it’s some kind of counter terrorist operation or something.
The behavior of American police behavior cannot be explained by the number that have been shot. That number has been trending downwards over the last few decades:
Regardless, the current actions in question were inexcusable even if police incorrectly believe they are in increasing danger in general. They simply had no reason to be brandishing firearms in this specific case.
It’s not about the number of officers being shot per se. I’m not trying to defend the US police. But I think it’s about the danger of the encounter. In my country, police don’t encounter suspects who are a) under the drug influence, b) very likely to be carrying a weapon and c) very likely to use that weapon. So here they are trained accordingly and police don’t shoot at suspects. In the US, it’s very different. My friend was once robbed by armed criminals in Los Angeles, which would be unthinkable where I live. So I guess the police in the US is trained to respond to such encounters because they have to. And the downward trend might be due various reasons, including aforementioned training that prevents police officer from being shot in the first place. It’s all just my guess, of course.
You're saying a lot here so it's a bit tough to respond specifically. But my point is the following: the danger police has decreased hence any talk of increased danger is certainly wrong. There may be a _perceived_ increase in danger, but that's not the same thing.
It seems pretty clear (to me) to be cultural. Not cultural in some static sense (e.g. American vs Swiss), but cultural as in the culture of policing in the US has been changing over time. Our police has treated American citizens as more dangerous while the opposite is true. The real question is why. Why have Americans idea of the level of crime in society so diverged from reality? Can this be reversed?
> "In my country"
> "In the US, it's very different"
If I had a dollar for every time someone on HN who doesn't live in the US nonetheless weighs in as an expert on American life I could retire.
Do you think a data scientist who had ethical concerns about covid data manipulation is a violent murderer? Do you think America in real life is like a movie with gun fights and explosions?
There is essentially zero risk of someone shooting a cop in a routine situation. They weren't raiding some druglord gang headquarters or ISIS terrorist operation.
Again, in my country criminals don’t carry guns and unlikely to be under drug influence = zero police shootings. Vs your country, where criminals do carry guns = lots of police shootings. No need to be American to connect the dots.
Switzerland is a much smaller and safer country than the USA, people Europe would come up with much better comparisons if they compared the USA to the whole of Europe rather than their particular niche.
Switzerland has very different regulations, practices, and policies related to guns than America. Although gun ownership in Switzerland is high for a developed country it is still a fraction of what it is in America.
Switzerland and America are like chalk and cheese when it comes to gun ownership.
The trigger happiness of cops is unrelated to our rate of firearm ownership. In fact the percentage of American homes that own any firearm has been on the decline for decades, while cops have gotten much more aggressive and militarized.
There's a difference between target shooting and threatening someone with a gun, just like there's a difference between pentesting an OWASP training VM and actively deploying ransomeware at a hospital.
I'm glad you find it easy to characterize 330 million people as the same person. That's in no way fair or realistic. It's like saying all Europeans are the same.
this is why Absolutly NO ONE should be immune from the consequences of thier actions, and in a situation of authoritative power should be even more accountable than others, not less accountable
I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement.
Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Seriously I think the only thing that saved us was two of us had our Eagle cards...
This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa... but having lived this sorta stuff first-hand you realize that it's not uncommon to have been harassed at gunpoint by the police.
Yea - criminals typically have more repercussions to their actions where-as a cop has lots of protection behind them. Usually the worst-case scenario for a cop pulling the trigger is a boring early retirement with one heck of a pension.
I'd rather be mugged at gunpoint vs. held at gunpoint by a cop any day of the week due to game theory alone.
The AR15 is shooting a much more potent round than the glock. It just is more fun to shoot because it is about 5-6x as heavy as the glock and your shoulder is a much stouter backrest than your wrists.
Are you under the impression that unless something is both illegal, and produced enough evidence to be convicted in court, it cannot be disgraceful? There's no possibility of a world where the police do disgraceful things legally, let alone disgraceful illegal things and get away with it?
Then please, enlighten me as to what exactly is stopping anyone from calling these people disgraceful until it ends up in court, particularly considering the fact that the video isn't especially ambiguous as to what happened. In fact, how is "a court of law" at all relevant to the matter of their being disgraceful?
I've seen some interesting backstories here on HN over the years but this was a brand new one for me I think ..!
I assume they figured out you were innocent since you are here commenting about it and I also assume you won't talk about it so I won't ask but I will say I am intrigued.
Yeah - it was a weird situation. My wife - who was pregnant- received a phone call that a close relative had died.
The guy had been a living off the grid. A nice guy who was into green living, etc. He was retired with a good pension and savings, so decided to build his “eco cabin” in the middle of nowhere and he self reliant via renewables.
Sadly, living in the middle of nowhere means a reduction in time to arrival for emergency medical support.
He had a stroke.
The details were a bit gruesome: walking for miles seeking help before freezing to death. Scavengers arrived quickly.
My wife got the phone call. The cousin she spoke with emphasized the gory details.
My wife responded loudly and with emotion.Screaming, wailing, crying, etc.
She wanted to go the impromptu funeral they were having. Apparently he’d wanted to be buried at his cabin. No service, just have his friends dig a hole and throw him in.
Perfectly legal in that state, as long as death was reported.
She’s need the car - which means I would have to walk to work. In the winter. With images of a man I knew dying from hypothermia fresh in my head.
I said no, unless she can find her own transportation.
Buses don’t go to the middle of nowhere.
We had a bit of a shouting match.
Anyway she said she’s going to the funeral and basically stormed out the door. She didn’t take the car.
Apparently neighbors overheard. They heard my wife’s blood curtling scream, and also heard about our plan to “bury a body in the middle of nowhere.”
My wife was pregnant, which substantially increases a woman’s risk of being murdered by the father.
And she was gone.
I wasn’t certain what state the uncle’s cabin was in, much less county or municipality.
I wasn’t certain how my wife planned getting there.
My wife had a smartphone but didn’t take it with her (not as odd back then).
There were other incriminating things- bloody clothes, lots of used menstrual pads (wife is pregnant - does he have a mistress?), there had been several shootings in my apartment building. Etc.
The police arrived in a very agitated state. They were certain I killed my wife. They asked questions I probably shouldn’t have answered:
“Where is your wife? Where’s the body?”
“I don’t know where she is, but the body’s in the middle of woods somewhere”.
“Your wife is in the middle of the woods?”
“Not yet, but she will be.”
You get the drift.
I was arrested and sent to the police station to be interrogated.
I spent a lot of time waiting around, and very little time being interrogated.
I got be treated like a murderer for the length of time it took my wife to borrow a car and drive 400 miles - when she checked in with family.
Not a fun 12 hours.
It’s worth pointing out we were broke and living in a high crime neighborhood. There had been three shootings in that apartment complex that year.
"Necessary" is a very subjective term, and many people disagree on what is "necessary."
For example I do not believe it is "necessary" to assume with out cause or evidence that every warrant enforcement will be a violent encounter the requires a military style response like we see here
Sure if you are going after a known violent criminal that committed a violent act (like murder). however IMO These types of tactics are not "necessary" in cases like the one we have here
They do it to blacks and whites just about as much as each other. You don't hear about the random people much, just the special cases that are suitable for the news. Don't mistake press coverage for the actual distribution.
Black people are killed at much higher rates (2-3x). Anything that says otherwise is usually trying to finagle the numbers by basically claiming that Black people have more encounters with the police so it's only natural. But that would imply that police have no say in who they stop and why.
There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation.
So it's not as if the police just came in like a swat team off the bat.
America is a dangerous place, and just like you're a 'regular person at the range with an AR and a Glock' - guns are everywhere.
The 'normal' situation for police to be serving a warrant would be against people accused of things more physically nefarious, and it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn if the individual wouldn't open the door and some degree of aggression needed to be used to enter the premises to serve the warrant.
That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise.
That said - this was a warrant for a white collar/non-violent crime and there's just no excuse for pointing guns at kids, or even the former employee frankly.
Point being, we can't cherry-pick just the things that don't sound nice, and entirely decontextualise.
If there weren't 500 million guns, many of them high-powered floating around out there - and Americans didn't have a propensity for shooting at cops (the level of assertion people show when being arrested in the US is way more than in other nations, car chases barely ever happen in my home country) - then the SOP (standard operating procedures) would be very different. Cops are chill where I'm from - t least in part - because they just don't face aggression or violence in a way that is really threatening. Fights, yes, guns in their faces, almost unheard of.
Given the possibly political nature of the arrest, I think it probably needs to be reviewed by the local Justice Department as well because 'gun pointing aside' - the other Elephant in the room is the issue of whistleblower harassment etc..
> America is a dangerous place, and just like you're a 'regular person at the range with an AR and a Glock' - guns are everywhere.
You are more likely to be violently attacked working at a convenience store than being a cop. But we would not tolerate it if the guy next to the slim jims pointed a gun at every random customer. Citizens that choose to carry a weapon for self-defense cannot point their weapon a people just in case, or even put their hand on their weapon or flash it to other people, that is called brandishing and is a crime. Yet police do it as a normal part of their interactions. This idea that police should be allowed threaten and intimidate other citizens as a normal part of their job because “its so dangerous” is ridiculous.
> it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn
Then this is a failure of their training or a failure of the individual police. Hand waving police having deadly weapons drawn and pointed at fellow citizens because of habit is not acceptable.
> That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise.
First, it is not too dangerous. Second, if it is, then pick a new line of work. If you are too scared to do your job correctly and would rather put citizens at increased risk then join the post office. And maybe, just maybe, a policy of shoving guns in people’s faces is what escalates many of these situations.
"You are more likely to be violently attacked working at a convenience store than being a cop."
You are absolutely more likely to be shot at while serving a warrant, than working in a convenience store.
"Citizens that choose to carry a weapon for self-defense cannot point their weapon a people just in case"
Citizens are not police officers, entrusted to carry out the law and who must actively confront danger, moreover, police are trained to do so.
"Then this is a failure of their training or a failure of the individual police."
This is wrong to the extent that it's very rational for police to at least have weapons drawn when individuals are refusing to comply with the warrant etc.. 'Weapons drawn' is a very simple tactic, which makes them easy to use if necessary. It is not in and of itself particularly dangerous.
"First, it is not too dangerous. "
Yes it is. [1] (from the AP, not Fox News) Have a little Google yourself.
" Second, if it is, then pick a new line of work"
This is a shameful remark, exemplary of the general tone here. "If you don't want to get COVID and die - quit being a nurse - now go ahead and work without a mask!". It's absurd (and basically offensive) to suggest that public servants shouldn't have the right to take appropriate steps to defend themselves, or even have to put themselves in a position of danger, let alone harassment in the first place.
Even African American Police officers are called the n-word and put up with all sorts of horrible abuses (just search 'police' on TikTok) which should definitely be illegal: you cannot go into the DMV or IRS (or Wallmart!) and start harassing people - the same should apply to police.
If the woman in question was concerned for the safety of her children, she would have simply opened the door and 'used her words'.
If in fact, the Gov. is illegally intimidating her, and she's done no wrong, well then I hope the judge recognizes that.
Finally, police reform is not going to come form the plebes on social media, it's going to have to be done thoughtfully, by them, led probably by ex-police officers who have first-hand experience.
> "You are more likely to be violently attacked working at a convenience store than being a cop."
> You are absolutely more likely to be shot at while serving a warrant, than working in a convenience store.
Do either of you have statistics?
> Yes it is. [1] (from the AP, not Fox News) Have a little Google yourself.
Serving a search warrant on a statistician who blew the whistle on corruption is nowhere near the same situation as serving a search warrant on drug dealers. Come the fuck on.
1) The article clearly makes a distinction between the types of warrants.
Serving warrants in general dangerous, point blank - and even 'white collar criminals' who don't answer the door are giving indication that something may be up.
It's 100% reasonable for the police to have their weapons upholstered at that point and well within reasonable SOP.
2) There's no evidence of corruption on behalf of the officials in Florida - this is the continued misrepresentation of some in the press, and easy echo-chamber populism.
There as an argument over how data should be represented; disagreeing with your employer is not 'whistleblowing'.
Again - Florida releases considerably more detailed information than they do in any province in Canada and somehow, everyone seems to think that we are doing 'such a great job in governance'.
The overall level of wilful ignorance on these nuanced incidents in shameful. Even so-called smart people believe what their emotional triggers and biases want them to believe.
I'm looking forward to hearing what the courts have to say about it.
I think this story might be the case study I use to open a discussion about news bias with my 66 year old father. We live in FL and I had a brief discussion with him sometime during the summer about our state's pandemic response. He mentioned something about the governor trying to hide data, and I was like “...huh?” and after hearing this story today I connected the dots.
> You are absolutely more likely to be shot at while serving a warrant, than working in a convenience store.
Over 600 convenience store workers are murdered on the job per year [1] compared to about 60 per year for police [2], about 5-7 of which are during serving warrants (additionally backed by your own source). Convenience store workers are murdered at about 7 per 100k, while police are about 7-8 per 100k [3]. As for how dangerous it is, there are more than 60,000 “no knock raid” search warrants per year in the US [4] and there is no way of knowing how many 10s of thousands of regular warrants are served as well. Saying that serving warrants is “inherently dangerous” because people could become violent is like saying working at a convenience store is inherently dangerous because any customer could be a violent robber.
> This is a shameful remark, exemplary of the general tone here. "If you don't want to get COVID and die - quit being a nurse - now go ahead and work without a mask!". It's absurd (and basically offensive) to suggest that public servants shouldn't have the right to take appropriate steps to defend themselves, or even have to put themselves in a position of danger, let alone harassment in the first place.
Well, wearing a mask doesn’t put others at greater risk. If police want to wear body armor, great. If police want to put other people in danger by excessive weapons use, then no that is not ok. Everyone is allowed to defend themselves against an attacker. Police want to defend themselves anyone that could be an attacker, which is not ok. I am all for providing safety equipment and training to all jobs. I am not ok with compromising the safety of others for the safety, perceived or otherwise, of the police.
This twisting of the concept of defending yourself is exactly the problem. Police already carry guns, multiple less lethal weapons, body armor, etc. If they are attacked, they have multiple ways of stopping the threat, including deadly force. No one has made any claim otherwise. But police want to be able to brandish their weapons and point their weapons at other people that have not shown themselves to be a threat, because there is the possibility of a threat and the misguided idea that imagined threats justify real threats by the police against other citizens.
My tone is one of outrage that police brandishing or even drawing their weapons against unarmed fellow citizens is just seen as normal and acceptable. That police being allowed to see every person as a potential threat and to treat them that way is the standard. Having your hand on your weapon is a threat. Having a weapon drawn is a threat. Pointing your weapon at someone else is a threat. Police threatening unarmed people is not acceptable.
>There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation.
Proof? This sounds an awful lot like something a police department who refused to publish video evidence themselves would make up out of thin air to save face.
The press clearly misrepresented even the minor facts of the case ('pointed guns at children') for which there isn't any evidence - using that likely untruth as the headline item thereby making it an iron clad fact of 'truth' in the public narrative.
It's possible, even likely that 1) The woman did something actually wrong and used government accounts without permission and 2) she didn't answer the door for 20 minutes, thereby requiring the police to take a more assertive posture. And frankly I doubt they pointed guns at children because that would be pointless. (Although it's possible she is entirely innocent of breaking into said systems, and possibly has some entirely good reason why she didn't answer the door for the police for 20 minutes)
If you use some public system in an unauthorized way, download data, you certainly would expect police to knock in the door, and you don't answer it for 20 minutes, they might have their guns upholstered when you finally do. That's not unreasonable.
Also, just because someone has a grievance with your company/government, doesn't them a whistleblower. In the entirety of her public foray, I'm not able to find the specific nature of her concerns - the more I look, the more I doubt her claims. Florida releases more data than any province here in Canada as I can tell, here is the Florida dashboard [1] here is the Ontario dashboard [2].
Florida release information specifically related to schools, LTC facilities etc. - Quebec has for example denied that data to the public.
I feel the entire case, like everything, has been politicized.
For reference From [3]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said.
Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said.
The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house.
One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.”
As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone."
This FL resident supports your efforts to inform. Trying to counter the downvotes but in the immortal words of Gureni Telsij: “there’s... too many of them!”
> All authorized users use the same user name and password.
Well, if you want to prevent unauthorised access to your custom-built messaging system, this is not the way to do it. Proving who accessed it has become a huge forensic investigation at that point.
Saying anyone hacked a system with such a clear and simple single-point-of-failure doesn't exactly ring true. It might be true on a technical level, but you left the door wide open.
Another way to interpret it is, law and order types have been co-opted by Republicans, rather than the other way around. It shouldn't take a Dave Chapelle colorfully telling you it doesn't fucking matter that some Florida data scientist broke a dumb law when she was disclosing information implicating Republicans of incompetence.
Have you even bothered researching the Breonna Taylor case? The judge issued a warrant in spite of evidence clearly saying she's not guilty, and she's dead now.
Judges routinely issue warrants just because the good ol police officer man says it's totally ok and he'll get a nice lollipop for doing it.
As I understand it, the warrant for Taylor's house had nothing to do with Taylor herself, but with another person believed to be using her house. Her guilt or innocence were never at issue.
The issue is: the evidence they gathered was that her home was specifically NOT part of any drug rings. The judge went ahead and issued a warrant even though all actual evidence said her house was not involved. Cops lied and said it totally was, and the judge just said "sure thing bros, we're all such buds."
My point is just because a judge issues a warrant doesn't actually mean anything at all. It has the same factual basis as me saying the sky is actually made of M&M's and judge granting a decree that it must be true because I said it.
