Presumably you could give these folks disinformation and check to see if the cops show up. I am not sure why anyone would think police on social media would be any more suave than police in real life. As far back as high school the attempts by law enforcement to get a jump on where the 'bad thing' of the week was going to happen were pretty transparent. I could never figure out if that was on purpose to put people on notice they cared (like driving around a neighborhood to let people know they are watching, showing the colors as it were) or if they were just that clueless.
> ...was on purpose to put people on notice they cared (like driving around a neighborhood to let people know they are watching, showing the colors as it were
Police officers follow what is known as "force continuum". This basically outlines how much force they should be using in any situation. Without deviating from the topic, this is where the public gets upset when an officer oversteps their bounds to use excessive force on someone. The first 'level' of all continuum protocols is simply 'presence'. Knowing a cop is around does stop a majority of people who would do illegal activity. Think about how you act next time a cop is behind you on the road. It's a passive power-play move; they need to keep up this presence to ensure the public knows they'll be a moment's notice away if something happens.
Moving cops to social media sounds perfectly logical to me. A lot of none-the-wiser people put this information on the internet, thinking its safe. By making an online presence known, they look to quell some people's actions.
You could argue people will just find other ways to circumvent the system, but I'm reminded of the constant rat race between White and Black Hat security specialists; each party trying to top the other.
> Police officers follow what is known as "force continuum". This basically outlines how much force they should be using in any situation...The first 'level' of all continuum protocols is simply 'presence'.
Wow. This set off a chain of fireworks in my brain. What kind of creature takes the role of someone big and strong, who keeps the peace through his presence and the implied possibility of force? What sort of being takes this role in primate behavioral biology? Police are basically the "alpha" primate proxies of the state.
However, if you examine how we deploy and present police officers, it's clear that society is still in denial about our primate origins and nature. What would happen if you took an alpha male chimpanzee, and by modifying various visual and other socially significant sensory markers, you made him seem to be a member of a different group? I'm sure the result wouldn't be harmonious. What's more, what if you did something analogous to sending a couple of policemen in a cruiser through some neighborhood? It would be analogous to a couple of strange young chimpanzee males invading another group's territory.
There is the concept of community policing, where officers are encouraged to be an integral part of the community they are policing. Still, it's clear that society is more interested in carrying forward traditions from the military origins of modern police forces than it is in acknowledging the primate origins of our psychology.
You can complicate this discussion by bringing in different contexts and wrinkles of primate biology. The main point still stands. If you reduce the size of the group, then you get to the point where it's one alpha in the peacekeeper role. Also, the point still stands with betas anyhow.
At least in activist circles, this kind of situation has been around for years, and security culture evolves to deal with it. Of course, that's a bit more serious then a show, but it's the same basic problem.
In NYC becoming an undercover activist for the purpose of spying on lawful activities is illegal, as it should be, because of the Handshu agreement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handschu_agreement
LOL - people hated this comment, but I thought it was funny that Steve (a personal friend) came back to HN to talk about police abuse (a hot topic for him).
The same thing happened years ago to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a college town that produced some very successful artists in the past 2 decades: Lifetime, The Bouncing Souls, Thursday, Gaslight Anthem. Around 2006, the cops started scouring Myspace for shows and permanently shut down a number of popular house venues. Since then, the punks have responded by moving all info to the sneakernet; you can't find out any show details unless you're actually friends with someone who already knows a band or the house owner. Even physical flyers don't have addresses or exact times. It's effectively killed most of the output that this cultural hotspot used to produce.
Hey There! I live in New Brunswick, NJ. Sounds like you were around a few years ago. I live in a show house and also put together a little show calendar app at http://nbshows.org which has been up for over a year now. It gets about 100 unique hits a day.
There are never any address posted on it. Whenever someone emails staff@nbshows.org and asks for address's I am always careful about giving out info, I always google the email to make sure its not a throw-away.
