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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

They look different to me. Australia is flexing its anti-speech authority, asserting the power to control what its subjects are allowed to talk about. My hometown cops are engaged in a much more quotidian abuse of power.

Which is not to say ransacking Carmody's place wasn't egregious - it was. Watching the circular firing squad composed of the Mayor, the police chief and the cop-union attack dog just leaves me rooting for injuries.

But ultimately it is a stupidity eruption caused by the cops' arrogant attempts to control their own (garbage) reputation. Our cops are criminals, but not part of a national strategy to shut down speech.

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> Our cops are criminals

I spent a year working as a cop and I can assure you that cops are in fact normal people. Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it and they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own; however, that is organizational not individual. There is a larger cultural issue involved that drives such misguided organizational behavior.

I think the real problem here is that police, as an organization, has the power to inflict real and considerable harm on those that try to "get in the way". They're not doing sanitation or driving your bus - they can ruin your life or just kill you.

Agreed. There's an elevated responsibility to be more than just "normal people" when you have a gun and a badge. I don't think it's fair to paint in broad strokes, but I do think it's fair to hold police to a higher standard, especially when it comes to tribalism. When it becomes "us vs them" and "us" has guns and state-sanctioned authority, that's a problem.

I'm unsure what your point is? You can make the same claims about criminals and indeed many people people do.

Criminals are in fact normal people.

> Criminals are in fact normal people.

Could you elaborate more on this claim?

In an ideal world, criminal behavior is supposed to be defined as abnormal and unwanted behavior.

* Is my definition of “criminal” for an ideal world way off target?

* Or, are you mostly critiquing how non-ideal our current world is, and the injustice of many laws currently on the books?

* Something else?

Read Alex Kozinski and Misha Tseytlin's classic essay "You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal" – http://alex.kozinski.com/articles/Youre_Probably_a_Federal_C... - in the US, there are so many federal crimes, so expansively defined, that almost every adult has probably committed at least one, and the only thing keeping them from prison is that they aren't on some prosecutor's hitlist. And I don't think this is an exclusively American problem either, it is a problem in many other countries too.

It serves the side effect|purpose of making people actionable literally from birth. That is, if some day you become an inconvenient someone for people in power, it's just a matter of finding something you did in the past that can ruin your life Cardinal Richelieu style.

The majority of Americans have smoked pot, are a majority now criminals?

Most people are not cops either. Most cultures (aside from some sometimes vocal subcultures) do appear to consider their abuses unwanted anomalous behaviour.

Most people are breaking some law, it just depends how vigorously we want to enforce the law against you.

>they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own; however, that is organizational not individual.

Are you not talking about an organization conspiring to protect law-breakers from justice? Because normal people don't do that.

As it turns out, “normal people in a group with a tribal aspect that closes ranks to defend itself” is ... often very easy to make act in illegal ways.

“Civvies are The Out Group” is a terrible worldview for law enforcement, though a very common one.

>that is organizational not individual.

man, that is just such a pathetic excuse to say the least.

>Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it

"any organization or group" doesn't have the right to shoot me on sight and get off just by claiming a split second subjective perception of danger.

If one can't handle the "tribal aspect", then the one is just not qualified to be a cop.

> they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own

AKA obstruction of justice. By cops. At an institutional level.

In every other industry, if you are caught breaking the law by a co-worker, you will be thrown under the bus (unless you are an executive or a top-quartile salesperson, because sometimes the money is more important than the justice).

Not all of them are actively abusing citizens or running protection, but the thin blue line means even the "honest" ones tolerate it.

If I were to look the other way while my coworkers abused or stole from people, I would at the very least expect to be fired and not trusted with similar responsibility again. That is what a normal citizen looks like, and I don't think a normal citizen attitude could survive in a cop shop.

There is the additional problem that your criminal cops (and we both know there are plenty of them) don't exactly wear identifying tags, so I have no way of knowing which are which. That means my only strategy is to minimize contact with and distrust all of them.

This is simple: if you want people to respect and work with the police, stop protecting the bad ones.

I think you’re actually agreeing with GP. It is the police organization that is criminal as a whole.

It seems obvious to me that senior officials should actively lead the organization into not being hostile to the public interest - which this heavy handedness certainly is.

They are meant to serve us, not themselves or the current political party.

"Australia is flexing its anti-speech authority, asserting the power to control what its subjects are allowed to talk about."

The state absolutely has that responsibility, and there isn't even a debate about that in general.

You cannot publish pictures of your naked girlfriend, or private medical records, or private e-mails of some employee of ABC corp, or of some bureaucrat, or of some military technology etc..

There's no debate there.

So then the question becomes - "What information that is nominally protected by law (say for example, classified material), rises to the level of evidence of criminal activity and therefore newsworthy, by law"

That's a razor's edge, and that has to be sorted out if we want to live in a world where our privacy is protected but the at the same time legit crimes are called out.

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