He Disparaged the Police on Facebook, So They Arrested Him
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The media is a mess. Even mainstream outlets like Fox routinely lie to their viewers. Other countries with stronger libel laws (like the UK) don't have nearly as bad a problem, and I can't help but feel like it's related. Obviously the UK has its own issues but it feels much saner to me.
In this case, accusing a specific police officer of being corrupt with zero evidence IS an awful thing to do. It's different from saying that a department is corrupt, etc. There are tons of examples of police abusing their power but this just doesn't seem like one.
Note that the standard for criminal libel requires the person to know they are lying, and that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
That being said, misinformation is also a huge problem. So maybe we'll have to find other ways to more effectively hold individuals accountable, whether they're abusing institutional power or spreading misinformation.
Is this really true or just the impression given by cherry-picking the worst possible cases nation wide and amplifying them via media?
Define "massive". If you got pulled over, would you be legitimately worried about being tazed or abused?
To reiterate, it'd be protected speech to say like you just said that "corruption is a massive problem in American police forces." It's not so much protected speech if you accuse Officer John Doe of specific criminal acts in public if the statement isn't true.
For other reasons, this is not the best defendant just from a character perspective the ACLU could pick for this kind of situation (https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20180531/exeter-man-char...). To actually challenge the law, they'd have to somehow reframe what he said as an opinion.
Obviously the cops aren't going to bring charges for the vast majority of these kinds of instances, but they did against Frese because he's a felon with a history of harassing the local police. And not a cute and cuddly felon either: he ran over a traffic worker after threatening to run him over. It's fine for the ACLU to take this as a test case but this is not this sort of situation that is a great test case.
Think about how hard each of those would be to prove. To prove he knew he was lying would almost require that he admitted it in writing or was recorded admitting it. But for a man like Robert Frese to prove that the police were dirty would be almost impossible, the FBI often has difficulty proving that crooked cops are crooked, and they have a lot more resources than just some guy who trash-talked the police. Requiring Robert Frese to prove himself correct is totally unreasonable. Requiring the prosecution to prove Robert Frese knew he was lying is the only semi-sane approach to criminal libel (the criminality of libel is dubious in the first place.)
If you want stronger libel laws to hold corporations accountable, you need to first stop treating corporations and individuals as the same. Applying the same standard to both will create a situation where either corporations are relatively free to say anything, or create a situation where individuals are crushed under the force of laws designed to be forceful enough to beat corporations into compliance. But until that separation happens, having laws that protect people like Robert Frese is the sane default.
Is it? If he can't prove his statements were true (eg. if he doesn't have hard facts baking him), then why was he making them?
That said, often those things (dirty police, dirty corporations, etc) are right there obvious to most, and you can't prove them because of course they're careful -- e.g. they might even admit it to your face, but never on record.
Shield laws and other legal protections are already incredibly strong in the USA. It would be a mistake to make police practically exempt from public restraint.
I would also be afraid that the media would face more targeting legal attacks and restraints from investigating possible corruption. They operate under the same laws as everyone else.
Ever read the Daily Mail, the SUN and co? (Or for that matter the Guardian, for left-sided BS).
The Morning Star would have been a better example...
Yeah, it's just as much as a tabloid, only for a different market group who considers themselves more refined.
Nothing actually high brow there...
Besides, a lot of the truly dangerous misinformation is coming from antagonistic foreign governments, which probably can't be bullied out of doing so over the Internet by mere local criminal laws.
Not to mention that there's plenty of ways to satisfy libel laws and still spread misinformation.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I don't think it's giving the government the ability to target people for things they say. That'd be a great tool to use to harass political opponents.
1) The incentive structures around libel laws are horrible. If you give the US Congress moral and constitutional authority to pass something like what the UK has they will make it very hard to criticise US politicians.
2) "especially on the right, but also the left" is wrong. All media organisations are routinely wrong on all issues - there was an anecdotal named law for this but I've forgotten the name of it, where if the media reports on something that the viewer understands it is obvious all the reporting is wrong, but then the viewer assumes that reporting on subjects they know nothing about is correct. One subgroup can't be more wrong when all of the group is basically all wrong - there is news that is wrong the way the consensus is wrong and then there is news that is wrong in radical new ways.
