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Comment by belatw | Hacker News Reader

“ A day after the initial threat was posted, the gang tried to spur payment by leaking personal information of some police officers taken from background checks, including details of officers’ past drug use, finances and — in at least one incident — of past sexual abuse.”

I’m all for leaking this data. It would be a heroic act to let the people know how bad our police really are.

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Does drug use and poor financial decisions, regardless of age, context, and scale, make you a fundamentally bad police officer? I'm not sure that's a bandwagon I can blindly jump on.

Locking people up for doing drugs is a moral travesty. Locking people up for doing drugs while you also do drugs is... just like, entirely beyond the pale.

Extorting people for money is also bad, and I hope that the extortionists don't get paid, and just release this shit. Police misconduct is the worst sort of misconduct.

the penalty for just using recreational quantities of drugs vs. dealing them is way less harsh though

Having done drugs in the past is not "police misconduct". Enforcing bad drug laws is also not "police misconduct". Conflating these things is not going to help you fix any of them.

>Locking people up for doing drugs is a moral travesty. Locking people up for doing drugs while you also do drugs is... just like, entirely beyond the pale.

We've had multiple recent presidents and vice presidents who have used illegal drugs.

That seems far more "beyond the pale" because the president has more power than anyone to ending the drug war

Locking up people for doing exactly what you're doing is pure hypocrisy, no arguments there. But unless I misread the article, these were background checks of police. They were also background checks of serving police which hopefully infers something about how bad the incidents were. It didn't say whether they were from last week, last year, or last decade. I'm all for transparency, but this is sensationalism with so few details available.

Let me introduce you to the current VP of the United States...

We also do not know if the officers that did drugs also locked up people for doing drugs. There are police officers that try to be lenient and use discretion.

Typically drug use and poor financial decisions are disqualifying for things like security clearances, signature-level financial authority, or say, the legal ability to kill people and enforce laws, not because they're inherently bad, but because addiction and debt make you subject to extortion and bribery.

I'm of the opinion that certain positions in society demand a moral character that rises above. That's not to say they should be perfect, that's ridiculous. But they should be upstanding. This should absolutely pertain to people who make instantaneous life or death decisions regarding the rest of us.

No, it makes you a risk.

A risk to everyone you have poor judgment.

Risk to authority as you are vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors.

This is why the background checks exist though, right? The police clearly got the job regardless of what was in the check so either we're suggesting the police as an entity are fundamentally corrupt and either didn't care/wanted these compromised people to serve or they didn't feel they were compromised.

If anything, that this stuff is on the background check makes me feel more comfortable. It means that whatever happened has been owned up to which makes you somewhat difficult to blackmail.

If it was only police conduct reports was in the leak, who cares. But its not.

Part of the leak also contains all confidential informants TO the police. This, in the hands of criminal enterprise, is a hitlist.

And given how the police operate, I think it would be safe to say that not all the informants are willing (think- "we look the other way over your drug garbage for juicy data")

Releasing the data would almost certainly put some people's lives in danger.

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