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I just became slightly enraged and irrational at the idea that I could potentially be stalked by hostile police, and any defensive behavior could result in them misrepresenting my behavior in a legal setting and successfully convicting me.

If you're walking down an alley one night and someone grabs you and you punch them any reasonable court will find assault charges levied against you completely bogus.

Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer. Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people - that's partially for a good reason due to the line of work they're in - but some people do abuse it and leverage law enforcement privileges and equipment to abuse random folks. Like, for instance, planting a tracking device on your partner to see if they're cheating on you - probably illegal and IA will probably come down on that officer - but they're much more likely to get away with it scott free.

> "Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer."

Well, you can be charged for anything, and criminal charges themselves do a lot of damage, but whether you get convicted is a completely different matter. That depends on the court; there have been cases of people shooting police who burst in unannounced, and having the charges dropped, or being acquitted.

For a criminal charge, you're also likely to be beaten or otherwise pushed to submit a guilty plea, no?

In some places, police officers are required to document all such events, using on-body cameras.

We keep learning cops turn cams off when inconvenient, generally without meaningful consequences.

honestly we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian. Arrest and handcuff someone with the badge cam turned off charge them with unlawful imprisonment. shoot someone with it off murder or manslaughter.

> we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian.

I endorse this.

And then the video file goes "missing" some days after...

require them all to be uploaded to; a local, a state, and a federal servers before clocking off every day. and all to be interned into the public record within 90 unless it a court order says other wise and then must have a public release date given within 5 years

I've said this before, but I think LEO should be treated like regular civilians in almost all situations. I think that if there was some path for regular citizens to get any particular privilege granted to LEO, we would be much more cautious about what we grant to LEO.

There are obviously some situations you would not want to allow for anybody but LEO, but I think those are rare. In all other interactions with the public, LEO should be accorded the exact same privileges as a civilian. It just drives the point home when you reverse that sentence and say civilians should have the same privileges as LEO.

The details of how this is done seems to matter quite a bit, and if I'm reading this[0] right, if the officers have the discretion about when to turn them on or off use of force might be higher compared to no body cams.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-016-9261-3

> Unless... that person (who grabbed you while you are walking down an alley one night) is a police officer

You see, this is the wonder of due process. In a mostly-reasonable jurisdiction, police officers are required to, first and foremost and at the very least, identify themselves clearly as law-enforcement, and with that carries the implicit suggestion that "you need to cooperate and not fight back". No identification and they might as well have arrested you without reading you your Miranda rights.

> Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people

I wouldn't call it lax but I'd settle for slightly different. Of course, a lot can be said about abuses of this "privilege to be different", which is maybe why observers would say law-enforcement is held to a relaxed standard.

It is different but not lax because:

- ordinary citizens can't break down doors into private property but law-enforcement can if they have probable cause (Have you watched Breaking Bad?) or a search warrant. Good luck obtaining a search warrant as an ordinary citizen, if that's even possible.

- ordinary citizens are not ever expected to result to fisticuffs and if they do so, they would face fees or even jail. But law-enforcement can do so except there's gonna be a fuck ton of paper work afterwards and, should their reason for resorting to force be successfully challenged, face suspension or dismissal but hardly ever fees or jail time.

Of course the MOST IMPORTANT caveats here are (a) law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, even for reasonably-democratic territories and (b) this is HN playing r/legaladvice, which is fun but not as productive IMO.

The most important caveat is if the cop lies about you doing something and you don't have video evidence that he's wrong, you're fucked. That's more than lax, it's willfully regulating for a system that attracts and defends oppressive corruption.

I am speaking for the United States.

And in Canada. This is correct.

A police officer is treated as an expert witness in a courtroom. If it's just you and the police officer in that alley, the officer's word will be taken over yours. Officers have a strong incentive to lie about the incident since they will always be believed.

I recently learned that - at least in theory - in Norway a police officer can not expect to be believed in court just because he is a police officer.

This was new to me and I'm not sure but I think I might have heard that it was because of some case in the 70ies or something.

I think in one of the Scandinavian countries, people cannot be charged or punished for attempted or actual escapes from prison, jail, or custody, as the desire for freedom is assumed to be a natural human motivation.