I am really excited that this topic is on HN today, because I am working on a personal project that will be at http://diyshws.org. Basically it will be a site where people can create show calendars for the small city that they live in if there is no central way to find out about shows. (other than Facebook)
When I was a sophomore or junior in college, a friend and I drove the roughly 8 hours from central Indiana to New Brunswick for a show. A hardcore band we dug was playing their last show ever and we were like fuck it. Had an address and started east. Got into town and went looking for the venue. Was a little nervous we had the wrong address when somewhere along Hamilton St., there stood a house. All in all, one of the coolest shows I've ever been to. The show was in the basement and my friend, who is quite tall, actually had to duck in a few places to move around. The house threw a kegger afterwards that we hung around at for a little bit, talked to the band and generally had a good time. Some very drunk punk guy showed up who was promptly ejected (physically) from the house onto the street. Super cool and I certainly won't forget it.
> Since then, the punks have responded by moving all info to the sneakernet
1) This is a key part of the "local problem." Not all of the relevant legal context is written down or documented.
2) The power of real social connections in many ways dwarfs the power of online connection. Networks of people who know each other well and trust one another are a potent force that can even threaten the establishment. The British know this well, from the POV of the state. YC is also proof of this.
Thanks for mentioning Lifetime, I think that'll be my soundtrack for the day. Had no idea things got that bad in NJ, it seems that living in Austin for a while spoiled me.
The police using email for this sort of thing actually seems like a step backwards somehow. It's been well known for a while that the B9 board gets frequented by law enforcement (both for gang and show related activities) so going the direct message route seems like an unnecessary step. You're never going to be able to adequately integrate, why even try?
I went to Rutgers & it was day and night in 2004-2005 & 2006 onwards as far as house shows were concerned in NB. Unfortunately, NBPD has been known to use a heavy hand in a lot of things. Not too long ago, the Prosecutor's office was investigating an Internal affairs guy for mishandling 81 cases.
On a side note, NYPD had an elaborate, illegal surveillance operation spying on Muslims in the NJ area that was outed when a building super inadvertently walked into the apartment being used as their base.
It should be known that most of the places in this article are in densely packed, residential neighborhoods. (I've been to them) Some of these places share walls with their neighbors, so sound isolation is non existent at some 'venues'. Also no attempts are made at controlling sound levels outside.
Also keep in mind many young punks are not exactly respectful of others. The word entitled comes to mind with a lot of their behaviour.
I say this as an aging punk who had a basement where we held 50+ shows with nationally touring bands playing. We never had a problem with being shut down.
If the noise levels are too high, why not let the neighbors call it in? It seems like a waste of time to proactively try to find parties when they could just wait around at night for people to call in the noise violations.
> I remember being at a basement show in Allston when I was 18 that was broken up by the cops and thinking "This is so fucking cool". I mean, it's a pain in the ass and sucks for the bands. It can totally ruin your night, but for me it totally fanned the flames and made me love it even more.
> What this article doesn't mention is that the cop who was using the Lemmingtrail board to find out about house shows kept posting even after being outed, eventually being somewhat-ironically accepted into the community. I regularly saw him at shows after he'd been exposed and he was always friendly.
It's hard being a cop who is into punk and going to one of these shows. For some reason, everyone hates you even though you're just there for the music. (Source: my cop hardcore punk friends in south florida)
Being a police officer isn't a job that you can just take off.... if you are willing to be an agent of state violence, don't be surprised when people who have problems with that situation have issues with you personally.
If people realistically want the situation to get better, they need to embrace the 'good' police officers, rather than automatically ostracizing all police officers equally. Many still really do want to improve their communities.
There's always been a strong connection between punk subculture and anarchist thinking (which is specifically opposed to this type of "legitimate violence"), so its actually a somewhat reasonable thing to bring up.
I added 'evil' because particularly in this community, the connotation of 'hacker' is not necessarily negative. Many here esteem hackers as people who get things done by taking cleverly manipulating the system, or, alternatively, value results over process (I'd actually really appreciate a proper neutral definition of the term).
You're somehow conflating developer and lawbreaker in an effort to explain how cops are something other than agents of state violence. It's a strange argument.
Nowadays police will apply force regardless, and retroactively claim that you didn't comply. Just look at all these videos of people being brutalized and beaten unconscious by police men shouting at them "stop resisting!"
So what you're basically saying is the price for having any policing is that we have to accept a morally and legally corrupt police force.
