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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I also never understood this. It almost seems as if interrogations aren't for discovery of information but moreso "we have this lead and we're going to beat you into submission until you confirm our lead".

You see it all the time with wrongful convictions and people signing confessions to crimes they didn't commit. I often wonder in these cases, do the officers, does law enforcement in this case really care who did it? If you bring someone in and interrogate them for 12+ hours and eventually they give you the answer you want to hear, do they never stop and ask themselves if the reason the person gave that answer is simply to make whatever they were doing stop?

It seems like some of these investigations the point isn't to solve the crime, but to dot the I's and cross your T's. It seems like actual public safety is an afterthought as long as you "catch the criminal" on paper.

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I saw something before that said something like 80% of cops thought they had never arrested an innocent person. From that, it is likely that they believe these people are the criminals but the crafty villains won't admit it without being tricked.

It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops legitimately think they're doing a good job over the alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility. Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.

>It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops legitimately think they're doing a good job over the alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility. Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.

Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.

I think one could make a strong argument that Stalin always knowingly acted in the best interest of Stalin.

This seems like a valid, if hyperbolic, point to me. I think that one could make a plausible argument that one of the most basic implications of the principle of rule of law is that, at least where the police are concerned, the ends don't justify the means. Allowing them to behave otherwise isn't a slippery slope that leads to rampant abuse of power; it's a dead drop.

Great illustration of why respect for individual rights is so important.

There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator, president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows best".

Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter how sure you are that there's stolen property in the building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter without a warrant.

Individual rights limit what others can do.

Agreed, which, as an aside, is why the civil forfeiture issue is such a scandal

It may not be that simple.

Imagine if each of your cells had individual rights or every bee in a hive has freedom to do its own thing.

Sometimes (most?) having centralized systems of power can be misused but that doesn't mean that centralized systems shouldn't be tried, there are evolutionary advantages to them.

I don't know what your point is, GP's comment already mentions a case where authority can intrude on individual rights: warrants, and there are many additional exceptions. The point of this system is not to make individuals untouchable, its to lift the authority to intrude on personal liberties out of the hands of individual beat cops and into a well-defined system and public observable record through the courts.

The problem with analogies is they're not really accurate.

Cells or bees have nothing to do with the wrongfully imprisoned minors in question.

Just like a broken clock analogies can be accurate some of the time.

This is a breath takingly disgusting over simplification and you know it.

How am I not surprised that you're the founder and CTO of a proctoring company that does facial recognition + AI to detect lying with "100% unbiased results". Fucking gross, man.

Wow, you are not kidding.

> Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing to process data and help you make unbiased hiring decisions 100% of the time.

> TBI stack ranks candidates according to their performance in the assessment with regards to the competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.

> Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate’s response and predict behavior in half the time.

So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this software to produce a team that looks like your existing team?

Either way, this Talview company is doing some really evil stuff.

> I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise?

To be fair, that is actually true, although I don't think that's the (false) claim they're actually making.

A response/critique to my comment is one thing.

A personal attack is not appropriate for this forum. I wouldn't have a made personal attack on you even if you had put what is you do in your profile.

FWIW I am proud of what I build, our products for half a decade have helped people to be able to take assesments from their home, whether it's disabilities or those cannot lose time on their jobs or would have to travel hundreds of miles just to an exam center to be certified. I am proud to have helped all of them.

There are plenty of discussions to be had on universities or certification bodies insisting on stringent requirements to do remote assesments to protect their integrity but a personal attack is not really the way to engage on this topic

>Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR.

I think a better way to phrase this would be that Stalin often said that what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR.

Good point. More likely, he did what was good for himself personally, to stay in power etc. Whilst saying to others that he did what was good for the USSR. And then, seems many people still today believe him

>More likely, he did what was good for himself personally, to stay in power etc. Whilst saying to others that he did what was good for the USSR. And then, seems many people still today believe him

Stalin remained true to the Marxist ideal of a classless and stateless world society until his death in 1953. This is the conclusion of researchers at Amsterdam University (UvA) who studied Stalin's annotations in books by Marx, Engels and Lenin in his private library.

