Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program
vice.com
vice.com
They didn't get that idea themselves, though.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/12/an-office...
Baltimore is #11 on a list of most violent cities in the world[1]. There are children and good people trying to live in those crime-ridden neighborhoods. The police is not the problem. I feel for the cops there because you can't take one of the most violent cities in the world and expect to police it like Sweden. As such, I wish they maintained their surveillance program because it works and it would result in more perps being taken out of that victimized community.
Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Sorry, working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.
What about them? False imprisonment is a problem, but not at the scale of the crime in that city. Baltimore had 350 homicides and 2000+ robberies/assaults/rapes, and thousands more thefts and property crimes [1].
Let me pose a question to you: At what point do we start focusing on victims of crime again? All I hear is about police reform, and about criminal rights. Who stands up for the good people living in the violent neighborhoods of St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore etc.? When will the focus be set on the victims in those neighborhoods? Do the people there have a right to not be victimized? Who enforces those rights? A 7 year old girl was killed by a stray bullet in Atlanta recently[2]? What is the ACLU doing for her, her family, and other such families?
>working a tough beat does not excuse the malfeasance endemic to the Baltimore PD.
Maybe the fact that Baltimore cops are forced to deal with the worst of humanity in one of the most violent cities in the world plays a role here? Maybe you need to lower the crime rate before you can expect policing to improve?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore [2] https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/latest-loss-from-atlantas-ris...
What about taking criminals out of the community and locking them away in prison? Would that not help? Because that's what this surveillance program would do. It allows the police to view footage after the crime occurred and track down the perp. It wouldn't help that victim, but it would prevent the next one.
>Lo and behold, police departments take a lot of tax money that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence and so that is why we talk about defunding police.
False choice. You don't need to defund the police to fund whatever program you want. And you make it seem like there is some magic social program just waiting to be funded that would solve criminality but the evil police budget is what prevents it from being implemented. As if!
Locking people up is a deterrence but it creates many criminals by putting them in depraved conditions for extended periods of time, then depriving them of employability and then as an insult, charging monthly fees for probation or other post-incarceration monitoring.
The last thing I want to point out is how often the police victimize people and create new victims. It's incredibly common.
You wrote: "police departments take a lot (in some cases a plurality) of total tax revenue that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence. That is why we talk about defunding police."
Where is the evidence that the police budget is what is preventing social programs to be funded? That is a fiction driven from the inane sloganeering around 'defund the police'. You can fund any program you democratically pass and that has nothing to do with police budget. That's the false choice you're putting out there .. that somehow you have to choose between 'funding the police' OR funding social programs.
Here's the reality, we're spending billions on social programs. There are no silver-bullet social programs that we know will lower crime rate.
>It's incredibly common.
Uh huh. Care to quantify that? Because I think you're basing this on nothing.
Show me where I supported policy brutality?
Here's a hint: NOBODY supports police brutality.
> Baltimore police does need a mass surveillance program - for it's own officers. Remember when they looked at 2 years of body-cam footage for one of their highest earners and came out the other end with 32 counts of assault, false imprisonment and generalized misconduct? [1]
That's police brutality.
Your reply: > The police is not the problem. [...] Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police due to documented police brutality is at least indirect support for police brutality. Beyond that, your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime would imply more direct support for police brutality, especially since you seem to justify their actions as "tough policing," which I fail to understand in any way other than a polite euphemism for "police brutality."
>The fact that you are arguing against oversight of the police
Where do I argue against oversight of the police?
>your general stance that appears to be okay with the police doing what they need to to prevent crime
Nowhere did I argue that, nor do I support that.
What is wrong with you? Can you stop straw manning my position?
You can't stop straw manning me, can you? Please indicate where I showed support for 'tough policing'?
The only policy I argued for was this drone program because that has real potential in getting criminals out of the community.
The argument about 'tough policing' is not one of support, nor is it a justification of any police brutality. Police officers should be held responsible for breaking the law and 'police brutality' is against the law. All I argued is that the type of policing you get is a result of the environment. I made this argument as a counter argument to the trope that somehow policing causes crime and if we can just fix policing that crime will magically go away. That's not how it works. You can put as many regulations as you want (and police are already highly regulated - for good reason), but you're not going to get easy-going Nordic-style policing in one of the most violent cities in the world. You're also not going to lower crime rates either. Again: that's neither support for, nor a justification of police brutality.