If the "good" police officers wish to be respected, they should start doing things like outing and arresting the corrupt cops, speaking out against victimless laws that only make everyone a criminal, routinely compensating innocents for damages caused by false arrests/raids/seizures/imprisonment, etc. Until these things are commonplace, it's only proper to consider all of them representatives of their misbehaving organizations.
The idiom "A few bad apples..." is commonly brought up in discussions such as theses.
There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.
So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.
> The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel".
They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.
This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.
No, because that's not the very definition of developer.
A cop is an agent of the state that (and is) ordered to arrest, take down, put in jail, etc people and is authorized to use force for that -- including his gun.
If they're not, I want them fired. They are here to find the non-compliant and hit them with sticks until they submit to the judicial system, and to kill them if that's not possible (if we as a society can stomach a death over whatever we're accusing them of.)
Though isn't the idea of state violence a workable one because there are situations in which violence and compliance are in people's best interest - such as shooting a home invader, and secondly because (ideally, and this is where it has broken down) the state is an accountable facilitator of the people's will.
Possibly, yes. I'm not passing any judgement here, just pointing out that police, as agents of the State, are ultimately agents of violence, since the State is ultimately just "that entity which reserves for itself a monopoly on the lawful use of violence".
Personally, I agree with Bastiat that the State should be more more than the collective extension to our own individual, inate right to self-defense, so any violence which goes beyond that, I consider improper.
But I've said too much already, HN really isn't the best place for these discussions...
So if I try to break into your house, you won't be calling the cops? Wouldn't you be supporting 'agents of state violence' by relying on them to come to your aid?
Huh? Well, yah, duh. It's better than me going out and acting as my own agent of violence to beat you myself... I personally think that a legitimate state has a legitimate monopoly on violence.
You can live in your own pretend society or you can deal with the one you're actually in right now - which includes things like laws and law enforcement. And you have options.
But taking a negative attitude so general as "all police officers are agents of state violence" has no positive outcome. You just decided every interaction you have with cops will turn out bad (or violent), so of course you're going to have issues! The rest of us try to treat each other fairly and as a result 99% of the time don't have problems with cops (unless we're breaking the law, wherein naturally problems do arise).
Also, your job isn't the only thing that may make one have personal problems with someone else. I tend to get pissed off at immature anarchopunks who think the world revolves around them. I guess it kind of goes both ways.
Well, I'm not a much of a fan of angry teens, either... I'm just describing the situation.
But in keeping with "act pragmatically" officers can live in their "own pretend society or [...] can deal with the one [they're] actually in right now", which includes folks who don't particularly like them solely based on the authority they represent.
This seems reasonable to me. Police are under an obligation to uphold the law, their presence at a less than legal event is at best a significant liability to all those involved. What kind of punk becomes a cop anyway? What's next, punks voting republican? Punks wearing designer clothes? Oh wait...
does anyone know if you can just ask them if they are a cop; with them having to respond truthfully? or is this just idiotic folklore that i've somehow heard.
It's folklore, based on a misunderstanding of the concept of entrapment. Learning exactly what entrapment means may be worthwhile, but cops lying about being cops does not constitute entrapment.
> does anyone know if you can just ask them if they are a cop; with them having to respond truthfully?
Of course police can lie about being police officers. Another person kind-of answered already, but this apparently needs to be stated unambiguously: A police officer can lie to you about being a police officer and get away with it.
This reminds me of throwing raves in the 1990s. At first, we had a culture where the DJs or promoters would invite you to the (usually illegal) location of the party. In response to busts, that evolved to where the DJs or promoters would invite you to a pick up point where someone would drive you to the actual (still illegal) venue. As promoters started making serious money, real entrepreneurs emerged and started booking big shows at legal venues. That increased costs, so promoters started charging for water and getting sponsors.
Long story long, kids will always throw renegade events and police will always use whatever tools to stop these events. And, in response, kids will keep changing their tactics until they either find a line that police won't cross, or until they turn legal! :)
Congratulations, now you're officially worse than USSR.
In USSR, independent bands had very hard time recording or playing on stage, but they could always gather on some flat and play music and nobody bothered them.
(Don't know why, maybe it's actually illegal for police to enter your home, maybe it's just decency)
And now it's illegal in the USA.
All this does is destroying all the new music that isn't profitable/hot enough to afford real venues yet. Talk so much about innovation and garages.
