Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built Covid-19 dashboard
tallahassee.com
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The Glock was another story. It kicked like crazy and you could really feel the power of each shot in your arms. I didn't have any fun shooting it and I was a more than a little terrified I was going to hurt someone. Even when it was empty I had so much unease just setting it down on the table.
Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. I had an immense sense of dread just knowing how much power was behind those guns. The thought that someone was pointing it at children is just beyond my comprehension now. For what? Allegedly logging into a website?
If shes guilty, go to jail, pay the fine, whatever. But the level of escalation to even walk through the front door with your gun drawn. The level of... I don't know... disrespect? Hatred? I can't even begin to describe to someone who doesn't know just how much force and how casually its being shown.
Truly, these officers are a disgrace to Florida. The people who trained them are a disgrace. And the people who empower them to behave this way are a disgrace.
Isn't the first thing they tell you about guns something like "don't point it at anything you don't intend to destroy"? How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? This is insanity.
Unfortunately the police shoot kids fairly routinely, as lawyer Greg Doucette shows in this twitter thread.
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1336132653481865217
Considering the sheer number of killings, this can and really should be reported in much a similar way to a protracted war, as it does look very much to be an extended attack upon civilians by an armed forces of sorts.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-clas...
No surprise. Even after years of training many, if not most, police officers miss close-up shots more often than they hit. There's a surveillance video somewhere of a security guard and a perp shooting their firearms at each other from about 3 feet apart: they miss every shot. One had a revolver and the other a semi-automatic. It is somewhat reminiscent of the "apartment scene" in Pulp Fiction but even wilder and less believable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YBKdmOlM8
Shooting a target at a range is very different from drawing and shooting at real people who are moving toward/away from you, possibly with ill intent and possibly armed.
For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation.
This is a ridiculous rationalization that could be applied to literally anyone or anything.
I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement.
Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Seriously I think the only thing that saved us was two of us had our Eagle cards...
This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa... but having lived this sorta stuff first-hand you realize that it's not uncommon to have been harassed at gunpoint by the police.
I'd rather be mugged at gunpoint vs. held at gunpoint by a cop any day of the week due to game theory alone.
So it's not as if the police just came in like a swat team off the bat.
America is a dangerous place, and just like you're a 'regular person at the range with an AR and a Glock' - guns are everywhere.
The 'normal' situation for police to be serving a warrant would be against people accused of things more physically nefarious, and it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn if the individual wouldn't open the door and some degree of aggression needed to be used to enter the premises to serve the warrant.
That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise.
That said - this was a warrant for a white collar/non-violent crime and there's just no excuse for pointing guns at kids, or even the former employee frankly.
Point being, we can't cherry-pick just the things that don't sound nice, and entirely decontextualise.
If there weren't 500 million guns, many of them high-powered floating around out there - and Americans didn't have a propensity for shooting at cops (the level of assertion people show when being arrested in the US is way more than in other nations, car chases barely ever happen in my home country) - then the SOP (standard operating procedures) would be very different. Cops are chill where I'm from - t least in part - because they just don't face aggression or violence in a way that is really threatening. Fights, yes, guns in their faces, almost unheard of.
Given the possibly political nature of the arrest, I think it probably needs to be reviewed by the local Justice Department as well because 'gun pointing aside' - the other Elephant in the room is the issue of whistleblower harassment etc..
Proof? This sounds an awful lot like something a police department who refused to publish video evidence themselves would make up out of thin air to save face.
The press clearly misrepresented even the minor facts of the case ('pointed guns at children') for which there isn't any evidence - using that likely untruth as the headline item thereby making it an iron clad fact of 'truth' in the public narrative.
It's possible, even likely that 1) The woman did something actually wrong and used government accounts without permission and 2) she didn't answer the door for 20 minutes, thereby requiring the police to take a more assertive posture. And frankly I doubt they pointed guns at children because that would be pointless. (Although it's possible she is entirely innocent of breaking into said systems, and possibly has some entirely good reason why she didn't answer the door for the police for 20 minutes)
If you use some public system in an unauthorized way, download data, you certainly would expect police to knock in the door, and you don't answer it for 20 minutes, they might have their guns upholstered when you finally do. That's not unreasonable.
Also, just because someone has a grievance with your company/government, doesn't them a whistleblower. In the entirety of her public foray, I'm not able to find the specific nature of her concerns - the more I look, the more I doubt her claims. Florida releases more data than any province here in Canada as I can tell, here is the Florida dashboard [1] here is the Ontario dashboard [2].
Florida release information specifically related to schools, LTC facilities etc. - Quebec has for example denied that data to the public.
I feel the entire case, like everything, has been politicized.
For reference From [3]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said.
Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said.
The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house.
One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.”
As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone."
[1] https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/
[2] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/infe...
[3] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower...
You are more likely to be violently attacked working at a convenience store than being a cop. But we would not tolerate it if the guy next to the slim jims pointed a gun at every random customer. Citizens that choose to carry a weapon for self-defense cannot point their weapon a people just in case, or even put their hand on their weapon or flash it to other people, that is called brandishing and is a crime. Yet police do it as a normal part of their interactions. This idea that police should be allowed threaten and intimidate other citizens as a normal part of their job because “its so dangerous” is ridiculous.
> it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn
Then this is a failure of their training or a failure of the individual police. Hand waving police having deadly weapons drawn and pointed at fellow citizens because of habit is not acceptable.
> That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise.
First, it is not too dangerous. Second, if it is, then pick a new line of work. If you are too scared to do your job correctly and would rather put citizens at increased risk then join the post office. And maybe, just maybe, a policy of shoving guns in people’s faces is what escalates many of these situations.
You are absolutely more likely to be shot at while serving a warrant, than working in a convenience store.
"Citizens that choose to carry a weapon for self-defense cannot point their weapon a people just in case"
Citizens are not police officers, entrusted to carry out the law and who must actively confront danger, moreover, police are trained to do so.
"Then this is a failure of their training or a failure of the individual police."
This is wrong to the extent that it's very rational for police to at least have weapons drawn when individuals are refusing to comply with the warrant etc.. 'Weapons drawn' is a very simple tactic, which makes them easy to use if necessary. It is not in and of itself particularly dangerous.
"First, it is not too dangerous. "
Yes it is. [1] (from the AP, not Fox News) Have a little Google yourself.
" Second, if it is, then pick a new line of work"
This is a shameful remark, exemplary of the general tone here. "If you don't want to get COVID and die - quit being a nurse - now go ahead and work without a mask!". It's absurd (and basically offensive) to suggest that public servants shouldn't have the right to take appropriate steps to defend themselves, or even have to put themselves in a position of danger, let alone harassment in the first place.
Even African American Police officers are called the n-word and put up with all sorts of horrible abuses (just search 'police' on TikTok) which should definitely be illegal: you cannot go into the DMV or IRS (or Wallmart!) and start harassing people - the same should apply to police.
If the woman in question was concerned for the safety of her children, she would have simply opened the door and 'used her words'.
If in fact, the Gov. is illegally intimidating her, and she's done no wrong, well then I hope the judge recognizes that.
Finally, police reform is not going to come form the plebes on social media, it's going to have to be done thoughtfully, by them, led probably by ex-police officers who have first-hand experience.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/30fd23e66f21446b90d2b8cb0135ae03
> You are absolutely more likely to be shot at while serving a warrant, than working in a convenience store.
Do either of you have statistics?
> Yes it is. [1] (from the AP, not Fox News) Have a little Google yourself.
Serving a search warrant on a statistician who blew the whistle on corruption is nowhere near the same situation as serving a search warrant on drug dealers. Come the fuck on.
Serving warrants in general dangerous, point blank - and even 'white collar criminals' who don't answer the door are giving indication that something may be up.
It's 100% reasonable for the police to have their weapons upholstered at that point and well within reasonable SOP.
2) There's no evidence of corruption on behalf of the officials in Florida - this is the continued misrepresentation of some in the press, and easy echo-chamber populism.
There as an argument over how data should be represented; disagreeing with your employer is not 'whistleblowing'.
Again - Florida releases considerably more detailed information than they do in any province in Canada and somehow, everyone seems to think that we are doing 'such a great job in governance'.
The overall level of wilful ignorance on these nuanced incidents in shameful. Even so-called smart people believe what their emotional triggers and biases want them to believe.
I'm looking forward to hearing what the courts have to say about it.
Over 600 convenience store workers are murdered on the job per year [1] compared to about 60 per year for police [2], about 5-7 of which are during serving warrants (additionally backed by your own source). Convenience store workers are murdered at about 7 per 100k, while police are about 7-8 per 100k [3]. As for how dangerous it is, there are more than 60,000 “no knock raid” search warrants per year in the US [4] and there is no way of knowing how many 10s of thousands of regular warrants are served as well. Saying that serving warrants is “inherently dangerous” because people could become violent is like saying working at a convenience store is inherently dangerous because any customer could be a violent robber.
> This is a shameful remark, exemplary of the general tone here. "If you don't want to get COVID and die - quit being a nurse - now go ahead and work without a mask!". It's absurd (and basically offensive) to suggest that public servants shouldn't have the right to take appropriate steps to defend themselves, or even have to put themselves in a position of danger, let alone harassment in the first place.
Well, wearing a mask doesn’t put others at greater risk. If police want to wear body armor, great. If police want to put other people in danger by excessive weapons use, then no that is not ok. Everyone is allowed to defend themselves against an attacker. Police want to defend themselves anyone that could be an attacker, which is not ok. I am all for providing safety equipment and training to all jobs. I am not ok with compromising the safety of others for the safety, perceived or otherwise, of the police.
This twisting of the concept of defending yourself is exactly the problem. Police already carry guns, multiple less lethal weapons, body armor, etc. If they are attacked, they have multiple ways of stopping the threat, including deadly force. No one has made any claim otherwise. But police want to be able to brandish their weapons and point their weapons at other people that have not shown themselves to be a threat, because there is the possibility of a threat and the misguided idea that imagined threats justify real threats by the police against other citizens.
My tone is one of outrage that police brandishing or even drawing their weapons against unarmed fellow citizens is just seen as normal and acceptable. That police being allowed to see every person as a potential threat and to treat them that way is the standard. Having your hand on your weapon is a threat. Having a weapon drawn is a threat. Pointing your weapon at someone else is a threat. Police threatening unarmed people is not acceptable.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/assaults-and-violent-acts-i...
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-2018.htm
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-war-on-drugs-gave-...
I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so.
Can not be access to guns, I live in Switzerland and 'we' shoot a lot. Have a lot of firearms at home too. Yet our cops are all but trigger happy. So the reason must be another that what I think you are implying?
I agree with you and think it’s an extreme oversimplification to say that higher rate of gun ownership would lead to a more violent police force. Like the military, they are a tool that will behave and act according to the implicit and explicit expectations placed upon them from different sides.
Not doing so is grounds for dismissal in a lot of precincts. It's why we hear stories of officers doing the ostensibly "right" thing by not killing a suspect, yet face dismissal. The department training guidelines dictate a use of deadly force in a scenario, and not doing so is seen as risking the lives of officers.
This is the hill American need to climb to reduce the likelihood of death and serious injury by police. There is a lot of judicial precedent supporting such policies as part of policing guidelines, so it is very unlikely the change will come from the courts. Instead, citizens will need to work at a local level to shift training and policy towards de-escalation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...