One of TPB founders was on Darknet Diaries recently saying this about Sweden. I wonder if it is true.

And the desire for power, money, or sexual gratification are not "natural"? You could justify nearly any crime by saying your motivation was "natural"

Trying to escape from prison is victimless. Scams, thefts and rapes have victims. Some argue that crimes without victims like using drugs are not crimes. They, of course, could be illegal and result in fines and related but not in restrictions of liberty like imprisonment.

"A victimless crime is not a crime" is a much more compelling argument than "the crime had a 'natural' motivation".

I'm not arguing one way or the other whether escaping from prison should be criminalized. I'm just saying the stated argument is really bad.

I agree.

So if an escapee is captured again they're merely subject to serve out the remainder of their time with no time added for the attempt?

In this framework, yes. But see, even if no time is added to the sentence he may lose eligibility for early release. And he will be prosecuted for any crime committed in the process. Look, I'm not advocating for A or B. Just being descriptive.

This is true in the US as well, at least where I live. Judges specifically inform the jury that they cannot treat a police officer’s testimony with any more weight or as any more correct than any other witness.

Whether juries actually pay attention to this or not I cannot say.

I just had jury duty in one of the most liberal states in the union.

I had the prosecuting lawyer explicitly ask us during jury selection if we would "take into account that police officers have training which [we] wouldn't have access to as a civilian." And repeated it during the trial. All without a peep from the judge. So YMMV on that.

On an unrelated note, the prosecuting lawyer then proceeded to systematically eliminate exclusively women and minorities from the jury, and specifically removed every woman of color. Which I'm sure was a total coincidence.

There really don’t need to be special exemptions for police. Cops as an institution abuse whatever privileges they get, and then lobby for more privileges. They are barely accountable.

Said with no real understanding of the subtleties of the issue and all the places where having special exemptions is critical to the police being effective in their job.

Yeah, it's not perfect. But you can't just say it's completely unnecessary without a fucking PHD thesis on the subject going into each and every one of the edge cases and explaining why it's not necessary.

We need proper checks and balances and accountability. Not to pretend we live in a fairy land.

To be fair you are the one claiming special exemptions and lack of accountability for the police. Maybe you can share some more details on why you think it should be like that, so that we can better understand.

I said nothing about lack of accountability.

Burden proof goes the other way. The police having ability to get physical with you without being charged with assault would seem to be critical to doing their job. Which is why they have that ability and citizens don't. You want to argue the widely accepted rules are wrong, sure, but the burden of proof is on you then.

How effective are police at stopping crime? Do we have any evidence that giving the extraordinary rights to regular run of the mill law enforcement makes a difference?

I'm not talking about federal agents working on large cases, but the city and county police who often can't be bothered to show up in person to take reports of robberies or assault.

How effective are those officers at using GPS trackers, drones, MRAPs, and other extraordinary equipment to stop crime? If I had to hazard a Gus's it would be not at all.

Maybe look at places where the police is defunded? Reports that crime skyrockets in such places are plenty to be found.

plenty of subtleties covered here, and no, the cause effect relationship of police budgets reduced = crime rising isn't quite so cut and dry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police#Effect_on_cr...

That's likely confirmation bias. You'd also want to look at places where crime skyrocketed, as well as other factors likely to have an influence, like alternative support systems

That seems a very American perspective.

Not that cops everywhere else are just dandy. But, as for one example, compare the use of firearms in the US by police with just about every other civilized country.

That is a rational feeling.

Governments are the same things as mobs of course this is how they would behave.

Governments are the same things as the mob, of course this is how they would behave.

Of course they forfeit ownership, if this were not the case, you could stick and a sticker on cop cars and expect them to return the sticker to you without damaging it. Its not grafitti officer I'm just leaving my paint here, please give it back soon. The bin man's life would be complicated if everyone still owns what they put in the bin or throw in a river.

If cops put a tracker on someone's car they can expect the same response to a bird shit on the windscreen.

Why a sticker and not a tracking device? That’s even better and you can then track their positions across town.

I knew someone who had done that in a small town. The batteries didn’t last long but it was a “fun” hacking experiment. Tracking was just a basic transmitter which transmitted a ping. The idea was to get a reasonable idea a cop car was “nearby”.