On the other hand, you did say at the very beginning, and I will quote your words here:
> Victim-rights trump criminal-rights.
which I am honestly not sure how it is meant to be interpreted, if not as a statement of support for "tough policing" (at least in theory, since any policy that generally priotizes ensuring the criminals are caught over police not violating their moral, and constitutional, obligations is very likely to result in police violating those obligations).
Here's how: we have entire movements preoccupied with spreading FUD over any policy that aims to curb crime. We have movements preoccupied with letting violent criminals out of prison (trust me, there is no way to reduce the prison population without releasing violent offenders).
This story is an example of this. Look at the facts: Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the world (not just in Maryland, not just in USA, in the effin world).
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out. Who is standing up for them? I don't see ACLU lawsuits to protect their rights - do you?
There is an attempt to curb this by introducing a drone program to attempt to provide some relief for this by improving police investigative powers and catch more criminals. And this program is the opposite of 'tough policing'. ACLU and other organizations focus lawsuits on this program to get rid of it (not to create common sense policies around, but to get rid of it) - why? Because they care more about safeguarding criminal rights, then the rights of citizens to safety.
It's fucked up and that's what I mean by "Victim-rights trump criminal-rights."
In Baltimore, the police ARE criminals. Again and again, that department has shown itself to be corrupt from top to bottom.
The victims are the citizens of Baltimore who are falsely accused of crimes and imprisoned on trumped up charges.
What that means is that there are a lot of innocent people being victimized by criminals. There are parents trying to raise their children in these neighborhoods and are desperately hoping that they their children don't get assaulted, killed or recruited into gangs or drugs, as they walk to school. All those tech bros in this thread wouldn't drive through some of these neighborhood. They wouldn't even let their children watch PG-13 movies due to the violence ... but there are children living in those violent neighborhoods day-in and day-out.
None of that is the fault of the police.
Did you read the article? Prosecutors didn’t make up the charges against this officer, they have documented video proof. There is no reason to arrest and assault bystanders, none.
I believe the vast majority of cops are doing their jobs legally and honestly. But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t, or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
I did. ACLU is trying to prevent this program from restarting after a trial run.
>or you will never get the public trust necessary to really make a dent in high crime areas.
Where is the evidence that 'public trust' is the reason for the high crime rate? What if the causality is reversed ... what if high crime rate is what breeds tougher policing because you know, police are human, and it has to mess you up being exposed to the worst of humanity, every.single.day, working in one of the most crime filled city in the world.
> But you have to punish and root out those cops who aren’t
Sure, nobody disagrees with that, but to be clear, that won't fix the crime rate in Baltimore.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/12/an-office...
Every bystander he harassed or assaulted is going to dislike the police even more, and help them even less. When police detectives go to them for help solving a crime, how often will they refuse to testify because of their distrust of the cops?
It’s a fantasy that the solution to high crime areas is tougher policing.
You can try to bust all the low level drug sellers on street corners to stop consentual drug use, but some will run. So you violently arrest anyone who runs, but done if those don’t have drugs or are just scared kids. Now those kids and their families hate you.
Soon dealers get smarter and only hold cash in their person. So you start frisking everyone out on the street or driving in these neighborhoods and take their cash, using civil forfeiture. But some of those people are honest citizens and you stole their paycheck, or the cash they were going to buy a car with, and they and their families now hate you.
You start getting warrants to enter homes of people you are told are dealing dope. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes you find something else to justify it, sometimes they were just regular folks it’s just a mistake. But they all end up hating you for it.
Sometimes the drug dealers flush the drugs while you politely wait at the door so you start getting no knock warrants and just burst in the door screaming at them, and shooting their dogs (you know, for safety). Sometimes it’s the wrong address or a false top, and the family now hates you even more, as you killed their dog man.
Sometimes the residents are armed and in the shock and confusion think it’s a home invasion and shoot back and you shoot them. If they survive, they hate you.
Then one day one of your brother officers is gunned down on the street, during the middle of the day, in that tough crime neighborhood you are “pacifying”.
When you roll up there are a hundred residents standing there staring at his corpse, but when you ask all you get is hard looks and “no-one saw nothing”.
I didn't argue that. I said that tough policing is a natural result of high crime areas because cops are humans and are affected by the environment they are in. I read an article about Facebook and YouTube content reviewers getting PTSD after only a few weeks of work looking at despicable images.