This isn't new. Depending on the town, time of day(or night), and whether you take money, house shows are often illegal. Not entirely unreasonable, if you think of it from the perspective of the neighbors.
Of course, kids should always be trying to throw them, and cops and narcs should always be trying to shut them down. It's the natural order of the world:)
Not yet, but it might be illegal because they're charging for a show without being licensed, or a myriad of other reasons. There have always been narcs, though. The kids may find @notpolice funny because of their experiences online, but in the 90s I ran into that guy a lot on the street.
What I'm saying is if that makes the US worse than the USSR, then the US was always worse than the USSR. If the legality of urban house shows is your key metric for freedom, then maybe reconsider using the USSR as your baseline.
I highly value legality of doing anything not immediately life threatening in my house because it's my last line of defense. Last line of privacy.
Even if you take the street, the workplace and the indoors away (by the means of tight and hostile control) your home is still your home. And if you gave up your home as a step one you will not have a place to fall back, a place to default to.
You can no longer say "Screw you guys I'm going home".
Now all your life depends on others (authorities) agreeing to let you do whatever you are doing, because you don't have one place where you are that authority.
I totally agree. I come from a country which used to be one of the Soviet republics and remained communist for almost 50 years, and really,the communist government could never pull some shit the US is doing right now. And they say that have "freedom".....yeahhhh sure.
What is wrong about this is not that the police are on social media (I expect them to be), but they are assuming a crime will be committed before the fact. Playing music in your house with a few friends over is not illegal. If there are too many friends or the music is too loud, then shut it down after a crime has been committed.
I am no huge fan of the BPD, and I don't deny that their tactics here were silly. But there is real history behind this issue, and it's a legitimate safety concern. It was only a few years ago that the Station fire happened less than fifty miles away from Boston; a hundred people died that night, and people haven't forgotten it, nor should they. This is an area that has a ton of old buildings that aren't coded for large numbers of people. It's a very real risk to pack people in.
And - fires happen fast. Between the moment a fire starts and the moment when people start dying, there generally isn't time for a neighbor to call the police and complain.
This isn't a noise issue; it's a fire hazard issue.
Thanks for the history. It certainly seems to explain the political and community motivation beyond the assumed "let's get those punks."
However, while there may be some similarities I don't see it as the same situation as the Station any more than enforcing the fire code for any other gathering. if I remember correctly it was a valid nightclub and the permits they did not have involved the pyrotechnics not the show or venue. Doors were locked when they shouldn't have been, place was beyond capacity, etc ... a horrific tragedy.
if this is really a purely motivated by enforcing occupancy laws (and therefore fire codes) they should be cracking down on family reunions and Superbowl parties posted on social networks too.
We're not talking about some kind of loitering with intent crap; these people had a clear, premeditated intention to break the law. If you announce publicly that you're going to commit a crime at a given time and place, don't be surprised if the police turn up to that place at that time and arrest you.
Did they say things would get unruly? Did they say minors would be drinking? Did they say the neighbors would complain because the music is too loud? Did they say they would be breaking fire codes? What crime did they publicly announce? The police are making a lot of assumptions (right or wrong) before the fact.
It's more disheartening that this is what the police are spending their time doing. There seriously isn't anything more important they could be working on?
Its one thing for neighbors to complain about loud and obnoxious people around them. Its a whole other thing for the police to preemptively break up shows. Some of the house spots that have been shut down in the past 6 months have been operating without complaint from neighbors for years.
Beyond that, the crackdown has been felt the most in the shutting down of art and show spaces in Allston warehouses which are zoned appropriately. Granted, the proprietors of these spots don't bother with permits from the city / following fire code, and often encourage or engage in illegal activity beyond simply hosting loud music, but these venues are definitely NOT disturbing neighbors (the neighbors in this case are generally rehearsal spaces for punk bands and other similar performance spaces).
> It's more disheartening that this is what the police are spending their time doing. There seriously isn't anything more important they could be working on?
You can use the same argument when you see a police officer working burglary instead of homicide, or homicide instead of rape, or vice-versa.