The notes originate from the period between 1917 and 1953 and show that the dictator continued to adhere to such Marxist goals as the abolition of the state and the creation of classless society. Moreover, Stalin's correspondence and discussions with such Communist leaders as Mao Zedong and Palmiro Togliatti show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-02/NOfS-SwfM-22...

A false preacher using his power for selfish purposes will carry a bible for show, maybe have a few stowed away. A false preacher certainly wouldn't have accumulated years of theology literature in his personal/private library over his lifetime. Seems like a true believer to me, but you may see it differently. Him being a true believer and having done what he did makes his particular flavor of human nature even more frightening.

Thanks for the quote and link, I didn't know about his annotations. Makes sense then that he was more a true believer

Still I'd think that primarily important thing for him was himself and personal power, and that if he had had to make a choice between ideologies and himself, he'd done what was better for him personally. I wonder if he looked at communism etc more like a powerful tool (or so he thought) for him to use, and then not surprising if he spent time studying it

From the article:

> show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".

That'd almost made him the dictator over the world? Who knows if that might have been a main goal, and communism a tool?

> Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.

Hitler as well.

I went to Catholic school. Had quite the debate with a nun over why I thought Hitler and Stalin both went to heaven, since both thought they were doing the right thing and were just horribly misguided.

Police deal often with people who have long histories of arrest and so I think there's also a perverse component of, like, sure it's possible they're innocent of this particular crime, but we're not dealing with an innocent person, more broadly.

That sounds like it would be pretty bad at motivating that person to quit committing crimes if they're going to be guilty whether they did it or not.

I didn't say that what the police are doing is good or effective. In fact I called it perverse.

Though I also think that line of thinking is dangerous, if that was all it was they'd still realize they occasionally make mistakes.

Perhaps the FBI should "adversarially test" police forces with fake People of Interest, the way DHS adversarially tests TSA agents with fake bombs. Set up a fake BOLO for an individual of a certain description, then hire a set of undercover actors who all fit that description, and drop them in the area, telling them to wander around acting suspiciously.

If the officers don't realize, upon bringing five separate people in on the same description, that at least four of them have to be the wrong guy, then they fail the test. If they end up eliminating four of the five but then concluding that the last guy actually did it, they also fail the test.

I wouldn't want to be the undercover actor involved in that. There's a non-zero risk of serious injury, or death.

Risk level is at the same level as for any other random person.

No, it's higher. Because you aren't just a random person you are purposefully intending to look and act like someone accused.

I get the whole purpose of "yes, people are stopped every day because they resemble someone wanted", but this is "I am going to go out of my way to purposefully resemble and act like someone who the police will take a negative interest in".

It'd certainly lead to deaths and injury if it were implemented today, but after police get the idea that anyone they pick up might be innocent and that they'll be held meaningfully accountable for shooting first and asking questions later that would change. I think in our current system it's totally unrealistic and not worth the risks but in a place where police weren't routinely abusive it'd probably be fine.

This is true of any undercover operation, and should be vastly less true than, say, infiltrating a gang or mob group.

No offense, but this is exactly the kind of proposal I would expect from a software developer. It would work perfectly with a program where everything is nice and clean:

INSERT fake_actor() 5 TIMES SELECT suspects() CHECK officer_state_of_mind()

In the real world, as somebody already said, the logistics of hiring 5 actors to act "suspicious", get themselves arrested, set up plausible backstories that you would somehow have to keep from the police, potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong, etc?

I'm going to assume you're proposing this as a thought experiment and not something that could actually work.