Imagine being a cop with decades of experience policing one of the most violent cities on the world, seeing what the worst of humanity does to innocent people, knowing that the next stop may be your last. My point is: there are limits to what you can do with policing in such an environment.
Sure .. get rid of all the bad cops you want. File any lawsuits to protect rights of criminals you want. None of that will make the crime go down and safeguard the community.
Then another cop goes into your neighborhood best, and starts threatening, intimidating, and even assaulting and falsely arresting honest citizens for filming, spectating, not producing ID, or just looking like a suspect they are after.
How easy is your job now? Those residents know who the drug dealers and actual criminals are.
Your perspective is like saying the US didn’t need Vietnamese villagers help to fight the NVA. I guess we must have won there didn’t we?
Lastly Dirty Harry, they aren’t criminals rights, they are our rights.
If the police were better at their job I imagine more people would be willing to look the other way. You don't get to violate people's rights and fail to keep them safe.
Courts should ultimately decide if the officer did this out of malice/incompetence and penalize accordingly.
Law enforcement should be held to a higher, not lower standard than ordinary people. That will make the job tougher, but if it that makes it too tough for an individual, they don't have to work there.
I ended up hanging the jury. My fellow jurors were frighteningly willing to unquestioningly accept a patent liar's testimony because he is a cop.
There are lots of people like this, but they are either apolitical, apathetic, hopeless, don't want to get their hands dirty, think politics is beneath them, that their resistance would be ineffectual, or they are too busy with other things.
That has to change.
Given the scope of human experience now encompassed by "politics", that's not sustainable.
Or as someone else once put it:
"130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform."
The choice is between doing nothing and doing what you can within your limited, fallible, human means.
Even the giants of history have failed to fix everything, but even small people have managed to make a difference.
The problem is that too many people capable of making a difference don't even try.
What? Vote? Write letters? Bitch on the internet? All that does is make people feel better about the system as it rolls over them.
The system has more power over our lives than at any other time in history because people act in the ways the system permits them to act. I don't have the answers, but for sure it isn't going to be more of the same.
So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.
Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too.
The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead.
(As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)
Even if true, and I don't think it always is (as there's often a "power behind the throne", and many such powers prefer to run things from behind the scenes rather be in the public eye, partially for the reasons mentioned earlier in the thread), elected officials rarely run campaigns on their own -- they need a staff and lots of feet on the ground, and they also need competent advisors during the campaign and after they get elected. Though the ultimate deciding power may lie in the elected official (for those officials who aren't puppets), the smart ones listen to their advisors, so the advisors wield great power in how and what they advise. This doesn't even mention the power of various gatekeepers that can prevent or facilitate access to the official or are delegated power themselves, or are appointed by the elected official. In all of these ways one can affect change without holding elected office.
Even when you can't directly influence an elected official you still have power in selecting which official to support.
Interestingly, there was a three-month extension of the three Patriot Act provisions, included in a House resolution to prevent a government shutdown. It's bad that these things are linked in the same resolution to begin with, and it leads to an unnecessarily hard choice for politicians. Even someone wary of mass surveillance can't just say no to keeping the government open. Often, this is how a lot of this stuff gets passed.
Why are the two disparate things so often tied together in the first place? Similarly today, we see Republicans tying together the repeal of section 230 with the extra stimulus money demanded by the president. It really makes no logical sense why these things are bundled together as one bill, either.
It makes perfect logical sense for a majority-government party which wants to quash scrutiny from the opposition, while also ensuring support from its own dissenters.
https://www.baltimorepolice.org/sites/default/files/General%...
Except crime rates are at their lowest points in decades[0].
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/take...
From the link[0] I posted previously"
"Lastly, we turn to another place where crime and violence spiked in 2015: Baltimore. This year, Baltimore’s story continues to be a mixed one. The total number of crimes reported in the city fell by almost 6 percent compared to 2018 (through the last week of November), with violent crime falling by about 2.5 percent. Robbery, burglary, theft, and auto theft decreased modestly, while reported rape fell dramatically — with law enforcement documenting nearly 26 percent fewer offenses."
As I said, crime is down in Baltimore. Continuing to say say "crime is up in Baltimore" doesn't make it true.
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/take...
No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore
> Continuing to say say "crime is up in Baltimore" doesn't make it true.
