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Comment by njacobs5074 | Hacker News Reader

Well there is the use case of the PO exercising his or her judgement in a situation where there may technically be a violation, e.g. carrying an open bottle of beer. Today, a PO can simply require the perpetrator to discard the beer and then both parties move on.

If we have cameras in that situation, the PO will have no choice but to issue a summons to the person and then potentially have to show up in court if the person requests it.

Is that the best use of our police officers and the courts time? I think your intention is to provide citizens protection against police abuse of our rights but I think that the situation is more complex and getting the right mix of tech and humanity in police practices requires better training and education of both the police and the citizenry.

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If this became a rampant issue, maybe it would be time to rethink the law? Discretion allows abuse. Laws that are not applied uniformly run counter to the notion of "Rule of Law".

This happens quite a bit with underage drinking. Cop catches some kids who are not quite 21 with beer and instead of fining every kid up to $1,000 and suspending their license (which is now on their record), he makes them ditch the beer and move on. Rethinking the law means we’d decide it’s ok for all teens to drink. Sometimes the laws are solid, but there are shades of gray in terms of how to apply them.

> Cop catches some kids who are not quite 21 with beer and instead of fining every kid up to $1,000 and suspending their license (which is now on their record), he makes them ditch the beer and move on. Rethinking the law means we’d decide it’s ok for all teens to drink.

Doesn't overlooking the beer also mean we've decided it's ok for teens to drink? What is the difference you see?

I'm quite sympathetic to your argument, although having been a teenager (age 19) that got caught with beer and had a cop let me off (he could clearly see that we were trying to be responsible, and were not causing trouble) I think there is value in not being a total hard ass while still not blanket condoning stuff. That said, in this case I absolutely agree that alcohol should not be restricted to anybody 18 and over. If we have a point where you are "an adult" then you should be a free person at that point.

So it really comes down to philosophically purity vs. pragmatism. I'm naturally drawn toward the former, but as I've gotten older I see more value in the latter, even tho intellectual it bothers me.

I think the difference is in assessing a situation - is it always ok for all teens to drink? Or is it more about assessing whether to sometimes scare them a little by giving them a talking to and reminding them it’s not legal - and other times (if they endanger lives or get caught multiple times) enforcing the penalties as appropriate. Much like speeding or running a stop sign - sometime just getting pulled over is enough to remind you to slow down.

If they endanger lives, etc, we already have laws against that. If people regularly speed on a road the local government should consider raising the limit or installing speed bumps. If we have a problem with a law we should fix it rather than avoid enforcement.

...unless they're black?

There's no reason to give cops this discretion, it just leads to unfair policing practices. Better to have police enforce all laws and think hard about what we want those laws to be.

Discretion can certainly be abused, but systems of rigid rules can only realistically approximate justice. Human discretion will always be important to avoid injustice.

I agree, but I'd rather see this discretion at the judicial level where there is a framework under which it operates and judges with presumably more moral, legal, and ethical training.

If a prosecution is legally justified, a court can’t do anything about it. At best, you could hope for jury nullification (but the rules of evidence might keep the jury from ever learning the morally-exculpatory evidence), or failing that, lenient sentencing.

> lenient sentencing

This is what I was alluding to. Historically judges have had a lot of leeway when it comes to sentencing, and, having heard all the details of the case, they are in the best position to decide the defendant's fate. (For what it's worth, I disagree with mandatory minimum sentencing laws.)

I’d much rather a police officer be able to make the call to not pursue something than regularly have people stand trial for trifles. If you don’t give the discretion to cops or prosecutors, that is the alternative.

Human discretion has its place in the courts, not at the roadside.

Do you really want the police to enforce every single, e.g. traffic, law all the time? I don’t think that would be practical.

If they did, it would lead to the political will to change the law. Because they don't, we are stuck with the non-uniform application of the law which causes tension in communities. Justice is not dispensed by police, it is frankly not their job. Pointing out that we'd have a lot more people getting ticketed just shows how broken the system actually is in its current form.

I don’t see this being an issue. Most (all?) police cruisers already have dash cams which almost certainly routinely capture footage of people speeding and breaking various other traffic laws which the police overlook, but no one is going back to review that footage and cite them.

Presumably the footage is archived and only reviewed for disputes, court, etc.

If we suddenly have a rash of police under enforcing, is that really a problem? Body cameras aren’t there to ensure police enforce the law, they’re there because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I would love for the police to enforce the law strictly and uniformly. If the laws are bad, then we will change them.

True, too often this discretion is only exercised for friends, relatives, and the powerful. Occasionally it gets extended to people who remind the officer of those people, because they fit the preconceptions or remind the officer of their own youth or family.

https://genius.com/Dave-chappelle-killin-them-softly-annotat...

I agree with you in theory, but in practice I wouldn't be so sure. There are plenty of people that suffer and have their lives ruined because they are the first victims of a bad law. The legislative process moves very slowly, sometimes it takes decades (look at Cannabis laws for example).

The solution to this would be to stop the criminalization of victimless actions - which carrying an open bottle of beer is.

Under enforcement based on individual judgement easily introduces racist bias

I agree with your point tho, bureaucracy has trouble thinking about edge cases, it's hard to create a complete spec of things like not requiring bringing someone in for an open beer if they aren't clearly drunk

> I agree with your point tho, bureaucracy has trouble thinking about edge cases, it's hard to create a complete spec of things like not requiring bringing someone in for an open beer if they aren't clearly drunk.

It is very much the job of the courts to interpret the law with respect to those edge cases and their judgements can provide guidance to politicians about how to more narrowly define the law. This is how things are supposed to work _in theory_.

Even on the optimal path, there's a long lag and (potentially) a bunch of ruined lives between "We think we wrote a law that appropriately covers all the edge cases" and "Oh, hey, this court decided this edge case is covered this way". That lag can be helped by giving the bureaucracy enforcers a way to use common sense to bypass the bureaucracy.

I agree, but ultimately society has weighed the trade-off and moved in favor of the ruining of some lives for the wheels of justice to grind forward. That is why society tends to reify martyrs imo. We have countless examples in history. For things to change people suffer and we elevate their suffering to some third party that can recognize its injustice. Peaceful protests are exemplars of this notion.

Aren't US cops afforded any personal input? I've been stopped in the UK for something I probably should have been arrested for, but the cop said he was just going to let me go because I was nice to him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've worked with a few police departments in a previous life. For the last few years I worked with the bigger dept they all wore cameras for their entire shift. They still let people go for small amounts of weed, or odd drinking violations (open intox usually) even though it's still illegal here.

They only review the videos if there's an incident or complaint. So it's not like there's someone watching 40 x 8 hour videos every day.

/this is a smaller rural area in the midwest US, so ymmv but these officers do use discretion and the higher ups don't care if it's nothing big. In the Chief's words, "we were all young and stupid at some point."

> They only review the videos if there's an incident or complaint. So it's not like there's someone watching 40 x 8 hour videos every day.

Right now there isn't, but some day, a computer might be able to do it.

Then you would write a law.

Why would they have no choice? Where are people getting this idea that an officer HAS to do something when a law is broken? If that was true, they would be in trouble all the time for driving down the road and not stopping speeders, or getting in trouble for not reporting things other POs have done that is illegal. A police officers discretion in executing the law is an enshrined privilege of being an officer and a camera isn't going to change that. Nobody will ever even be looking at those videos if nothing is reported.

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