> she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device

Fair? Yes. It's 100% fair as far as I'm concerned.

But rational? If I thought I found a bomb, I'd be running as fast as I could from it, then once I was a hundred meters away at least, I'd call the bomb squad. Trying to destroy the bomb myself sounds like a momentously stupid idea for a number of reasons. Foremost being, what if this homemade bomb with potentially unstable explosives goes off in my face? Or what if it's remote controlled and the bombman pulls the trigger once I start messing with it? Or what if I successfully destroy the bomb myself.... what do I tell the cops and my neighbors? That I blew up a bomb but it wasn't my bomb? How many weeks would I spend in jail before my lawyer manages to convince everybody that I didn't make the bomb I blew up and for some reason I never thought to call the bomb squad? I think an unlucky man might end up in prison for many years if he did that.

Well, if you had reason to believe that the police placed a bomb then it makes sense to me that you might not trust whoever you get on the other end of the line when trying to contact a bomb squad.

If you believe that the place placed a bomb on your car in the Us then you probably belong in a psychiatric hospital.

It was in the news five years ago when the Dallas police (in the US) used C4 to blow up a suspect in a parking garage. It seemed to startle people then, mainly because they repurposed a normally bomb-defusing robot to do it.

In fairness, while it was in a garage, it was not on a car.

"We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777...

While the use of a bomb in that case soubds like an affront to justice, I would think the police had probably cordoned off the area such that no untargeted bystander would find the bomb by accident.

To me it would only be reasonable to suspect a bomb on one's car if one did not know that the police placed it there.

Not if you have actually seen the device and it looks like a goddamn pipe bomb, as at least some of these tracking devices do. But if your response is anything other than running, I think you belong in a psychiatric hospital. Normal people run like hell when they think they've found a bomb.

>i.e. have search history for that exact tracker device or have testimony from a mechanic or technician who advised you on what the device is

I disagree this should even factor in. If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. Knowing what the device is != knowing who installed it, their intent, or where the installer got it from. Nor do I think that a savvy criminal removing a tracker should become grounds for searching browsing history for parallel construction purposes since I somehow doubt third party records are answered in yes/no format, and the phrasing of query strings could be rather broad, leading to a reasonable request of search activity between the dates of installation and when they felt they "smelled a rat". In which could be bundled other incriminating evidence to spawn off new ledes.

If actually telling the person you as a government agency installed it invalidates it as an investigative technique, maybe it shouldn't be being used in the first place. Police shouldn't have to resort to breaking basic decorum routinely in doing their job. It's just converged on that because the population under observation aren't necessarily well equipped or educated sufficiently to be savvy on this sort of thing, or to make enough of a stink. Law enforcement also relies on law abiding people to remain silent on these matters because "it'll never happen to me" when there is no guarantee you won't become persona non grata one day.

>If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device.

"Police say a lot of things and they're both trained and encouraged to lie in the execution of their normal duties."

If you think it might be a car bomb, I would suggest not trying to destroy it without training. Best to call the police and let them deal with it.

Considering the people who installed the malicious device was the police, I think it's questionable logic.

For many people, the police are an actively antagonistic threat, not protectors of safety. In this very case, they used legal threats against her. Why would she trust them with her safety?

It was a tongue in cheek comment on my part, but now that you mention it, I don't see how it wouldn't be a logical thing to do in this situation.

First off, the issue would probably get routed to the local police who take these kinds of calls, not the state police who planted it.

This would probably create some paperwork that would frame the event as a crime before it comes to light that the state police were behind the planting. Bring in a good lawyer and you might have a better shot in court over this nonsense.

Regardless, if you're not trained, probably best not to destroy a suspected bomb on your own unless you have no choice.

This is some very "hindsight is 2020" thinking. She knew there were cops at her place asking around for someone, and the next day she sees men attaching something to her car.

How is she to know that they were state vs local police, and whether they were working together.

Besides, it seems clear to me she only "didn't know if it was a bomb" at first, but at some point likely after taking to NAACP, she found out it was a tracker. So therefore at no point in time was she thinking she was disposing of a bomb. That's a fantasy.