I could say the same.
Where, exactly, did I say we shouldn't "support lowering crime rates?"
During prohibition the national murder rate was incredibly high. When alcohol was legalized suddenly the murder rate plummeted.
You see, when you take a popular substance and make sale/distribution illegal, you create an opportunity for those willing to take the risk to get rich making and selling said substance.
But the problem with getting rich that way is now you have a bullseye on your back. your place of business is loaded with cash and valuable substances. It’s hard to put cash in banks without risking arrest, and you can’t call the police if someone threatens or steals from you. But you can easily afford your own guns, and your own security.
And when someone tries to kill you or steal from you or rat you out, you just kill them. After all, the prison sentences for trafficking are just as bad as the ones for murder, so you won’t be making things worse for yourself.
And the good news is you have plenty of money to pay others to do lots of crimes to protect your business and markets. Enough to buy your own corrupt cops even. Not only will they top you off, but they’ll be happy to no knock raid your competitors.
All of this is equally true for pimps (why hire willing sex workers when unwilling are cheaper? After all you going to jail either way, make no money while the sin shines), and bookies, and gambling operations, etc, etc, etc.
I may no longer fully agree with what ACLU has turned into in recent years (despite their legendary past of unquestionable defense, which now apparently HAS conditions thanks to the social media whining era, which is sadly unsurprising in 2020), I fully respect what they are doing here.
This sounds like the police were caught in the act and a perfect moment for pro-privacy lawyers to nail them in court.
The story was a female Mexican police officer had been ambushed, and with the use of the spy plane, the US was able to back-track the routes of the ambushers, and the routes all led back to (cartel headquarters) house on the outskirts of town.
Was this all a dream?
Edit: Found the article: Persistent Surveillance Systems https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/eye-s...
On an individual level it doesn't matter even if the lie is in a courtroom for the purpose of turning a murder into justified deadly force! Why wouldn't an organization of police lie even more when they know full well neither the org nor the individual officers will be punished?
Even in this story the truly disturbing part is this:
> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit eventually ruled in BPD’s favor in the case.
ACLU is appealing the decision, but where are the obstruction / perjury / contempt charges for all the individuals that lied?
But there seems to be heavy bipartisan support federally/executively for mass surveillance in the US so good luck with getting your privacy protected nationally.
Your best hope is some local policy changes at the state or municipal level in Baltimore or Maryland. Which may inspire change elsewhere.
Make sure your DA knows that if they aren't willing to indict criminal cops they will be out of a job. We just did this in Los Angeles! No clue how far the new guy will take it, but he definitely understands that this was a referendum on the previous DA's near-absolute refusal to even consider indicting police misconduct.
A better way to say it is that there aren’t enough honorable police departments firing enough dishonest cops.
And in this case they will argue that misleading != lying.
If 99% of police encounters don't involve violence, then 99% of police don't need to be equipped for violence. We need 1% of high speed, low drag, well funded SWAT teams, and the rest can just trudge around on foot.
The better solution is to eliminate the drivers of friction between honest citizens and cops, especially those traffic create more violent encounters. No knock warrants, the war on drugs, civil forfeiture, vice squads and the criminalization of victimless crimes, the “trafficking myth” war on sex workers, etc.
AKA "Defund the police."
If cops weren’t tasked to police what you put in your body and what you do with other consenting adults, we’d need far fewer of them and we’d probably appreciate the remaining cops a lot more.
BTW what exactly do cops police what consenting adults do with each other these days? Honest question.
Baltimore residents have a right to set their own destiny, but if they reject innovations in crime control that at least have a chance of being effective, I'm sure they'll spend the next 30 years like the last 30: getting absolutely nowhere. I spent decades desperately hoping and expecting Baltimore to turn the corner. It's an absolutely beautiful city with a rich history and many world-class cultural and educational institutions. But it hasn't changed (except even more murders over the last 50 years) and won't ever change if it doesn't control its crime.
Frankly, the city already has many hundreds of street-level "blue light" cameras all over the place. To me, those are far more problematic and intrusive with respect to privacy than aerial surveillance. I'd much rather be an anonymous pixel on a giant map than a person whose recognizable features are video recorded and stored on a government street level security camera. To me, blue light cameras are both more problematic and fundamentally less effective. And yet, that's what the city has already accepted as a worthwhile privacy trade off.