[And I mean this in the nicest of ways, I construct these kinds of "solutions" constantly too]

You think it's a bad idea just because of logistics? Compared to other things the FBI does I don't understand why you think this would be unreasonable from a logistics standpoint

I wasn’t so much proposing hiring five professional actors; rather, doing what police forces themselves do to set up a sting — finding five FBI officers that all happen to look similar, cleaning them up to look even more similar to one-another, training them in espionage / counter-counter-intelligence techniques, and then phrasing the BOLO in such a way that it avoids mentioning their differences.

> potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong

Presume that the FBI is staking out the police building and has (compelled) the cooperation of the local sheriff, in exactly the same way white-hat social-engineering pen-testers work in cooperation with the management of the organizations they attempt to penetrate. Presume also that, unknown to the police, no real suspects are being simultaneously processed (all have been redirected to other neighbouring precincts) and so all police suppression equipment has been swapped out for non-working versions. (If you try to taze or shoot the suspect, you lose.)

To be clear, this is a setup that already happens when there is an officer under FBI suspicion of being complicit/involved in criminal activity. The FBI comes in and works with the precinct to set up an internal sting. The only difference, here, is that this involves all the officers of the precinct, rather than just one.

Ah fair enough, I didn't realize this was something that already happens.

This attitude is less hard to understand when you’re not looking at it through the filter of cases where that happened not to be true. When I worked for a federal judge I saw a ton of criminal appeals. Most criminals are dumb and usually there was just a plethora of evidence in the case. I can see why it would be very easy for cops to think that every case was that way, rather than just 98% of them. I have public defender friends. They’ll tell you, in almost every case their client is guilty of something. Their job is to make sure the police and prosecutors don’t overreach or act abusively and save the rare person who really is innocent.

That’s the key factor that outsiders looking into the criminal justice system overlook. They think it’s easy. “Just stop being racist, corrupt, etc.” It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being. Reforming the system is important, but it’s much harder than people think.

> It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being.

This is categorically not true. Police have to deal with some very problematic people, sure. But bad days are far more common that bad people, and most interactions aren't even that.

Every police force has its share of assholes too, who are net cause of more problems than they solve. The most effective ones I've known have been aware of the systemic problems of thinking like you suggest, and intentionally work against it.

It depends on what part of the system you’re in, and much of the criminal justice system exists after an initial filter and with a particular pipeline that it’s almost impossible to avoid a bias against on a day to day basis.

If your job is to do image/video forensics on hard drives of people already arrested or served with warrants, it’s generally either unremarkable or traumatically upsetting. The latter is going to have the most impact on your perception, and would likely color your worldview on things like encryption or the overall goodness of humanity.

This is true, I originally had a comment about narrower roles but thought it was a a distraction. If you are looking at the justice system as a whole, the pool of people shifts a fair bit. However, you have to pick an extremely narrow role before you are anywhere close to GP's "almost everyone is shitty" characterization.

My comment was more aimed at general policing, the vast majority of which fits my characterization.

> Every police force has its share of assholes too

Due to the nature of the job, and the perks and impunity of it in the US, it actually self selects for assholes. The military does as well, to a much lesser extent. There were some days when I went to bed thinking, "everyone I talked to today was a self important asshole."

When I say “criminal justice system” I’m talking in the context of this article (people who are arrested and prosecuted). Obviously most interactions with the police are with normal people and don’t lead to anything major.

But randomly pick out some sentencing hearings one day at your local federal court. They’ll go over the rap sheet of people who actually go to prison. It’s eye opening.

You can even see this in the criminal justice advocacy materials if you read carefully. I love the ACLU but if you read beyond the headline in many cases it’s quite revealing. I remember a case a few years ago where the headline was some “child” was imprisoned simply for being at a scene where a pizza delivery guy was murdered in broad daylight. Turns out he was actually in a gang, who murdered the guy in cold blood, and the legal theory is that the cops can’t prove which kid actually fired the shots. You can find the legal theory compelling (and I do) while acknowledging that this is the kind of shit that turns up even when social justice types are trying to pick impact cases.

Or heck George Floyd. I think the media overlooked a really important angle on this story that would have spoke to religious people. Floyd was a guy who spent most of his life being a pretty bad person: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-us-news-ap-top-new...

