Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.complex.com/music/afroman-sued-by-ohio-sheriffs-...
They are trying to, but these laws will likely fail to be constitutional because so far they are completely arbitrary and do not respect freedom of press.
> That pertains to audio, not anyone’s image.
Approximately the same states are all-party consent for video recording any place that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, reasonable expectation of privacy is different between audio of a conversation, and video.
But you can't record it; that's not evidence at all.
One could potentially collect lots of very good evidence if permitted to ignore laws in the process.
I'd like to think that if someone, especially someone in a position of power, were caught doing something truly evil that society would find an appropriate response regardless of some legal technicality and that there will always be someone willing to risk the personal legal consequences for letting the rest of us know about it. That that same risk of legal consequences would also prevent people from exposing others over trivial matters.
I'm not sure that works out in reality though. We have lots of evidence of people who have done very terrible things but have fully gotten away with it, and plenty of evidence that society is as terrible at evaluating evidence as mobs are at coming up with just responses.
That isn't just magic. The longer a memory stays in your head, and the more times it's called up, the more likely that recollection is to be changed by your own brain. A written account of events shortly after they occur is a good way to protect against future damage to the memory.
It doesn't mean that what's written is accurate to start with, we know how little eye witnesses and even our own senses can be trusted, but it's probably going to be a lot better than what we think happened days/weeks/years later.
> It doesn't mean that what's written is accurate to start with, we know how little eye witnesses and even our own senses can be trusted, but it's probably going to be a lot better than what we think happened days/weeks/years later.
This is great if you assume everyone is always telling the truth to the best of their ability, but that's not such a great assumption in court. Giving greater weight to notes mostly means that someone who plans to screw you over benefits from automatic victories against people who didn't plan not to get screwed.
I do think that people should be able to record events that occur on their own properly, and even their own phone calls without consent of another person, but I worry about the implications of saying that our ability to remember events and the ability to log data are basically the same. Feels like a loophole that a lot of evil people and companies would happily jump through.
Generally though, I don't really see an ethical problem with data collected strictly for an individual's personal use and I guess in theory we could have two party consent laws that acknowledge that but still offer some protections.
I'm not sure to word conservative applies. In the US you are just as likely to get a liberal judge as a conservative one in a local trial court. Most cases are never appealed, at the state level, it depends on the state if it's conservative/liberal, and at the Federal level we have judges appointed by both conservative, moderate and liberal presidents.
> It also can't stop the police carrying out violent retaliation against dissidents.
It can, however make violence expensive. We're seeing case after case cost local governments hundreds of thousands of dollars for civil rights violations and excessive force. The great equalizer has been cameras.
The funny thing is this is basically the exact same story for J. Cole's "Neighbors"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nfVWiXY3WY
Basically he moved to a new bougie neighborhood and the neighbors called the cops on him accusing him of "selling dope" (the primary hook of the 1 minute song). So he took his security footage and made a music video out of it
You can see the SWAT team members casually talking to the neighbors peeking over the fence too lol
Is this a misspelling (perhaps purposefully?) of “bourgeoisie”?
It looks mostly like a claim about using their likeness commercially —- their personality rights. i.e. the rights someone would sign over in a modeling contract.
…Like how you can’t put Tom Hanks face on a box of cigarettes and sell it without permission. He may sue and claim that you’ve tarnished his image.
But yeah, it’s a stretch here too given the circumstances, but these laws vary by state so I have no clue how this state handles it.
I believe the reason he has a right to publish this work is because he is not profiting from their likeness. He is profiting from his work of criticism. (Edit: a sibling comment points out that Ohio exempts audiovisual and political works)
Also, as a public servant in official duty, in a place where they found themselves likely to be recorded, they had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
I disagree, mostly because it isn't hard to get fringe cases. Drunk folks, folks with memory issues, and so on. Even if they break in, I don't think this is the sort of thing they should face public ridicule for.
I think the homeowner has the right because the folks breaking in are cops. If a cop cannot handle these facets of their job being public, they should act better. A cop in uniform is a public figure, even if they are in a private residence. An ununiformed cop is a public figure if they are doing cop stuff, especially if they are in your house.
They should be acting like someone is always watching. They should be able to handle being told bad words from people. They should be expected to always act professional. That is part of the standard we set for call center employees, after all, and we should expect folks that can ruin other people's lives to live up to better standards.
> Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2741.09 (A)(1): Right Of Publicity In Individual's Persona: Exceptions.