Aren't magistrate judges supposed to take the police's word for this? You can't have an adversarial process for getting a search warrant. The remedy for broken warrants happens at trial, with motions to exclude evidence.
There was grave misconduct in the Taylor case! Police shouldn't routinely be assaulting homes with weapons drawn. My issue is just the process you're describing here.
"They got a warrant. Judges aren't going to issue a warrant based on asking a bunch of people if they sent a message."
Judges absolutely issue warrants all the time just for the hell of it. The very up parent seems to be indicating that some sort of due process was done because "oh, a judge issued a warrant" and I'm emphatically stating: a judge issuing a warrant means as much as me saying the sky is made of M&M's - just the ravings of irrelevant madmen in the face of actual facts.
Edit: I will say - the warrant process should absolutely be adversarial. Justice is to be blind. Which means if a crackhead and a cop come to a judge and requests the legal authority to break into a home with lethal force, the judge should weigh both requests the same. That's the intent of our legal system - the executive does what it thinks it's supposed to do in light of what the legislative has passed, while the judicial watches them to make sure they don't screw up.
Instead they all get together as buddies and stomp their collective boots into the skull of their fellow citizens.
This isn't realistic. Warrants occur relatively early in the investigative process and are often the first indication a target has that they're under investigation. An adversarial warrant process would simply result in the destruction of most evidence.
A good way to prosecute your side of this argument would be to point out any country in the world that has an adversarial warrant system and how well it works. I'm unfamiliar with any. Much of Europe doesn't even have the exclusionary rule, meaning that evidence of crimes obtained under false or broken warrants remain admissible.
If your argument is simply that most police shouldn't be armed, you'll get no argument from me.
To my knowledge, much of the rest of the developed world doesn't have a problem with cops being able to lie under oath with no punishment. The non-adversarial systems you reference rely on the confidence that when a cop gets caught knowingly lying to get a warrant, that cop is fucked. Here in the US, it's just another Tuesday morning at the coffee shop with the boys.
On the destruction of evidence, this one has always baffled me - so is there evidence or not? Presumably when I go to a judge saying I need the legal authority to kill some babies at 3 AM because otherwise the evidence will be destroyed... I have enough evidence to justify killing those babies, right?
... So this begs the question... Why do I need authorization to kill babies at 3 AM? In case the suspects destroy more evidence? What was my evidence to kill babies to begin with? Just a hunch? Because a judge should absolutely shit on that, and it should be adversarial. A judge should laugh when evidence for a warrant request is "oh, I need the warrant because they'll destroy the evidence for me to request this warrant."
From my rough observation of the news for the past 20 or so years, the evidence of these crimes these babies died to protect has never been worth it. Maybe you know of a few where the death of a few babies were worth it because the crimes were so heinous. Every time I'm aware of - it's just been drugs, which could have been done in daylight hours, with no dead babies.
Now maybe this is your point about unarmed police. I'm not sure. But a warrant tends to be a fuck ton of latitude (as I've said in prior comments - judges just hand them out like candy), so just send in cops who want to kill with their bare hands and you'll get the same result, in my opinion.
I agree I'm being extreme, but that's where we are today. We tried the whole "let's just all get along and try to fight crime together" method, and it turns out cops will just lie to judges and go kill kids. This isn't me doing a slippery slope "what if" scenario. This has already happened. A bunch of times. Too many times in my opinion.
So now it's time for us to take away everyone's toys until they can show us they can all be good.
I don't really understand how this is a response to what I said. I pointed out that much of Europe doesn't even have the exclusionary rule: that if the police obtain evidence through misconduct, prosecutors are allowed to use it at trial. You responded with 6 paragraphs about killing babies.
Be specific. What country has better rules regarding warrants than the US? This should be easy, because it seems hard to believe that we could be the best country in the world at this process. Then we can go look at how that country handles things, in specifics, and learn something.
Honestly, I've typed out a few replies, and I've got nothing.
Basically, I'm saying I don't trust cops because they kill 1,100 people a year. That's it. That's my whole argument. Just 1,100 lives. Every year.
You're saying that's not relevant to what we're talking about and let's look at how European countries seem fine with their more lax evidentiary protocols, legal systems, and trusting cops. Even though their cops only kill 50 people a year (at equivalent population rates).
I really don't have a "better" warrant system to propose other than an adversarial one because at the end of the day I don't trust cops, and you're advocating for a legal system that intrinsically does. This is me saying "hey, blue is actually yellow" and you saying "no, blue is blue." Our perceived realities are too far apart.
You haven't proposed an adversarial system. That would involve details, or an example of some country or system that uses one, so we can get the details from there. It's not interesting to simply wish that the warrant process was adversarial, because it doesn't appear realistic to have such a system; you might just as well abolish investigations altogether.
I'm not interested in your feelings about the police killing people, because I share them, and there's nothing for us to discuss about it.
I am interested in the provenance of warrants, because they're central to the actual story we're commenting on.
I think that you're both arguing a bit past each other. Fountainofage is stating that the situation as it stands is untenable and needs to change, and they've given several good reasons as to why. You are asking for examples of a direction for society's legal systems to change to, to fix the problem.
Basically you both are in violent agreement, I think.
No, we're not. We agree that police barging into homes with guns drawn and shooting people is a problem. We violently disagree about the solution: I think we should disarm most police, eliminate qualified immunity, have states license police officers, and require police officers to carry insurance. 'Fountainofage wants to eliminate search warrants.
I’m pretty sure this is the case in most if not all US jurisdictions. You have to pass police Academy and annual or at least somewhat regular proficiency, physical, and written tests to ensure you are competent.
It not like you can just get hired as a cop because you have a cop friend.
It is absolutely not the case. You generally have to pass a competency test, and, having done that, your retention is a matter for your local police force and governed by its collective bargaining agreement. Some states can "decertify" police officers, mostly for committing a felony, which is a batshit standard.
The point of licensing is to bypass the CBA; the state can revoke a license --- for reasons other than "failed an exam" --- and having done so, the local department cannot retain the officer regardless of the results of labor arbitration.
This is something Illinois is working on right now, at the behest of the Lightfoot administration, though I haven't seen much news on progress. It's a big deal.
> Justice is to be blind. Which means if a crackhead and a cop come to a judge and requests the legal authority to break into a home with lethal force, the judge should weigh both requests the same.
A judge does not have the power to grant a random private citizen the right to break into someone else’s home, with or without legal force, under any circumstance. Even a court order to allow breaking into your own property, say to evict squatters or tenants, would involve law enforcement. The judge can’t just deputize you like it’s the Wild West.
That's my point - not that a judge should grant a warrant to a crackhead, but that they should act as if they're granting a warrant to a crackhead. So basically the opinions, social standing, and claims of the entity requesting the warrant are irrelevant. Only the actual evidence should be considered by a judge when granting a "right to wantonly kill" because that's exactly what a warrant is at the end of the day. It should be taken very seriously, and unfortunately, it's not.
> Aren't magistrate judges supposed to take the police's word for this?
No. They have to convince a judge who is neutral in the matter. They have to have probable cause the criminal activity has/is occurring at the stated location the warrant is requested to be issued for. And the officers are under oath for this process, yet we see very few repercussions for a breakdown in this process. The affiant is open to persecution for perjury. The officers in the Taylor case lied by listing her and two others on the warrant. [0]
It's not an adversarial process, it's one of fact based decision making. Why would the judge blindly trust or mistrust the officer? The judge should trust the facts being presented are true, but that doesn't constitute a rubber stamp. And, as stated, if said officer lies about that evidence they should be prosecuted appropriately. Facts are often questioned to ascertain validity, that clearly did not happen in her case.
Right, the facts presented to the judge, taken as stated, have to add up to cause for a search. Judges shouldn't ignore a paucity of factual assertions. I don't doubt that many do. But short of an adversarial process, which I don't think can work with warrants, I don't know what you can do to mitigate a police officer fabricating evidence.
This is becoming nothing but a semantic problem. Where lies the line between "judges shouldn't ignore a paucity of factual assertions" and "judges should be adversarial towards a warrant application"?
But to me, the more important question is "what are the ramifications for subverting the intended warrant process"? It seems that both sides here are arguing that the warrant process should be based on veracity and proportionality, and it regularly isn't. So what process oversees and corrects the rubber-stamping of warrants?
In the US, the major ramification of exploiting misconduct to get warrants is that all the evidence stemming from that warrant is excluded from the trial, which is a rule we have that is not common in the rest of the world.
> The remedy for broken warrants happens at trial, with motions to exclude evidence.
But merely broken (if not fraudulently obtained) warrants aren't a basis for excluding evidence, because of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule.
She's listed because it's her residence. Read the warrant, and compare the language in it about her to the language of the other people suspected of using the building.
Note how there's no criminal history associated with her, and none of her behavior is a predicate to the warrant. Compare to what the warrant says about the other occupants of the building.
I'm not sure you read the warrant correctly. They clearly state they've seen Taylor's car in front of the 2424 Elliott address. That wasn't the address issued for the warrant. This is an implication being made. The warrant is issued for 3003 Springfield.
You've summarized it inaccurately unfortunately. Taylor was part of the warrant, not simply because it was her address. This has been publicly put to bed:
"The connection with Glover is an important piece in this puzzle. The narcotics investigation was not just going after Glover, but several people believed to be involved in a drug trafficking ring. Police had reason to believe that Breonna Taylor had been involved because they believed that packages were being delivered to her apartment which Glover picked up and he said that she was in possession of several thousand dollars that belonged to him." [0]
Obviously she's "a part of the warrant". It's her house. I don't know what "Clash Daily" is; I read the original source, which you provided. It comported with what I'd already read about the case, which is that Taylor wasn't the target of the investigation. See also the NYT's coverage, asserting that Jamarcus Glover was the target.
They explicitly call out her car being at a different address, not her own, in the warrant. This implicates her with the other two. She is clearly a target of the warrant. You can find validation of this in the warrant and the follow on reports done by the police department. At this point you're pushing a false narrative pretty hard.
She's a target of the warrant. It's her house. Glover was using her car. Of course she's a target of the warrant. Her guilt or innocence in drug trafficking had nothing to do with the warrant's issuance. She's not the target of the investigation. If I'd been renting a room in her house, I'd be a target of the warrant too.
Sorry, but she was the soft target of the investigation. As you (hopefully) know her house was only one of the warrants executed on that day.
From NPR: "The purpose of the raid on Taylor's home was to find evidence linking her to an ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a convicted felon with a history of drug trafficking, according to court documents.
Police didn't find any.
Now it appears prosecutors attempted to tie Taylor to a life of crime after her death." [0]
Now color me sceptical, but that appears to be an interesting argument if she's not a target as you continue to incorrectly posit.
What? the warrant had nothing to do with her house. The police broke into a home, and shot the occupants, and then arrested the one who survived for practicing his 2nd amendment right to use a gun to defend himself from criminals that were trying to murder him.
Aren't the requirements for being a judge basically just (1) be a lawyer (2) get elected? I'd hazard a guess that the bar in terms of technical sophistication for a Tallahassee judge is not that high and that it wouldn't be inconceivable for police to sell them a story about a scary hacker stealing people's medical data.
> I'd hazard a guess that the bar in terms of technical sophistication for a Tallahassee judge is not that high
I do wonder how much of the response to this post just begins with the assumption that red states are incompetent. If this had happened in a blue state no doubt the comments would be different. On the internet it's all ideology all the time.
Florida is still a purple state and Wikipedia says Tallahassee is 2:1 Democrat:Republican. I'd have said the same about judges in most areas of the US that don't have a significant tech presence. I would not feel that way about a judge in, say, Austin.
Per the article: "The FDLE investigator claims he determined through his "investigative resources" that an Internet Protocol, or IP, address associated with Jones's Comcast account was the source of the ESF-8 text message."
> Per the article: "The FDLE investigator claims he determined through his "investigative resources" that an Internet Protocol, or IP, address associated with Jones's Comcast account was the source of the ESF-8 text message."
Comcast has this weird system that allows users to open their WiFi AP to other Comcast customers, in return for the ability to hop on to any other "open" Comcast AP.
AFAIK, Comcast made it opt-out.
So, someone could have driven by to use her AP specifically in order to implicate her.
That is not how Comcast's wifi works. You'll find that when you connect to an Xfinity Wifi network in a subscriber's home, you're on a completely different network from their home network.
How much would you bet against that when the cop 'determined through his "investigative resources"' the ip address of the guest Xfinity network still came back as 'associated with Jones's Comcast account' ???
Are you claiming that the Comcast modem uses a different IP address for Comcast-network side of the NAT? That the modem has two routable addresses, one for the 'house', and one for the 'open' world?
Yes, that is generally/approximately correct. I'm not sure precisely how it's implemented on the public side, but you're placed into a seperate VLAN that enforces the captive portal. Traffic from the public WiFi network is isolated from the subscriber's traffic.
That does not mean it uses a different public IP address that communicate with the rest of the intermet, I have seen dozens of such public/private wifi systems, abd never seen one with a separate public IP
That doesn't at all answer GPs question though. That they're isolated LANs doesn't at all answer what WAN address they use. If no other indication it probably uses the same.
I have multiple VLANs at home, and I only have one WAN IP.
Yeah, it would definitely be something I would think to do. It's not like Wi-Fi security is that tight either. I'm mostly baffled by the resources being put into this crime. There's no way that if this weren't politically motivated it would get this much effort.
It is also a trivial piece of data to plant. Given the facts, I see no particular motivation for her to have sent the message. However I do see a motivation for the department to try to frame her. And they've already established a willingness to make stuff up.
And I'd also want to know more about the setup. What is the machine used for? What else is on it? How is the logging set up?
Given the general incompetence shown, I wouldn't be surprised if the machine needed to provide ingress is also one that is publicly accessible for downloading data from the public. With lots of stuff in unlogged POST requests. If so, they could indeed have a request from her close in time to when the message was sent. And it might be legitimately hard to figure out whether she was doing something authorized or not.
Our plea bargain system is so lopsided that 97% of criminal charges end with a guilty plea without a trial. Even if she is 90% sure of winning at trial, unless she has a million dollars lying around and a deathwish, it STILL isn't worth it to fight the system.
I first looked into this after Aaron Swartz's suicide. Every time I've looked since it has seemed even more broken.
This is bad news for anyone who cares about justice. And good news for any authorities who are trying to target someone that they don't like.
That is not a remotely reasonable way of looking at the situation. Your odds in a criminal trial do not in fact reflect the likelihood that a random accused person will take a plea deal.
If we're discussing police charging into houses of people accused of nonviolent crimes armed to the teeth, we're on the same page. But otherwise, I'm not clear what your suggestion is here.
What is unreasonable about my way of looking at the situation?
Look at what happened to Aaron Swartz. If he lost at trial, he was facing a lifetime in jail. They were also seeking damages that he had no hope of paying because his finances had already been drained by the legal fight. A legal fight that was projected to cost over a million dollars more than already spent.
Or he could take a plea bargain. Which would have put him in serious debt, in jail for a few years, and made him a life-long felon.
Or he could commit suicide. Which, of course, he did.
In that surprisingly typical example, if his odds of winning were 90%, on average he spends as much time in jail if he chooses to fight. Which he couldn't afford to do. And you still have to accept that chance of losing your whole life in jail.
In that situation, I'd probably have accepted the plea bargain. No matter how much I believed myself to be in the right.
Given those incentives, it is somewhat surprising that 3% of people do choose to fight. But then again, that's down in the range of the portion of the population with serious mental illnesses.
This is plainly false. Swartz's own lawyer believed, in writing, after Swartz's death, that had Swartz gone to trial and lost, he wouldn't even been given a custodial sentence, and you can look at the sentencing guidelines and see why he reached that conclusion. The prosecutors didn't demand a lifetime in jail; at their grimmest, most hardball state, they were suggesting (a laughable, given the guidelines, the fact that it was a first offense, and a non-remunerative crime) 7 years.
You wrote other things, and I'm sorry I didn't read them carefully, because I'm a nerd and a human and I can't get past "a lifetime in jail". I'll try to revisit later and respond to them, and wouldn't want to suggest my not responding to them is an indication that they aren't good points.
You can read https://web.archive.org/web/20120526080523/http://www.justic... to see that the prosecutor's press release in 2011 said, "If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million."
That was before they added nine more felony counts on September 12, 2012. As techdirt said at the time in https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-go..., the theoretical amount that he could have been put away for was 50+ years with a fine of up to $4 million.
That's the lifetime that I was talking about.
The fact that they were seeking a far lesser conviction, didn't stop them from throwing around those figures. And I'm sure that Aaron Swartz had to think about those numbers.
Incidentally Aaron Swartz wasn't even the first programmer to commit suicide while being prosecuted by a team including Stephen Heymann. That dubious honor goes to Jonathan James in 2008.
All of this notwithstanding, the important point is this. For most of US history, plea bargains were illegal. The way that they now railroad people into pleading guilty en masse demonstrates that they should still be illegal. And the fact that our plea bargaining system is so lopsided means that the right to a fair trial is more theory than practice.
As a double check on that, consider https://innocenceproject.org/bad-drug-test-leads-to-wrongful.... Widely used roadside drug tests that are inadmissable in court have been found in practice to be wrong more than 1/3 of the time. And yet, 90% of people charged wind up accepting the plea bargain.
The state literally has no evidence that they can present in court. And knows that a lot of those people are actually innocent. But they all get railroaded.
35 years is a "whale sushi sentence". You have multiple ways of knowing it's false, if you dig in: again, Swartz's lawyer, the prosecutors own statements, and a straightforward reading of the sentencing guidelines (2B.1).
