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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

There was a parallel story in Denmark where the Danish police prevented free Tibet demonstrators demonstrating during the visit of the Chinese president in 2012. It led to an official inquiry but the trail ended blind where the leading police officers giving orders to detain the demonstrators could not remember where their instructions came from and the electronic paper trail had been deleted.

To me the Danish story was less a story about Chinese influence and more about our democracy's separation of powers or lack thereof. How our most powerful politicians and their minions basically can have our police do anything even if it is obviously wrong.

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This reminds me of how China uses their panda’s for diplomatic reasons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panda_diplomacy

"If, as you say, it is no crime to be a panda, then why were we arrested?"

Best New Yorker cartoon ever.

I've read similar stories about lost police documents. A public blockchain could be useful to prevent that.

how?

A public anything would be helpful; you don’t need a blockchain because there’s a single publisher.

Or, instead of blockchain, a simple API.

Being able to lose the paper trail is a feature, not a bug, so a system like that would never be implemented.

The police exist to protect the property and station of those in power. It's why New York City was able to function without a police department until the 1840s while the New York Fire Department can trace its history back to the 1640s.

New York had 180 police officers (marshals and local policemen, and before that, night watchmen) way before the NYPD was established - they were just not organised in one big hierarchy because most crime was local before the mid-19th century immigration wave.

The issue was not the internal communication within the police. For that there was a complete paper trail. But the top police officers got their instructions from somewhere; probably high ranking civil servants, spin doctors or maybe even politicians in the then government. Those communications were gone.

> “no officer had a case to answer for misconduct or gross misconduct.”

Pretty suggestive that in this case, the police were able to demonstrate a binding order from someone who was not an 'officer'.

Really for cases like this the only way through is the Nuremberg one: "only following orders" is not a defence, especially if you can't or won't say who gave the order.

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