Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

You hear this from police, too and it's one of the reasons police will often require you to go to a specific station, sign an affidavit, record an interview of you, and provide maximal information to show that your complaint is valid, and now your name is stored in their systems forever.

Which, you know, leads to situations where a complaint is filed, but eg there's fear of retribution. So maybe they'll fill out an affidavit but don't go downtown for an interview. Or they'll do everything by the book, but because they didn't know the badge number of the cop who physically harmed them, the complaint is dropped. This shit happens all the time.

Hell, I've seen complaints get dropped -- despite videos proof attached to the complaint -- that show cops slamming a kid against a wall and threatening to beat the kid up. Because the person getting slammed against a wall didn't know the badge number. There are probably ten different ways to figure out who the thug cop was, but nope.

Point is -- anonymous complaints are important because they give people with real claims of harm the comfort of reduced exposure to retaliation. Not being able to file a complaint because of genuine fear of retaliation is a threatened voice. Anonymity is important.

The type of person that becomes a professor isn’t known for slamming kids against the wall. It’s the other way around. You see that frequently in those that go on to teach in troubled districts.

Academic types and teachers are some of the most agreeable and easily bullied people on the planet. They’ve already been severely gouged out of payment for the vast majority of the value they provide by administrators. The only real reason for that is personality profile. Colleges and schools get virtually all of their real value from high quality teachers. If teachers were less agreeable and less easily bullied by bureaucrats they’d have kicked the vast majority of the admins out by now.

Professors give their lives and turn down lots of money they could be earning on different high intelligence career tracks to teach students in classes where you’re lucky if only 50% are ungrateful, disrespectful and/or incompetent. They do that because they genuinely love teaching and mentoring and research/learning, even if only a fraction of their students absorb it. A lot of them also do it because they have a kind hearted but soft-spined personality profile that’s never left the Alma Mater.

The profession doesn’t have a power tripping cop like problem, at least for the majority of teachers. And the types of professors that do go on power trips often turn classes into cults and use their students as weapons. Look at Evergreen.

These kinds of anonymous complaints are just another tool for the types of bullies that have already destroyed a lot of the value of the university to get student followers to use against people they don’t like, and a tool for immature students (which colleges are full of, since the main impetus of college is to guide young adults to intellectual maturity) to attack their professors on a whim with zero consequence.

I don’t see any world in which they don’t do way more harm than good.

Is it, though? To be blunt, run a news search for:

  professor rape for years "complaints" "ignored"

Tons of distinct cases there. Many of them ignored until after the victim(s) filed suit. Edit: and at Stanford! [1]

[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2022/06/19/a-stanford-professor-se...

If we’re going to be blunt, let’s be blunt about the dark side of reality.

Consider the population of rapists. Who are you more likely feeling safe complaining about: 1) A professor 2) A cop 3) A powerful politician 4) A gangbanger 5) An unhinged uncle

Consider the population of false rape accusers. Are they more likely to be: 1) An immature college student relatively new to determining sexual boundaries marinating in ideological literature that considers looking at someone the wrong way rape 2) A drug addict, prostitute, or other person a cop typically runs into 3) A regular person that knows the abuser has relationships to prosecutors 4) A person with good reason to fear for their life if they report 5) A person who has to deal with family betrayal if they report.

Between the administrative bureaucracy obsessed with student safety, the often rich and well connected protective parents propping up the school, and the often nerdy and agreeable nature of professors, professors are also probably some of the safest people to accuse of rape (rightly or wrongly) on the planet.

Best of luck.

> Hell, I've seen complaints get dropped -- despite videos proof attached to the complaint -- that show cops slamming a kid against a wall and threatening to beat the kid up. Because the person getting slammed against a wall didn't know the badge number.

If there was video evidence of a cop slamming a kid against a wall, why was this not used to identify the officer? This seems like a pretty outrageous claim that demands specifics - where and when did this happen - and citation of sources.

EDIT: Fixed grammar

Your guess is as good as mine, man.

But -- I saw the video, I saw the cop's face, I saw his partner's face, and the faces of the cops who were also dispatched, I saw the reports, I've seen the dispatch data, I've seen the assignment sheets, I've seen the car number, the GPS logs, etc etc. It should have been easy, but...

Mind you, the only reason we have these docs is because a FOIA lawsuit that required their release, among about a hundred thousand other complaints, while the city's FOP was pushing to destroy those documents.

Your guess is as good as mine.

You’ve seen a lot of things. So can you provide sources for any of these things? Most importantly, where did this happen and when?

I'm a reporter who works very specifically on policing and jailing in Chicago, and have spent years FOIAing these documents, and thousands of hours reading through them, and just as many in SQL/python. It hurts to the core reading it all. If you want me to share my reporting around these issues, I'm more than happy to. If you don't trust my reporting, I can share other reporters'.

It happened in Chicago outside of someone's home after the mom called the cops on her son. Her mom was the person who filed the complaint.

These stories are everywhere. https://cpdp.co is a good place to start looking.

>why was this not used to identify the officer?

The machine protects itself.

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