A particularly important detail of how sentencing works: charges group. The press releases often imply that you might serve time on every count, but in reality, in almost all circumstances, you serve the sentence associated with the most severe count.
The TechDirt article makes the same mistake. TechDirt has gotten better over the last few years; Mike Masnick got tight with the Ken White / Popehat scene, and I assume they get feedback now on legal stuff. But that article is exactly the kind of thing what White is talking about when he says that the media bears some culpability in people's misunderstanding of how sentencing works.
To be clear: all I'm litigating is whether Swartz faced a "lifetime" in prison --- or, for that matter, any double-digit-years sentence whatsoever. I'm not qualified to evaluate the sentencing guidelines, but my layperson read of the guidelines results in Swartz facing 1-2 years if he'd been convicted on everything. You shouldn't take my word for it at all, but do note that my reading lines up with what Swartz's attorney said as well.
You are right. I was remembering the press releases and not paying attention to the more detailed guidelines. (Side note. I've personally eaten at the restaurant that got shut down for serving whale meat.)
Still, the fact that prosecutors seek to create this confusion in the general public makes it likely that they seek to create it in defendant. And stressed out people who should know better often wind up with bad conclusions because stressed out people under pressure don't think well.
That said, Swartz's attorney told Swarts that they would be seeking 7 years. Your lay reading may say that they wouldn't get it. But the gap between what you hear from different sources is extreme. And once you're in front of a judge, I don't trust courts to do the right thing.
The press releases are a real problem, and I don't understand what the DOJ gains by lying to the public about this stuff, since they are not in fact going to win any of these lurid fake maximum sentences, but they're setting expectations that they will.
Swartz had excellent counsel, federal criminal defense attorneys understand the sentencing guidelines the way we understand singly-linked lists.
I agree, strongly, that there is a massive power disparity between ordinary defendants and prosecutors. But I'm going to gingerly venture that you can't gauge the magnitude of that disparity by the number of cases that plead out. Some component of that is power imbalance, but the greater component of it is that law enforcement generally prosecutes lay-up cases. Many years of reading and listening to Ken White, who is no friend of the DOJ, leads me to believe this is even more true with federal prosecutions.
By contrast the example of Harris County convinces me that law enforcement prosecutes a lot of shaky cases that they know wouldn't hold up.
See https://www.texastribune.org/2017/03/07/report/ for how there is only one county in the country that actually double checks drug tests after someone has plead guilty. The result is that the one county alone manages to exonerate more people each year than the next three states combined.
There is no reason that I know of to believe that Harris County has an abnormal number of people wrongfully convicted. They are only unusual in figuring that out and turning them free later.
You're not wrong and I feel roughly about prosecutors the way I assume you do. All I'm saying is that the plea deal rate is not an especially good metric; even in optimal circumstances, most charges would plea out.
>If he lost at trial, he was facing a lifetime in jail.
This is very likely not true according to his very good attorney. He felt that there would be no custodial sentence, and that losing the case was not likely.
Right, a fair and honest trial that you hold after seizing her property and assaulting her family in front of her with the full legal backing of the state. Seems good.
I'd say the most obvious is an old e-mail sent to her containing the username and password. Do we know for certain that the judge who issued the warrant was aware that the same username/password was repeatedly issued to different persons?
> The system is Internet-exposed. Even proving the user is in the country that you think they are is nontrivial.
If you run an internet exposed service and you log IP addresses and have the ability to issue a warrant, it is entirely trivial to trace a request back to a specific house.
There are a lot of ways to obfuscate your IP address, but if you don't know how to cover your tracks, it's easy to get caught.
> If you run an internet exposed service and you log IP addresses and have the ability to issue a warrant, it is entirely trivial to trace a request back to a specific house.
Having an IP address alone is not generally probable cause enough to get a warrant, because they are regularly rotated, and shared, across geographic areas. And that's assuming nothing proxying that connection at all.
> Having an IP address alone is not generally probable cause enough to get a warrant, because they are regularly rotated, and shared, across geographic areas.
It might not be enough to convict her, it is enough to get a warrant. While they do rotate, ISPs do this with law enforcement a fair amount and I'm pretty sure they keep track of who owns which IP at any given moment.
> And that's assuming nothing proxying that connection at all.
A clever knowledgeable person would proxy, most people wouldn't know how. This is why I said it would be a foolish hacker. It's also possible someone else tapped into her wifi and did it. Or maybe there was no IP.
I'm just suggesting what is the most obvious piece of evidence which a judge would accept to grant a warrant here.
It might not be enough to get an arrest warrant, but it could be enough for a search warrant.
Find out the ISP that owns the address, ask the ISP what customer it was assigned to at the time in question, and while that doesn't tell you who was using it for the particular accesses you are investigating (it could be anyone in the house at the time, or someone outside using that house's WiFi, or someone from anywhere in the world using malware installed on a computer in the house), it does tell you that that house has a decent chance of having relevant evidence, and that will probably be enough to get a warrant to go look for that evidence.
Is this merely an assertion or do you have evidence to back up that this isn’t enough for probable cause? I believe a whole lot of people have been served search warrants due to ISP logs.
An ISP log contains more than just an IP address, they contain customer information as well. And to obtain that log the ISP either has to cooperate, or the police have to get another warrant. The IP address by itself isn't enough to get the warrant to raid a house.
I have to admit that stories like this evoke a really strong, visceral reaction in me.
The depiction of police (allegedly) escalating the situation with threat of deadly force, especially with kids present, literally (not figuratively) got my adrenaline going.
I'd be interested in hearing both sides of the story with supporting evidence.
>I'd be interested in hearing both sides of the story with supporting evidence.
The thing is this story is not at all surprising or unusual for the US. This kind of stuff is constantly happening on an almost weekly basis and after all the evidence is collected the result is "Yes this all did happen and no we are not going to do anything about it"
Police departments are not required to report how many citizens they kill nationally, and they’re shielded from legal liability in virtually every case. Even when charges are brought, judges parse the law to an insane degree, to the point where sending attack dogs against a surrendering suspect in the woods is illegal, but not if they’re in a “grassy ditch”.
I’m not being hyperbolic, that’s an actual case where cops got off because there was no clear and specific precedent that what they were doing was wrong. And since they got off, they didn’t make new precedent to stop it in the future. Of course.
It’s trivial to pick someone up when they leave the house for literally anything. You’re isolated and trapped in your vehicle, if it’s done properly you have no means of running. They have a patrol car pull you over like a normal traffic stop, officer asks you to exit the vehicle and the two agents you didn’t see place you under arrest. Easy. It’s done in murder cases all the time.
This person clearly was not a fugitive and I’d be surprised if she or her family posed any threat but they chose to enter her home guns drawn.
>>It’s trivial to pick someone up when they leave the house for literally anything.
Yes, but it costs more and the potential hazard justifies it. Of course, if there are innocents involved the police might go in anyway, and they will allege such danger in the request for the warrant. Obviously Rebekah presented a suspected danger of continued cybercrime unless her alleged activity was interrupted immediately. Looking for the warrant...?
All laws implicitly carry the premise of enforcement by deadly force. What you see on the video is just stock procedure embodying that premise. This is the product of calling the police "Law Enforcement Officers".
> I'd be interested in hearing both sides of the story with supporting evidence.
I am not. As much as 'anti-intellectual', or 'plain wrong' it may be it may be, I am not interested in seeing evidence produced by the state or local police.
The US has regressed to a fascist state. Neither the police, nor politicians, nor federal judges can be trusted at this point. The whole system reeks of corruption at every level.
There is a difference between the two bodies. One is a state with a history of escalating violence, blatant fascism, utter disregard for human lives and history of manufacturing evidence. The other is a person who as far as I know can still be given the benefit of the doubt.
I get your point about the state, and I largely agree, but there's also been enough stories of individuals manufacturing outrage to their advantage. So I wouldn't give either party the benefit of the doubt here.
I get your point as well, it is not the right way to see things, but at this point, I am tired with the whole situation and I don't really see a way out of the situation for the States. I am lucky enough that I don't need to deal with this, but sitting here idle isn't really comforting either.
Sort of maybe... I feel like you've never visited Florida. I can't imagine a scenario where she is in the wrong, just that she didn't comply. Florida is full of authoritarian nut jobs. DeSantis is a literal plague.
"I'd be interested in hearing both sides of the story with supporting evidence."
Me too.
Coming in guns drawn is not that uncommon in that scenario. You have a suspect refusing to answer the door for 20 minutes, so you don't know if they are preparing an ambush or other danger.
Why did you decide to take the Police's story as truth? Do you actually believe that this person, a scientist with zero criminal history, decided to not answer the door for 20 minutes as cops were banging on it and yelling? How does that make sense to you?
My favorite piece of cop story-telling was the photograph the Philly FoP posted of a child they claimed was abandoned during recent protests, imploring citizens to help them help children such as them and that they weren’t their enemies.
It turns out those police officers had been a violent mob that swarmed a woman’s car, ripped her out of it and gang assaulted her before arresting her (she was later released without charge). The child they broke the window and took him out before taking his picture and using it for propaganda. But they got their child for a photo op, so I suppose it was justified.
FWIW, the caption was:
“We are not your enemy,” the union said in the posts showing Young’s son. “We are the Thin Blue Line. And WE ARE the only thing standing between Order and Anarchy.”
An affair whilst she was a PhD student at Florida State University with an adult undergraduate. Charges filed, no conviction, on stalking and revenge porn charges.
The article has statements from her in there. Did she deny at any point that she didn't wait 20 minutes? Seems odd that she wouldn't deny that part. But true, for all we know, none of the facts have been corroborated. To get the warrant, a judge would have to sign off on it with evidence meeting a probable cause standard. Also, this is the journalist's story, not necessarily one of either party.
“Yes you see. It made sense for me to point a gun at a child because I was made to wait for 20 minutes”
If I was a better writer, I’d adapt these things to prose and write up some Alice in Wonderland style story. People will go to the most ludicrous lengths to defend the most incredulous actions by police. Was the kid gonna throw his Tonka truck at him?
The officer in the video comes in with gun drawn, and points the gun upwards as he approaches the stairs.
The "point a gun at a child" part comes in that her children where upstairs, but if the cops are looking out for hidden gunmen, why would they belief what she says.
Police in the UK are routinely without firearms, so I think in this case the burden of proof would be on you to show they’re regularly entering houses of people suspected of computer crimes with weapons drawn.
I wasn't the one making a claim about what happens in other countries, so I don't need to provide evidence of their claim. My claim is that the actions in this specific situation showed no misconduct and was consistent with similar situations (non-compliance and building searches) in this country. You want evidence? Use a right to know request for the procedures from your local department. You can also read books like The Tacticle Edge to gain an understanding of what's actually going on.
Germany: for white-collar crime, they'd usually arrest you by sending y0u a letter asking you to please come in. Even if she were guilty, she wouldn't be looking at jail time where it makes any sense for a regular person with family to try running.
Soeaking of idiots ruining their life: Assange might be a good example that people know. He was allowed to surrender on his own/with his lawyers (first time around). Not sure about his latest arrest, but IIRC he was resisting and all they did was humiliate him by carrying him out like a petulant child.
Anything "hacking"/"unauthorized access", even if fairly trivial, will easily get your home raided and hardware confiscated in Germany too. They're unlikely to be waving guns around though.
Be harder to find counter examples. I can't think of many "western" nations where it's normal for the police to go in to a house for a non violent office with people with no history of violence with guns drawn.
If the expectation is that the cops will come in with weapons drawn any time they execute a warrant then we have to realize that this will result in people accidentally being killed. Does the standard for evidence for obtaining a search warrant justify the increased risk of someone innocent dying?
Some people would argue that not having guns drawn in this type of case would result in more police deaths. I agree but don't view this as a deal breaker. How many civilians will die with guns drawn vs how many police officers die without? Should we count civilian and police lives the same in this situation? Police officers are compensated for the risks they take and have protective gear like body armour to reduce this risk. In the linked video I don't see the police using any head covering other than ball caps. If they thought there was a risk why didn't they put on helmets? I'm sure the Tallahassee police have access to that kind of PPE. The fact that they chose not to wear full PPE suggests to me that they didn't believe there was a substantial threat in the home.
If she was compliant, they would typically ask everyone to exit the house before they enter to clear it. This scenario specifically took a different approach. I don't see a higher risk of innocent people being killed, so maybe you can gather some statistics on that since the scenario is really a counter example to that.
Every building search is considered high risk. It's not an extreme risk, which is why they didn't execute it as a no-knock with SWAT, but there is still risk. The actions taken appear to consistent with that level of risk.
This link [0] shows that US police kill over three times as many people, per capita, than Canadian police. However, I think there are other issues, like easy access to guns, that affect this stat so this isn't really a very useful stat for our discussion.
This group [1] has been collecting info on arrest related deaths but a quick look only showed me links to how they collect data and not the actual data. It also looks like they stopped their surveys in 2012.
This paper [2] has some of the most relevant stats I've found for our discussion and covers use of lethal force by police between 2009-2012. From their numbers, 83% of victims were armed or believed to be armed (this includes toy guns, etc) and over 93% of the deaths were from firearms. If we assume that the 7% of deaths were the police didn't shoot all apply to unarmed victims then 10% of the people killed by police were unarmed and shot. Their stats also show LEOs being killed in less than 2% of these incidents. Their numbers do show 9% of these cases resulting in an injury to LEOs but we don't have numbers on non-fatal police caused injuries so I don't want to compare apples to oranges.
I think I remember this paper from a while back, but read it based on a different perspective (ethnicity).
Unarmed in the context of this paper would only be as it applies to deadly weapons. The suspect could still pose a threat with an alternative weapon (such as a pipe) or even pose a threat with bare hands too. The percent of people killed without posing an immediate threat would be more appropriate, and was 5% (would like to see the details of those with prosecution metrics). I would guess that 5% that mostly fits in the 7% you mentioned (which includes cars, suffocation, falls, etc), but unfortunately the paper doesn't seem to get granular enough for that. So I don't think we can draw a good conclusion from this paper that there were more civilians unjustly shot by police than the police being shot by civilians (the paper leaves out non-fatal incidents too). On that note too, the 2% officer fatality rate you show would not be fully encompassing. Meaning, it would be missing encounters in which the suspect killed the officer without also being killed.
Do not point a gun at something you do not intend to shoot.
There is no reason to draw your weapon in this context. Danger should be determined from context clues, not defaulted to the highest priority.
There is no reason in hell you can ever justify pointing a weapon at a child. Period. That goes beyond bad policing and into disrespecting guns and plain stupidity. This is someone’s home not a war zone.
It would be great if we had good video of how the gun was pointed and where the people were. It was likely only pointed up the stairs in a "low-ready" manner and not aimed. But we will never know.
How about defiantly refusing to open the door and a past conviction for assaulting an officer as context clues?
I honest would like to know, from your perspective when should a police officer NOT have gun drawn? Seems like you think there is danger lurking every where, so should cops just go around with assault rifles at the ready all the damn time?
I didn't say guns should be drawn all the time. Someone's overly emotional and absolute statement incorrectly stated that guns should never be pointed a children. The scenario we are discussing is building searches, which are high risk and the behavior was appropriate in this example. Not to mention there is no evidence showing the guns being pointed directly at anyone.
At least three pistols were drawn by officers entering the home. The first officer doesn't draw his weapon until after interacting with the suspect, being told her husband and children are home, and then entering the home. If she has a previous conviction for assaulting an officer that wouldn't matter since she was already removed from the situation at this point. The first and third pistols I saw were pointed at the floor the whole time. The second officer has his pistol aimed at the top of the stairs as he is walking towards the bottom of the stairway.
"We have a video its at the very top of the link.
...
The second officer has his pistol aimed at the top of the stairs as he is walking towards the bottom of the stairway."
And like my comment said, we don't see any people at the top of the stairs, so we don't know if it was aimed at anyone or not. Even if there are people up there, we can't tell if the gun is aimed at anyone or pointed "low" (into the top few stairs) or at a higher angle to aim at a person as it's only a 10 degree or so difference in angle and we don't see the full scene. All we can do is make assumptions, which isn't helpful.
Based on the actions of the people we do see I don't think there was anyone visible at the top of the stairs. However, the reason for having a weapon up when doing corner drills or stair drills isn't because you're pointing at someone already in view, it's to have the weapon pointing at someone who comes into view. His weapon is up because he thinks someone might either step into view or become visible as he continues to move. He is the only LEO I see not pointing his weapon at the floor the whole time so his actions stand out to me.
He may have been following his SOPs perfectly. I don't think this is an appropriate SOP for LEOs to use in this situation. I don't think this case called for having weapons drawn at all. My view is that this SOP is likely to contribute to unnecessary civilian injuries and deaths.
Usually you have the gun up, but not aimed up (eg at the top few stairs but not above them), otherwise you're blocking your view of threats that are crouched or prone if you have the gun fully up and aimed at a standing adult torso level.
Why wouldn't this be appropriate when clearing a building with unknown threats when dealing with an uncooperative person? The only way it leads to unnecessary injuries is if the officers don't make a proper identification of a threat/non-threat, which can happen with the gun in other positions too.
This type of search wouldn't have been necessary anyways if she had complied immediately. They would have normally asked everyone to exit before doing their search, but once the suspect has been uncooperative and they gain entry they need to be proactive about the search to avoid evidence destruction or suspect fortifications given the suspect's actions. Now had she opened the door quickly, I would agree that the actions would not have been appropriate because you're supposed to clear the building by voluntary means first. In this case, the suspect's family declined that voluntary option by not complying.