Regardless, the current actions in question were inexcusable even if police incorrectly believe they are in increasing danger in general. They simply had no reason to be brandishing firearms in this specific case.
It seems pretty clear (to me) to be cultural. Not cultural in some static sense (e.g. American vs Swiss), but cultural as in the culture of policing in the US has been changing over time. Our police has treated American citizens as more dangerous while the opposite is true. The real question is why. Why have Americans idea of the level of crime in society so diverged from reality? Can this be reversed?
Or maybe it's the fact that corporations pay police to "protect and serve" them instead of the general public [2].
Or it's the "perceived" danger from the cops' point of view?
[1] https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-tra...
[2] https://readsludge.com/2020/06/19/corporate-backers-of-the-b...
If I had a dollar for every time someone on HN who doesn't live in the US nonetheless weighs in as an expert on American life I could retire.
Do you think a data scientist who had ethical concerns about covid data manipulation is a violent murderer? Do you think America in real life is like a movie with gun fights and explosions?
There is essentially zero risk of someone shooting a cop in a routine situation. They weren't raiding some druglord gang headquarters or ISIS terrorist operation.
I used to deliver pizza's back in the 90s, I never would've thought my job was top 5 for deaths, and cops were > 18th, but those are the statistics.
Switzerland and America are like chalk and cheese when it comes to gun ownership.
You need to have guns and a mixture of distrust and/or fear of the government.
Essentially zero handguns produce the kind of energy downrange that an AR-15 produces.
You feel more recoil with a pistol, sure, but that's misleading in the extreme.
Because I am a giant nerd (I mean, look where I'm posting) I have a folder full of Excel docs I created to collate information to compare it for my own amusement. One of those is about ballistics.
An AR is almost always chambered in 5.56x45mm, a NATO standard caliber. The actual projectile in a 5.56 round is super super small -- like, 62 grams. But there's a LOT of powder behind it, so it delivers on the order of 1800 J.
Glocks are most often in 9mm, which is the most popular handgun round in the world. The actual bullet for 9mm is about TWICE as massive, but has so much less powder, and so much less barrel to spin up, that its downrange energy is typically less than 500J -- ie, like 28% of the AR.
But the Glock will buck in your hand, for sure. It takes training and practice to be able to hit the target reliably over and over.
An AR, though, is insanely stable for lots of reasons -- obviously, it's heavier than the pistol, but that's not all of it. There's some clever design involved. But the end result is a gun that most any trainable person can learn to shoot accurately very, very quickly. The marriage of 5.56 and the AR platform creates a weapon that's really insanely good at rapid, accurate fire.
This made it very successful as a military rifle, and makes it a serious terror in the hands of someone bent on bad acts.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab7ec2e9df26a1afc26803...
But if you have the same amount of powder (chemical energy) a heavier bullet will simply move slower, resulting in the same momentum and recoil.
What makes the AR-15 easier to handle is that the gun itself is heavier, so it moves slower from the recoil. That and a few other things like dissipating the energy over a large area on your shoulder instead of the palm of your hand.
5.56 is about 4 grams, or 62 gr.
9mm is about twice that: 7.5 grams or 115 gr.
Well, if you want to prevent unauthorised access to your custom-built messaging system, this is not the way to do it. Proving who accessed it has become a huge forensic investigation at that point.
Saying anyone hacked a system with such a clear and simple single-point-of-failure doesn't exactly ring true. It might be true on a technical level, but you left the door wide open.
Of course, they may have just asked all the authorized users, and had each of them deny it.
Or they could... check the logs, pull the IP, get a warrant, and get the account/ address associated with that IP.
This is basic stuff.
They got a warrant. Judges aren't going to issue a warrant based on asking a bunch of people if they sent a message.
That's just a fancy way of saying "speculate," and judges don't seem to object.
We should see when the warrant application becomes public.
Yep, often followed with "based on my training and experience".
Which is just a fancy way of saying "this is what the other cops in the lunchroom reckoned", and judges don't seem to object.
Don't have to wait, they updated the linked article with more details.
As I figured, they got her IP address from the logs.
Judges routinely issue warrants just because the good ol police officer man says it's totally ok and he'll get a nice lollipop for doing it.
My point is just because a judge issues a warrant doesn't actually mean anything at all. It has the same factual basis as me saying the sky is actually made of M&M's and judge granting a decree that it must be true because I said it.
There was grave misconduct in the Taylor case! Police shouldn't routinely be assaulting homes with weapons drawn. My issue is just the process you're describing here.
"They got a warrant. Judges aren't going to issue a warrant based on asking a bunch of people if they sent a message."
Judges absolutely issue warrants all the time just for the hell of it. The very up parent seems to be indicating that some sort of due process was done because "oh, a judge issued a warrant" and I'm emphatically stating: a judge issuing a warrant means as much as me saying the sky is made of M&M's - just the ravings of irrelevant madmen in the face of actual facts.
Edit: I will say - the warrant process should absolutely be adversarial. Justice is to be blind. Which means if a crackhead and a cop come to a judge and requests the legal authority to break into a home with lethal force, the judge should weigh both requests the same. That's the intent of our legal system - the executive does what it thinks it's supposed to do in light of what the legislative has passed, while the judicial watches them to make sure they don't screw up.
Instead they all get together as buddies and stomp their collective boots into the skull of their fellow citizens.
A judge does not have the power to grant a random private citizen the right to break into someone else’s home, with or without legal force, under any circumstance. Even a court order to allow breaking into your own property, say to evict squatters or tenants, would involve law enforcement. The judge can’t just deputize you like it’s the Wild West.
A good way to prosecute your side of this argument would be to point out any country in the world that has an adversarial warrant system and how well it works. I'm unfamiliar with any. Much of Europe doesn't even have the exclusionary rule, meaning that evidence of crimes obtained under false or broken warrants remain admissible.
If your argument is simply that most police shouldn't be armed, you'll get no argument from me.
On the destruction of evidence, this one has always baffled me - so is there evidence or not? Presumably when I go to a judge saying I need the legal authority to kill some babies at 3 AM because otherwise the evidence will be destroyed... I have enough evidence to justify killing those babies, right?
... So this begs the question... Why do I need authorization to kill babies at 3 AM? In case the suspects destroy more evidence? What was my evidence to kill babies to begin with? Just a hunch? Because a judge should absolutely shit on that, and it should be adversarial. A judge should laugh when evidence for a warrant request is "oh, I need the warrant because they'll destroy the evidence for me to request this warrant."
From my rough observation of the news for the past 20 or so years, the evidence of these crimes these babies died to protect has never been worth it. Maybe you know of a few where the death of a few babies were worth it because the crimes were so heinous. Every time I'm aware of - it's just been drugs, which could have been done in daylight hours, with no dead babies.
Now maybe this is your point about unarmed police. I'm not sure. But a warrant tends to be a fuck ton of latitude (as I've said in prior comments - judges just hand them out like candy), so just send in cops who want to kill with their bare hands and you'll get the same result, in my opinion.
I agree I'm being extreme, but that's where we are today. We tried the whole "let's just all get along and try to fight crime together" method, and it turns out cops will just lie to judges and go kill kids. This isn't me doing a slippery slope "what if" scenario. This has already happened. A bunch of times. Too many times in my opinion.
So now it's time for us to take away everyone's toys until they can show us they can all be good.
Be specific. What country has better rules regarding warrants than the US? This should be easy, because it seems hard to believe that we could be the best country in the world at this process. Then we can go look at how that country handles things, in specifics, and learn something.
Basically, I'm saying I don't trust cops because they kill 1,100 people a year. That's it. That's my whole argument. Just 1,100 lives. Every year.
You're saying that's not relevant to what we're talking about and let's look at how European countries seem fine with their more lax evidentiary protocols, legal systems, and trusting cops. Even though their cops only kill 50 people a year (at equivalent population rates).
I really don't have a "better" warrant system to propose other than an adversarial one because at the end of the day I don't trust cops, and you're advocating for a legal system that intrinsically does. This is me saying "hey, blue is actually yellow" and you saying "no, blue is blue." Our perceived realities are too far apart.
I'm not interested in your feelings about the police killing people, because I share them, and there's nothing for us to discuss about it.
I am interested in the provenance of warrants, because they're central to the actual story we're commenting on.
Basically you both are in violent agreement, I think.
I’m pretty sure this is the case in most if not all US jurisdictions. You have to pass police Academy and annual or at least somewhat regular proficiency, physical, and written tests to ensure you are competent.
It not like you can just get hired as a cop because you have a cop friend.
The point of licensing is to bypass the CBA; the state can revoke a license --- for reasons other than "failed an exam" --- and having done so, the local department cannot retain the officer regardless of the results of labor arbitration.
This is something Illinois is working on right now, at the behest of the Lightfoot administration, though I haven't seen much news on progress. It's a big deal.
No. They have to convince a judge who is neutral in the matter. They have to have probable cause the criminal activity has/is occurring at the stated location the warrant is requested to be issued for. And the officers are under oath for this process, yet we see very few repercussions for a breakdown in this process. The affiant is open to persecution for perjury. The officers in the Taylor case lied by listing her and two others on the warrant. [0]
It's not an adversarial process, it's one of fact based decision making. Why would the judge blindly trust or mistrust the officer? The judge should trust the facts being presented are true, but that doesn't constitute a rubber stamp. And, as stated, if said officer lies about that evidence they should be prosecuted appropriately. Facts are often questioned to ascertain validity, that clearly did not happen in her case.
[0] https://www.wave3.com/2020/05/12/breonna-taylor-shooting-war...
But to me, the more important question is "what are the ramifications for subverting the intended warrant process"? It seems that both sides here are arguing that the warrant process should be based on veracity and proportionality, and it regularly isn't. So what process oversees and corrects the rubber-stamping of warrants?
But merely broken (if not fraudulently obtained) warrants aren't a basis for excluding evidence, because of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule.
What do you imagine is the point of having one? It's to hold police accountable and Judge if what he/she being told is potentiality total BS.
[0] https://www.wave3.com/2020/05/12/breonna-taylor-shooting-war... [1] https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09...
Maybe go reread it.
"The connection with Glover is an important piece in this puzzle. The narcotics investigation was not just going after Glover, but several people believed to be involved in a drug trafficking ring. Police had reason to believe that Breonna Taylor had been involved because they believed that packages were being delivered to her apartment which Glover picked up and he said that she was in possession of several thousand dollars that belonged to him." [0]
This is readily apparent in the warrant.
And another, just to clarify. [1]
[0] https://clashdaily.com/2020/08/report-breonna-taylor-extensi... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/04/report...
From NPR: "The purpose of the raid on Taylor's home was to find evidence linking her to an ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a convicted felon with a history of drug trafficking, according to court documents.
Police didn't find any.
Now it appears prosecutors attempted to tie Taylor to a life of crime after her death." [0]
Now color me sceptical, but that appears to be an interesting argument if she's not a target as you continue to incorrectly posit.
Please top spreading misinformation.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908625259/prosecutors-plea-of...
I do wonder how much of the response to this post just begins with the assumption that red states are incompetent. If this had happened in a blue state no doubt the comments would be different. On the internet it's all ideology all the time.
Comcast has this weird system that allows users to open their WiFi AP to other Comcast customers, in return for the ability to hop on to any other "open" Comcast AP.
AFAIK, Comcast made it opt-out.