3) I don't have any examples of abuses of the UK system because the abuses would be suppressed under the libel laws. That is not a sane state of play to assess the merits of libel laws. The US system of messy, public opposition is much better than hiding all the conflict behind a veneer of civility - conflict does not disappear because people don't talk about it publicly.
What you are referring to here I believe is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect [0] cited by Michael Crichton.
Note that the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" is a discussion point by a popular novelist, not a well-researched psychological concept. Frankly, without deeper research into the concept, it's a quote from an famous person.
Years ago when local papers were still relevant, there was a local paper article about me and three other people. They got the details hilariously wrong. Everything was totally backwards. There was no plausible motive for malice, they just got everything wrong because the reporter was lazy or something. Didn't take good notes. After that I still kept my subscription to the paper and didn't doubt the accuracy of other stories in that paper, even from that same journalist.
So years later when I see the Gell-Mann Amnesia quote for the first time, the pieces all click. Plainly I had been afflicted, and I see no reason to think I'm the only one.
They are, for example, exemplary in terms of correcting errors quickly and transparently. I rarely come across errors these days, and the ones I see corrected below articles are almost always very minor, such as spelling errors in names.
In some circles, such as HN, it also seems to be en vogue to consider all media biased and unprofessional, every politician to be corrupt, every business leader as optimising (short term) profit with no regard for other considerations, every scientific study underpowered, and every headline clickbait.
I guess gratuitous negativity is often mistaken for expertise or intelligence. But in reality, it just renders any actual effort useless: why not be corrupt/lazy/incompetent/etc, when that is the charge that will be levelled against you, no matter what you do?
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accu... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/...
As for "it would find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people." A lot of people throughout history have believed a lot of unscientific things. I don't believe we've reached a point of enlightenment where we no longer do that. Science not infrequently finds the truth is not what we expected, not what our intuition would lead us to believe.
In the absence of scientific research, the "theory" is as true and useful as any saying "two in the hand is worth one in the bush", "a penny saved is a penny earned", ...
EDIT: Looks like a sibling comment beat me to it
I strongly disagree. A policeman is a representative of the state, he chose that job freely and he is getting paid for it, he can have personal insurance and legal support paid by the taxpayer. If libel is a routine professional hazard for policemen, they can request a raise and we as a society will pay more to hire such men, just as we pay more to hire people willing to risk their lives in the line.
A citizen on the other hand, has no such liberties and is paying for the whole show. The least he can do, when he feels he's being wronged, is to call out those who are responsible. I agree they should be liable for libel damages and I understand that might not deter some poor people.
But the idea that libel from homeless people against government officials is an awful affliction that must be stopped with criminal punishments - that must be rejected wholeheartedly.
> Note that the standard for criminal libel requires the person to know they are lying, and that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The article notes that is very little stopping a policeman to abuse a person while that criminal liability lingers. He can easily make that person spend a few nights in jail, can coerce them into self-incrimination and can even get a conviction out of lower status individuals with little power to defend themselves.
Nothing good can come out of jailing people that criticize public officials.
I'd be OK with the police suing him for defamation, but he should not serve jail time.
The article does a good job of presenting a high level overview of criminal libel: what it is, what the arguments around it are, and so forth. Read the whole thing.
Sounds like a better world!
This whole conversation has become very silly. It's plain that criminal libel is an awful idea, we can joke about silly scenarios that might unfold if people facing criminal libel charges were required to prove their innocence, but current criminal libel laws with a normal burden of proof are already being abused and doing real damage to the lives of real people, which isn't very funny.
They could, but it would be futile. The politician is not going to govern anybody anyway (remember, straight to jail from the end of their campaign).
Besides, surely you understand that this thread has stretched a BS hypothetical.
You've a strange notion of how people behave. People still routinely criticize Bush and Obama, even though neither will ever be in office again. That's how people are.
Doesn't matter. Can still lose money (e.g. by taking time off of his work) and can still be harassed (even after the case ends), and can still have his life made a living hell by casual police and friends activity.
I'm not convinced of his innocence here.