But he had found Jesus, he was turning his life around and reaching out to kids, and when Derek Chauvin murdered him he cut short what could have been a path to redemption. Reflexively saying “criminals don’t deserve to be murdered” when Floyd’s background comes up is a tautology. Sure. But does pretending that stuff never happened help you understand the real human story of Floyd, Chauvin, and the people in that community? Why making progress on criminal justice reform is so hard even as it’s extremely necessary? Is your phat dismissal and reduction of people to a demons and angels binary persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you?

Even if you are talking only about people prosecuted, "98% shitty people" is ridiculously hyperbolic.

It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point; lots of people make excuses for the excesses of these systems based on this sort of "98%" (or whatever big number) argument; mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.

> mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.

Fertilizer is good and useful (it helps plants grow); what you're talking is raw sewage, complete with draino and hastily-disposed medication.

> Even if you are talking only about people prosecuted, "98% shitty people" is ridiculously hyperbolic.

Good people don't rob their neighbors because they're "having a bad day." They're shitty people. And no, poverty doesn't excuse it. People in Bangladesh, where I'm from, are vastly poorer. If poverty caused crime, they'd go around stealing, joining gangs, etc. But mostly they don't. In Bangladeshi villages, crime is lower than in U.S. cities. And when they do those things, nobody hesitates to call them shitty people!

I'm extremely sympathetic to police reform, because I think even shitty people don't deserve to be abused by the state. But let's not mince words here.

> It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point

That may be your point, but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding. My point was in the context of this article, which is about someone who was prosecuted for brutally raping and murdering a woman.

The narrative that you can perform some sort of binary classification into "good people" and "shitty people", and the the latter is who shows up nearly exclusively in the justice system (and, critically that the converse might be true) falls apart under any real scrutiny.

> but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding.

Neither was I. I was talking about the majority of all the work they do.

Everyone can identify clearly horrible behavior, and often it is police who have to deal with this as part of their job. This is difficult and unfortunate, but it is not the defining characteristic of the work. Pretending that it is in order to somehow excuse bad behavior on their part doesn't do anyone favors.

>This attitude is less hard to understand when you’re not looking at it through the filter of cases where that happened not to be true

Nope, the attitude of "I never make mistakes" still baffles my mind. I get that most people they're dealing with are causing some amount of trouble, they should still regularly doubt their instincts. That would also go a long way to answering demands to "stop being racist."

>It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being.

If they hold that mindset, they should just extend it to themselves and the other people in the criminal justice system.

The show on Netflix "Making a Murderer" has some scary examples of this. Not only of the lying during interrogation but of just how pervasive this mentality is.

During an appeal to the 7th (iirc) District Court, the ADA's argument always came down to "What about Justice for the victim'a family?" like somehow it isn't even relevant anymore if they have the wrong guy or not - if they decided that the recently convicted was wrongfully convicted, it would be unfair to the victim's family to let him go, even if he isn't guilty.

Interrogations are where they think they have a case against you but it's not good enough so they try and mislead you into making their jobs easier by giving them more evidence against you.

If they're going through the effort of asking you questions in a controlled setting it's because they're trying to make sure anything they get is 100% unambiguously admissible in court.

There is a reason why they don't tell you "anything you say can and will be used either for or against you in a court of law".

>does law enforcement in this case really care who did it?

Law enforcement is an organization and all the baggage that usually comes with organizations still applies (eg maintaining the organization is a priority). LEOs are people that want to do people things - it's a job, not a way of life.

They also have a lot of political pressure to "solve crimes," which is literally a score board. I'm not excusing what they do in any way. It's a big mess of a system with too many incompetent bureaucratic careerists who seem to be short on ethics.

I liken it as a game which didn't take hackers into account when designing the system, and the hackers are now rampant, ruining the game, except it isn't a game.

They also have a lot of political pressure to "solve crimes," which is literally a score board.