So, someone could have driven by to use her AP specifically in order to implicate her.
I have multiple VLANs at home, and I only have one WAN IP.
for what its worth: claims to have tested and says they are different public IPs
If you have some simple logging and a foolish "hacker", it's a pretty trivial investigation.
The system is Internet-exposed. Even proving the user is in the country that you think they are is nontrivial.
If you run an internet exposed service and you log IP addresses and have the ability to issue a warrant, it is entirely trivial to trace a request back to a specific house.
There are a lot of ways to obfuscate your IP address, but if you don't know how to cover your tracks, it's easy to get caught.
Having an IP address alone is not generally probable cause enough to get a warrant, because they are regularly rotated, and shared, across geographic areas. And that's assuming nothing proxying that connection at all.
It might not be enough to convict her, it is enough to get a warrant. While they do rotate, ISPs do this with law enforcement a fair amount and I'm pretty sure they keep track of who owns which IP at any given moment.
> And that's assuming nothing proxying that connection at all.
A clever knowledgeable person would proxy, most people wouldn't know how. This is why I said it would be a foolish hacker. It's also possible someone else tapped into her wifi and did it. Or maybe there was no IP.
I'm just suggesting what is the most obvious piece of evidence which a judge would accept to grant a warrant here.
That does not negate the fact that an ISP can trivially correlate a time-stamped IP addr with a specific user.
Find out the ISP that owns the address, ask the ISP what customer it was assigned to at the time in question, and while that doesn't tell you who was using it for the particular accesses you are investigating (it could be anyone in the house at the time, or someone outside using that house's WiFi, or someone from anywhere in the world using malware installed on a computer in the house), it does tell you that that house has a decent chance of having relevant evidence, and that will probably be enough to get a warrant to go look for that evidence.
It doesn't take a ton of expertise to set logging, most web services log access by default.
Warrants do not require evidence, just a signature.
It is also a trivial piece of data to plant. Given the facts, I see no particular motivation for her to have sent the message. However I do see a motivation for the department to try to frame her. And they've already established a willingness to make stuff up.
And I'd also want to know more about the setup. What is the machine used for? What else is on it? How is the logging set up?
Given the general incompetence shown, I wouldn't be surprised if the machine needed to provide ingress is also one that is publicly accessible for downloading data from the public. With lots of stuff in unlogged POST requests. If so, they could indeed have a request from her close in time to when the message was sent. And it might be legitimately hard to figure out whether she was doing something authorized or not.
Our plea bargain system is so lopsided that 97% of criminal charges end with a guilty plea without a trial. Even if she is 90% sure of winning at trial, unless she has a million dollars lying around and a deathwish, it STILL isn't worth it to fight the system.
I first looked into this after Aaron Swartz's suicide. Every time I've looked since it has seemed even more broken.
This is bad news for anyone who cares about justice. And good news for any authorities who are trying to target someone that they don't like.
If we're discussing police charging into houses of people accused of nonviolent crimes armed to the teeth, we're on the same page. But otherwise, I'm not clear what your suggestion is here.
Look at what happened to Aaron Swartz. If he lost at trial, he was facing a lifetime in jail. They were also seeking damages that he had no hope of paying because his finances had already been drained by the legal fight. A legal fight that was projected to cost over a million dollars more than already spent.
Or he could take a plea bargain. Which would have put him in serious debt, in jail for a few years, and made him a life-long felon.
Or he could commit suicide. Which, of course, he did.
In that surprisingly typical example, if his odds of winning were 90%, on average he spends as much time in jail if he chooses to fight. Which he couldn't afford to do. And you still have to accept that chance of losing your whole life in jail.
In that situation, I'd probably have accepted the plea bargain. No matter how much I believed myself to be in the right.
Given those incentives, it is somewhat surprising that 3% of people do choose to fight. But then again, that's down in the range of the portion of the population with serious mental illnesses.
You wrote other things, and I'm sorry I didn't read them carefully, because I'm a nerd and a human and I can't get past "a lifetime in jail". I'll try to revisit later and respond to them, and wouldn't want to suggest my not responding to them is an indication that they aren't good points.
That was before they added nine more felony counts on September 12, 2012. As techdirt said at the time in https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-go..., the theoretical amount that he could have been put away for was 50+ years with a fine of up to $4 million.
That's the lifetime that I was talking about.
The fact that they were seeking a far lesser conviction, didn't stop them from throwing around those figures. And I'm sure that Aaron Swartz had to think about those numbers.
Incidentally Aaron Swartz wasn't even the first programmer to commit suicide while being prosecuted by a team including Stephen Heymann. That dubious honor goes to Jonathan James in 2008.
All of this notwithstanding, the important point is this. For most of US history, plea bargains were illegal. The way that they now railroad people into pleading guilty en masse demonstrates that they should still be illegal. And the fact that our plea bargaining system is so lopsided means that the right to a fair trial is more theory than practice.
As a double check on that, consider https://innocenceproject.org/bad-drug-test-leads-to-wrongful.... Widely used roadside drug tests that are inadmissable in court have been found in practice to be wrong more than 1/3 of the time. And yet, 90% of people charged wind up accepting the plea bargain.
The state literally has no evidence that they can present in court. And knows that a lot of those people are actually innocent. But they all get railroaded.
Welcome to justice, American style.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
35 years is a "whale sushi sentence". You have multiple ways of knowing it's false, if you dig in: again, Swartz's lawyer, the prosecutors own statements, and a straightforward reading of the sentencing guidelines (2B.1).
A particularly important detail of how sentencing works: charges group. The press releases often imply that you might serve time on every count, but in reality, in almost all circumstances, you serve the sentence associated with the most severe count.
The TechDirt article makes the same mistake. TechDirt has gotten better over the last few years; Mike Masnick got tight with the Ken White / Popehat scene, and I assume they get feedback now on legal stuff. But that article is exactly the kind of thing what White is talking about when he says that the media bears some culpability in people's misunderstanding of how sentencing works.
To be clear: all I'm litigating is whether Swartz faced a "lifetime" in prison --- or, for that matter, any double-digit-years sentence whatsoever. I'm not qualified to evaluate the sentencing guidelines, but my layperson read of the guidelines results in Swartz facing 1-2 years if he'd been convicted on everything. You shouldn't take my word for it at all, but do note that my reading lines up with what Swartz's attorney said as well.
Still, the fact that prosecutors seek to create this confusion in the general public makes it likely that they seek to create it in defendant. And stressed out people who should know better often wind up with bad conclusions because stressed out people under pressure don't think well.
That said, Swartz's attorney told Swarts that they would be seeking 7 years. Your lay reading may say that they wouldn't get it. But the gap between what you hear from different sources is extreme. And once you're in front of a judge, I don't trust courts to do the right thing.
Swartz had excellent counsel, federal criminal defense attorneys understand the sentencing guidelines the way we understand singly-linked lists.
I agree, strongly, that there is a massive power disparity between ordinary defendants and prosecutors. But I'm going to gingerly venture that you can't gauge the magnitude of that disparity by the number of cases that plead out. Some component of that is power imbalance, but the greater component of it is that law enforcement generally prosecutes lay-up cases. Many years of reading and listening to Ken White, who is no friend of the DOJ, leads me to believe this is even more true with federal prosecutions.
See https://www.texastribune.org/2017/03/07/report/ for how there is only one county in the country that actually double checks drug tests after someone has plead guilty. The result is that the one county alone manages to exonerate more people each year than the next three states combined.
There is no reason that I know of to believe that Harris County has an abnormal number of people wrongfully convicted. They are only unusual in figuring that out and turning them free later.
This is very likely not true according to his very good attorney. He felt that there would be no custodial sentence, and that losing the case was not likely.
The depiction of police (allegedly) escalating the situation with threat of deadly force, especially with kids present, literally (not figuratively) got my adrenaline going.
I'd be interested in hearing both sides of the story with supporting evidence.
The thing is this story is not at all surprising or unusual for the US. This kind of stuff is constantly happening on an almost weekly basis and after all the evidence is collected the result is "Yes this all did happen and no we are not going to do anything about it"
US law enforcement has very little oversight on their use of force.
Police departments are not required to report how many citizens they kill nationally, and they’re shielded from legal liability in virtually every case. Even when charges are brought, judges parse the law to an insane degree, to the point where sending attack dogs against a surrendering suspect in the woods is illegal, but not if they’re in a “grassy ditch”.
I’m not being hyperbolic, that’s an actual case where cops got off because there was no clear and specific precedent that what they were doing was wrong. And since they got off, they didn’t make new precedent to stop it in the future. Of course.
Me too.
Coming in guns drawn is not that uncommon in that scenario. You have a suspect refusing to answer the door for 20 minutes, so you don't know if they are preparing an ambush or other danger.
If I was a better writer, I’d adapt these things to prose and write up some Alice in Wonderland style story. People will go to the most ludicrous lengths to defend the most incredulous actions by police. Was the kid gonna throw his Tonka truck at him?
The "point a gun at a child" part comes in that her children where upstairs, but if the cops are looking out for hidden gunmen, why would they belief what she says.
It turns out those police officers had been a violent mob that swarmed a woman’s car, ripped her out of it and gang assaulted her before arresting her (she was later released without charge). The child they broke the window and took him out before taking his picture and using it for propaganda. But they got their child for a photo op, so I suppose it was justified.
FWIW, the caption was: “We are not your enemy,” the union said in the posts showing Young’s son. “We are the Thin Blue Line. And WE ARE the only thing standing between Order and Anarchy.”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/30/philadelphi...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929752605/mom-dragged-from-su...
It really should be uncommon though.
Being a police officer isn't close to one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but being in contact with an adversarial police officer is one of the most dangerous situations to be in. I'd be more afraid of the police, like many people.
"Being a police officer isn't close to one of the most dangerous jobs in America, but being in contact with an adversarial police officer is one of the most dangerous situations to be in."
This is a logical fallacy. It can be dangerous to be at the hands of an hostile officer, but then an equal comparison would be to say that being a police officer I'm the presence of an armed violent criminal is dangerous.
But like you said, being an officer is not the most dangerous profession. Just like being in the presence of a police officer is not that dangerous.
There is no reason to draw your weapon in this context. Danger should be determined from context clues, not defaulted to the highest priority.
There is no reason in hell you can ever justify pointing a weapon at a child. Period. That goes beyond bad policing and into disrespecting guns and plain stupidity. This is someone’s home not a war zone.
It would be great if we had good video of how the gun was pointed and where the people were. It was likely only pointed up the stairs in a "low-ready" manner and not aimed. But we will never know.
How about defiantly refusing to open the door and a past conviction for assaulting an officer as context clues?
At least three pistols were drawn by officers entering the home. The first officer doesn't draw his weapon until after interacting with the suspect, being told her husband and children are home, and then entering the home. If she has a previous conviction for assaulting an officer that wouldn't matter since she was already removed from the situation at this point. The first and third pistols I saw were pointed at the floor the whole time. The second officer has his pistol aimed at the top of the stairs as he is walking towards the bottom of the stairway.
And like my comment said, we don't see any people at the top of the stairs, so we don't know if it was aimed at anyone or not. Even if there are people up there, we can't tell if the gun is aimed at anyone or pointed "low" (into the top few stairs) or at a higher angle to aim at a person as it's only a 10 degree or so difference in angle and we don't see the full scene. All we can do is make assumptions, which isn't helpful.