Here is some 2021 thinking: If you have reason to believe the police have attached a bomb to your car, you should run from the car. Better to abandon your car forever than to attempt to defuse or destroy the bomb, something you have ZERO experience with. It's better to lose your car than your life.

(You call the bomb scenario a fantasy, but that is what this sub-conversation is really about and it's the scenario you were responding to up thread.)

Are car bombings common enough in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that it's a reasonable fear? Statistically, having a fear that you're going to die in a plane crash or terrorist attack is totally unreasonable. Even if we ignore that, how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear?

Also I'm not sure destroying a device you suspect of being an explosive is recommended.

I think the point is moot, since even if you thought it was a tracker, there isn't much reason to believe that you are required to act any differently.

>how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear

It's not clear which NAACP. The NAACP LDF (Legal Defense Foundation) certainly sounds to me like a good choice to call.

Does the LDF do a lot of bomb disposal?

If you are a person who has been recently persecuted by the police and have a fear of police overaction contacting the LDF to help you navigate interacting with the police in any manner seems completely legitimate.

I think they have connections/lawyers that could help sue for civil rights violations.

Also, if the police are doing something sketchy to one person, then it is probably not the only instance, and an organization like the LDF could pursue the broader issue.

By analogy, if a corporation steals $20 from you, it may not be worth personally crusading for it back, but if you tell the right person about it, they might file a class action.

It was reasonable, because she never actually thought it was a bomb.

Given that there was an active investigation against her, and that they had gotten a warrant, And that she knew to reach out to the NAACP, it’s pretty likely she was aware ahead of time that the cops might want to track her.

Sometimes when you’re reading statements by the “victim” in a one-sided article like this, you have to read between the lines. As you say, if she thought this was a car bomb, she probably would not have gone straight to the NAACP to ask them if it was a tracking device.

Playing devil's advocate here. Let's say people start making car bombs that look like tracking devices. Or they modify the tracking device to become a bomb. Many police tracking devices already look similar to a pipe bomb:

https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warr...

This gets kinda scary if the person you're tracking is a dealer working with a violent crime syndicate.

Even if you do have a search history or whatever you can still claim ignorance of who put it there. Better yet reattach it to a long haul truck and let them have a great time trying to figure it out.

> I disagree that it'd be safe to assume that the police forfeited ownership so if they claim the device is theirs it makes sense to return the device.

Unless legislated law states otherwise, it is certainly the case at common law that they “failed to manifest their desire to exclude others” and forfeited ownership. This is the basis behind “possession is 9/10th the law”.

I've they want their device back, which they attached to my car (or planted into my apartment) I don't think I have any obligation to return it. Same if you send me some junk with a bill for which I never asked.

What they can do, of course, is find a judge who orders me to return it. Could be, though, that they have to answer a few embarrassing questions in the process.

Given that they had a warrant, a judge already signed off on this and would likely have no problem ordering you to return the device.

> Car bombs are a thing that happens, they happen thankfully quite rarely but destroying a suspicious device is probably the best general course of action.

Why would you destroy something you think is possibly a car bomb or a detonator?

Wouldn’t the best general course of action be to call the police? Possibly unless you’re a meth dealer as pointed out in a sibling comment, of course.

i wonder how much it costs, to deploy a bomb squad, and how many times that will happen when compliant about the device come in.

scenarios such as : 1] i see this thing on my car

2] a saw a sketchy dude messing around under my neighbours car

3] please pull over for secondary inspection before crossing the border

I think this is a completely reasonable way to respond to finding a tracking device and simultaneously discourage them from continuing the practice but please do drive out of county first so that the police officers that respond don't just say "Oh hey, Joe put that on this morning, we don't need the bomb squad for that."

You probably shouldn't drive anywhere if there's a bomb on your car.

If it's reasonable to assume the device on your car was a bomb and you didn't take any actions that directly disproved you had that understanding - even if your actions weren't optimally logical - then that would probably make a reasonable defense if the city/state tried to go after you for destruction of property.

for comparison, [there used to be a video] a keyholder or a container about the size of the telemetry device will bare minimum blow a hole in the gas tank and explosively ignite however many gallons of gas in your tank, gasoline having the power of 12 sticks TNT per vapourized gallon is a big boom