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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

This is something any US citizen should be concerned about, if not outraged. There is no 4th amendment if a cop can just have a dog with him, or say "I smelled weed", etc. The cops even joke about it, referring to the dogs as “probable cause on four legs”. The root problem is credulous or complicit judges who let this evidence be introduced. We need them to throw out these cases.

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The judge issue is understated. Local judges who can throw out this evidence get elected without challenge and often by relatively small numbers of voters. Judges are often voted in during an off season so voter turnout is tiny. But i used to joke that if about 50 percent of a local university turned up to vote for a judge they could easily de facto make marijuana legal in their area.

It's no joke!

Ann Arbor Michigan had the most liberal cannabis laws in the United States for a couple decades running, it was a $5 fine for personal use quantities.

In the late 80s (IIRC) a Republican on the city council tried to change this, campaign promise or something. The council said "hmm, yeah, it costs us more to process this paperwork than we get in fines" and raised it to $20 or $25.

In the UK we seem to have similar problems where what is considered personal use and not worth enforcing seems to be suspiciously dependant on the users societal class. I know people literally growing the stuff next to their house, but because they have a nice big garden and some local stature they'd face no consequences, whereas in the same county I'd never get away with that because I live in a suburb.

Legalise it and tax it folks.

>>> Legalise it and tax it folks.

Can't we just enforce the law equally without fear or favour?

It is just a plant

Ok I am on the wrong side of HN on this, but question - are drug laws more harmful because they exist or harmful because of the unequal and discriminatory enforcement?

If a law is used to systematically keep a section of society in its place (poverty, race, class whatever) then it kind of does not matter if the laws are repealed - the systemic abuse will continue some other way.

If those in society who are not systematically on the wrong side of the law, but are otherwise inconvenienced by access to drugs, then they see only upside.

If however we work to enforce the law equally, whatever the law is, we see all sorts of benefits. Kick down doors in penthouses in manhatten using ten SWAT officers and two helicopters, and we shall see re-evaluation of those tactics and those laws, but only if we apply the law equally.

Justice without Mercy. My new campaign slogan

They exist because of the unequal and discriminatory enforcement so it's a pretty naive question.

The single most important issue in the US is getting our elections to be on the same date for all levels.

The nonsense that is "democratically" voted for in elections where a handful of interested parties vote for it and no one else knows it happens is astonishing. Especially for judges and infrastructure bonds.

It seems like it should be a requirement and very easy for state and local governments to publish calendars. I did a quick search and was excited that Chicago published an iCal until I looked and saw that there were zero items on the calendar going forward or backward six months

https://chicagoelections.gov/en/calendar.html

Most countries don't elect judges or prosecutors. Seems like a case where less democracy is desirable rather than more.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-too-dangerous-to-elect-pro...

yeah seems like a strange thing to want to turn into a popularity contest.

The alternative to being elected is they are (effectively) appointed by the elected officials. Either system has tradeoffs.

Why should elected officials have any say who is in judiciary branch any attempt should be shotdown and maybe get attempters shot. It's clear way to corruption.

I don't know, in most countries judges are appointed by the government after advise from independent advisory boards. Then again, in most countries judges have a lot less power than what it seems like they do in the US and the legal system is not a political battleground.

The US has a really quite unique judicial system, and in many ways ultimate sovereignty of the USA resides in the Supreme court. That power has filtered down to lower courts who make various rulings that will shape what things the higher courts consider on appeal.

Courts can say whatever they like, it comes down to the executive branch to enforce it.

The courts are the ultimate source of legitimacy.

Every time an executive defies the courts they erode the basis of their own power, and their public image as a legitimate executive.

Look at what actually happens to executives who defy the courts. The level and types of protest people feel are legitimate increases dramatically. Once the court said that "well technically the emergency order only lasts for 30 days" the anti-mask brigade was much more vocal and flagrant about it.

Free and fair elections are the ultimate source of legitimacy. The courts have maintained good publicity in our rigged system, but they don’t have any inherent legitimacy of their own.

Its a double edged sword. Do you think the people of say Atlanta want all their judges appointed for them by the party that controls Georgia legislature?

Of course you don't want the legislative or executive branch to appoint members of the judicial branch. All three branches are supposed to be strictly separate from each other.

If you did allow the other branches to appoint judges, the bench would obviously become stuffed based on who's currently in power.

And yet that's what the US does.

But it's the same electorate! So it's likely to be the same party?

Often the Party and the electorate have differing goals. As a general rule the Republican Party didn't particularly like Trump, but the Republican electorate adores him. Likewise the Democratic Party really likes Biden, but my general feeling from Democratic voter was, "we'd rather Bernie or Yang, but have have to dump Trump."

Biden got an absolute majority of the Democratic primary vote. Sanders got half that, and Yang's share was minuscule.

I'd say somewhere around 50% or more of Americans are pretty much understand that the cops have accumulated fairly unanswerable power, that something should be done about it and that nothing will be done about.

But another 30-40% of Americans believe cop movies/TV and think cops need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later 'cause of armies of "bad guys" armed with machine guns.

Look at the venn diagram between the first 50% and people who blow like grass in the political winds.

Unfortunately I will be surprised if a great many of the "reform the police" advocates stick around after it becomes apparent that "reducing police power" likely means some amount of "reducing the number of criminal infractions", "reducing staffing/resource allocations" and "reducing police's ability to screw people at their discretion" and that will greatly reduce their ability to call the cops and get a response to minor nuisance behavior. Unfortunately people really like using state violence as a cudgel against whatever they don't like.

I've been bitching about the cops for decades. Things have changed a lot since BLM came onto the scene and getting cops/government to generally treat people fairly and with dignity/respect after interactions have started (which seems to be the avenue where most progress is being made) would be a massive win but I see a lot of pitfalls that need to be avoided on the way there.

This is why BLM and the like generally ignore "reform the police" types entirely. Reform always ends up toothless for those exact reasons, so the only solution is to reduce their power in other ways (namely reduction of funds and repealing of criminal laws).

I don't know why it's not considered animal abuse. They say that 40% of them are domestic abusers, but really 100% of K9 units are animal abusers. They are taking advantage of puppies and having them do things that a dog shouldn't naturally tend towards when interacting with human beings.

If a dog can be trained to find drugs then it can be trained to alert on command.

I feel like many science-y people have an intuition that a measurement technique should not be used until you have explored its false positive rate. Perhaps judges don't share that intuition. Presumably judges receive their training in law school. One solution might be to persuade law schools to teach that to their students, by adding questions about this to bar exams.

Judges must defer to experts, and experts are often really wrong.

https://nndda.org/the-double-blind-attack/

>While the scientific community highly endorses double-blind testing, it can have disastrous effects on canine teams. As there is no way to determine whether the canine responded correctly at the time of the alert, the question is, should the handler reward the canine? This is a vital question due to the fact that detection canines are largely trained on a fixed ratio reward system where the canine is rewarded immediately for almost every correct response.

A measurement system that only works when you can't calibrate it isn't a useful system.

Also we live in a world where instantaneous communication at arbitrary locations is possible. How hard would it be to make an app where the evaluator can check if the canine's response warrants a treat?

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