He may have been following his SOPs perfectly. I don't think this is an appropriate SOP for LEOs to use in this situation. I don't think this case called for having weapons drawn at all. My view is that this SOP is likely to contribute to unnecessary civilian injuries and deaths.
Why wouldn't this be appropriate when clearing a building with unknown threats when dealing with an uncooperative person? The only way it leads to unnecessary injuries is if the officers don't make a proper identification of a threat/non-threat, which can happen with the gun in other positions too.
This type of search wouldn't have been necessary anyways if she had complied immediately. They would have normally asked everyone to exit before doing their search, but once the suspect has been uncooperative and they gain entry they need to be proactive about the search to avoid evidence destruction or suspect fortifications given the suspect's actions. Now had she opened the door quickly, I would agree that the actions would not have been appropriate because you're supposed to clear the building by voluntary means first. In this case, the suspect's family declined that voluntary option by not complying.
Some people would argue that not having guns drawn in this type of case would result in more police deaths. I agree but don't view this as a deal breaker. How many civilians will die with guns drawn vs how many police officers die without? Should we count civilian and police lives the same in this situation? Police officers are compensated for the risks they take and have protective gear like body armour to reduce this risk. In the linked video I don't see the police using any head covering other than ball caps. If they thought there was a risk why didn't they put on helmets? I'm sure the Tallahassee police have access to that kind of PPE. The fact that they chose not to wear full PPE suggests to me that they didn't believe there was a substantial threat in the home.
Every building search is considered high risk. It's not an extreme risk, which is why they didn't execute it as a no-knock with SWAT, but there is still risk. The actions taken appear to consistent with that level of risk.
Here's what a quick google search turned up.
This link [0] shows that US police kill over three times as many people, per capita, than Canadian police. However, I think there are other issues, like easy access to guns, that affect this stat so this isn't really a very useful stat for our discussion.
This group [1] has been collecting info on arrest related deaths but a quick look only showed me links to how they collect data and not the actual data. It also looks like they stopped their surveys in 2012.
This paper [2] has some of the most relevant stats I've found for our discussion and covers use of lethal force by police between 2009-2012. From their numbers, 83% of victims were armed or believed to be armed (this includes toy guns, etc) and over 93% of the deaths were from firearms. If we assume that the 7% of deaths were the police didn't shoot all apply to unarmed victims then 10% of the people killed by police were unarmed and shot. Their stats also show LEOs being killed in less than 2% of these incidents. Their numbers do show 9% of these cases resulting in an injury to LEOs but we don't have numbers on non-fatal police caused injuries so I don't want to compare apples to oranges.
[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ [1] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=82 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
Unarmed in the context of this paper would only be as it applies to deadly weapons. The suspect could still pose a threat with an alternative weapon (such as a pipe) or even pose a threat with bare hands too. The percent of people killed without posing an immediate threat would be more appropriate, and was 5% (would like to see the details of those with prosecution metrics). I would guess that 5% that mostly fits in the 7% you mentioned (which includes cars, suffocation, falls, etc), but unfortunately the paper doesn't seem to get granular enough for that. So I don't think we can draw a good conclusion from this paper that there were more civilians unjustly shot by police than the police being shot by civilians (the paper leaves out non-fatal incidents too). On that note too, the 2% officer fatality rate you show would not be fully encompassing. Meaning, it would be missing encounters in which the suspect killed the officer without also being killed.
[1] Suspect accused of a non-violent offense, with no violent history.
Her whole family had headphones in? She had headphones in even while talking to and hanging up on the police? Seems unbelievable in case.
Soeaking of idiots ruining their life: Assange might be a good example that people know. He was allowed to surrender on his own/with his lawyers (first time around). Not sure about his latest arrest, but IIRC he was resisting and all they did was humiliate him by carrying him out like a petulant child.
The rights/procedures for the search warrant vary by state. I have a general understanding of them for my state.
Every citizen should learn their rights. I think it's terrible, and a sign of a poor state of education and civic duty that so few people know their rights. This lack of knowledge allows violations to happen without any punishment.
Seriously- I’m not just being difficult here. Threats of deadly force should not be the default.
For context, this is coming from someone who carries a handgun every day for personal reasons. I’m not at all uncomfortable with guns. I am extremely uncomfortable with law enforcement using guns in a way that would get me arrested, charged, and convicted when there is zero legal justification for them to do so.
You also don't have the duties assigned to police. That's the difference. If you have the legal authority to clear a building, you could act lawfully the same way they did.
Not "allegedly". There is video: https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065787900145665
This person clearly was not a fugitive and I’d be surprised if she or her family posed any threat but they chose to enter her home guns drawn.
Why?
Yes, but it costs more and the potential hazard justifies it. Of course, if there are innocents involved the police might go in anyway, and they will allege such danger in the request for the warrant. Obviously Rebekah presented a suspected danger of continued cybercrime unless her alleged activity was interrupted immediately. Looking for the warrant...?
All laws implicitly carry the premise of enforcement by deadly force. What you see on the video is just stock procedure embodying that premise. This is the product of calling the police "Law Enforcement Officers".
I am not. As much as 'anti-intellectual', or 'plain wrong' it may be it may be, I am not interested in seeing evidence produced by the state or local police.
The US has regressed to a fascist state. Neither the police, nor politicians, nor federal judges can be trusted at this point. The whole system reeks of corruption at every level.
I've seen a lot of people with bad trigger control and not knowing proper gun safety, but I've seen it far too often from police. The acceptable level of this for police is zero and it isn't even close to that.
[0] This is a cult classic for "Bad" movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ZpyKSmgdE
[1] From what I've seen, it does still seem like they do similar training that is highly fear based. As in "you could die at any second. It is you or them" and does not reflect the reality that being a cop is relatively safe. At least that narrative is not in the public domain. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-23/how-da...
I would say that being careful with one's language to avoid offense is reasonable, if the hypothetical other party's propensity for taking offense is reasonable. Incense at the specter of a political discussion is not reasonable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Po...
> When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ [Trump, July 2017]
> If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise. They won’t be so much, because the courts agree with us too — what’s going on in this country? [Trump, July 2016]
> “Sometimes they grab one guy, ‘I’m a reporter! I’m a reporter!” ...they threw him aside like he was a little bag of popcorn.” [Trump, September 2020, clearly mocking the reporter in context]
So the people on the “right” who are cool with this are basically every Republican official and about 70m Americans who voted for Trump last month. Seems like a lot of people!
The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)
In the decades since, the police (and their unions) have had a long, long history of right wing action.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is known for their 'Red Squad', which was used in the 1900s to bust up unions, leftists, and people suspected of being communists. They regularly welcomed literal Nazis into their ranks in the 30s and 40s.
The stories aren't unique to Portland either. A common piece of police iconography is a Punisher skull. Police with SS tattoos are not uncommon.
This is a correct reading of the history of policing in America[1].
I'm serious baffled as to how people got the idea that police were created in the 1800s. Do people really believe that cities like Boston and New York existed for centuries with nobody to enforce laws?
> Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647.
Again, police are as old as civilization. Laws without a body to enforce them are just words in paper (or clay tablets).
That said, we're skidding towards a semantic argument, so if you are comfortable agreeing to disagree here, I am too. We can continue to think each other wrong, looking at the same history.
This isn't a semantic disagreement, this is factually incorrect. ”Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces" have absolutely existed in the US before the 1800s and date back to classical antiquity at least. Rome often employed it's legions as police, and there was even a dedicated legion stationed specifically to police Rome [1]. It's hard to get more "Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed" than deploying the military as a patrol force. And in the US professional police forces, not militia or community watch, have existed since the 1600s. And by the way, many police forces are still led by elected leaders - professional, organized police and community oversight are not mutually exclusive.
It might be fair to say that in the 1800s and early 1900s industrialization and technology had progressed to the point that police started to resemble modern police, and many US cities grew to the point that they started municipal police forces in this time frame. But the police of the 21st century with cameras, computers, dna testing, 911 systems and radios are arguably even more removed from the police of 1900 than the police of 1900 were to the police of 1800 or 1700.
Historically, enforcement of the law was a military, community, religious, or rotating obligation. It was not particularly respected, organized, or high class. There were some exceptions, but in general our current model of policing evolved from English tithings. Groups of men who were responsible for bringing criminals forward. These groups were collected into Shires, overseen by a Shire-reeve (later "Sheriff"). The shire reeve could round up a posse to go collect a criminal.
Over time, cities started to want to improve the protections for their capital. They wanted to try and prevent crime rather than hunt criminals. The night watch had a reputation of being low class and unruly, and the city of Glasgow decided to clean up their act. They founded the first uniformed police department in 1800 in an effort to be a visible presence in hopes of deterring crime.
Police in America were largely slave patrols, sheriffs and posses, and militias until the middle of the 1800s, when larger cities started following Glasgow's model.
There are plenty of prominent Republicans explicitly supporting Kyle Rittenhouse (not a cop, but a similar event.)
There are, of course, vastly more examples of explicit support for police brutality and other lawbreaking in opposition to protests.
There are several major issues like that in US politics.
Why is climate change a left or right issue?
Why is wearing masks a left or right issue?
Because businesses don't want to pay/lose money on climate change action, and the "party of small businesses" endorses this view.
> Why is wearing masks a left or right issue?
Because the virus was seen as a political/messaging problem (rather than a public health issue) by one of the sides, therefore wearing masks was viewed as capitulation.
You really broadcast your ignorance and your failure to understand others positions with comments like that.
There are definitely people who believe the party line on everything. If that's the case, that could be an indication you're not thinking for yourself.
Because as with all politics it determines the distribution of resources. Those who stand to gain v/s those who stand to lose have both heavily manipulated the science, or at least the reporting.
> Why is wearing masks a left or right issue?
Voluntary masking wouldn't be. Compulsory masking runs afoul of those who have a fundamental belief in self-ownership, negative rights and reject most positive rights [1]. This has deep political roots.
This strikes me as the kind of characterization of other peoples' beliefs that they would find to be false, misleading, and uncharitable.
Not that odd. One side believes in decentralized power which tends toward police doing "pretty much anything" according to their read of the situation, and another side favors reams of paperwork and regulations that may hinder effective policing. The oddity in the US is how the media convinces people to pick one side and criticize the other absolutely, rather than commit to compromise.
I'm on the right side economically but I'm fiercely anti authoritarian and I find this terrible. I don't like the "peaceful protests" because it's just destruction of private property but I hope they can create enough momentum to push for the privatisation of police. Some BLM leader in NY was organising something like that, a militia to defend their people. I speculate this is also why people like Kyle Rittenhouse were defending people in the protests despite not agreeing with the violence (before being identified as not part of the violent mob and attacked).
Incidentally I don't think police privatisation is going to happen, even under a Biden presidency, because that would remove power from the government and neither democrats nor conservatives are happy with that.
Municipal bond offerings are currently exempt from SEC registration and disclosures, we can get the federal government to change that upon evidence of small infractions and force an extremely high level of disclosures such as policing statistics for the next 10 years if the municipality wants to raise capital.
This beats activist's state-level FOIA requests.
It doesn't harm the ability of an officer to make split second decisions and get home safely, which is usually their argument against any proposal.
It doesn't require a whole civil suit or criminal suit for anything to happen.
Just gets the message across that actions have consequences. It lets them run out of excuses so their real thoughts can be made as clear as day.