So you're clearing house as part of a warrant and you know what threats are in it? Police would love a psychic like you. Maybe we should let you go in first all the time.
If it was an option? And I didn't have to travel? And I could review the warrant application and just "go in first" for houses like this woman's, and Breonna Taylor's? Ok?
Being a police officer isn't close to one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but being in contact with an adversarial police officer is one of the most dangerous situations to be in. I'd be more afraid of the police, like many people.
You would have to go in for all of them because it's your job, not pick and choose.
"Being a police officer isn't close to one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but being in contact with an adversarial police officer is one of the most dangerous situations to be in."
This is a logical fallacy. It can be dangerous to be at the hands of an hostile officer, but then an equal comparison would be to say that being a police officer I'm the presence of an armed violent criminal is dangerous.
But like you said, being an officer is not the most dangerous profession. Just like being in the presence of a police officer is not that dangerous.
No, your statement is not equivalent to mine. George Floyd wasn't an "armed violent criminal". Neither was Eric Garner. Neither was Breonna Taylor. Neither was Daniel Shaver.
What legal obligation did she have to answer the door?
Seriously- I’m not just being difficult here. Threats of deadly force should not be the default.
For context, this is coming from someone who carries a handgun every day for personal reasons. I’m not at all uncomfortable with guns. I am extremely uncomfortable with law enforcement using guns in a way that would get me arrested, charged, and convicted when there is zero legal justification for them to do so.
You also don't have the duties assigned to police. That's the difference. If you have the legal authority to clear a building, you could act lawfully the same way they did.
It may not be uncommon in the US but shouldn't it be? Do you know what your rights are when the cops show up at your door with a search warrant? If that happened to me I'd probably be finding and calling a lawyer with that 20 minutes, not setting up an ambush for the cops in a house with children inside.
But they couldn't possibly know if she's doing one or the other.
The rights/procedures for the search warrant vary by state. I have a general understanding of them for my state.
Every citizen should learn their rights. I think it's terrible, and a sign of a poor state of education and civic duty that so few people know their rights. This lack of knowledge allows violations to happen without any punishment.
I'm always amazed at how often cops approach every day tasks with weapons drawn. Reading the article (and being aware of the ongoing story) there's no indication (to me) that there would be any hostility facing the officers. Thus it is easy to draw a conclusion of threat escalation from the police towards a citizen (if this is the wrong conclusion to draw then the police need to do a lot more work to justify their actions and explain why they thought there was a threat, because right now no one should buy that). This is unacceptable gun behavior in any environment and goes against conventional training (I'm sure there are gun users here or people who at least shot in the boy scouts or something). I mean officer #2 even appears to have his finger on the trigger (officer #1 doesn't). There's a rule "never point a weapon at something you do not intend to destroy." Pointing a weapon at a person indicates they are willing to destroy (kill) that person. This is unacceptable in non-violent cases where there is not an equal force against them. I just can't imagine the training they get. It makes me feel like Surviving Edged Weapons[0] is, at least in spirit, used. [1]
I've seen a lot of people with bad trigger control and not knowing proper gun safety, but I've seen it far too often from police. The acceptable level of this for police is zero and it isn't even close to that.
[1] From what I've seen, it does still seem like they do similar training that is highly fear based. As in "you could die at any second. It is you or them" and does not reflect the reality that being a cop is relatively safe. At least that narrative is not in the public domain. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-23/how-da...
I mean officer #2 even appears to have his finger on the trigger (officer #1 doesn't). There's a rule "never point a weapon at something you do not intend to destroy."
That's horrible. And should be grounds for firing the cop.
I'm not sure how many on HN have shot a gun. But if you've got a qualified instructor, before you are even allowed to TOUCH the gun, you need to memorize the 4 basic rules of gun safety.
1. Every gun is always loaded.
2. Never point a gun at anything you're not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire.
4. Be sure of your target and what's behind it.
The second cop failed the last 3 rules. Was he willing to destroy the children? Was he ready to shoot when he put his finger on the trigger? Was he sure of his target and what's behind it?
Given that the answer is no, he shouldn't be allowed to handle that gun. He's a danger to the public, and a liability to the police department.
"Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men."
Police are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll. They get to retire with a full pension after only 20 years of working, and they often make as much as, or more than, software engineers do. The strong-arm of the state needs to be held to a high standard.
On the flip side, I had a friend who was a homicide cop in NYC.
By the time he retired, he was broken by the things he'd seen and dealt with that nobody should ever see or deal with. He got a nice pension, but he earned it.
My grandfather was a detective. He never once talk about his day as a cop to us the grandchildren. He was very cynical and suspicious of other people too. I guess this is what happened when you had to deal with the worst of society on daily basis.
Once there was an offhand comment about Soylent Green, and he said, "I've seen the stuff." It was in a bottle that the murderer kept in his fridge. If the police hadn't thought to do a DNA test on the liquid, they wouldn't have realized what it was.
Every Spring NYC has "floaters". These are people who died and were thrown into the river. Often with weights attached. As the water warms slightly, the body starts decomposing and eventually bloat from the gas makes it buoyant so it comes to the surface.
He once commented, "I don't think that there is a way that one human can kill another that I haven't seen." He then began giving a long list.
> In my opinion, police should be held to the highest standard. It seems like they're held to the lowest.
That's a bit harsh. Standards (and holding to them) varies considerably by jurisdiction (and sometimes by precinct).
And before anyone accuses me of making a "Not All Police" argument or anything similar, I'll point out that, generally speaking, poor enforcement of such standards (and harsher responses by officers) seem to be associated with communities that are poorer or have more minorities.
There are also issues with 'problem officers' getting shuffled off to departments in other cities or states without adequate record keeping or sufficient scrutiny, which can result in them tending to collect or concentrate in certain places (and predictably, that makes it more likely that such officers will have like-minded colleagues that are willing to cover for them).
If you fire this cop, they'll hire a new one, and put them through training that says that everyone might be armed and they're authorized to use force when they think they're in danger, and they'll continue sending cops out to raid people's houses for crimes where there's absolutely no evidence the suspect has ever even thought about being armed.
This cop almost certainly was in fact willing to destroy whatever he pointed his gun at and whatever might be behind it, because that's how he was trained.
This is strange logic. You're saying that they shouldn't fire the cop because any new hires are going to be incompetent? This doesn't make sense. You can both fire the cop and call for better training. Besides, if we're constantly firing cops for not following basic gun safety, either we solve the problem or it becomes cost prohibitive to not properly train. You can indeed have both.
One, I think this cop will argue he was following basic gun safety, that he was authorized to use deadly force against anyone or anything in the house. I don't think this cop was incompetent nor would his replacements be; I think he was doing what he was trained to do, and they'll train his replacements the same. You've got to make his actions fireable, first. You can't just wish they were.
Second, we won't fire the cops who don't follow basic gun safety - we will at most fire the ones who get caught on video as part of a story of national importance. This cop isn't the one bad-trigger-discipline cop in that department, let alone the country. Fire him without figuring out how to systemically fire them all, and cops will dismiss it as politically-motivated persecution, have some protests about #BackTheBlue or maybe even a work stoppage, and then go back to business as usual, with the same trigger discipline.
And the fired cop will get a job in another department.
I agree you can have both. I just think you can't have one without the other.
The gun safety rule applies to things you actively intend to destroy, not things you're merely "authorized" to destroy. Furthermore, cops aren't authorized to use deadly force against anyone in the house a priori, only if there's sufficient danger (IANAL).
(Not disagreeing with your overall point, just saying that it would be (IMO) laughable for a cop to try to make those arguments, even considering their training.)
Then we should sanction the whole state for minor infractions of one officer.
Municipal bond offerings are currently exempt from SEC registration and disclosures, we can get the federal government to change that upon evidence of small infractions and force an extremely high level of disclosures such as policing statistics for the next 10 years if the municipality wants to raise capital.
This beats activist's state-level FOIA requests.
It doesn't harm the ability of an officer to make split second decisions and get home safely, which is usually their argument against any proposal.
It doesn't require a whole civil suit or criminal suit for anything to happen.
Just gets the message across that actions have consequences. It lets them run out of excuses so their real thoughts can be made as clear as day.
If this is the case (I'm not saying it is or isn't), then that is more akin to gestapo tactics and should not be even remotely acceptable by anyone in society. More so those on the right who often draw analogies to the Soviet Union.
If you are surprised by these tactics, there are hours and hours of video you should watch from peaceful protests that have occurred over the last 6 months.
It's an oddity of US politics that this is perceived as a left or right issue at all, in that one 'side' seems to have adopted the stance that police should be allowed do pretty much anything with no repercussions or meaningful oversight. Outside the lunatic far-right, this sort of thing would be condemned from all sides in many developed democracies.
Because businesses don't want to pay/lose money on climate change action, and the "party of small businesses" endorses this view.
> Why is wearing masks a left or right issue?
Because the virus was seen as a political/messaging problem (rather than a public health issue) by one of the sides, therefore wearing masks was viewed as capitulation.
Because some sizable proportion of humans will believe any crap they're told, provided the message is couched in terms of something they're afraid of, and the right has decided to cater to those people leaving the left with the people who like to think about things for themselves.
I don't believe this is a good argument.
The same argument has been done endlessly for the other side.
There are definitely people who believe the party line on everything. If that's the case, that could be an indication you're not thinking for yourself.
For what it is worth, this isn't only a problem in the US. It is just that the US only knows what's up in the US and the US news is seen by most other western countries. There's also an argument to be made that US news highlights the worst people and not the average person.
Because as with all politics it determines the distribution of resources. Those who stand to gain v/s those who stand to lose have both heavily manipulated the science, or at least the reporting.
> Why is wearing masks a left or right issue?
Voluntary masking wouldn't be. Compulsory masking runs afoul of those who have a fundamental belief in self-ownership, negative rights and reject most positive rights [1]. This has deep political roots.
Exactly. I can recall when the right was all upset about Ruby Ridge and Waco. Now that it's people they perceive to be their enemies being punished they're cool with it.
The police (and their unions, and civilian voters with authoritarian pro-police ideologies) are a major political constituency on the right, one that Donald Trump had repeatedly pandered to (because he is a pro-police authoritarian). It is beyond naive to pretend “unaccountable police violence is good” isn’t a mainstream right-wing belief in 2020.
> When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ [Trump, July 2017]
> If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise. They won’t be so much, because the courts agree with us too — what’s going on in this country? [Trump, July 2016]
> “Sometimes they grab one guy, ‘I’m a reporter! I’m a reporter!” ...they threw him aside like he was a little bag of popcorn.” [Trump, September 2020, clearly mocking the reporter in context]
So the people on the “right” who are cool with this are basically every Republican official and about 70m Americans who voted for Trump last month. Seems like a lot of people!
The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)
In the decades since, the police (and their unions) have had a long, long history of right wing action.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is known for their 'Red Squad', which was used in the 1900s to bust up unions, leftists, and people suspected of being communists. They regularly welcomed literal Nazis into their ranks in the 30s and 40s.
The stories aren't unique to Portland either. A common piece of police iconography is a Punisher skull. Police with SS tattoos are not uncommon.
Law enforcement had existed for millennia, not the last two centuries. Greek polis had nyctostrategoi (literally, "night officers") that patrolled and enforced laws as early as 500 BC. And Mesopotamian city states probably had police, too. Do people really believe that professional law enforcement didn't exist until 1800 AD?
Sorry, I was a bit vague. Yes, obviously law enforcement has existed for centuries. Uniformed police departments have not. Especially in the United States, where police violence is especially bad. (I had sort of implied this with the North/South dichotomy, but was not explicit about it.)
Historically, enforcement of the law was a military, community, religious, or rotating obligation. It was not particularly respected, organized, or high class. There were some exceptions, but in general our current model of policing evolved from English tithings. Groups of men who were responsible for bringing criminals forward. These groups were collected into Shires, overseen by a Shire-reeve (later "Sheriff"). The shire reeve could round up a posse to go collect a criminal.
Over time, cities started to want to improve the protections for their capital. They wanted to try and prevent crime rather than hunt criminals. The night watch had a reputation of being low class and unruly, and the city of Glasgow decided to clean up their act. They founded the first uniformed police department in 1800 in an effort to be a visible presence in hopes of deterring crime.
Police in America were largely slave patrols, sheriffs and posses, and militias until the middle of the 1800s, when larger cities started following Glasgow's model.
As I pointed out in a response to your other comment [1] this is incorrect. Police as a public institution in the US date back to the colonial era, centuries before you claim the first police departments were formed. Altering the statement to saying that police were reformed to be more professional in the 1800s immensely different than claiming that police did not exist. The latter is akin to saying that armies didn't exist until the early modern period because most soldiers were levies instead of professional solder.
> The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)
This is a correct reading of the history of policing in America[1].
Policing in America dates back well beyond the 1800s (let alone the late 1800s), and has it's roots in the medieval system of sheriffs and their deputies. Organized police in the US date back to the early 1600s at the latest. In fact police existed in New York back when it was called New Amsterdam: https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...
I'm serious baffled as to how people got the idea that police were created in the 1800s. Do people really believe that cities like Boston and New York existed for centuries with nobody to enforce laws?
Night watches, tithings, posses, militias, and sheriffs are not the same thing as police departments. And even still, the vast majority of night watches were privately funded in America.
My link provides direct examples of law enforcement organizations that were publicly funded, as early as the 1630s:
> Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647.
Again, police are as old as civilization. Laws without a body to enforce them are just words in paper (or clay tablets).
Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.
That said, we're skidding towards a semantic argument, so if you are comfortable agreeing to disagree here, I am too. We can continue to think each other wrong, looking at the same history.
> Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.
This isn't a semantic disagreement, this is factually incorrect. ”Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces" have absolutely existed in the US before the 1800s and date back to classical antiquity at least. Rome often employed it's legions as police, and there was even a dedicated legion stationed specifically to police Rome [1]. It's hard to get more "Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed" than deploying the military as a patrol force. And in the US professional police forces, not militia or community watch, have existed since the 1600s. And by the way, many police forces are still led by elected leaders - professional, organized police and community oversight are not mutually exclusive.
It might be fair to say that in the 1800s and early 1900s industrialization and technology had progressed to the point that police started to resemble modern police, and many US cities grew to the point that they started municipal police forces in this time frame. But the police of the 21st century with cameras, computers, dna testing, 911 systems and radios are arguably even more removed from the police of 1900 than the police of 1900 were to the police of 1800 or 1700.
> It's an oddity of US politics that this is perceived as a left or right issue at all, in that one 'side' seems to have adopted the stance that police should be allowed do pretty much anything with no repercussions or meaningful oversight.
This strikes me as the kind of characterization of other peoples' beliefs that they would find to be false, misleading, and uncharitable.
>It's an oddity of US politics that this is perceived as a left or right issue at all
Not that odd. One side believes in decentralized power which tends toward police doing "pretty much anything" according to their read of the situation, and another side favors reams of paperwork and regulations that may hinder effective policing. The oddity in the US is how the media convinces people to pick one side and criticize the other absolutely, rather than commit to compromise.
It shouldn't be, and that's why I'm being a bit careful with my language. To normalize that it is in fact a bilateral issue. How to solve it and what to do about, sure, those are left and right opinions. But the fact that it is an issue needs to be normalized, because it is indeed a fact.
Honestly this seems like a bonkers denial of reality: the State is exactly the embodiment of the use and monopoly of violence. Pretending otherwise is ignoring hundreds of years of empirical data.
We aren't denying or even objecting to the state's monopoly on violence. The problem is the word "punitive" there. State violence should be a means to stop other violence. It shouldn't be used as a punishment by itself (beyond more indirect forms of violence such as denying someone's freedom by putting them in prison).
Half the problem is that you've been convinced that this is a left-right issue. It's political, absolutely. But not left-right. Stand up for what's just.
Being careful with my language should not be indicative of believing that it is a left-right issue. Being careful of my language should be indicative that I believe people will interpret it as a left-right position and I'm not here to discuss politics.
You're talking about how society should be run and how the state should respond to issues within its purview. That's inherently political.
I would say that being careful with one's language to avoid offense is reasonable, if the hypothetical other party's propensity for taking offense is reasonable. Incense at the specter of a political discussion is not reasonable.
This is something I've noticed. Often authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian views are mapped to left-right views. This makes conversation particularly confusing at times. I tend to notice when fairly central left-right anti-authoritarians speak they get accused of being left or right (whichever is opposite of the position the person they are responding to). I'm unsure how to have these types of discussions without them becoming left-right issues.
You should check out the political compass [0]. It's an organization but I'm more interested in the compass itself [1], which has left and right on the X axis and authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism on the Y axis. It seems to succinctly describe one's political ideology, although not to a granular detail. There is also the issue of multi-faceted extremism, where one takes views on different issues where when taken as a whole, the overall political philosophy does not fit into any one category. An example is being pro-gun-rights but left-leaning. PG wrote about this [2].
I recently stumbled upon Altemeyer and found his recent thoughts fascinating. He tries to approach the subject separately from left/right. The PDF is free.
That’s likely to a large extent a product of the US’s two party system. In multiparty democracies, you’ll usually get a selection of right-wing parties, from libertarian/ hyper capitalist types to moderate conservative parties (think Merkel’s CDU) to hard right to fascists. In the US, to some extent they’re packed uncomfortably into one party (though some of the CDUish tendency ends up in the other party), and the authoritarian end of the spectrum is assertive and noisy and tends to grab the narrative.
The case the right cares about is Roger Stone. He's an old man, no threat to anybody, who was involved in normal legal proceedings. Somebody decided to make an example out of him. He got a heavily-armed pre-dawn raid, and CNN was right there to watch.
