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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I tweeted @SFPD yesterday my disgust at their behavior. I feel it's all that twitter is good for these days, registering displeasure at companies and agencies. Will they do anything about it? Likely not, but if enough people show anger at them, maybe the Mayor will fire the police chief.

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yeah i don't really understand this. Like why do you need a whole squad and feds to break down his door with a battering ram for a single "leaked" document. Could have just knocked and said they had a warrant.

Police state gotta exercise that power.

There are hundreds to thousands of abuses of law enforcement power like this per year where simple warrant serving is executed by a swat team in order to justify the budget of the swat team.

If you surprise him by suddenly breaking down his door, there's a chance he'll make the wrong gesture. Then you get to kill him saying you felt threatened.

I always found handwritten letters or calls more convincing in an age where everybody says you are a bot, if you are more than one.

You get far fewer angry letters when the barrier for entry is that the writer has to pay for a stamp and an envelope.

The thing about a letter is, you've got 30-90 minutes while you write it to reconsider what you're writing. And if there's a 50p + an envelope + paper cost to that, maybe you think more carefully about what you're trying to say.

With a 500 character limit and a "quick fire, gotta reply fast" push, most interactions are utter crap.

Email (at least to me) is the sort-of-okay middle ground.

You don't really have leverage through Twitter.

It does create a public paper trail of community sentiment though.

I hate to break it to you, but Twitter is fairly meaningless to almost everyone in the world except a specific type of people in coastal cities.

So is the vast majority of public documents. That being said, having a record of actions, issues and opinions can be quite useful as these records age.

While I agree with this sentiment (and despise “Twitter activists”) https://onemilliontweetmap.com says otherwise

This is telling me that 45 tweets are coming from North Korea.

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