I think we need private police, subject to the same law as anyone else, and third party arbitration in private courts when something happens.
So I can get that part.
Pointing a gun, loaded or not, at someone else should be a serious crime though! And there probably is, but cops can safely break most laws.
If they've announced that they're law enforcement, it's a bad idea though. You may be in the right if you're just armed and not pointing it, but being in the right never protects you.
Cops just have qualified immunity and have shown they throw hissy fit little tantrums if a DA holds them responsible for being the worthless sacks of shit that they are.
Guns should not be drawn unless there is a reasonable suspicion of a threat. What I tried to say in my OP is that there appears to be no indication of a reasonable suspicion of a threat.
As for gun ownership stats, I think many will be surprised with some of the data points: https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
There is not enough time to draw and shoot if the occupant runs out with his gun.
By the way, you are absolutely right about what it means to have a gun drawn: they are indicating that they are willing to kill. That's how they are trained.
If you want to structure society around fear, that is (I guess) a country's prerogative, but it's not something I (as a non-American) would ever support.
Which doesn’t stop NYC having many, many guns being concealed carry. Because of you are looking to commit violent crimes, what’s another felony vs. having the power of life and death over victims?
And if you are a likely target of violent crimes, what’s a concealed carry felony vs. being dead or having a family member assaulted or murdered because you couldn’t stop it?
EDIT: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted? We're discussing gun ownership in America, when it is legally allowable to use said firearms and the fact that none of that matters when it comes to Police entering your home, all in the context of police acting like the Gestapo at this woman's home.
Its completely unacceptable. Police don't pull over drivers for speeding with a gun drawn. However, anyone in Florida may be armed and you cannot reasonably argue that the drivers are cool headed.
This overreaction is unprofessional, dangerous, and thuggish.
We have a law that we may not be required to quarter soldiers, perhaps a better law would have been to make it illegal to enter private property without consent armed.
I believe that a warrant gives them this right. But the give a bit more nuance there is a difference in entering armed vs drawn. We should definitely have a high standard for when weapons are allowed to be drawn. It is in fact the police who are in a position of power, so they have the higher standard to meet.
When you break down a door, you can't know what's waiting on the other side.
That is IMO a side-effect of the (from an European POV) absolutely mind-boggling, ridiculous sentencing of criminals in the US. Here in Germany, when a drug smuggler gets caught, they can expect four, five years behind bars. Not worth to shoot the cop that just stopped your car full with meth and make a life sentence out of it for murder.
In the US however? Decades, sometimes centuries behind bars. Given that perspective, it does make sense for a criminal to shoot that traffic cop - the chance to get away and escape a death in prison is non-zero.
Add to that the fact that there are more guns than people in the US, plus extremely lax carrying laws, and "stand your ground" laws.
The result are (rightfully, I have to admit) afraid and thus extremely trigger-happy cops.
If the US wants to get rid of trigger-happy cops they have to get the gun problem and sentencing under control first.
(No I didn't vote for Trump)
See the recent-ish school shooting in Florida where the on-duty cop ran away like a baby and let children die. Brian Miller. Still has his job. No one gives a shit.
Cops in the US are cowards who don't deserve to arm with a super soaker.
Three-strikes sentencing can also exacerbate this - escalating minor drug possession to potentially life-ending prison sentence.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/06/denver-star-program-me...
It’s weird too, because on one hand you have them being patient and restrained, on the other they decide to pull their guns out.
The people with actual power in this situation have the greater responsibility.
This cannot be stated enough. It seems in our general conversations that whenever there is a tribal component to the discussion that this responsibility shifts when it aligns or disaligns with your tribe. I've always been a firm believer that you can complain about those in other tribes, but it is your responsibility to hold those in your tribe to a higher bar. After all, you don't have a voice in the tribe you don't belong to and your tribe isn't perfect and can always seek to improve.
And there should never be a question about a person in a position of power being held to a higher responsibility than an average person. No one should be getting a pass on this, inside or outside of your tribe.
Your options are pretty much comply and hope you don't get shot, fight, hide somewhere and hope you don't get shot when they storm in, or set up a camera streaming to someone you trust just in case you don't survive. It looks like she used those 20 minutes to go with the latter option.
Thats terrible judgment. If you think you might be shot for no reason at all, then it certainly doesn't improve your chances to start giving people reasons to shoot you.
I wonder if things like this are what honor duels were about in the past? A way to semi-legally call out someone personally with potentially severe consequences.
Pointing a gun at a kid in a situation like this seems like it should be punishable by itself.
My impression of developing countries was that police are vicious, brutal, and corrupt by default. As opposed to the US where bad cops are the exception. And they have very little oversight. Which countries are you talking about where that's not the case?
Your civilian scenario isn't exactly congruent because you are missing the legal authority point. If you are a civilian with the authority to search a building (your house when you hear a noise at night for example), then you you would be justified in clearing the building in the same way the police did. The response of deadly force depends on if there are alternatives to that use of force (and greatly varies by state). In this case, the alternative to the occupant using deadly force is to comply with the warrant, and if necessary, sue in court for any damages.
How to avoid this:
1) When they show up at your house with a search warrant, let them execute it.
That's it.
I understand the sentiment. I really do. But that is the wrong response when someone is pointing a gun at you. That’s how’s your child loses their father or mother.
Don’t forget that police are trained to shoot to kill. There is no training for “shoot to injure” ... the logic being that if you are injured, you can reach into your clothes and pull out a gun, potentially killing the officer who shot you.
Most training is to shoot “center of mass”. That often kills, yes, but if the goal was to kill (or even kill quickly), tactics like the “Mozambique drill” - two shots center of mass and one shot to the head - would be standard. It’s not. It’s specifically used as training for exceptional circumstances.
You may not understand this type of situation, but I've experienced the feeling of going from a safe, comfortable environment to being in pain and seeing friends hurt, all in a split second; even with Marine Corps training, I was ready to snap. My hands were shaking, there was a roaring in my ears, and I was ready to kill the first threat I saw. That situation, in my home, with my family? It isn't a choice. We are biological creatures, and there are some reactions that are just biological. It's easy to play armchair general and discount all of the human factors.
I understand and I assume you have weapons stashed around your residence in case of these kind of encounters.
But this family almost certainly did not. If you watch the video, the gun is pointing upstairs, presumably at the husband and children. I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation.
So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish, unless on the odd chance he’s a trained ninja like you :)
Read through your comment: "I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation. So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish"
This point of view is speculative, it doesn't come from experience (or even a basic psychological understanding). People do NOT function that way. Maybe they do when playing Call of Duty or watching a Die Hard movie, but not in real life. I can't really impart what it feels like in that sort of situation, but I hope you never have to experience it. You end up needing therapy.
I'd have thought the logic is, "If you want to injure, use a baton. Guns are tools for killing."
Teaching "shoot to injure" would be reckless considering the chances a "wounding" shot ends up killing somebody.
You have 20 seconds to comply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M
My brother, a Portland living, Bernie Sanders voting guy who is in charge of the covid data analysis for a large, global defense contractor (he does it all day, every day) has called her an irresponsible hack from day 1.
Can you do this forever? Just ignore them and stay in your house forever, or at some point are they allowed to escalate the situation?
(serious question)
Her key claim (She refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."[1]) doesn't appear disputed by any of the counter narrative, which seems mostly about smearing her about a cyberstalking charge related to her personal life and questioning her credentials[1].
> My brother, a Portland living, Bernie Sanders voting guy who is in charge of the covid data analysis for a large, global defense contractor (he does it all day, every day) has called her an irresponsible hack from day 1.
Well that settles it? Although with ESRI crediting her work on the C19 dashboard[3] and Google finding her skills credible enough to work with her on the school opening dashboard[4] I'm think there is some evidence that perhaps your brother-in-law's "day 1 judgement" might have been rushed.
[1] https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/12/07/rebekah-jo...
[2] https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2020/05/21/florida-he...
[3] https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/scientist-maps-flor...
[4] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/data-analytics/former-...
Taken from the article:
She claims to be a data scientist.
Her quote:
“Hacking is not something I ever thought they would accuse me of because I have never displayed any capability of doing that,” she said. “I’ve never taken any computer courses or anything like that. I do statistics in a software program designed basically to do all that stuff for you by clicking stuff.”
Yeah, that's the data scientist to hire: someone who "clicks stuff."
Additional quote from article:
"In an affidavit signed by FDLE investigator Noel Pratt on Dec. 3, he concluded the email message was sent to approximately 1,750 accounts before it was discovered. Pratt said in the affidavit that he tracked down the IP address of the computer associated with the email and it directed him to Jones’ home address, which he said was probable cause to conduct a search of her property and seize her computers."
This person is not trustworthy, or qualified as a source. None of her colleagues have corroborated her claims. She was put on a pedestal by a media that desperately wants to attack any governor, especially a Trump ally, who wanted to open their state back up rather than go the lockdown model. It's that simple. I'm not a DeSantis fan at all, but if an anti-vaxxer was crusading against him, I wouldn't give them a platform just to get to him. I'd think about the implications of putting an alarmist with no scientific credentials to speak of on a platform as a weapon against him. She's a GIS specialist with no coding skills. How exactly does that make her qualified to talk about infectious disease data publicly, and to unilaterally change the dashboard she was tasked with maintaining without consulting her boss and/or team? (that's why they fired her)
We can talk all day about the appropriate police response to this kind of crime, but she's not credible as an expert. She's a click jocky who is skilled with Tableau, Qlik, and ESRI. And she's engaged in a deceptive charade of labelling herself a whistleblower, down to the tweets leaving out key information.
My own experience working near a lot of police early in my career led me to believe that the majority of the training instills a "us vs them" attitude in the police, and it carries through to everything they do. Combined with the constant bombardment of stories about the tiny percentage of cases where someone is actually violent and the results are predictable.
Frankly, i'm of the opinion that the vast majority of cops shouldn't be carrying lethal weapons into the average traffic stop or whatever other activity is basically 100% safe outside of infinitesimal number of cases which go violent. After all, by pulling over, the person has basically already yielded to their authority.
Related to that point, defunding may actually have the opposite of the intended effect. You may actually have to spend more money to increase accountability, change culture, and improve the quality of policing.
And I don't for a moment consider most police forces to be underfunded. The lions share of most city budgets are the police force, and it goes to buying armored cars and helicopters, and "benchmark city" ratios of police/citizens. And where I live the armored car gets used once or twice a decade, and in all cases so far could have probably just called the larger city an hour away and borrowed theirs as was done 15 years ago before the purchase.
Some how we survived for a century with far less police, and outside of the crime wave of the 1970/80's which were likely caused in large part by other things, were generally safer too. That "crime wave" seems like it would have solved itself without the huge ramp up of police funding we now have today, although the tough on crime people like to attribute it to that. A large part goes to fighting the failed drug wars. Which in turn feeds into the massive prison populations we have now, the largest part of which are there for non violent crimes.
Also, the threat on a traffic stop is not to be dismissed - there are officers attacked during those stops. Those stops are not just for traffic violations, but can also happen if the vehicle matches one used in a crime or reported stolen. Do you really want to be unarmed when making traffic stops or other calls? Sometimes they may stop, not to yield to authority, but to ambush the officer so they can get away without being identified.
Those were the systems I was working on 20+ years ago.
Violence has never gone down from defunding. Although this should be obvious, an alarming number of people don’t seem to be thinking rationally on that topic. It has certainly gone up after defunding, however.