I'm on the right side economically but I'm fiercely anti authoritarian and I find this terrible.
I don't like the "peaceful protests" because it's just destruction of private property but I hope they can create enough momentum to push for the privatisation of police.
Some BLM leader in NY was organising something like that, a militia to defend their people.
I speculate this is also why people like Kyle Rittenhouse were defending people in the protests despite not agreeing with the violence (before being identified as not part of the violent mob and attacked).
Incidentally I don't think police privatisation is going to happen, even under a Biden presidency, because that would remove power from the government and neither democrats nor conservatives are happy with that.
It’s obviously not the case, just a silly take. Do we really think “the state” is involved in telling police how to do their raids? Like DeSantis walked in to their planning meeting said to be extra mean, just to teach her a lesson?
Most police academies subject trainees to hours of video footage of cops getting ambushed by people with guns, and drill into them that any situation can turn deadly in an instant. They are hard-wired to think that they can lose their life in any second in any interaction with any citizen no matter what the circumstances.
Right, and that is why the "more training" argument I've heard some use as an alternative to the "de-fund the police" doesn't hold water.
My own experience working near a lot of police early in my career led me to believe that the majority of the training instills a "us vs them" attitude in the police, and it carries through to everything they do. Combined with the constant bombardment of stories about the tiny percentage of cases where someone is actually violent and the results are predictable.
Frankly, i'm of the opinion that the vast majority of cops shouldn't be carrying lethal weapons into the average traffic stop or whatever other activity is basically 100% safe outside of infinitesimal number of cases which go violent. After all, by pulling over, the person has basically already yielded to their authority.
You need the proper training. You can review some of that training through right-to-know requests. You can also read The Tactical Edge. Many of the issues you see happen are because of incorrect or insufficient training. There can be an us-vs-them if it's not done right.
Also, the threat on a traffic stop is not to be dismissed - there are officers attacked during those stops. Those stops are not just for traffic violations, but can also happen if the vehicle matches one used in a crime or reported stolen. Do you really want to be unarmed when making traffic stops or other calls? Sometimes they may stop, not to yield to authority, but to ambush the officer so they can get away without being identified.
Which is of course why they are suppose to report the traffic stop as they make it. Plus, in the case of warrants and the like, the second they get a hit on their terminal it sets off flags in dispatch/etc which will immediately start sending backup.
Those were the systems I was working on 20+ years ago.
I think that's an argument for better training or a complete rethinking of training. More of the wrong training will just result in bad behavior getting more entrenched.
Related to that point, defunding may actually have the opposite of the intended effect. You may actually have to spend more money to increase accountability, change culture, and improve the quality of policing.
Yes, you can probably rework it, but as another comment noted its entrenched culture at this point. So, even if a cadet gets out of training with good habits/attitudes those can change very quickly when they start working with the more experienced officers. I'm sure it can be done, but it will likely take a zero tolerance level of push-back like has happened with sexual harassment in the corporate world to solve the problem.
And I don't for a moment consider most police forces to be underfunded. The lions share of most city budgets are the police force, and it goes to buying armored cars and helicopters, and "benchmark city" ratios of police/citizens. And where I live the armored car gets used once or twice a decade, and in all cases so far could have probably just called the larger city an hour away and borrowed theirs as was done 15 years ago before the purchase.
Some how we survived for a century with far less police, and outside of the crime wave of the 1970/80's which were likely caused in large part by other things, were generally safer too. That "crime wave" seems like it would have solved itself without the huge ramp up of police funding we now have today, although the tough on crime people like to attribute it to that. A large part goes to fighting the failed drug wars. Which in turn feeds into the massive prison populations we have now, the largest part of which are there for non violent crimes.
Well, more training and proper training (and probably getting rid of a lot of the leadership). It’s not like this is new ground; plenty of places have reformed their police (in particular, after the fall of the iron curtain), and there are playbooks that have been moderately successful.
This is a very naive understanding of police work. Pulling over does not mean a thing. If a small number of cases go violent, and you don’t know which ones, you cannot just ignore them. If 99.9% of contacts are non-violent, a cop who makes 1000 contacts is dead.
Violence has never gone down from defunding. Although this should be obvious, an alarming number of people don’t seem to be thinking rationally on that topic. It has certainly gone up after defunding, however.
You shouldn't make up numbers about the ratio of violent vs non-violent stops. The vast majority of police go for their entire careers without having to ever discharge their weapon. Police work is actually quite safe, they never appear in any of the top most dangerous professions lists. And compared with some of those lists https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i... they are paid much better due to being about the only job that is still unionized throughout the entire country. I've been pulled over by cops making $100+k a year, and its not all all uncommon for them to break $200k with overtime. (and this is in TX, not exactly known for CA salary levels).
That’s not how data works unfortunately. You can’t average the experience of a Chicago beat cop with a desk duty cop from Nome Alaska. Besides that, number of discharges doesn’t tell much of the story.
They’re not paid better due to the fact that they are in unions at all. Otherwise teachers would be rich, and police departments in major cities wouldn’t be struggling to hire even with relatively high wages. They pay that because nobody wants the job and the public is inexplicably antagonistic towards cops who join out of a desire to help people.
Saying that it’s quite safe is absurd and obviously untrue. It didn’t make your top 10 list of professions with the most deaths, but it’s barely below the cut, so still in the top 20 easily. And again, that data doesn’t tell the whole story.
American police training routinely promotes an us-versus-them mentality. It instills the idea that every situation is a threat that must conquered and dominated. You can see this in their comments that the streets are "a war zone" and talk about being "warriors", and a routine glorification of violence and stereotypes. This is why American police routinely escalate situations. Note on the video, the police don't just pull guns, but then start agressively barking orders.
Of course, in reality, COVID has killed five times as many cops as criminals have. In normal years, traffic accidents are higher risks for them, and many other professions are more dangerous.
Traffic accidents are the highest risk in normal years, followed by heart attacks. Those two reasons account for almost all of the on the job deaths for cops.
This is very true(personal experience). It’s not just in the academy it’s in every training course. All it takes is a jittery Rookie and things go wrong quick.
> "Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents. After several attempts and verbal notifications that law enforcement officers were there to serve a legal search warrant, Ms. Jones eventually came to the door and allowed agents to enter," Plessinger said. "Ms. Jones' family was upstairs when agents made entry into the home."
It’s weird too, because on one hand you have them being patient and restrained, on the other they decide to pull their guns out.
I felt the same way when I read they waited for 20 minutes. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be stated if the cops initially showed up with vests and guns drawn or if more showed up after failure to comply. If it was the former, I could understand the shock and cloudy judgment experienced by the scientist when you've realized your house is under siege.
Perhaps they viewed her uncooperative nature as the residents preparing for conflict. It's possible they wouldn't have drawn their weapons if the residents complied immediately.
> The people with actual power in this situation have the greater responsibility.
This cannot be stated enough. It seems in our general conversations that whenever there is a tribal component to the discussion that this responsibility shifts when it aligns or disaligns with your tribe. I've always been a firm believer that you can complain about those in other tribes, but it is your responsibility to hold those in your tribe to a higher bar. After all, you don't have a voice in the tribe you don't belong to and your tribe isn't perfect and can always seek to improve.
And there should never be a question about a person in a position of power being held to a higher responsibility than an average person. No one should be getting a pass on this, inside or outside of your tribe.
That's not really logical. If you think you'll get shot for no reason, then surely you would think that your chances of getting shot will go up with non-compliance.
If I think I'll get shot for no reason, then there's no point where I think I can do anything about my chances. There's just nothing you can do when your home is surrounded by people who likely have at least one person who's gone through "warrior training."
Your options are pretty much comply and hope you don't get shot, fight, hide somewhere and hope you don't get shot when they storm in, or set up a camera streaming to someone you trust just in case you don't survive. It looks like she used those 20 minutes to go with the latter option.
> If I think I'll get shot for no reason, then there's no point where I think I can do anything about my chances.
Thats terrible judgment. If you think you might be shot for no reason at all, then it certainly doesn't improve your chances to start giving people reasons to shoot you.
Perhaps preparing for conflict is the natural response to interacting with the police in the US, because that is what the police do before barging into your home and interacting with you. I'd lose my mind if some swine pointed a gun at my child. A message to police: don't do that, and you won't have a reason to be armed around me.
>I'd lose my mind if some swine pointed a gun at my child.
I wonder if things like this are what honor duels were about in the past? A way to semi-legally call out someone personally with potentially severe consequences.
Pointing a gun at a kid in a situation like this seems like it should be punishable by itself.
We need to codify a right to self defense against the police. Too many situations like this exist where the police place others in mortal danger. In a situation like this were the armed party not police it would be unquestionably legal for the victim to respond with deadly force. Police no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt and they deserve no special legal protections when they run around assaulting people with deadly weapons.
Who was in mortal danger? The video showed no evidence of a gun being aimed at anyone, simply up the stairs. It's also not assault unless there's motive. Without a physical or verbal act indicating unlawful use or potential use of violence, it would be hard to prove assault. (You might be surprised when you look up case law on this)
Your civilian scenario isn't exactly congruent because you are missing the legal authority point. If you are a civilian with the authority to search a building (your house when you hear a noise at night for example), then you you would be justified in clearing the building in the same way the police did. The response of deadly force depends on if there are alternatives to that use of force (and greatly varies by state). In this case, the alternative to the occupant using deadly force is to comply with the warrant, and if necessary, sue in court for any damages.
> There are plenty of developing and underdeveloped countries where that’s how it works.
My impression of developing countries was that police are vicious, brutal, and corrupt by default. As opposed to the US where bad cops are the exception. And they have very little oversight. Which countries are you talking about where that's not the case?
> I'd lose my mind if some swine pointed a gun at my child.
I understand the sentiment. I really do. But that is the wrong response when someone is pointing a gun at you. That’s how’s your child loses their father or mother.
Don’t forget that police are trained to shoot to kill. There is no training for “shoot to injure” ... the logic being that if you are injured, you can reach into your clothes and pull out a gun, potentially killing the officer who shot you.
I appreciate your sentiment, but, as a former Marine with a little combat experience, I probably have a bit more understanding of this type of situation than you (statistically likely). You say it's the "wrong response"; I've seen people who have their families put under threat of death; they actually lose it. It's not some choice of bravado, not an honor thing, it's a physiological reaction to the extreme emotional stress.
You may not understand this type of situation, but I've experienced the feeling of going from a safe, comfortable environment to being in pain and seeing friends hurt, all in a split second; even with Marine Corps training, I was ready to snap. My hands were shaking, there was a roaring in my ears, and I was ready to kill the first threat I saw. That situation, in my home, with my family? It isn't a choice. We are biological creatures, and there are some reactions that are just biological. It's easy to play armchair general and discount all of the human factors.
> We are biological creatures, and there are some reactions that are just biological
I understand and I assume you have weapons stashed around your residence in case of these kind of encounters.
But this family almost certainly did not. If you watch the video, the gun is pointing upstairs, presumably at the husband and children. I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation.
So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish, unless on the odd chance he’s a trained ninja like you :)
I think I did a poor job in highlighting the meat of my response from the rest. The point is not about what I would do, or could do, in a situation like that. The point was that people don't behave rationally in situations like that; not because they're fools, or weak, or immature; it's because they are having a physiological response to extreme emotional trauma. If they don't, they are textbook sociopaths, or have been put through large amounts of emotional conditioning.
Read through your comment:
"I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation. So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish"
This point of view is speculative, it doesn't come from experience (or even a basic psychological understanding). People do NOT function that way. Maybe they do when playing Call of Duty or watching a Die Hard movie, but not in real life. I can't really impart what it feels like in that sort of situation, but I hope you never have to experience it. You end up needing therapy.
Yep, the correct response is comply, document everything, hire a civil lawyer. Cities spend 10s to 100s of millions to settle police lawsuits every year. Might as well get your cut.
If some insane police officer with no trigger discipline is dumb enough to point his gun at an unarmed child, the child's parents are justified in shooting him dead. If the officer reacts with lethal force, he should be charged with murder.
>There is no training for “shoot to injure” ... the logic being that if you are injured, you can reach into your clothes and pull out a gun, potentially killing the officer who shot you.
I'd have thought the logic is, "If you want to injure, use a baton. Guns are tools for killing."
Teaching "shoot to injure" would be reckless considering the chances a "wounding" shot ends up killing somebody.
I understand where you’re coming from, but it really isn’t.
Most training is to shoot “center of mass”. That often kills, yes, but if the goal was to kill (or even kill quickly), tactics like the “Mozambique drill” - two shots center of mass and one shot to the head - would be standard. It’s not. It’s specifically used as training for exceptional circumstances.
Exactly. Law enforcement or self-defense training does not train to put a security round into the head of a downed subject (shoot to kill training), but rather to summon/render medical aid once the threat has been stopped (shoot to stop training).
Again, this fits the pattern of half-truths and lying by omission that she uses to fuel her sensationalism. Her tweets conveniently leave out the fact that she ignored the police for 20 minutes and was uncooperative.
My brother, a Portland living, Bernie Sanders voting guy who is in charge of the covid data analysis for a large, global defense contractor (he does it all day, every day) has called her an irresponsible hack from day 1.
> Again, this fits the pattern of half-truths and lying by omission that she uses to fuel her sensationalism.
Her key claim (She refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."[1]) doesn't appear disputed by any of the counter narrative, which seems mostly about smearing her about a cyberstalking charge related to her personal life and questioning her credentials[1].
> My brother, a Portland living, Bernie Sanders voting guy who is in charge of the covid data analysis for a large, global defense contractor (he does it all day, every day) has called her an irresponsible hack from day 1.
Well that settles it? Although with ESRI crediting her work on the C19 dashboard[3] and Google finding her skills credible enough to work with her on the school opening dashboard[4] I'm think there is some evidence that perhaps your brother-in-law's "day 1 judgement" might have been rushed.
“Hacking is not something I ever thought they would accuse me of because I have never displayed any capability of doing that,” she said. “I’ve never taken any computer courses or anything like that. I do statistics in a software program designed basically to do all that stuff for you by clicking stuff.”
Yeah, that's the data scientist to hire: someone who "clicks stuff."
Additional quote from article:
"In an affidavit signed by FDLE investigator Noel Pratt on Dec. 3, he concluded the email message was sent to approximately 1,750 accounts before it was discovered. Pratt said in the affidavit that he tracked down the IP address of the computer associated with the email and it directed him to Jones’ home address, which he said was probable cause to conduct a search of her property and seize her computers."
This person is not trustworthy, or qualified as a source. None of her colleagues have corroborated her claims. She was put on a pedestal by a media that desperately wants to attack any governor, especially a Trump ally, who wanted to open their state back up rather than go the lockdown model. It's that simple. I'm not a DeSantis fan at all, but if an anti-vaxxer was crusading against him, I wouldn't give them a platform just to get to him. I'd think about the implications of putting an alarmist with no scientific credentials to speak of on a platform as a weapon against him. She's a GIS specialist with no coding skills. How exactly does that make her qualified to talk about infectious disease data publicly, and to unilaterally change the dashboard she was tasked with maintaining without consulting her boss and/or team? (that's why they fired her)
We can talk all day about the appropriate police response to this kind of crime, but she's not credible as an expert. She's a click jocky who is skilled with Tableau, Qlik, and ESRI. And she's engaged in a deceptive charade of labelling herself a whistleblower, down to the tweets leaving out key information.
Give a bunch of high school bullies a few hours of training and all the 'tacticool' gear they want (vests, drop leg holsters, armored vehicles, ar's etc) and it's hard to imagine any other result. Poor muzzle discipline, innocents (and dogs) killed, the list goes on.
While it is true that a lot of people own guns, there still needs to be a good reason to draw your weapon. Drawing a weapon is escalating the situation. Full stop. By drawing a weapon you indicate that you are willing to kill another person. There is a clear difference between having a weapon and positioning one's team in case weapons are drawn, but the police have a higher standard than the citizens. As a trained professional you have a higher expectation to remain cool and collected in a stressful situation (that's why you train. That's what you train for).
Guns should not be drawn unless there is a reasonable suspicion of a threat. What I tried to say in my OP is that there appears to be no indication of a reasonable suspicion of a threat.
I imagine police officers are trained to have their guns drawn any time they enter a home where they cannot see the occupants.
There is not enough time to draw and shoot if the occupant runs out with his gun.
By the way, you are absolutely right about what it means to have a gun drawn: they are indicating that they are willing to kill. That's how they are trained.
> Gun ownership is very common in this country, and anyone on the other side of any door can have one.
> So I can get that part.
Its completely unacceptable. Police don't pull over drivers for speeding with a gun drawn. However, anyone in Florida may be armed and you cannot reasonably argue that the drivers are cool headed.
This overreaction is unprofessional, dangerous, and thuggish.
We have a law that we may not be required to quarter soldiers, perhaps a better law would have been to make it illegal to enter private property without consent armed.
> We have a law that we may not be required to quarter soldiers, perhaps a better law would have been to make it illegal to enter private property without consent armed.
I believe that a warrant gives them this right. But the give a bit more nuance there is a difference in entering armed vs drawn. We should definitely have a high standard for when weapons are allowed to be drawn. It is in fact the police who are in a position of power, so they have the higher standard to meet.
There is the concept of the Castle Doctrine, where you are allowed to use deadly force (within reason) to defend yourself and your family when someone attempts to assault you within your own home. Not all states have it but regardless, it is null and void when it comes to the police.