> (A) This chapter does not apply to any of the following:
> (1)(a) A literary work, dramatic work, fictional work, historical work, audiovisual work, or musical work regardless of the media in which the work appears or is transmitted, other than an advertisement or commercial announcement not exempt under division (A)(1)(d) of this section;
> (b) Material that has political or newsworthy value;
> ...
Source: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2741.09
Although, that might not cover the T-shirts…
These count as news, right?
https://www.wlwt.com/article/afroman-adams-county-home-raid/...
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/08/23/afroman-hou...
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-a...
https://hightimes.com/news/afromans-ohio-residence-raided-by...
https://www.tmz.com/2022/08/22/afroman-home-raided-police-oh...
https://www.tmz.com/2022/11/30/afroman-cops-stole-missing-mo...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/afroman-calls-police-raid-hom...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11135971/Afrom...
All prior to releasing the song (the "commercial use"). This isn't exhaustive.
Afroman just might have a case...
Still, it seems to me (IANAL) that the suit doesn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell. In particular, they reckon their damages not based on any actual damage, but on the earnings Afroman made from publicising them.
Well, that's what the report says; but it's from The Grauniad, and the quality of reporting in that organ has been declining rather quickly (whatever Wikipedia says about "reliable sources").
> Afroman responded to the lawsuit, telling TMZ the deputies have no grounds to sue, especially since they lifted a stack of money from his property and at first, didn’t return $400 of the seized cash.
It still mentions the stolen money, FWIW.
That should be the entire story: if a raid is performed and the warrant doesn’t pan out the cops behind the warrant should be immediately investigated by another agency (which, they’re cops too so who knows if this would help).
The second amendment protects organized armed resistance against state-level tyranny, whether external or internal.
Can't have a militia of one.
I especially dislike how people will point to the private writings of certain founding fathers to support their 2A opinions, even though what was ratified by the states was NOT those private writings, but rather the very very short amendment.
Individual officers benefit from this, too. It keeps the relationship between citizens and police much healthier.
We need to end QI and make the police earn their keep. In general, they've cozied up too close with any potential oversight for a reasonable person to have faith in them being held accountable for misdeeds.
(I say this as someone who's been grateful for police presence before)
Is this impossible to do in the US?
https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/w...
It's generally not expensive enough to create enough economic pain to break through the 2 party (or 1 party in many locales) political system.
When people sue a public company, the people who in the end must hold the people responsible will be the share holders. When government are sued, it is the voters that must hold the people responsible. If a local government is found guilty in a court of law and forced to pay millions in damages, the money need to be either from raised taxes or reduced services. Both of those should be strong points for the opposition to gain votes and kick out the people who are responsible.
Where I live, when the government is found guilty and forced to pay out it usually also result in the current local leader responsible for the situation being forced out. Mismanagement is not a effective way to gain votes, so if the leader don't step down volunteerly the party may just want to replace them anyway for someone without such baggage during next election. Maybe US politics and the system around political donations makes such results less common?
This is a red herring. Qualified immunity only protects individual cops from civil liability, not from criminal liability. And above all, proper check for police is neither civil nor criminal liability, but independent institution for investigation of criminal and professional misconduct (like police IA division, but independent and ideally under different level of government - e.g. state or federal for checking municipal police).
Then why is literal theft protected by qualified immunity? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibill...
Most other places in the world cops have to train for +24 months and most of it is focused on physical conditioning, descalation/conflict psychology, and Law.
I mean knowing my local government incompetence I would be pretty nervous in having people with guns being trained by a local institution. It needs to be federal, standardized, and just longer than the few months training US cops have.
You are militarizing incompetent institutions (with military grade hand me downs) which have far less trigger discipline than actual military.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/02/14/...
Issue is not that they are incompetent. Issue is that they know fully well they can get away with it. And real world proves them right almost every time.
Well at least here the answer is somewhat simple.
There is a deep ingrained level of distrust for federal government. It has been there since country's foundation and the past few decades have done nothing to lower it ( and one can reasonably argue it has only increased ). In a sense, the reason is structural.
<< It needs to be federal, standardized, and just longer than the few months training US cops have.
FWIW, FBI is effectively federal police. I think you will agree that they had their fair share of, uhm, not great behavior.
<< I mean knowing my local government incompetence I would be pretty nervous in having people with guns being trained by a local institution.
The whole point of cop that is local is that people will not, ehkm, revolt, because random guy from NY got plopped in AK and does not understand the basic environment they are in.
I personally prefer local. I think last year I went to our local quarterly neighbors/cops outreach and I was largely happy with what the sheriff had to say, because it dealt with MY local issues and not some pre-ordained stuff from the top.
Like I said, the issue is structural, because US is a massive country.