They’re not paid better due to the fact that they are in unions at all. Otherwise teachers would be rich, and police departments in major cities wouldn’t be struggling to hire even with relatively high wages. They pay that because nobody wants the job and the public is inexplicably antagonistic towards cops who join out of a desire to help people.
Saying that it’s quite safe is absurd and obviously untrue. It didn’t make your top 10 list of professions with the most deaths, but it’s barely below the cut, so still in the top 20 easily. And again, that data doesn’t tell the whole story.
American police training routinely promotes an us-versus-them mentality. It instills the idea that every situation is a threat that must conquered and dominated. You can see this in their comments that the streets are "a war zone" and talk about being "warriors", and a routine glorification of violence and stereotypes. This is why American police routinely escalate situations. Note on the video, the police don't just pull guns, but then start agressively barking orders.
Contempt of Cop is real.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-clas...
This is what Defund the Police is about. Its not about getting rid of cops, its about providing the right resources and tools and staff for the type of job they have.
And then you still have armed police without training.
Also, you know, tanks. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/towns-dont-need-...
Yeah, and safer cars increase reckless driving for the same reason...
"Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as it is a social signal that you come prepared to enact violence."
It's being used in response to a suspect's social cue that they are there to commit violence. What should we do, just lay down?
"Less lethal equipment promotes escalation, as it has a perception of being harmless and more acceptable to use in non-violent situations."
This is false. The use of less lethal force is not viewed as harmless and any training will show that. That training will also contain use of force education.
I think there's a conversation about law enforcement and civil rights that people in the US need to have. But its awfully hard to have a real conversation when people don't want police to use lethal force and also don't want cops to have access to things that allow them to do their job with less reliance on lethal force.
> Also, you know, tanks. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/towns-dont-need-...
Actually those are not tanks. And the US military has no problem using .50 cal on personnel. Which are just nitpicks but they illustrate how hard it is to talk about these subjects when the people making the criticisms are so profoundly ignorant about the facts of the matter.
In the incredibly rare event you have an active terrorist attack and can move the MRAP to it before it's over, it may provide the benefit of movable cover.
The rest of the time you have to park it (in two parking spaces likely), train people with it, fuel it, clean it, maintain it. It's just a huge distraction that sends a terrible message to the people you are supposedly serving.
And what events in the US are at high risk of attack by IEDs and mines?
Also, a regular truck will not stand up to storm debris in strong winds.
They pay for it and in fact if they dont USE it, it will be confiscated and not refunded.
so not only do they get very big brutal hammers, but for contractual reasons they are FORCED to use them or lose they money they paid for them.
> We found that, in a two week period at the beginning of June, when the anti-racism protests began, New York City spent $115 million on police overtime, which was over four times what the city spent in the same period last year.
> $14 million went to new locker rooms. $64 million went to motor vehicles and $104 million was planned for police training. During that training, 60 hours are spent on firearm skills while just eight hours are spent on conflict management.
So the training given to police is a fraction of money spent on annual overtime, and the training that is received goes towards increasing violence.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-cost-of-police-nypd...
NYC alone has dropped over $300M on settling lawsuits due to their poor training over the last 5 years[0]
I know a couple current and former NYPD officers and the amount of times I’ve been told of how a routine mental health check up turned into 4+ cops beating the crap out of an unarmed person in their own home would likely surprise most people who aren’t familiar with how brutal the police in the USA are.
[0] https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/city-payouts-in-nypd-misconduc...
I suspect your comment is greyed out because of this term. Such a fucking stupid slogan, when you turn off people and then try to clarify "It means..." to an audience that's mostly stopped listening.
People's public personas really aren't a guarantee that they'll act a certain way on their property, especially when they are not doing something voluntarily.
Combine that with the fact being that gun ownership is a Constitutional right--that means the chance that anyone can have a gun is above 0. And various attributes of anyone that might determine whether or not someone is about to retaliate are extremely unknowable without long observation times. There's no possible way to quickly ascertain someone's proclivity to violence, agitation level, emotional state, number of guns they really have on hand, willingness to use them, etc. People will act differently outside of a public setting like work, on a TV show, etc.
So as long as guns are as easily available as they are currently, it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most.
I doubt this is true. To me it is clear that their demeanor and behavior increases the liklihood of escalation and an incident.
It's totally unreasonable for the officers to act this way, and I don't think it's particularly obvious that escalating to guns drawn makes them any safer. Maybe it does, but maybe it turns them into a threat in the minds of the people they think they are protecting themselves from.
I don't think it is as simple as this. While one should train for the worst possible scenarios one also has to be aware what to reasonably expect. Like the source in my original comment notes, being a police officer is relatively safe. Given those statistics an officer should not view every situation as deadly. Though it is fine for them to be on high alert. It is still something that is often drilled into people during gun training that you should not point a weapon at something you do not intend to destroy. That is rule #1. Officers need to understand that by erring on the side of weapons drawn is equivalent to escalating any given interaction. Is that the mode of failure we want to have in police?
Sometimes (I'm actually going to say most of time) giving the suspect warnings or time isn't a good idea. In the case of collecting evidence that is on computers, this evidence is easily destroyed if someone knows what they are doing and giving the suspect a warning could ultimately result in loss of justice.
Therefore, coming in unexpectedly, and performing actions to make sure the suspect does not do anything until the evidence is collected makes sense. Yes, coming in with guns drawn is scary, etc. But would knocking on the door and asking for the computers have worked? It might eventually, after many opportunities for evidence destruction occurred... but which way has a higher chance of working?
It's useful to note here that I think if you work for the state, you should be held to a higher standard--this is different than working at a private company and embezzlement, stealing, etc. If you have violated the trust of the citizens of Florida via doing something wrong at your state job, and a judge agrees there is enough probable cause that evidence is on your home computer, isn't better that a method of evidence collection is done that is swift and not likely to result in destruction of evidence? If someone more or less commits a crime against the state of Florida, isn't that more important than the fear/mental health of the individual suspect?
This mentality is so wrong to me.
Yes there is danger associated with entering a home, but if you are not willing to take any risk, don't try to be a cop. Sure, if cops can reduce risk for themselves without increasing it for others, then by all mean they should, I'm not saying they should be daredevils.
But this is different, this is just offloading all the risks from their side onto the citizens. A situation that could be minimal risk to everyone (because let's not pretend that people shooting at cops entering a home is a usual thing), is now high risk (and traumatic in all cases) for the citizen. I would even wager that the risk for themselves is getting increased over time because of people freaking out more and more seeing a cop with a gun in the US.
And let's not pretend that cops in the US are well trained, they are so afraid and completly unable to de-escalate a situation that I would have 0 confidence in a cop pulling a gun on me in the US (not saying I would like it anywhere, but I would sure be less freaked out in Europe).
This is just plain stupid, it's not a necessity of life like you paint it.
> The officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota,[...] clocked more than 100 hours of trainings on topics such as firearms usage, street survival, and the use of force—but had only attended two hours of deescalation training.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-clas...
Well, if you are arresting a person, perhaps there's things that can be done, like waiting outside. How is it supposed to be handled when you have to get evidence?
> I would sure be less freaked out in Europe
I'm sure this is an oversimplification but AFAIK states in Europe either have more restrictions on gun ownership or a culture/mediascape/welfare-state that doesn't encourage the desperation/antagonism you see in the US.
This chance is always above zero, unless you've just full-body-and-orifice searched the person.
I am not american, but isn't there some constitutional clause on bodily integrity or something like that? And isn't that more important than this right on owning guns/pointing guns at people that might own guns, and/or carry said guns?
> So as long as guns are as easily available as they are currently, it's not unreasonable to expect a law officer to start the interaction in this way which is a manner that protects the officer the most.
Going into a home gun-first is something I would expect from armed burglars, not from police that are there for a digital media search warrant.
[edit]
So, after a search, TIL: the USA does not have constitutional bodily integrity, but does grant you the right to own a gun... What ?
So you or me entering this woman's home with guns drawn - we have the same obligation to be there as a cop.
This whole "oh but the cops are scared for their life" crap needs to stop. They have no obligation to do anything, so anytime they do, it's their choice. Just as much their choice as you or me busting into a home with guns drawn.
You wouldn't be sitting here sympathizing with how a random burglar is totally justified in entering a home with a weapon drawn because the homeowner could be armed.
Why do you do the same with cops?
Edit: to summarize my point: cops have no obligation to be there, so if their solution is to enter with guns drawn and barking orders, we shouldn't try to sympathize with that behavior. We should tell them to stay at home and cuddle a teddy bear instead. A lot more people would be alive today if we quit making excuses for why cops are so eager to kill people.
This is a search warrant situation. Obligations exist in this situation - to the judge, court process, and CO. If you want to debate the obligations to the public or immunity of cops, fine--but this isn't like a random traffic stop. What the police is supposed to do in this situation is very clear--serve warrant, get evidence.
> You wouldn't be sitting here sympathizing with how a random burglar is totally justified in entering a home with a weapon drawn because the homeowner could be armed.
This isn't sympathy but just expectation. You would expect a house invader to be armed for exactly that reason, right? Similarly, why wouldn't you expect a cop to do the same?
On your second point... I agree? Cops are forcing themselves into people's homes with the express intent of fucking shit up, that's why they enter armed and dangerous, the same as a thief. Is that what you're saying? Because that's what I'm saying. Do you sympathize with the thief? I don't, the same as I don't sympathize with the cop.
Edit: to clarify - the cop could be entering the home as a neighbor and a friend, and that's what everyone would prefer. Unfortunately, cops decided long ago they'd rather hold onto their right to kill with no questions asked, so now they're no better than a methhead busting down a door. It's ultimately their fault for this image, and they're the only ones that can fix it.
Was surprised to learn this is true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
In the vast majority of cases, the police choose which situations to enter and how to engage.
While this is often true, it wasn't true in this specific case. The person whose home the cops wanted to search was a former state employee, whose record they had plenty of time to examine prior to going to her home, so she was not an unknown quantity.
Invading someone's home isn't an every day task. Most people don't like that. And since this in the US where potentially anyone could easily have a gun, some will take the opportunity remove the invaders of their house by force, especially if they aren't aware or sure it's the police. [0]
But anyway, I'm not sure why police should even be the focus of this thread. They're just doing their job. The bigger issue I see here is the police have been called to take care of an issue that shouldn't require police.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine
EDIT: I'll just add since I'm getting downvoted to oblivion for saying something that could slightly be viewed as remotely favorable to police: It's sad to see this topic hijacked from the focus on Rebekah Jones, where there's an actual interesting story here about her work being potentially surpressed, to some unrelated topic about how much force police should use. Something that has been talked about ad nauseam across HN already, and yet this (at this time) is the most upvoted comment.
Of course, if they received a tip or confirmed that someone in the building is armed and dangerous, then that’s a different story. But simply going in with guns drawn in every single situation is simply unacceptable.
His joke was to the effect; imagine airplane pilots spending 90% of training learning how to use the ejection seat and a couple hours learning to fly
Police _are_ overly militarized and overly aggressive. We should be able to have a conversation in a healthy democracy about appropriate rules of engagement and escalation.
Personally, I think it can be traced directly to the failed war on drugs. and indirectly, to the wars on terror creating both an excuse and a market for police weaponization.