EDIT: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted? We're discussing gun ownership in America, when it is legally allowable to use said firearms and the fact that none of that matters when it comes to Police entering your home, all in the context of police acting like the Gestapo at this woman's home.
I think the law is a bit different when that someone shows up at your door or is inside your house. Isn't that the essence of the Breonna Jones case? I was reading of a different case recently too.
If they've announced that they're law enforcement, it's a bad idea though. You may be in the right if you're just armed and not pointing it, but being in the right never protects you.
Cops just have qualified immunity and have shown they throw hissy fit little tantrums if a DA holds them responsible for being the worthless sacks of shit that they are.
I agree that good cops do exist. Show me a cop that, for example, wants justice for Breonna Taylor, and I'll agree they're one of the good ones. But without being able to clear what is actually a very low bar for belief in American ideals and the rule of law, most of them are part of a criminal conspiracy.
Yeah, I bet if someone came over and beat the shit out of you for only an hour a day, you'd be correcting people that the person is only sometimes an asshole.
That's not the real relationship tree. Mass gun ownership leads to fear. Fear may lead to politeness and caution, but only because of the fear. It may also lead to a 'fight or flight' type response, and things might escalate quickly beyond where anyone wanted them to be...
If you want to structure society around fear, that is (I guess) a country's prerogative, but it's not something I (as a non-American) would ever support.
This hasn't been my experience fwiw as someone who moved from a non-gun country to the US. To be honest where I live (Montana) guns really aren't a problem. At least not the kind of problem that makes it a win to require Democrat candidates to support additional gun control measures. I think it's not unrealistic to imagine that we could completely dispense with the crazy Republicans if only democrats would drop gun control, it's such a wedge issue. Imagine that: Trump would never have happened, in exchange for not pursuing gun laws that probably wouldn't have achieved anything.
Mass gun ownership also increases gun ownership among fools and incompetents who leave their guns in places where they can be stolen and introduced into the black market.
Which doesn’t stop NYC having many, many guns being concealed carry. Because of you are looking to commit violent crimes, what’s another felony vs. having the power of life and death over victims?
And if you are a likely target of violent crimes, what’s a concealed carry felony vs. being dead or having a family member assaulted or murdered because you couldn’t stop it?
Half of what police are trained to do is violence-based. And we need people like that, for violent situations. But we don’t need that for a /TON/ of basic situations. We have armed warriors giving speeding tickets and expecting them to not be warriors. Where are the administrators who aren’t the warriors?
In that vein, there's actually an experiment in progress where cops are not always dispatched but instead a paramedic and social worker are sent. Turns out they can resolve many issues.
> I'm always amazed at how often cops approach every day tasks with weapons drawn.
That is IMO a side-effect of the (from an European POV) absolutely mind-boggling, ridiculous sentencing of criminals in the US. Here in Germany, when a drug smuggler gets caught, they can expect four, five years behind bars. Not worth to shoot the cop that just stopped your car full with meth and make a life sentence out of it for murder.
In the US however? Decades, sometimes centuries behind bars. Given that perspective, it does make sense for a criminal to shoot that traffic cop - the chance to get away and escape a death in prison is non-zero.
Add to that the fact that there are more guns than people in the US, plus extremely lax carrying laws, and "stand your ground" laws.
The result are (rightfully, I have to admit) afraid and thus extremely trigger-happy cops.
If the US wants to get rid of trigger-happy cops they have to get the gun problem and sentencing under control first.
Eh, don't side with cops. They have no legal obligation to do anything. They know this. So they pick their battles where they know they can kill a few people and get away with it. When it comes to actually having a chance at saving lives, they run away and hide, and get rewarded for it.
See the recent-ish school shooting in Florida where the on-duty cop ran away like a baby and let children die. Brian Miller. Still has his job. No one gives a shit.
Cops in the US are cowards who don't deserve to arm with a super soaker.
> In the US however? Decades, sometimes centuries behind bars. Given that perspective, it does make sense for a criminal to shoot that traffic cop - the chance to get away and escape a death in prison is non-zero.
Three-strikes sentencing can also exacerbate this - escalating minor drug possession to potentially life-ending prison sentence.
> I'm always amazed at how often cops approach every day tasks with weapons drawn. Reading the article (and being aware of the ongoing story) there's no indication (to me) that there would be any hostility facing the officers.
It's less amazing when you start to realize that police are cowardly and most are dumb enough to think that having a gun out will protect them.
It's currently a side life goal of mine to get the IANA to assign me acab::/16.
I agree. And the responses so far indicate either cynicism or justification. Neither is useful imho.
Police _are_ overly militarized and overly aggressive. We should be able to have a conversation in a healthy democracy about appropriate rules of engagement and escalation.
Personally, I think it can be traced directly to the failed war on drugs. and indirectly, to the wars on terror creating both an excuse and a market for police weaponization.
when you insist as a population to the right to have guns, then you have to be prepared that people need to treat you as if you have a weapon and, at times, will make mistakes. It's one of those weird rights that people want so they can "defend" themselves, but actually makes society as a whole a lot more dangerous.
The police went through the house with their weapons drawn because they had a search warrant that was being ignored.
They spent almost half of an hour politely requesting that these people allow them to carry it out, and these people refused to comply with what amounts to a legal court order.
A functioning state requires that the state has a monopoly on violence. If you are ordered to allow the police to seize some of your property, and you refuse, force will be escalated within the limits of the law until you the property is taken. That is a good thing. If the police show up at your house with a warrant, COMPLY WITH THEM. You aren't going to win a physical battle against them because, again, they have an ultimate monopoly on violence and the only way to change that is going to be the creation of a new state.
I sort of don't want a comment like this, that isn't relevant, at the top. Like you can briefly say you empathize with her position and that obviously the police are misbehaving. But what we all really want is the Republicans to pay for suppressing data, because obviously Florida is in much worse shape than anyone wants to admit, it couldn't be any other way, so whose head will roll for the inevitable cover-up, and if not, why was such a cover-up lawful?
"that there would be any hostility facing the officers"
From [1]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said.
Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said.
The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house.
One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.”
As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone."
...
There's a couple things missing from your comment:
1) The person refused to answer the door for 20 minutes, which is definitely a form of resistance and an indicator of possible problems, at which frankly, SOP probably kicks in and 'guns are drawn' at the point of entry.
2) The cops deny pointing guns at anyone, including children.
So frankly, that seems very reasonable.
While all of the journalists seem to want to recount only one side of the story, and only even part of it - is frankly deeply troubling, and it's misinformation of a serious kind. Right now we are getting really spooked about 'someone' misinforming American about election results, and attacking the integrity of the press, so I'm perennially amazed that journos want to avoid the important details that provide context.
Finally, remember there's SOP (standard operating procedure). There are a lot of guns in America, and people are pretty violent in general in terms of trying to get away, or to assail cops in the process. Most warrants served are probably not for 'hacking' rather more violent actions, and there may very well be established SOP about when to draw and not.
If the incident basically amounted to:
1) No answer at door
2) Cops enter with guns draw, point only upstairs urging people to come down.
Then it's completely reasonable.
Obviously, nobody should be pointing guns at regular people for white collar crimes, but as usual, all this might have been avoided if the individual answered the door and 'used her words'.
Also, the 'big story' here is the possibility of someone being harassed for whistle-blowing, which is disconcerting, but that's not so much relevant when worrying about the specific facts of an altercation.
When you give a cop a hammer and only a hammer they will view every problem as a nail.
This is what Defund the Police is about. Its not about getting rid of cops, its about providing the right resources and tools and staff for the type of job they have.
Evidence doesn't seem to indicate that, given funding, the police will turn it into meaningful training: it seems to go elsewhere. From [1], a sample:
> We found that, in a two week period at the beginning of June, when the anti-racism protests began, New York City spent $115 million on police overtime, which was over four times what the city spent in the same period last year.
> $14 million went to new locker rooms. $64 million went to motor vehicles and $104 million was planned for police training. During that training, 60 hours are spent on firearm skills while just eight hours are spent on conflict management.
So the training given to police is a fraction of money spent on annual overtime, and the training that is received goes towards increasing violence.
Remove funding for military equipment, restrict gun carrying by police to special teams, stop using militarized police as a response to nonviolent crime. These are all necessary changes that are part of defunding the police.
Military equipment is provided under the federal grants. It is only "free" in the sense that it isn't being paid for by local taxes. That means that local police need to be defunded of federal funds as well as local funds.
Sounds like it would be more socially responsible to decommission it properly, rather than using untrained, irresponsible, and reckless police as a dumping ground for surplus equipment.
What peices of this surplus equiptment are socially irresponsible? This equipment is defensive, administrative, or less lethal. If anything, it should provide more options before things turn lethal.
Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm. Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as it is a social signal that you come prepared to enact violence. Less lethal equipment promotes escalation, as it has a perception of being harmless and more acceptable to use in non-violent situations. The solution is to stop escalating, not to provide more methods by which to escalate while decreasing the risks involved in escalating.
> Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm.
I think there's a conversation about law enforcement and civil rights that people in the US need to have. But its awfully hard to have a real conversation when people don't want police to use lethal force and also don't want cops to have access to things that allow them to do their job with less reliance on lethal force.
Actually those are not tanks. And the US military has no problem using .50 cal on personnel. Which are just nitpicks but they illustrate how hard it is to talk about these subjects when the people making the criticisms are so profoundly ignorant about the facts of the matter.
Community trust and support is what lets police be able to police without lethal force. Treating it as a war between police and other citizens destroys that trust.
"Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm."
Yeah, and safer cars increase reckless driving for the same reason...
"Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as it is a social signal that you come prepared to enact violence."
It's being used in response to a suspect's social cue that they are there to commit violence. What should we do, just lay down?
"Less lethal equipment promotes escalation, as it has a perception of being harmless and more acceptable to use in non-violent situations."
This is false. The use of less lethal force is not viewed as harmless and any training will show that. That training will also contain use of force education.
But what is the purpose of an MRAP (for one example)?
In the incredibly rare event you have an active terrorist attack and can move the MRAP to it before it's over, it may provide the benefit of movable cover.
The rest of the time you have to park it (in two parking spaces likely), train people with it, fuel it, clean it, maintain it. It's just a huge distraction that sends a terrible message to the people you are supposedly serving.
I'm a person that it serves and don't see it sending a bad message. They can use it in inclement weather to deliver supplies, such as after hurricanes. They also tend to deploy the armor at events that are high risk prior to an attack.
Training and equipping peace officers to de-escalate situations is far cheaper and better for the general population than the hundreds of millions in excessive force and wrongful death lawsuits that are paid out of our taxes.
NYC alone has dropped over $300M on settling lawsuits due to their poor training over the last 5 years[0]
I know a couple current and former NYPD officers and the amount of times I’ve been told of how a routine mental health check up turned into 4+ cops beating the crap out of an unarmed person
in their own home would likely surprise most people who aren’t familiar with how brutal the police in the USA are.
It's not necessarily a 'lack of training' so much as 'money spent on irrelevant training instead of what they need'. Either police departments can agree that not all members of the police need to carry guns and be trained to shoot, and redirect training funds from weapons to de-escalation and assistance - or we must move the funding away from the police department to a different department that will do so.
There seems to be a weird attitude in the US that the police are some sort of independent entity, and the most the state can do is reduce its tribute to them. This is a really odd approach, and doesn’t really have a parallel elsewhere; successful police reform had generally involved changes of leadership, independent misconduct commissions, and increased consequences.
They are usually unionized. This mandates that many changes opposed by the union (misconduct commissions and increased consequences) would have to be approved/negotiated by them or else risk a strike. Those negotiations tend to cut out any meaningful changes that threaten their autonomy/privileges.
I suspect your comment is greyed out because of this term. Such a fucking stupid slogan, when you turn off people and then try to clarify "It means..." to an audience that's mostly stopped listening.
Again, "defund the police" is a motte and bailey argument: its activists will claim it's all about reform, but once they have your attention and know they won't be substantively debated, watch that word "defund" turn quickly to "abolish". And no solutions will be forthcoming about how to deal with criminals.
I'm not amazed, because police are put in completely unknown situations with people they've never met, and know absolutely nothing about.
People's public personas really aren't a guarantee that they'll act a certain way on their property, especially when they are not doing something voluntarily.
Combine that with the fact being that gun ownership is a Constitutional right--that means the chance that anyone can have a gun is above 0. And various attributes of anyone that might determine whether or not someone is about to retaliate are extremely unknowable without long observation times. There's no possible way to quickly ascertain someone's proclivity to violence, agitation level, emotional state, number of guns they really have on hand, willingness to use them, etc. People will act differently outside of a public setting like work, on a TV show, etc.
So as long as guns are as easily available as they are currently, it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most.
You are aware cops have absolutely no obligation to enforce the law, right?
So you or me entering this woman's home with guns drawn - we have the same obligation to be there as a cop.
This whole "oh but the cops are scared for their life" crap needs to stop. They have no obligation to do anything, so anytime they do, it's their choice. Just as much their choice as you or me busting into a home with guns drawn.
You wouldn't be sitting here sympathizing with how a random burglar is totally justified in entering a home with a weapon drawn because the homeowner could be armed.
Why do you do the same with cops?
Edit: to summarize my point: cops have no obligation to be there, so if their solution is to enter with guns drawn and barking orders, we shouldn't try to sympathize with that behavior. We should tell them to stay at home and cuddle a teddy bear instead. A lot more people would be alive today if we quit making excuses for why cops are so eager to kill people.
> You are aware cops have absolutely no obligation to enforce the law, right?
This is a search warrant situation. Obligations exist in this situation - to the judge, court process, and CO. If you want to debate the obligations to the public or immunity of cops, fine--but this isn't like a random traffic stop. What the police is supposed to do in this situation is very clear--serve warrant, get evidence.
> You wouldn't be sitting here sympathizing with how a random burglar is totally justified in entering a home with a weapon drawn because the homeowner could be armed.
This isn't sympathy but just expectation. You would expect a house invader to be armed for exactly that reason, right? Similarly, why wouldn't you expect a cop to do the same?
They have no legal obligation to be there or do that job. If they refuse, there can be no punishment. This has gone to the federal courts, and even the Supreme Court, several times. Cops have absolutely zero legal obligation to enforce the law. There's no sense in you even trying to disagree with this because the highest court in the land had consistently declared it as the law.
On your second point... I agree? Cops are forcing themselves into people's homes with the express intent of fucking shit up, that's why they enter armed and dangerous, the same as a thief. Is that what you're saying? Because that's what I'm saying. Do you sympathize with the thief? I don't, the same as I don't sympathize with the cop.
Edit: to clarify - the cop could be entering the home as a neighbor and a friend, and that's what everyone would prefer. Unfortunately, cops decided long ago they'd rather hold onto their right to kill with no questions asked, so now they're no better than a methhead busting down a door. It's ultimately their fault for this image, and they're the only ones that can fix it.
Of course the cops have an obligation to be there. Regardless of whatever legal principle you're referring to states, it will not take long for a police officer to be fired if they refuse to do any work.
> it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most
This mentality is so wrong to me.
Yes there is danger associated with entering a home, but if you are not willing to take any risk, don't try to be a cop.
Sure, if cops can reduce risk for themselves without increasing it for others, then by all mean they should, I'm not saying they should be daredevils.
But this is different, this is just offloading all the risks from their side onto the citizens.
A situation that could be minimal risk to everyone (because let's not pretend that people shooting at cops entering a home is a usual thing), is now high risk (and traumatic in all cases) for the citizen. I would even wager that the risk for themselves is getting increased over time because of people freaking out more and more seeing a cop with a gun in the US.
And let's not pretend that cops in the US are well trained, they are so afraid and completly unable to de-escalate a situation that I would have 0 confidence in a cop pulling a gun on me in the US (not saying I would like it anywhere, but I would sure be less freaked out in Europe).
This is just plain stupid, it's not a necessity of life like you paint it.
> And let's not pretend that cops in the US are well trained, they are so afraid and completly unable to de-escalate a situation that they I would have 0 confidence in a cop pulling a gun on me in the US (not saying I would like it anywhere, but I would sure be less freaked out in Europe).
> The officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota,[...] clocked more than 100 hours of trainings on topics such as firearms usage, street survival, and the use of force—but had only attended two hours of deescalation training.
> A situation that could be minimal risk to everyone (because let's not pretend that people shooting at cops entering a home is a usual thing), is now high risk (and traumatic in all cases) for the citizen.
Well, if you are arresting a person, perhaps there's things that can be done, like waiting outside. How is it supposed to be handled when you have to get evidence?
> I would sure be less freaked out in Europe
I'm sure this is an oversimplification but AFAIK states in Europe either have more restrictions on gun ownership or a culture/mediascape/welfare-state that doesn't encourage the desperation/antagonism you see in the US.
The chance that anyone can have a gun is above 0 everywhere, it's a meaningless statement. Sure, the chances are higher in the US than just about everywhere else, so why not just say that.
It's totally unreasonable for the officers to act this way, and I don't think it's particularly obvious that escalating to guns drawn makes them any safer. Maybe it does, but maybe it turns them into a threat in the minds of the people they think they are protecting themselves from.
> So as long as guns are as easily available as they are currently, it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most.
I don't think it is as simple as this. While one should train for the worst possible scenarios one also has to be aware what to reasonably expect. Like the source in my original comment notes, being a police officer is relatively safe. Given those statistics an officer should not view every situation as deadly. Though it is fine for them to be on high alert. It is still something that is often drilled into people during gun training that you should not point a weapon at something you do not intend to destroy. That is rule #1. Officers need to understand that by erring on the side of weapons drawn is equivalent to escalating any given interaction. Is that the mode of failure we want to have in police?