While also being handicapped (budget cuts) and undermined (blamed) by politicians. On the one hand politicians demand lower crime, but at the same time denounce the police as the source of societal conflict.

LAPD budget is about 15% of the total LA city budget.

NYPD is about 11% of total NYC city budget

Maybe looks are deceiving, but officers and their vehicles sure look like they're having a whole lot more money spent on them than they were in, say, the 90s. They have more stuff, it all looks fairly new, and it all looks slicker, meaner, and more "apart" from normal folks, than it used to. I'm not talking about SWAT or armored cars or any of that stuff, either, but normal stuff that ordinary officers wear, carry, and drive.

This. The rules that allow them to confiscate and sell or use materials deemed to be "having been used in aid of committing a crime" means the funding is actually drastically higher than it once was.

High enough for them to buy APCs for staging public relations events.

Police spending was 0.05% of the GDP in 1980, it's 0.25% of the GDP now.

So, somehow were spending more and the opinion is that were spending less.

This does raise the question of how many cases are actually up in the air at all. One would think that given the IQ distribution of criminals a majority of cases involving arrests are quite open and shut, with suspects usually being caught either red handed or after not covering their tracks at all.

A justice system optimized for public safety will err on the side of putting aggressive, anti-social individuals behind bars rather than making absolutely sure they really did do the thing most of them were caught doing. Public safety is therefore orthogonal or even somewhat opposed to the pursuit of truth.

I think your baseline assumption about the US "justice system" should be that it is a horror show from top to bottom. If you expect any kind of rationality, fairness or common sense idea of justice, you will not find it.

You might find these videos interesting as they analyze interrogations and the subject's behavior. Sometimes the lying is part of eliciting responses that can be analyzed.

https://www.youtube.com/c/jcscriminalpsychology

I'm not particular fond of the lying though and the asymmetry ... You can't lie to law enforcement but they can lie to you.

I completely agree. Some of the Jan 6 protestors have recently plead guilty to trespassing or similar petty nonsense after being held im solitary confinement for over 6 months in a DC jail. Solitary confinement for what ends up being a trespassing misdemeanor.

Actual public safety is an afterthought. The point isn’t to solve a crime, but to punish enemies or to boost conviction rates.

> Actual public safety is an afterthought

Are we talking about the people who participated in a violent insurrection against the US, or is this another group?

If you want to have nice things (eg: a democracy) then you can’t be letting people who commit some mild treason off just because they’re dumbasses who got caught up in the moment.

The next yahoo who decides they want to try and block the peaceful transfer of power needs to 100% understand that they will be prosecuted.

The parent comment says they "plead guilty to trespassing or similar petty nonsense" so I'd assume they weren't charged with "violent insurrection" and "mild treason."

And they got Capone for tax evasion. Brushing off a conviction under 18 U.S. Code § 1752 -- which seems to be what people are being charged[0] with -- as "petty nonsense" is itself misleading, as it's the part of law that deals with "PRESIDENTIAL AND PRESIDENTIAL STAFF ASSASSINATION, KIDNAPPING, AND ASSAULT"[1]

[0] https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-ar... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-84

I’d agree that reality is likely somewhere between “petty trespassing” and “violent insurrection.”

If you don't think the goal was violent insurrection then what, specifically, do you think the people were doing there?

They were protesting just fine outside of Congress, why did they go into congress? Why were they trying to find Nancy Pelosi? Why did the Capitol police think they needed to use deadly force?

> "Why did the Capitol police think they needed to use deadly force?"

Might have had something to do with the violent death threats some of the invading fools were shouting…

Yes, that’s definitely the implication

Why did that dude dress up in face paint and a Buffalo hide? I don’t know and suppose the answer wouldn’t be coherent anyway.

Why do people protest anything? Nothing changes. It’s a futile effort.

Why did that capitol cop shoot that lady thru a window? Cops gunna cop and they always lie about it afterwards. Probably needs de-escalation training.

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