They spent almost half of an hour politely requesting that these people allow them to carry it out, and these people refused to comply with what amounts to a legal court order.
A functioning state requires that the state has a monopoly on violence. If you are ordered to allow the police to seize some of your property, and you refuse, force will be escalated within the limits of the law until you the property is taken. That is a good thing. If the police show up at your house with a warrant, COMPLY WITH THEM. You aren't going to win a physical battle against them because, again, they have an ultimate monopoly on violence and the only way to change that is going to be the creation of a new state.
That's horrible. And should be grounds for firing the cop.
I'm not sure how many on HN have shot a gun. But if you've got a qualified instructor, before you are even allowed to TOUCH the gun, you need to memorize the 4 basic rules of gun safety.
1. Every gun is always loaded.
2. Never point a gun at anything you're not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire.
4. Be sure of your target and what's behind it.
The second cop failed the last 3 rules. Was he willing to destroy the children? Was he ready to shoot when he put his finger on the trigger? Was he sure of his target and what's behind it?
Given that the answer is no, he shouldn't be allowed to handle that gun. He's a danger to the public, and a liability to the police department.
By the time he retired, he was broken by the things he'd seen and dealt with that nobody should ever see or deal with. He got a nice pension, but he earned it.
He once commented that ever since he helped investigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587, the smell of jet fuel has made him sick.
Once there was an offhand comment about Soylent Green, and he said, "I've seen the stuff." It was in a bottle that the murderer kept in his fridge. If the police hadn't thought to do a DNA test on the liquid, they wouldn't have realized what it was.
Every Spring NYC has "floaters". These are people who died and were thrown into the river. Often with weights attached. As the water warms slightly, the body starts decomposing and eventually bloat from the gas makes it buoyant so it comes to the surface.
He once commented, "I don't think that there is a way that one human can kill another that I haven't seen." He then began giving a long list.
Good enough?
That's a bit harsh. Standards (and holding to them) varies considerably by jurisdiction (and sometimes by precinct).
And before anyone accuses me of making a "Not All Police" argument or anything similar, I'll point out that, generally speaking, poor enforcement of such standards (and harsher responses by officers) seem to be associated with communities that are poorer or have more minorities.
There are also issues with 'problem officers' getting shuffled off to departments in other cities or states without adequate record keeping or sufficient scrutiny, which can result in them tending to collect or concentrate in certain places (and predictably, that makes it more likely that such officers will have like-minded colleagues that are willing to cover for them).
This is definitely a "wicked problem".
(Raymond Chandler, 1943)
This cop almost certainly was in fact willing to destroy whatever he pointed his gun at and whatever might be behind it, because that's how he was trained.
Second, we won't fire the cops who don't follow basic gun safety - we will at most fire the ones who get caught on video as part of a story of national importance. This cop isn't the one bad-trigger-discipline cop in that department, let alone the country. Fire him without figuring out how to systemically fire them all, and cops will dismiss it as politically-motivated persecution, have some protests about #BackTheBlue or maybe even a work stoppage, and then go back to business as usual, with the same trigger discipline.
And the fired cop will get a job in another department.
I agree you can have both. I just think you can't have one without the other.
(Not disagreeing with your overall point, just saying that it would be (IMO) laughable for a cop to try to make those arguments, even considering their training.)
A common misunderstanding. The police in the USA are regarded as above the law; rules don't apply to them.
You'll never find a prosecutor willing to address criminal behavior like this by police.
If you want to fix this, do a five whys on that, not some idiot cop waving his gun around at children.
News at 11.
It's less amazing when you start to realize that police are cowardly and most are dumb enough to think that having a gun out will protect them.
It's currently a side life goal of mine to get the IANA to assign me acab::/16.
From [1]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said.
Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said.
The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house.
One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.”
As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone."
...
There's a couple things missing from your comment:
1) The person refused to answer the door for 20 minutes, which is definitely a form of resistance and an indicator of possible problems, at which frankly, SOP probably kicks in and 'guns are drawn' at the point of entry.
2) The cops deny pointing guns at anyone, including children.
So frankly, that seems very reasonable.
While all of the journalists seem to want to recount only one side of the story, and only even part of it - is frankly deeply troubling, and it's misinformation of a serious kind. Right now we are getting really spooked about 'someone' misinforming American about election results, and attacking the integrity of the press, so I'm perennially amazed that journos want to avoid the important details that provide context.
Finally, remember there's SOP (standard operating procedure). There are a lot of guns in America, and people are pretty violent in general in terms of trying to get away, or to assail cops in the process. Most warrants served are probably not for 'hacking' rather more violent actions, and there may very well be established SOP about when to draw and not.
If the incident basically amounted to: 1) No answer at door 2) Cops enter with guns draw, point only upstairs urging people to come down.
Then it's completely reasonable.
Obviously, nobody should be pointing guns at regular people for white collar crimes, but as usual, all this might have been avoided if the individual answered the door and 'used her words'.
Also, the 'big story' here is the possibility of someone being harassed for whistle-blowing, which is disconcerting, but that's not so much relevant when worrying about the specific facts of an altercation.
[1] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower...
#1 The police had a warrant. That means they had to have a certain amount of evidence to present to a judge. "She is a disgruntled former employee with an axe to grind" is probably not enough to get a warrant. Server logs with an IP address would hold up in court.
#2 Pointing guns at clearly non-aggressive people and particularly kids is bullshit in general. The PD says she hung up on them and knocked on the door for 20 minutes. Maybe BS cover up, but if true, might explain the seemingly over-aggressive entry.
Not jumping to conclusions, but sometimes decent people do stupid things.
Officer is clearly pointing a firearm upstairs at the family.
Come in with the damn guns holstered. It's some scientist's house, where her kids live. Not a fucking prepper compound.
Come on now. If you can't look at events this year and understand why people are frustrated/scared about a situation like this, then that's willful ignorance.
Is it reasonable for LE to come into certain situations preemptively prepared for violence (gun draw in tight quarters)? I think yes. Is this one? Hell no
Laws differ greatly across the US as to this. I am unfamiliar with the laws and procedures of this particular jurisdiction though.
> No harm was done
Though everyone is different, pointing guns at kids is very likely far from harmless, no matter the firearm operator. As we have seen very much in 2020, law enforcement makes mistakes all the time (to be generous).
If you have a mother acting illogically and emotionally, then I would say that is what would cause the harm. Kids will respond the way they think they are supposed to respond based on the response of others. If the mother remains calm and tells them everything was fine and normal, then there should be no harm.
Kids vary a lot, but I've not seen a kid that ever behaved in such a way.
I can remember being a little kid and being afraid of stuff. A parent telling you not to be scared because the situation was normal can work.
You seem to have made a lot of posts on this thread about how law enforcement should behave and the tactics they employ. What experience with law enforcement or the military do you have? If you don't have direct experience, what are you basing these comments on?
I am trained in a law enforcement program and do self study (more than many officers do) on tactics and the law.
You implied it. "If they had thought there was a chance of violence, they would have been much more forceful."
I feel like we're going to continue to disagree here but I do want to thank you for contributing your viewpoint to the discussion.
Same to you.
Edit: Watched it, but did not see guns being pointed at anyone.
Re #2, "sometimes decent people do stupid things": these "decent people" have been doing these "stupid things" habitually, systematically, across the nation, for decades. This isn't some one-off incident, this is the typical procedure.
All of these factors are the result of poor institutional control, and a lack of capacity of institutional leaders to incentivize good behavior and eradicate bad behavior.
There's no reason to pull a gun on an unarmed child in a household of people who have demonstrated no danger to the police executing the warrant, even if it took forever to enter the property. There is no planet upon which "she hung up on us and didn't answer the door for 20 minutes" is by itself a reason to threaten to kill someone.
Fully agree. Wasn't trying to justify it.
When I read about police behavior I am always reminded of Dr. Zimbardo's suggestion that systems may be corrupted not by bad apples, but rather by a bad barrel that damages otherwise healthy apples within. Your comment about decent people hits near the same concept.
I wish our police forces could be much more like the British where only a small percentage of officers are armed. The over-abundance of weapons here makes that exceedingly difficult, but it would be nice.
Certainly situations like this where the probability of violent resistance is so small should merit unarmed response, but that's just not the way we do things.
> It's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don't have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it's too late.
That's literally it. When I hear "disgruntled former employee" I think of phishing for credentials or threatening former coworkers, in this case the terms "whistleblower" and "civil disobedience" seem more appropriate.
Creating your own dashboard and fighting your former employer’s data is much more like whistleblowing or fighting the system. Hopefully these are just allegations and she can get good lawyers.
Prong 1: Any violation or suspected violation of any federal, state, or local law, rule, or regulation committed by an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor which creates and present a substantial and specific danger to the public’s health, safety, or welfare; and/or
Prong 2: Any act or suspected act of gross mismanagement, malfeasance, misfeasance, gross waste of public funds, suspected or actual Medicaid fraud or abuse, or gross neglect of duty committed by an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor.
https://www.floridalaborlawyer.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a...
And once they had taken violent charge of that innocent person they had no business lurking in the family dwelling with weapons drawn menacing people that were not even listed on that warrant.
You are making a very thin apologium for appalling behaviour.
Agree.
> You are making a very thin apologium for appalling behaviour.
Wasn't my intent, but I can see how you would read it that way.
TIL I can frame somebody by breaking their wifi password and doing some crimes. Cool.
That makes more sense, but I suppose you can still frame somebody for the warrant only and make their life miserable. (Rebekah's computers were confiscated, as an example.)
I guess people just want to downvote my question without an answer.
But I have the right to give money to whoever I want until it is shown to be unlawful.
What evidence do you have that cops are more trigger happy now than before? The numbers seem pretty steady to me. https://www.statista.com/statistics/251894/number-of-justifi...
Im aware that there are professional law enforcement personnel but overall the institution failed to clean up its bad apples. Oh no, not only that but actively defends them.
The LEO who is clearing the corner has also gone to a higher escalation of force than the other LEOs. Other LEOs have weapons drawn but he's the only one pointing his gun at things. The fact that only one person is behaving differently, and more aggressively, suggests to me that their behavior isn't appropriate here.
From what I can tell, Rebekah's supervisor didn't mention the reason for removing the data, he just told her to remove it. She told him it was "the wrong call", but did it anyway. He then told her to add the data back a few hours later, which she did.
So, it looks like she got the wrong end of the stick about deleting data, and was then fired for insubordination. Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...
https://www.lsureveille.com/daily/crime-briefs-student-charg...
https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...
Please do not post off-topic and irrelevant information onto existing threads, you run the risk of derailing the current conversation.
Her criminal history has nothing to do with whether or not this specific warrant, raid, and overall government response was justified.
A) That is an extremely dangerous road to encourage law enforcement to go down. "Charged with" is not the same as a conviction, and resisting arrest is a broad category that can encompass a wide variety of behaviors. Police in most instances should judge danger based on the current information they have, based on who is actively presenting a threat -- not based on whether or not someone was charged with something in the past. I can go into more detail on that if you want, but... I don't really think it should be hard to figure out why that would be problematic.
B) Even ignoring the above point, your comment is exactly the kind of off-topic change I was warning about. This thread was started by someone claiming that Rebekah's whistleblowing was justified and that it was worth throwing financial aid her way because she was doing the right thing. It was followed by another commenter questioning why she deserved aid, and as evidence that she didn't, that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record. Now we're debating whether the police used excessive force and whether they should have been scared of her.