> While one should train for the worst possible scenarios one also has to be aware what to reasonably expect
Sometimes (I'm actually going to say most of time) giving the suspect warnings or time isn't a good idea. In the case of collecting evidence that is on computers, this evidence is easily destroyed if someone knows what they are doing and giving the suspect a warning could ultimately result in loss of justice.
Therefore, coming in unexpectedly, and performing actions to make sure the suspect does not do anything until the evidence is collected makes sense. Yes, coming in with guns drawn is scary, etc. But would knocking on the door and asking for the computers have worked? It might eventually, after many opportunities for evidence destruction occurred... but which way has a higher chance of working?
It's useful to note here that I think if you work for the state, you should be held to a higher standard--this is different than working at a private company and embezzlement, stealing, etc. If you have violated the trust of the citizens of Florida via doing something wrong at your state job, and a judge agrees there is enough probable cause that evidence is on your home computer, isn't better that a method of evidence collection is done that is swift and not likely to result in destruction of evidence? If someone more or less commits a crime against the state of Florida, isn't that more important than the fear/mental health of the individual suspect?
> Combine that with the fact being that gun ownership is a Constitutional right--that means the chance that anyone can have a gun is above 0.
This chance is always above zero, unless you've just full-body-and-orifice searched the person.
I am not american, but isn't there some constitutional clause on bodily integrity or something like that? And isn't that more important
than this right on owning guns/pointing guns at people that might own guns, and/or carry said guns?
> So as long as guns are as easily available as they are currently, it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most.
Going into a home gun-first is something I would expect from armed burglars, not from police that are there for a digital media search warrant.
[edit]
So, after a search, TIL: the USA does not have constitutional bodily integrity, but does grant you the right to own a gun... What ?
> police are put in completely unknown situations with people they've never met, and know absolutely nothing about
While this is often true, it wasn't true in this specific case. The person whose home the cops wanted to search was a former state employee, whose record they had plenty of time to examine prior to going to her home, so she was not an unknown quantity.
> I'm always amazed at how often cops approach every day tasks with weapons drawn. Reading the article (and being aware of the ongoing story) there's no indication (to me) that there would be any hostility facing the officers.
Invading someone's home isn't an every day task. Most people don't like that. And since this in the US where potentially anyone could easily have a gun, some will take the opportunity remove the invaders of their house by force, especially if they aren't aware or sure it's the police. [0]
But anyway, I'm not sure why police should even be the focus of this thread. They're just doing their job. The bigger issue I see here is the police have been called to take care of an issue that shouldn't require police.
EDIT: I'll just add since I'm getting downvoted to oblivion for saying something that could slightly be viewed as remotely favorable to police: It's sad to see this topic hijacked from the focus on Rebekah Jones, where there's an actual interesting story here about her work being potentially surpressed, to some unrelated topic about how much force police should use. Something that has been talked about ad nauseam across HN already, and yet this (at this time) is the most upvoted comment.
Invading someone’s home with an assault team is unnecessarily aggressive. Police in the US are armed to the teeth, so it’s no wonder they overcompensate with aggression.
Of course, if they received a tip or confirmed that someone in the building is armed and dangerous, then that’s a different story. But simply going in with guns drawn in every single situation is simply unacceptable.
Police have to announce their presence. You would think also just from common sense and context that this was something that could have been done with one officer politely knocking on the door, knowing there is a zero percent chance that there would be someone hold up with a gun trained on the other side of the door in this instance. I mean it's not like this data scientist was some drug lord or arms dealer with a history of resorting to violence. The guns were for theatrics and nothing more.
Lots of people jumping to conclusions one way or the other here, but keep in mind a few things.
#1 The police had a warrant. That means they had to have a certain amount of evidence to present to a judge. "She is a disgruntled former employee with an axe to grind" is probably not enough to get a warrant. Server logs with an IP address would hold up in court.
#2 Pointing guns at clearly non-aggressive people and particularly kids is bullshit in general. The PD says she hung up on them and knocked on the door for 20 minutes. Maybe BS cover up, but if true, might explain the seemingly over-aggressive entry.
Not jumping to conclusions, but sometimes decent people do stupid things.
For further context, this is the message that she's accused of sending:
> It's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don't have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it's too late.
That's literally it. When I hear "disgruntled former employee" I think of phishing for credentials or threatening former coworkers, in this case the terms "whistleblower" and "civil disobedience" seem more appropriate.
I'm not sold that what she did was a terrible crime. I do think it was foolish and likely pointless, but not something which merits police pointing guns at her kids and going to prison.
A disgruntled former employee allegedly accessed the former employers system to send an unauthorized emergency message. That’s illegal and it doesn’t matter if it’s the Florida Department of Health, Google, or McDonalds.
Creating your own dashboard and fighting your former employer’s data is much more like whistleblowing or fighting the system. Hopefully these are just allegations and she can get good lawyers.
Whistleblowing is often illegal. Civil disobedience is, by definition, illegal. Actions can be both illegal and morally/ethically admirable--hopefully we can all agree on that.
It’s not often illegal for public employees. Most of the time there are specific Whitleblower statues. She falls into the one for Florida.
Prong 1: Any violation or suspected violation of any federal, state, or local law, rule, or regulation committed by an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor which creates and present a substantial and specific danger to the public’s health, safety, or welfare; and/or
Prong 2: Any act or suspected act of gross mismanagement, malfeasance, misfeasance, gross waste of public funds, suspected or actual Medicaid fraud or abuse, or gross neglect of duty committed by an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor.
#1 seems like a fairly optimistic interpretation of how the system works in practice.
Re #2, "sometimes decent people do stupid things": these "decent people" have been doing these "stupid things" habitually, systematically, across the nation, for decades. This isn't some one-off incident, this is the typical procedure.
"Decent people do stupid things" when oversight is lax, accountability is thin, wrong is not punished, and right is not highlighted.
All of these factors are the result of poor institutional control, and a lack of capacity of institutional leaders to incentivize good behavior and eradicate bad behavior.
There's no reason to pull a gun on an unarmed child in a household of people who have demonstrated no danger to the police executing the warrant, even if it took forever to enter the property. There is no planet upon which "she hung up on us and didn't answer the door for 20 minutes" is by itself a reason to threaten to kill someone.
> There's no reason to pull a gun on an unarmed child in a household of people who have demonstrated no danger to the police executing the warrant, even if it took forever to enter the property. There is no planet upon which "she hung up on us and didn't answer the door for 20 minutes" is by itself a reason to threaten to kill someone.
I wasn't going after you, apologies if it came off that way. My frustration is aimed at the system which tacitly consents to needless police aggression.
When I read about police behavior I am always reminded of Dr. Zimbardo's suggestion that systems may be corrupted not by bad apples, but rather by a bad barrel that damages otherwise healthy apples within. Your comment about decent people hits near the same concept.
No worries, I can see how you could read it as justifying their actions. I was just trying to point out that she likely made things worse.
I wish our police forces could be much more like the British where only a small percentage of officers are armed. The over-abundance of weapons here makes that exceedingly difficult, but it would be nice.
Certainly situations like this where the probability of violent resistance is so small should merit unarmed response, but that's just not the way we do things.
Just because they have a warrant does not mean they should be going in with weapons drawn even if they were made to sit around for 20 minutes while the innocent person decided what do to.
And once they had taken violent charge of that innocent person they had no business lurking in the family dwelling with weapons drawn menacing people that were not even listed on that warrant.
You are making a very thin apologium for appalling behaviour.
> Just because they have a warrant does not mean they should be going in with weapons drawn even if they were made to sit around for 20 minutes while the innocent person decided what do to.
Agree.
> You are making a very thin apologium for appalling behaviour.
Wasn't my intent, but I can see how you would read it that way.
#2 acting aggressively simply because someone didn't comply is an abuse of power. The only justifiable reason to draw their weapons is if the occupants were viewed as a threat. To threaten as retaliation for non compliance is fucking horse shit.
Well I meant the IP was enough for getting a warrant. But people have been in some dicey situations due to funky shit on their IP addresses. "I have an unsecured wifi" is a defense that's been used in court.
> Well I meant the IP was enough for getting a warrant.
That makes more sense, but I suppose you can still frame somebody for the warrant only and make their life miserable. (Rebekah's computers were confiscated, as an example.)
It doesn't show people upstairs in that video. Even if they were, they were doing it to clear the corner and then lowering the weapon after identifying them as non-hostile (or no person at all since they aren't on video).
Do you know if they have guns in the house or if they are violent? This is standard procedure if they were noncompliant. No harm was done, so I don't see why this is being discussed. If they had thought there was a chance of violence, they would have been much more forceful.
> No harm was done, so I don't see why this is being discussed
Come on now. If you can't look at events this year and understand why people are frustrated/scared about a situation like this, then that's willful ignorance.
Is it reasonable for LE to come into certain situations preemptively prepared for violence (gun draw in tight quarters)? I think yes. Is this one? Hell no
They're prepared to defend themselves because the individual was non-compliant for 20 minutes so they don't know if the people in the residence were setting up an ambush. I believe it's willful ignorance to ignore the facts of the case. Have you ever educated yourself on police training and tactics?
So coming in with guns drawn and covering their arcs as they move through the building is okay even if they thought there was no chance of violence? The fact that no one got shot this time makes it ok for this to be SOP?
You seem to have made a lot of posts on this thread about how law enforcement should behave and the tactics they employ. What experience with law enforcement or the military do you have? If you don't have direct experience, what are you basing these comments on?
> This is standard procedure if they were noncompliant
Laws differ greatly across the US as to this. I am unfamiliar with the laws and procedures of this particular jurisdiction though.
> No harm was done
Though everyone is different, pointing guns at kids is very likely far from harmless, no matter the firearm operator. As we have seen very much in 2020, law enforcement makes mistakes all the time (to be generous).
I know of no laws that would prevent clearing a house they way they did.
If you have a mother acting illogically and emotionally, then I would say that is what would cause the harm. Kids will respond the way they think they are supposed to respond based on the response of others. If the mother remains calm and tells them everything was fine and normal, then there should be no harm.
Nobody was hiding anything as far as I can see. The state epidemiologist asked her department to temporarily remove one data field from the public report while they verified some data. Then, they asked it to be re-enabled a few hours later.
From what I can tell, Rebekah's supervisor didn't mention the reason for removing the data, he just told her to remove it. She told him it was "the wrong call", but did it anyway. He then told her to add the data back a few hours later, which she did.
So, it looks like she got the wrong end of the stick about deleting data, and was then fired for insubordination. Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.
If you want to dispute the facts go ahead, but don't bother with this character assassination BS.
Brian Burgess is a political operative, not a journalist.
The State of Florida has all of her email correspondence at work and after firing her for insubordination the best evidence they can offer from a person they allege is such a terrible human being is that she sent an email that said "that's a wrong call" and then complying with the request.
As far as I can tell Jones' work since her firing has been fine and that the Governor felt the need to use his platform smear her just bolsters her credibility, as does this absurd police action at her house.
"battery against a police officer" obviously relates to the level of danger that a police officer would be expecting. If that happened before, it is more likely to happen again.
A) That is an extremely dangerous road to encourage law enforcement to go down. "Charged with" is not the same as a conviction, and resisting arrest is a broad category that can encompass a wide variety of behaviors. Police in most instances should judge danger based on the current information they have, based on who is actively presenting a threat -- not based on whether or not someone was charged with something in the past. I can go into more detail on that if you want, but... I don't really think it should be hard to figure out why that would be problematic.
B) Even ignoring the above point, your comment is exactly the kind of off-topic change I was warning about. This thread was started by someone claiming that Rebekah's whistleblowing was justified and that it was worth throwing financial aid her way because she was doing the right thing. It was followed by another commenter questioning why she deserved aid, and as evidence that she didn't, that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record. Now we're debating whether the police used excessive force and whether they should have been scared of her.
The thread is off topic. The point is, the police shouldn't have done a raid over a crime this minor in the first place. Rebekah's previous criminal record doesn't have anything to do with the severity of the crime that caused this raid. The conversation over how police should have acted during the raid is a distraction from the original point that this was not the kind of crime that warranted breaking down someone's door and pointing a gun at their family.
"battery against a police officer" in a completely separate case does not change that point. It's irrelevant information to what we're currently talking about.
>another commenter questioning why she deserved aid
No, that is incorrect. OP claimed she was a whistleblower, with no evidence. I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.
>that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record.
Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".
What do those prior charges against her have to do with whether or not she's a whistleblower in this specific case? Nothing.
> Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".
It is when it's irrelevant information tacked on just just to give an impression that her account of what happened here is untrustworthy. If you had left that sentence off and not mentioned her prior charges, would anything about the rest of your comment have needed to change? What were you trying to accomplish by bringing up unrelated prior charges other than to impugn her character?
> I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.
Eh... let's not go overboard here. You linked 2 relevant articles, one of which is largely sympathetic to Jones' account, and one of which is an opinion piece that devolves into the same personal attacks in your own comment.
Then to drive home the point of how important you thought her prior charges were, you linked a 3rd article that's only talking about those charges and nothing else.
And that goes for the police who executed the search warrant - lawful until proven otherwise. The warrant is issued by a judge meeting a probable cause standard.
And pointing a gun at her children is just dandy, isn’t it? Cops training and behavior is one huge problem in the US. The other part of the problem is people like you, people who justify and normalize their violent behavior. If i were to choose what’s worse I’d say it is actually not the cops who are trained poorly, it’s people like you whose thinking is distorted towards violence
They were clearing a corner (assuming the kids were off-frame since the video didn't show it). I see no problem with what was presented in the article/video. Training and behavior is a major problem, but I don't see it in this case. If you had any training, then you would have understood there was no abuse in what was presented.
I have some training. When I was taught to clear corners it was always done by the first person to go around the corner. There isn't much point in clearing a corner when you have someone friendly who has already gone around it.
The LEO who is clearing the corner has also gone to a higher escalation of force than the other LEOs. Other LEOs have weapons drawn but he's the only one pointing his gun at things. The fact that only one person is behaving differently, and more aggressively, suggests to me that their behavior isn't appropriate here.
The first person went past the stairs (you clear floor by floor). It would be better to park the first person at the stairs while the others proceed to search the rest of the first floor, basically a modified bounding overwatch. That way you don't have to reclear the stairs everytime you pass it (since the upstairs has not been cleared).
You have to clear a corner of your conscience and learn some empathy (fake it till you make it). If it ever happened to you and your family you’d be pissed and wouldn’t waste your energy in trying to justify their violent behavior
Lol I have been the victim of police misconduct and filed a (successful) complaint against them. Maybe if you took some training and educated yourself on law and law enforcement, you would have some empathy for both sides instead of just one. There was no violence here.
Soft violence or symbolic violence is what I was referring to here. It’s menant to humiliate, to subjugate, to impose unearned reapect and law enforcement abuse it all the friggin time. Just once in a while is there is a honest and really respectful cop that not cooperating with doesn’t even appear like an option. But when cops bark orders and you’re supposed to say yes sir, i’ll do whatever you please because you’re authority, that’s when we’re dealing with soft violence
But not if you’re law inforcement, it is considered routine or justified as a commenter did previously: they did clear some corner or whatever. This kind of behavior has sadly been normalized and is seen as acceptable now. If we don’t do something now we’ll have striking/hitting/punching suspects as normal too
That's not true at all and is a slippery slope argument. In fact, over the decades the courts have made numerous rulings in the opposite direction - giving suspects more rights and protections.
That is not untrue, the courts have made some terrible rulings but that’s a different story. However, the law enforcement department has become increasingly trigger happy and there’s no denying of that.
They may indeed not be more trigger happy now than before but more evidence came to light now so the perception is that they are more trigger happy when in reality they WERE ALREADY trigger happy.
Im aware that there are professional law enforcement personnel but overall the institution failed to clean up its bad apples. Oh no, not only that but actively defends them.
You have the right to give money to anyone whether their actions were lawful or not. I was just wondering why people jump to give money to people they never met, based on 30 seconds of video and a short article. Maybe there's more to it, like what was listed on the search warrant.
Reporting accurate data on the current pandemic when government officials couldn't be trusted to do so. On the balance of evidence I don't think it's that likely that she was responsible for the unauthorized access, and even if she did I don't think the ethics would be as cut and dried as you're making them out to be regardless of what CEH says. What if that message saved lives? What if, as a hypothetical/counterfactual, it had saved thousands of lives?
Ends justifying the means is generally not considered sound ethical thinking. She may feel it's her moral responsibility, but it still wouldn't be ethical.
That's an awfully flippant dismissal of an entire major branch of moral philosophy. Consequentialism has its critics and I don't expect everyone to subscribe to it in a strict sense, but if your own moral philosophy doesn't justify unauthorized access to a computer system to save lives (and s/thousands/billions/ if it's just a matter of degree) we'll just have to agree to disagree.
> Ends justifying the means is generally not considered sound ethical thinking.
Sure it is; what else could justify means?
It is often recognized that there is a tendency to make arguments about ends justifying means when the benefits realistically foreseeable from an action are not such that they should be seen as justifying the particular means, though.
It would be better if you call it by its name then - utilitarianism. The choice with the greatest good or least harm. This is different from the ends justifying the means, which is colloquially used to justify bad actions.
> It would be better if you call it by its name then - utilitarianism.
Non-utilitarian deontological systems typically have rules about which means are appropriate to which ends, so, no, ends properly justifying means isn’t exclusive to utilitarian systems.
> Non-utilitarian deontological systems typically have rules about which means are appropriate to which ends, so, no, ends properly justifying means isn’t exclusive to utilitarian systems.