Why have states at all rather than one federal government that decides all laws?
I disagree. Since having radically different roles and powers for police, rasically different organizational structures for poloce, or not even having anything that exactly fits the typical concept of “police" are also within the acceptable variation, and all of those factor in to minimim quals, minimum quals for police absolutely are legitimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
The system is working as designed.
Institutions change over time.
>Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.
But sure, this system that obviously had a huge impact on how the country developed, how power structures were purposely designed, and how freedom even worked, TECHNICALLY wasn't the primary reason for rebelling, maybe.
No technically about it. Though you're right about the rest.
> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
As far as I'm concerned, the Ohio state government should step in and entirely dismantle this county's police department and replace everyone.
All we can do is try.
Last time I had to call cops was when two drunk people started brawling in a bus. One fell asleep and the second, driven to desperate acts by prolonged homelessness tried to steal his phone. In the end, the victim decided that the best course of action after reclaiming his phone was to kick now lying down thief until satisfied.
I and another passenger have stepped in, restrained the aggressive phone owner. We have gotten 4 of us out of the bus. We told the phone owner repeatedly to verify that his phone is OK, in order for him to realize that no harm has been done. We have talked him down. He was still inclined to (way less fervently) take revenge. I had to choose between getting confrontational and sending him home to sleep it off "or else" and calling the cops. Since the first option would put me at risk of being caught breaking the law, I had to call cops.
Cops came in sirens blazing, 3 cars, acting all high and mighty. "Your IDs" and shit. In the end, the phone owner has not even been told not to kick other people. The homeless person has not been checked by a medical professional. He was drunk, might have had some ribs broken, but none of those 7 "public servants" bothered to check. I asked if they were at least giving him a lift to wherever he was residing. "We are not taxi."
Fucking useless.
The fired cops will just get jobs in other departments. Cops won't be better trained, procedures that lead to this won't be changed. No real change is going to happen.
Firing cops at this point is just theater. It isn't trying, it is honestly just more of the same. It isn't likely that they fire the entire department either, and it will do nothing to take care of the folks that were elected in (sherriff and prosecutor, for example).
>it will do nothing to take care of the folks that were elected in (sherriff and prosecutor, for example).
I won't deny that rot starts at the top, but part of that rot is never firing misbehaving employees. You emphasise training, I emphasise learning, and the only way to learn is not fiddling around with the curriculum, it's not giving cops an extra year of training. What helps people learn is bad cops fucking around and finding out.
You can give people as much training as you want, but if they see other cops getting away with this gang nonsense, they will learn that you can do that and nothing bad will come of it.
- A large percentage of the people are already bad
- Anyone who pushes back against bad behavior is shunned, fired, or left "without backup" in bad situations
- There are no repercussions for bad behavior
- There are positive reinforcements for bad behavior
Eventually, you're either going to be driven out, or you're going to turn. So wiping the place clean and starting from scratch, while drastic (and _certainly not appropriate everywhere) can be a valid approach when the problem is rampant across the entire department.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
I will use myself as an example. I absolutely do not want to be a cop despite having a relatively strong moral compass, because I know for a fact that I will agonize over small things and believe most excuses thrown at me. More than that, I do not think taxpayers would want me to be a cop, because I am lenient ( which also why I did not really enjoy having a position of authority in my previous job ). I mostly assume everyone will do what has to be done.
And sadly, that is not nor has ever been the case. Uniform is just a symbol of that power.
Ah and before you answer: most of use who are not in the US live in places where police misconduct is much less of an problem, so obviously it can work better. The entire German police force fires less bullets during their patrols and missions in a year than e.g. the NYC police force alone. Sometimes single cops in the US fire more bullets alone than the entire German police force. This is even hard to compare, because the Germans have numbers for every bullet fired at a person during service, bullets fired for warning shots, bullets that hit, bullets that did not etc. That data is wildly mixed and unreliable in the US depending on the state.
If you want to have a police force you can trust they must not be above the law and the law must be even stricter, the standards even higher for them than for the rest of the population. That means longer and better education and training, knowing the law, but also strict measures when police officers break the rules or there is even just the slightest doubt about their version of events.
In many police departments in the US the problem is essentially that there are so many bad apples that every good apple that comes is spoiled or cannot do good. This can only be changed be decisive action from the top.
How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?
I'm not disagreeing with the comment I'm replying to, just trying to challenge the perception that there's anything ok with "just" a few bad apples. The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.
This is obviously idealistic and impossible in the real world (given the size of a police force). What is needed is a system that gets rid of bad apples with time, instead of letting them thrive and corrupting other apples.