The thread is off topic. The point is, the police shouldn't have done a raid over a crime this minor in the first place. Rebekah's previous criminal record doesn't have anything to do with the severity of the crime that caused this raid. The conversation over how police should have acted during the raid is a distraction from the original point that this was not the kind of crime that warranted breaking down someone's door and pointing a gun at their family.
"battery against a police officer" in a completely separate case does not change that point. It's irrelevant information to what we're currently talking about.
No, that is incorrect. OP claimed she was a whistleblower, with no evidence. I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.
>that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record.
Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".
> Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".
It is when it's irrelevant information tacked on just just to give an impression that her account of what happened here is untrustworthy. If you had left that sentence off and not mentioned her prior charges, would anything about the rest of your comment have needed to change? What were you trying to accomplish by bringing up unrelated prior charges other than to impugn her character?
> I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.
Eh... let's not go overboard here. You linked 2 relevant articles, one of which is largely sympathetic to Jones' account, and one of which is an opinion piece that devolves into the same personal attacks in your own comment.
Then to drive home the point of how important you thought her prior charges were, you linked a 3rd article that's only talking about those charges and nothing else.
Brian Burgess is a political operative, not a journalist.
The State of Florida has all of her email correspondence at work and after firing her for insubordination the best evidence they can offer from a person they allege is such a terrible human being is that she sent an email that said "that's a wrong call" and then complying with the request.
As far as I can tell Jones' work since her firing has been fine and that the Governor felt the need to use his platform smear her just bolsters her credibility, as does this absurd police action at her house.
Sure it is; what else could justify means?
It is often recognized that there is a tendency to make arguments about ends justifying means when the benefits realistically foreseeable from an action are not such that they should be seen as justifying the particular means, though.
Non-utilitarian deontological systems typically have rules about which means are appropriate to which ends, so, no, ends properly justifying means isn’t exclusive to utilitarian systems.
In the example you mention, the means are justified by the rules, not the ends.
No, in a deontological system where the appropriate means are tied to the ends, the means are justified by the ends. The rules are the decision principals, but the ends are (in that case) the inputs.
according to the rules.
> The rules are the decision principals, but the ends are (in that case) the inputs.
Whether an input provides justification is a function of whether the rules specify that it does or not.
But, just as in reasoning from facts with rules of logic and inference to conclusions of facts, you don't say knowledge of the fact conclusion is justified by the rules of logic and inference, but by the source facts, so when ethical rules consider means in determining ends, it is said that those ends are justified by the means. In either the fact or ethics case you will, when it is not otherwise clear from context, cite the particular rule framework within which you are working, but even then you wouldn't say the conclusion or action is justified by the rule framework, though you might say it is justified within the rule framework by the applicable premises.
Here's the question: if you have the opportunity to save hundreds or thousands of lives by breaking a minor law, are you justified in breaking that law? Many of us would say yes. The alternative is absurd, it doesn't hold up in the real world. How many widely accepted historical heroes do we have who broke laws to save lives?
tfehring's point still stands, and I think you should respond to their post using the meaning that they obviously intended before you get mired down in a more pedantic debate over the technical definition of individual words.
"Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built COVID-19 dashboard"
That implies it was raided because she was working on the dashboard, but it was raided because she allegedly accessed an emergency messaging system she should have no longer had access to.
That headline primes you to be outraged.
Could this have been revenge from the agency for what happened earlier this year? Maybe, but the article doesn't actually suggest that, and there's no evidence of it.
> "FDLE began an investigation November 10, 2020, after receiving a complaint from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only," Plessinger said.
https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article247682356.ece...
Allegedly
Having shared credentials for an account is going to make it very difficult to prove who accessed the system.
Also, the single user for a common system typically means that they didn't want to pay extra to have multiple users. Makes me wonder if this incident will open Florida to a lawsuit by the vendor.
As others have said, if she actually used the system, access from her home IP might be enough to convict.
> Makes me wonder if this incident will open Florida to a lawsuit by the vendor.
Possibly, but that'd be civil law. I definitely wouldn't want to be in that agency's shoes right now.
Like most things, you have to sort out the details of the case before you can pronounce judgement.
Call me biased, but for some reason, when people sacrifice their careers and freedoms to send out a warning about corruption, I usually give them a lot more trust than the institution under scrutiny. Time will tell.
They are aware of the context, they know that they are entering a house where also a husband and two children are living. What makes them believe that they pose any kind of threat?
I'm not expecting them to ask for a coffee and discuss the matter and further proceedings at the table, but threatening everybody with a firearm like that?
That turned out to not be true, at all. It was just a very convenient story for journalists who, weirdly, have been obsessed with highlighting deaths in states run by Republicans, and simultaneously ignoring the same in blue states due to their narrative bias.
Illinois has been practically ignored because of this bias, despite very bad numbers in the latest spike, while when Georgia first relaxed it's lockdowns in May, articles were published calling it "an experiment in human sacrifice". (Didn't see a surge in cases afterwards, since most Georgians are sane and just kept wearing masks while going places)
While I always am against excessive police force, I also am fed up with journalists trying to dramatize things, and add credibility when it's not needed to any cause celebre. A person who builds dashboards isn't a data scientist BTW.
Edit:
I'm fully aware I'll be downvoted to oblivion for this post, but this person is a COVID alarmist, has pushed for excessive caution, and claims credentials and skills she doesn't have. I particularly resent her pushing for keeping elementary schools closed despite all of Europe and the vast majority of peer reviewed scientific literature saying otherwise. She's marketed herself as a renegade scientist all year, and dramatized all of it to great effect.
Second Edit:
Here she is in spring making the claim on Rachel Maddow that Florida was "hiding" hospitalization data. Absolutely untrue, and would have required conspiracy by public and private medical orgs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csvzt6kGzHw
Neutral media outlets wouldn't touch the story.
Do you have any citation on this? That would help your case a lot.
This was patently untrue, and sensationalist. The absence of a massive, national scandal resulting in the impeachment of DeSantis proves that Florida wasn't hiding anything, months later. Her claims were always made without evidence, and were magnified by partisan actors.
So tons of people in Florida died, and they hid it? Because that's the only way this wouldn't have been a scandal if the private hospitals and public health authorities had colluded to "hide" hospitalizations and deaths.
I'm sorry but that proves nothing of the sort. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The big question is whether you trust Ron DeSantis more to make scientific judgments, or a random low level professional.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-f...
It doesn't directly state that hospitalizations numbers were actual lies, but it does demonstrate how the information was spun and presented in a very misleading way.
> "Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents. After several attempts and verbal notifications that law enforcement officers were there to serve a legal search warrant, Ms. Jones eventually came to the door and allowed agents to enter,"
As others have posted - here's the video... I think it's important we watch it: https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1336065787900145665
I hope she gets good legal representation.
EDIT: Yeah there's tons of comments in here that are scarily along the lines of "she broke the law and here are the consequences" - gross. Just gross.
Just threatening them temporarily with violent death is nothing compared with that.
That is a problem. It might be poor training. It might be bad policy. It might be personnel who make bad decisions. Or some mix of all three.
But it isn't corruption.
I understand that when you think of corruption you are assuming several magnitudes greater recompense but you have to remember how the little folks live.
> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
With the information currently available to the public it does appear like this action by government officials was done out of retribution
From my non-US perspective all these gun first arrests look crazy, especially for handling car speeding or non-violent offenders.
Oh, well done.
I'd say we should be outraged, but we're awash in outrage because the rule of law has become a one sided bludgeoning instrument for the government to suppress dissent.
I can't wait to get out of here. To hell with this place any more.
You can click the link and see for yourself.
This is why police should be unarmed. They can't be trusted if they have guns on hand.
I hope she sues those officers.
But even if they just had them out, that's improper police work. You gun should only be drawn if the intent is to kill someone. They went in there with the intent of terrorising their victim. At no point did anyone demonstrate any threat to the officers, and so at no point should they have had their guns out.
That's basic gun safety 101.
Sure, you can do what you want but usually in law enforcement we like to see evidence presented for serious accusations. In fact that is how they obtained the search warrant for the screaming woman's residence, by showing evidence to a judge.
> But even if they just had them out, that's improper police work.
What are your qualifications for criticizing warrant service procedure?
> You gun should only be drawn if the intent is to kill someone.
Thats wrong in multiple ways, you don't seem to have the relevant background knowledge and experience to discuss this issue.
Ask yourself how upset you would be with a police officer's use of deadly force if you learned that he had intended to kill the person he shot, rather than intending to save someone's life?
> They went in there with the intent of terrorising their victim.
You don't know that. You could just as easily believe that the woman refused to open the door for 20 minutes in order to antagonize law officers in the performance of their official duties. This is why we want people to support their statements with evidence instead of pretending to read minds.
> At no point did anyone demonstrate any threat to the officers, and so at no point should they have had their guns out.
Perhaps that would have been the case if they had responded to the officers in a timely manner. After a 20 minute wait, its possible that the individuals in the house have set up to attack the police when they enter.
> That's basic gun safety 101.
Hard to take lectures on gun safety from someone who hasn't demonstrated the relevant qualifications.
And in case anyone thinks I'm trolling, I'm not. Dead serious.
Edit: I said FBI, I was wrong about that- but still- if she's accusing of unauthorized access, isn't such a raid par for the course? added allegedly above.
The evidence provided in the article for the crime is flimsy at best however. The communication system had a shared username and password for everyone and the warrant was reported to be based on an IP address that was believed to be the source of the unauthorized access.
It seems reasonable to go 50/50 on either of:
1. they looked for and found a reason to charge her with this as retribution for her work.
2. she was disgruntled enough about being let go that she illegally accessed a poorly secured government system to send a retaliatory communication.
There is no where near enough information to know which is which though.
She hasn't even been accused of breaking the law. There have been zero charges.
They had to get a warrant to search her home. Seems unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant without some kind of probable cause. While the system was poorly secured, a lot of poorly secured systems have basic logging. All it would take is an IP address.
None of us are privy to the details here, so it's really hard to say.
Unfortunately, here in the US that is not something you can bank on. There is a large amount of evidence that judges routinely sign on warrants without even understanding what the warrant is for, and there are even many types of non-standard warrants that do not need to follow that protocol.
She hasn't been charged, let alone found guilty, of any crime.
From the article, I think it was the Florida state police, not the FBI.
You've seen zero evidence of her being responsible and you still accuse her?
This was state police rather than federal (a highly relevant distinction, given the context) and the snide "surprised" is unwarranted/baseless when we don't have even the full facts from one side let alone both sides.
That aside, even if she did, is that reason to storm in with guns? The level of possible harm is incredibly out of proportion with the supposed crime.
And I'm not buying that guns-drawn arrest with kids present is necessary. Dead serious.
In a situation where police are legitimately going in with guns drawn (like, I dunno, arresting actual terrorists known to have actual guns?), they don't have the luxury of determining whether someone's a child before pointing a gun in their face. If anyone in the house could be armed and firing back, they need to point the gun first.
So, there isn't a realistic "They shouldn't have pointed guns at children, but the rest of it is fine." Either it's okay to point guns at children because the situation demanded it, and the moral culpability of the child's trauma (or worse) is on whoever left children with armed outlaws... or they shouldn't have gone in with guns at all to the personal residence of someone whose alleged crime involved no violent action of any sort.