In the example you mention, the means are justified by the rules, not the ends.
> In the example you mention, the means are justified by the rules, not the ends.
No, in a deontological system where the appropriate means are tied to the ends, the means are justified by the ends. The rules are the decision principals, but the ends are (in that case) the inputs.
Sure, justification in any system is a product of the the rules as applied to the facts.
But, just as in reasoning from facts with rules of logic and inference to conclusions of facts, you don't say knowledge of the fact conclusion is justified by the rules of logic and inference, but by the source facts, so when ethical rules consider means in determining ends, it is said that those ends are justified by the means. In either the fact or ethics case you will, when it is not otherwise clear from context, cite the particular rule framework within which you are working, but even then you wouldn't say the conclusion or action is justified by the rule framework, though you might say it is justified within the rule framework by the applicable premises.
You're arguing about the individual definitions of specific words while ignoring the overall question. Nobody here cares about the subtle differences you see between "ethics" and "morals."
Here's the question: if you have the opportunity to save hundreds or thousands of lives by breaking a minor law, are you justified in breaking that law? Many of us would say yes. The alternative is absurd, it doesn't hold up in the real world. How many widely accepted historical heroes do we have who broke laws to save lives?
tfehring's point still stands, and I think you should respond to their post using the meaning that they obviously intended before you get mired down in a more pedantic debate over the technical definition of individual words.
I think you're mistaken to think that more data will save people's lives. The people not wearing masks have turned it into a political ideology, which doesnt respond well to data base arguments.
"Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built COVID-19 dashboard"
That implies it was raided because she was working on the dashboard, but it was raided because she allegedly accessed an emergency messaging system she should have no longer had access to.
That headline primes you to be outraged.
Could this have been revenge from the agency for what happened earlier this year? Maybe, but the article doesn't actually suggest that, and there's no evidence of it.
Not addressing claims of her data accuracy she <strike>did break</strike> apparently broke CFAA:
> "FDLE began an investigation November 10, 2020, after receiving a complaint from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only," Plessinger said.
> All authorized users use the same user name and password.
Having shared credentials for an account is going to make it very difficult to prove who accessed the system.
Also, the single user for a common system typically means that they didn't want to pay extra to have multiple users. Makes me wonder if this incident will open Florida to a lawsuit by the vendor.
Somewhat on tangent but interesting fact I just read about the CFAA - two cofounders of HN (Morris and Swartz) were convicted of breaking CFAA - Morris being the first ever.
Assuming Morris and Swartz here are Robert Morris and Aaron Swartz - Morris is a cofounder of YC, but I don't believe he had much to do with HN. Swartz was involved with Reddit, not HN.
He was a co-developer on the Lisp variant that HN is written in, but as far as I know the HN codebase was PG doing a POC that said Lisp variant could write software (and given he was more concerned with Lisp then and Reddit, then a company YC had investments in, had just rewritten from Lisp to Python, maybe making the case that Lisp could be used)
Sure. But if it turns out her allegations are correct, and the state was manipulating the data, I think that more than excuses it, and makes the police action malicious (criminal?) retaliation. If the state wasn't manipulating any data, then it's disorderly and improper (though doesn't call for armed officers still...).
Like most things, you have to sort out the details of the case before you can pronounce judgement.
Call me biased, but for some reason, when people sacrifice their careers and freedoms to send out a warning about corruption, I usually give them a lot more trust than the institution under scrutiny. Time will tell.
I wish that people with this mindset could be denied entry to Europe even for vacationing.
They are aware of the context, they know that they are entering a house where also a husband and two children are living. What makes them believe that they pose any kind of threat?
I'm not expecting them to ask for a coffee and discuss the matter and further proceedings at the table, but threatening everybody with a firearm like that?
As I recall, she first became famous claiming that the dashboard was deceptive and hiding cases and deaths.
That turned out to not be true, at all. It was just a very convenient story for journalists who, weirdly, have been obsessed with highlighting deaths in states run by Republicans, and simultaneously ignoring the same in blue states due to their narrative bias.
Illinois has been practically ignored because of this bias, despite very bad numbers in the latest spike, while when Georgia first relaxed it's lockdowns in May, articles were published calling it "an experiment in human sacrifice". (Didn't see a surge in cases afterwards, since most Georgians are sane and just kept wearing masks while going places)
While I always am against excessive police force, I also am fed up with journalists trying to dramatize things, and add credibility when it's not needed to any cause celebre. A person who builds dashboards isn't a data scientist BTW.
Edit:
I'm fully aware I'll be downvoted to oblivion for this post, but this person is a COVID alarmist, has pushed for excessive caution, and claims credentials and skills she doesn't have. I particularly resent her pushing for keeping elementary schools closed despite all of Europe and the vast majority of peer reviewed scientific literature saying otherwise. She's marketed herself as a renegade scientist all year, and dramatized all of it to great effect.
Second Edit:
Here she is in spring making the claim on Rachel Maddow that Florida was "hiding" hospitalization data. Absolutely untrue, and would have required conspiracy by public and private medical orgs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csvzt6kGzHw
This was patently untrue, and sensationalist. The absence of a massive, national scandal resulting in the impeachment of DeSantis proves that Florida wasn't hiding anything, months later. Her claims were always made without evidence, and were magnified by partisan actors.
Sure but when you make an absolute claim that something is true, absence of evidence is enough for any reasonable person to disbelieve the claim entirely.
I don't think that's an accurate recounting of the dispute. She wanted some data included; the government didn't because it thought it was invalid/made them look bad; and she disobeyed orders around how and which data to publish, which is what got her fired. I don't think any of that is even in dispute.
The big question is whether you trust Ron DeSantis more to make scientific judgments, or a random low level professional.
It's a few days later, but here's a pretty extensive report on the Florida coverup from the Florida Sun Sentinel, titled "Secrecy and spin: How Florida’s governor misled the public on the COVID-19 pandemic"
It doesn't directly state that hospitalizations numbers were actual lies, but it does demonstrate how the information was spun and presented in a very misleading way.
The absence of a national scandal proves nothing. Proof has to meet a much higher bar than that. Does it lend some support for thinking there was nothing there perhaps. But it is far from proof.
She made an assertion that Florida was hiding covid hospitalizations. Where was the bar of proof then? That which can be asserted with no evidence can be refuted with none as well.
So tons of people in Florida died, and they hid it? Because that's the only way this wouldn't have been a scandal if the private hospitals and public health authorities had colluded to "hide" hospitalizations and deaths.
> "complaint from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only"
> "Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents. After several attempts and verbal notifications that law enforcement officers were there to serve a legal search warrant, Ms. Jones eventually came to the door and allowed agents to enter,"
Although terrifying, many people in the US won't see that as a problem along the lines of "she broke the law and these are her consequences". I don't know if that's getting too "into the fray" for HN but... whatever... I feel it's important to express this.
Plenty of people in America think that having your kids put in refrigerated cages is a perfectly normal and justifiable consequence of your commission of a misdemeanor.
Just threatening them temporarily with violent death is nothing compared with that.
Sure it is. These "personnel who make bad decisions" are accepting money as recompense for their role as mafia enforcers. Just-following-orders is a corrupt moral position which has resulted in the deaths of a lot of innocent people.
I understand that when you think of corruption you are assuming several magnitudes greater recompense but you have to remember how the little folks live.
Has anybody verified the original story where she says that she refused to manipulate data? Is that true? I'm not from the US and I don't know if "floridatoday.com" is a trusted source.
This must be one of the weirdest arrests I've seen. I would understand officers busting in guns drawn if they considered denizens dangerous. I would understand an arrest without guns drawn. But casually walking in with a gun (in case there's something to kill) makes this look like a psycho checking in.
From my non-US perspective all these gun first arrests look crazy, especially for handling car speeding or non-violent offenders.
There is another thread discussing the benefits of government licensing the title "data scientist" while in this thread we complain about the government persecuting a data scientist for apparently political reasons.
She says she has backups of the website data and files, but I wonder if she has backups of the evidence of state corruption that she said was also on her computer?
Land of the free? The US a has created its own reality and complicity enables it to persist. It made its bed, now lie in it or do something and stop whining.
I'd say we should be outraged, but we're awash in outrage because the rule of law has become a one sided bludgeoning instrument for the government to suppress dissent.
I can't wait to get out of here. To hell with this place any more.
What if this is false? Like, everybody here is quick to believe that someone raided a home and pointed guns at the faces of children. What if it is a lie? How do we know it's not beyond "oh yes it's the US so it makes sense"
What if I had four legs and a tail? Edit for clarity: both are non sequiturs. You provide no justification for your spurious speculation. The article has a video.
I just watched the video, and I didn't see anyone have a gun pointed at them. I saw a cop holding a gun and another cop point his gun at the top of a staircase that's out of frame.
In most cases, one reason they can is because there is no enforced repercussion for doing so.
Most police forces do in fact have rules for this type of conduct and institutional mechanisms to regulate it, but enforcement has become discretionary to the point of non existence.
Please note that this description is extremely generalized and that there are numerous other factors.
I’m not making a comment about whether it was right for them to do so or not, but “someone that clearly do not pose a threat” is not as clear cut a category as it might seem. When the potential consequences of making an incorrect judgment are very large, they have to be extremely careful in drawing such conclusions.
Another major issue we have with policing in the US (aside from the people who are only there as a power trip) is that one group with little variation in training is sent in for everything from jaywalking to armed robbery.
The odds of any random police officer encountering a situation where they are going to be truly in harms way are lower than the odds they use excessive force against a cooperative person. It's horrific.
Being a pizza delivery driver is twice as dangerous as being a police officer.
I didn't see any gun-aiming at her, or even drawn guns before she was escorted outside in the posted video. The only place I've seen that claim is from the subject of the raid.
Then you weren't watching the video. They drew guns after entering the residence. They pointed them up the stairs where she said her husband and two children were. Thus they were pointing guns at her children. Watch the full video on her twitter account, it happens about 10-20 seconds into the video.
Whether the claims are true or not, the video does not support it.
> They drew guns after entering the residence.
Yes, but she claims:
>> They pointed a gun in my face.
In the video, she clearly leaves the residence before any guns are drawn. Potentially the cop to the left of the door from the camera's perspective has his hand on his gun, but it's not drawn either. So if this happened, it's not on video.
> They pointed them up the stairs where she said her husband and two children were. Thus they were pointing guns at her children.
She doesn't say that and the video doesn't support it.
She says:
>> I tell them my husband and my two children are upstairs... and THEN one of them draws his gun.
>> On my children.
According to the video, she's outside at this point. It's not clear how she can know where they are, except that she might have assumed they were where she last saw them. She actually says they 'are upstairs' which doesn't mean 'at the top of the stairs', but 'on the second floor.'
If anything, the video disputes the idea that they are at the top of the stairs. There is a light source shining down on the steps, but there are no shadows.
In fact, I don't even read that she's making the claim that the cops pointed guns at her children, merely that they drew the guns on her children. The video does support this claim since it could be argued that they were drawing their guns on anyone who might be in the house, whether they were physically in the same space or not.
Yup. You can even hear her complaining about the cops pointing guns at her children while she's outside the house and can't possibly know what the police are pointing guns at. I'd bet she was planning this smear campaign from the moment police showed up at her house.
Having guns drawn while making sure there's no threat in the house is perfectly normal. I'd do the exact same if I was executing a search warrant.
I'm going to trust the women screaming about them pointing their guns at her children.
But even if they just had them out, that's improper police work. You gun should only be drawn if the intent is to kill someone. They went in there with the intent of terrorising their victim. At no point did anyone demonstrate any threat to the officers, and so at no point should they have had their guns out.
> I'm going to trust the women screaming about them pointing their guns at her children.
Sure, you can do what you want but usually in law enforcement we like to see evidence presented for serious accusations. In fact that is how they obtained the search warrant for the screaming woman's residence, by showing evidence to a judge.
> But even if they just had them out, that's improper police work.
What are your qualifications for criticizing warrant service procedure?
> You gun should only be drawn if the intent is to kill someone.
Thats wrong in multiple ways, you don't seem to have the relevant background knowledge and experience to discuss this issue.
Ask yourself how upset you would be with a police officer's use of deadly force if you learned that he had intended to kill the person he shot, rather than intending to save someone's life?
> They went in there with the intent of terrorising their victim.
You don't know that. You could just as easily believe that the woman refused to open the door for 20 minutes in order to antagonize law officers in the performance of their official duties. This is why we want people to support their statements with evidence instead of pretending to read minds.
> At no point did anyone demonstrate any threat to the officers, and so at no point should they have had their guns out.
Perhaps that would have been the case if they had responded to the officers in a timely manner. After a 20 minute wait, its possible that the individuals in the house have set up to attack the police when they enter.
> That's basic gun safety 101.
Hard to take lectures on gun safety from someone who hasn't demonstrated the relevant qualifications.
Somebody fired from a job over a grievance allegedly used unauthorized access and is surprised the FBI showed up at her door? I don't understand.
And in case anyone thinks I'm trolling, I'm not. Dead serious.
Edit: I said FBI, I was wrong about that- but still- if she's accusing of unauthorized access, isn't such a raid par for the course? added allegedly above.
Even if you believe retributive justice is to be doled out by LE, one of its own principles is: "It is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers."
And I'm not buying that guns-drawn arrest with kids present is necessary. Dead serious.
I didn't comment at all about that kids having a gun pointed at them. that is awful. The rest? Sounds like normal legal proceedings against somebody suspected of committing a computer crime.
When you're making policies for people who both fire guns and have guns fired upon them for a living, you don't get to be very fine-grained in those policies. The situations are, by their nature, chaotic.
In a situation where police are legitimately going in with guns drawn (like, I dunno, arresting actual terrorists known to have actual guns?), they don't have the luxury of determining whether someone's a child before pointing a gun in their face. If anyone in the house could be armed and firing back, they need to point the gun first.
So, there isn't a realistic "They shouldn't have pointed guns at children, but the rest of it is fine." Either it's okay to point guns at children because the situation demanded it, and the moral culpability of the child's trauma (or worse) is on whoever left children with armed outlaws... or they shouldn't have gone in with guns at all to the personal residence of someone whose alleged crime involved no violent action of any sort.
Actually, no. Retributive justice is not something LE usually gets involved in (within civilized democracies). It is left for the courts. The way she was arrested isn't normal, nor necessary. But I suspect that was the point.
As far as I can tell from the story, there is no evidence whatsoever that she had anything to do with the unauthorized access, which seems to consist of somebody logging into an account that has a shared username and password (!) and posting a message that got emailed out to ~1700 people.
> As far as I can tell from the story, there is no evidence whatsoever that she had anything to do with the unauthorized access
They had to get a warrant to search her home. Seems unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant without some kind of probable cause. While the system was poorly secured, a lot of poorly secured systems have basic logging. All it would take is an IP address.
None of us are privy to the details here, so it's really hard to say.
> Seems unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant without some kind of probable cause.
Unfortunately, here in the US that is not something you can bank on. There is a large amount of evidence that judges routinely sign on warrants without even understanding what the warrant is for, and there are even many types of non-standard warrants that do not need to follow that protocol.
I made it clear that it was conjecture on my part. Pulling the IP from server logs was the most likely reason they got the warrant. Turns out that was indeed the case.
> Somebody fired from a job over a grievance used unauthorized access and is surprised the FBI showed up at her door? I don't understand.
This was state police rather than federal (a highly relevant distinction, given the context) and the snide "surprised" is unwarranted/baseless when we don't have even the full facts from one side let alone both sides.
I'm not sure she is surprised. But if her grievance is that her employer is not fulfilling its public health mission, and the data she is sharing is public health data she feels the public has a right to see, then she might feel getting arrested is unjust.
While the arrest may or may not be unjust, the fact of the matter is that she broke the law. Which typically results in police showing up. Regardless of your attitude about what she did, the title can be really boiled down to 'data scientist releases confidential federal data; gets arrested'.
Can you explain to me why COVID-19 data should be considered confidential? My first thought is that she got raided because she was releasing data that contradicted the Official Florida State COVID-19 data.
The alleged crime is unauthorized access to a government communication system and has nothing to do with covid-19 data.
The evidence provided in the article for the crime is flimsy at best however. The communication system had a shared username and password for everyone and the warrant was reported to be based on an IP address that was believed to be the source of the unauthorized access.
It seems reasonable to go 50/50 on either of:
1. they looked for and found a reason to charge her with this as retribution for her work.
2. she was disgruntled enough about being let go that she illegally accessed a poorly secured government system to send a retaliatory communication.
There is no where near enough information to know which is which though.
They weren’t FBI, they were state police. And this was more than showing up at her door: they came in with guns drawn, pointed them at people. One cop had his finger on the trigger.
They aren't FBI. Where is the evidence she did it? Even if she did send the text, why do they need that many guns drawn (check out the rifle on the last guy in the vid)?
The Glock was another story. It kicked like crazy and you could really feel the power of each shot in your arms. I didn't have any fun shooting it and I was a more than a little terrified I was going to hurt someone. Even when it was empty I had so much unease just setting it down on the table.
Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. I had an immense sense of dread just knowing how much power was behind those guns. The thought that someone was pointing it at children is just beyond my comprehension now. For what? Allegedly logging into a website?
If shes guilty, go to jail, pay the fine, whatever. But the level of escalation to even walk through the front door with your gun drawn. The level of... I don't know... disrespect? Hatred? I can't even begin to describe to someone who doesn't know just how much force and how casually its being shown.
Truly, these officers are a disgrace to Florida. The people who trained them are a disgrace. And the people who empower them to behave this way are a disgrace.