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Comment by PaintBucket | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone says, "Why harass these people? They're just trying to make a living." Think about it for a little while.

Have you bothered to "think about" this? Police officers have a sworn duty to uphold the law. They don't write it. If you have a problem with the law your issue is with the Legislators not the cops.

(This is the very definition of "killing the messenger")

Police have a great deal of latitude in how they enforce the law.

Ever been to court when it was your word against a police officer? Who would you imagine the court, jury or your peers will believe?

I'm guessing you've never been in a car when a cop plays the "I smell pot Joe. What do think?" game.

Police officers do have a sworn duty. But some of them do not uphold their oaths. Some of them even break the law outright. It's therefore quite possible to have an issue with law enforcement, separate from the laws themselves.

Some cops are crooked so screw them all? This happens in every profession, not just law enforcement.

Edit, to the poster below: There have been many cases where a man and women have sex and the woman later claims she was raped. Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite.

Every profession does not grant you the ability to send people to jail based on your word.

Or shoot people lying prostrate on the ground in the back and kill them.

They're not allowed to do that, in my knowledge.

Under which definition of "allowed"?

where allowed = "Get caught by an unaligned third party", probably

Your knowledge has not yet encompassed the Oscar Grant case.

> "Some cops are crooked so screw them all?"

Not all cops are crooked - but the Blue Code of Silence puts the culpability for the crooked cops' crimes squarely on the police force as a whole. If the police forces of the US even showed some inclination of willingness to police the actions of their own, then we wouldn't have most of these problems.

Here in Seattle we've had an unprovoked shooting of a homeless man, to which the officer involved was allowed to resign gracefully, despite all parties agreeing that the was no provocation nor justification. Another officer body-slammed an innocent man (without warning, provocation, or identifying himself) into a wall so hard he is now in a vegetative state. This man remains on the force. Similarly, another officer was caught on store surveillance taking his rage out on a teenager in a convenience store, stomping on his face, after a failed drug bust next door. That officer remains on the force also.

Not all cops do these things, but they are all guilty of covering up these acts and ensuring that, even if they do get out to the public, that no real consequences occur for the officers involved.

I will have zero trust for any police force until they have proven their ability and willingness to police themselves.

> "Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite"

Huh, could've sworn I typed in "news.ycombinator.com" not "reddit.com/r/mensrights"

I don't live in the USA, but in my country normally when a cop is being abusive of the authority granted to him he has a few layers of command above him that tolerate, and sometimes even encourage, such behaviour. I believe this is usually the norm and not an exception particular to my hometown.

> Some cops are crooked so screw them all? Some cops are crooked so screw them all?

However if most of them are crooked, it is pretty safe to informally say "screw them all" (as opposed to linking to scientific studies and then proclaiming that "screw 59.45% of them" or something like that).

And btw, those that are engaged in cover-up of abuses of fellow cops are crooked just the ones engaging in abuse.

Couldn't agree more. Also, im sure there are undercover po and border patrol risking their lives to keep parts of AZ from ending up like the Mexican border towns. Giving up that kind of information and risking those lives is in-excusible. Also, names and adresses of family! are u serious? That makes you no better than the gang bangers. While I do believe the war on drugs is bs, as well as that bill AZ has, there are still a lot of persons down there that would kill you just because they were told to, or kidnap you for the money. And the police and border patrol are risking themselves to keep your dumbass safe.

I realize most of Arizona isn't that bad, but the police are still ther to serve and protect. can't we just send a bunch of taquitos and a bag of weed to whoever wrote up that bill or something?

I don't see how you can justify upholding laws with lethal force if you don't agree morally with the law. Just because you wear a badge on your chest doesn't mean that you aren't morally responsible for your actions as a human being. If some state passed a law which outlawed red hair, I would hope that the police would refuse to enforce it, rather than saying "take it up with your legislator." "I was just following orders" is never an excuse for your actions.