The police, like the military, is a tool used to implement the policy of others; in this case, the policy is chosen by the jurisdiction's legislature, which is composed of people chosen by that jurisdiction's population. The police can (and should) prioritize which policy they implement most avidly, but if some things are going entirely undone that's something that needs to be handled at the legislative level, possibly by repealing or modifying the laws the police are charged with implementing.
Remember when the banks fucked up, and you were forced to pay for it? Where were the cops then? Spraying pepper gas into the faces of young protesters, that's where.
And then there's the wars. Big, heavy duty crime hasn't "fallen" by any means, it's soaring from peak to peak more like.
well, at least those indies bothered to hide their time and location. this is what happened to tuners/streetracers in Poland recently on fb http://i1.minus.com/jbdZ3dwKcOnWYB.png (translation: fb event "Nightly gathering of powerful cars. Tesco parking lot." Police: attending for sure :))
But... why? First of all if it bothers the neighbours why can't they just arrive on the spot and bust the thing?
Also, all this planning ahead and resources, why instead don't they just create one or two halls per area that are soundproof etc and let people rock out?
> First of all if it bothers the neighbours why can't they just arrive on the spot and bust the thing?
Because these neighbors complained so loud that they passed a city-wide law on the matter.
> Also, all this planning ahead and resources, why instead don't they just create one or two halls per area that are soundproof etc and let people rock out?
You should itemize the budgets for both of these plans and compare them. I'm willing to bet that setting up "one or two halls per area" costs an order of magnitude more than what they're doing.
First of all I'm sure they could find an unused estate to convert into what they want. The dudes are used to playing in houses, I'm sure they wont mind if its not a perfect concert hall.
Also, taxes on tickets and stuff or other promotions or rent for the night could very much turn into a big profit.
About the law, I don't have anything against the law, just that I can't understand why would they be so obsessed with preemptive action instead of on-the-spot
> First of all I'm sure they could find an unused estate to convert into what they want. The dudes are used to playing in houses, I'm sure they wont mind if its not a perfect concert hall.
"The dudes" might be okay with it, but the city would own that venue and not only do they have to obey their own law on how it's maintained and regulated, but they'd be liable for anything that happened inside it. Further, if the city owns it, they're going to use it for more than just "the dudes", and those people may have different requirements.
> Also, taxes on tickets and stuff or other promotions or rent for the night could very much turn into a big profit.
You're assuming that (1) anyone will rent the space and (2) anyone will come if they do. These aren't minor assumptions.
> About the law, I don't have anything against the law, just that I can't understand why would they be so obsessed with preemptive action instead of on-the-spot
How much effort have you even bothered putting into stepping into their shoes rather than tyrannically deciding that your solution fixes all possible ills and should stand in for any agency on their part?
They might be raising revenue for the city with noise ordinance fines, who knows. I wish the reporter had included some possible motives. I never met a city cop who was interested in this kind of silly stuff. Lots of bored small town cops, sure, but for the Boston pd to (allegedly) put this amount of effort into busting basement concerts makes me think that money is somehow involved.
Before others vote this down, many activists have been arrested by the pairs of shoes they're wearing, and many an attendee of an action has been deemed suspicious because of their shoes.
That has nothing to do with what JohnnyCache was saying. JohnnyCache was saying that cops put on a punk "costume" but forget to muss up their clean shoes, unlike actual punks who are out all night eating and drinking and running around and generally making a mess.
This is exactly the reason why pretty much every house show no longer gets its location listed on Facebook or on flyers where I live. Instead we just put "ask a punk" for the address. You have to be in the know or you won't find out. Unfortunately it's a bit of a turn-off for younger people and anyone who isn't good friends with someone already involved in the scene. The alternative is to have every show busted before it can even start.
I wonder how this interacts with the right to peaceably assemble, especially given the often political nature of punk music.
Cities can police nuisances, sure, but they cannot craft statutes abrogating first amendment rights that are not narrowly tailored to the perceived harm.
There were a few laws against public dancing in the late 1800s that got struck down under this sort of reasoning.
I'm not sure what the current state of constitutional limits on nuisance laws are, but the Boston statute does seem very broad.
This is one of the larger, emerging problems with social media. Interested groups can create large amounts of dummy accounts to manipulate the group discussion. This is already happening on a large scale on reddit.
What we need is machine learning systems to help us identify the astroturfers who run dummy accounts to influence the group discussion.