If you can't uphold the law as a cop you would lose your job. Laws don't just magically appear, right? By the time they pass as a law the cop is just doing their job. We didn't do our job as voters and the correct action now is to "take it up with your legislator".

> "If you can't uphold the law as a cop you would lose your job."

Your responsibility to humanity (particularly as an officer of the law) trumps your right to be fed.

Also, the world at large has upheld, many times over, that "following orders" is not a sufficient defense.

"But I have a mortgage" - the new and improved Nuremberg Defense (with apologies to Thank You For Smoking). Hell, the people who relied on the Nuremberg defense would've been shot for violating said orders. Being fired is peanuts in comparison.

You're wrong on this (or at very least looking at the issue without nuance). More often than not "just following orders" IS a sufficient defense. Only in the most heinous of acts is it considered insufficient (if that weren't the case there'd be no reason to define what is and is not a "war crime")

Deporting someone, even if you feel it's unjustified, is a far cry from a War Crime.

That's the cogent point. The danger in an officer choosing to enforce the law as he or she sees fit is so great that they aren't excused in doing so unless the act is an atrocity. Because once an officer is selectively enforcing the law they actually become the one making the law.

Since officers of the law aren't elected that's unacceptable.

Personal responsibility applies even to police officers.

If they cannot square their actions with their morals, then they are in the wrong job.

This is a pretty interesting topic. I'm reminded of the famous trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel after WW2 and Hannah Arendt's book about the trial, "The Banality of Evil".

Eichmann was responsible for over-seeing the trains that sent Jews to concentration camps. He tried, to no avail, to employ the "just following orders" defense. If anyone is interested, definitely check out Hannah's book.

No, you are personally responsible for your actions even when they aren't "the most heinous of acts". Being sworn to uphold an unjust law means that you have no good alternatives available to you: you can break your word (and perhaps lose your income) or you can perpetrate injustice. In that situation you must choose which is the greater wrong.

But the unjust law doesn't need to rise to the level of genocide or war crime before it becomes a greater wrong than breaking your word. I think murdering a single innocent person is worse than breaking your word, for example. How many unjustified deportations does it take? I don't know.

It's actually kind of rare that cops lose their jobs for not upholding the law. Check out the front page of reddit.com/r/bad_cop_no_dounut, and you'll get a sampling of how cops regularly brutalize the law and the people they're meant to serve.

"I was only following orders."

Speaking as a supporter of democracy in the Arizonan context.

The reports of cops breaking the law for their own purposes, and getting away with it, vastly outnumber the reports of cops breaking the law for humane purposes or moral reasons. If reality is they are perfectly happy doing the first, arguing against the second as something they 'should not do' is ludicrous. As long as this is the way the balance tips, any cop that lets an illegal immigrant walk has my blessing.

Sorry, they didn't "target" the AZDPS and there were no good intentions involved. They are vultures and I'm guessing one of them that lives nearby cracked an insecure wireless network and stole some shared docs.

If you lived in AZ you'd know that DPS had very little to do with 1070 and in some cases spoke against it.

There's nothing noble about lulzsec. If someone rampaged through a neighborhood lock picking or crowbaring doors open and dumping the contents on the street out of some misguided sense of raising awareness about security how would people view them? Why should we view lulzsec any different?

Well, if the victims were planning to ethnically cleanse said neighborhood that would in fact shade the issue differently

Noble isn't the word I would use by a longshot..in fact I think lulzsec is pretty stupid. but I'm also not going to go out of my way to defend a corrupt institution that happens to have the law on their side

The victims are planning nothing of the sort. The voters of Arizona and their elected representatives are the ones responsible for the laws that the officers in question have to enforce.

The enforcers of the law are just as responsible for their own actions as the law makers are for theirs.

Separately, I personally would have redacted some of that data.

I absolutely agree that they hold more responsibility. However, my point was that this is one criminal organization targeting another morally corrupt organization. I don't find the analogy that InclinedPlane gave to be appropriate

That's appropriate on many levels... As you intended, no doubt.

I'm glad one person got it.

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