WHAT PUNISHMENT?
And that.. can probably be changed. Qualified immunity would be much harder.
It doesn't just take apples, it takes time. If you remove the bad apple as soon as possible, the rest of the barrel can still be fresh and healthy. If you leave it to rot, you spoil the entire batch.
Should we defund and abolish public schools since more than zero teachers are child molesters? Should we defund and abolish fire departments since more than zero firefighters are arsonists?
Where that cutoff percentage is, depends on the single organisation and the individuals within it. But I believe that in this case it is a combination of police culture ("we always did it that way, we need to protect our own") and systemic incentives ("if we hide bad behaviour we look better than if we expose it") are the key to understanding this.
These are deep rooted issues that are not as easily quantified and discouraged. Reducing gun misuse is one thing, but reducing police discrimination, selective policing, and misconduct is a much larger ball of wax.
And people think that they need those means (which they never had) "back."
Also institutional racism and all the other shit that's true for most police across the world.
ACAB.
The German government decided there doesn't need to be an external investigation into police violence because the police can be trusted to have correctly investigated itself finding that police violence is not a problem.
The NRW state minister of the interior abolished ID badges for riot police, then insisted that there had been no evidence of misconduct during police riots because no individual officers (wearing full helmets and no individually identifying features) had ever been charged despite video evidence of excessive use of force.
Demonstrators hospitalized due to police violence routinely receive police visits in hospital because their injuries are taken as evidence of resisting arrest as all police violence is presumed to be justified.
The NRW police literally used the energy company's transport vehicles to detain and transport arrested demonstrators during the raid on Lützerath, where the police was explicitly instructed to show full force to deter future protests at similar sites.
Police officers were found to be part of a neo-nazi group called Combat18 (18 = Adolf Hitler) that had maintained kill lists using police records and a stash of assault weapons and body bags.
It's a whole thing, yes.
We can look at statistics from eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... and compare with statistics on police shootings.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/gun-ownership.html
https://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gu...
But it’s like firing the whole development team because we all keep ignoring lint errors and our bugs crash the system.
I think there’s systemic changes to make.
Maybe for cases like this if the judge or person that approves the warrants has a high failure rate they can no longer approve warrants.
Same issue with nearly every place people have power. It feels particularly acute in the US because of reverent attitudes to police force.
But doctors, nurses, teachers, priests... Good people will do bad things given half a chance.
From what I can tell from the outside, people always accuse American police of being terrible. I don't see much of a reverent attitude.
This attitude goes way back. It is characterological. See the Fugitive Slave Act versus states' rights.
Also, the Democrats have never had a politician of any stature, let alone a president of their party, say "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." That was Ronald Reagan.
In other words, you are right, the left does distrust those portions of the government it does not control, but there is an enormous difference of degree in how the two sides behave towards these portions of the government.
There's no inconsistency in trusting a democratic process to do mostly democratic things but thinking the lack of accountability in policing has had negative outcomes. The vast majority of democratic voters in america do not support "abolish the police' in entirety, but rather that reforms are needed.
The first problem with that, from the perspective of forming an accurate view of the populace, is that, as a whole, the US leans ever-so-slightly center-right[0].
The second problem is that much of our political news is a circus whereby both political parties attempt to paint a picture that the “majority” of the country is behind more extreme interpretations of their platforms — that the country leans more heavily to the left or the right than it really does. The Republican Party has been doing this for more than a generation; its a more recent phenomenon with the Democrats.
0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/275792/remained-center-right-id...
…and except when Team Red needs to justify owning military grade weapons, in which case it’s all about deterring tyranny by being prepared to shoot cops and soldiers.
It’s a very… situational reverence. Like, as long as the situation is the police attacking the correct demographics.
I think that's starting to break down. Conservatives are not happy with the ATF's self evaluation of congressional law right now and they are certainly an armed police force with arresting power. Also, poor people who are conservative are also on the receiving end of police violence quite frequently as well.
There are plenty of police abuse videos out there, against citizens of all colors and they're all over YouTube. The more people watch them, the more that support will break down.
Of course the other irony is some of the worst police departments are in cities run by the Democratic Party. New York, LA, Chicago, Louisville, New Orleans. The abuses aren't limited to a single party, so it's difficult to politicize.
And how changing the systems and culture can fix it. Think the book checklists discusses this in detail .
If people no longer trust that executive arm of government, then hold those in power responsible for it. Start at the top and replace those politicians. An elected politician can only remain in office if they continue to receive support by voters.
Just voting differently is naturally not the only way a government can be held responsible. Political assigned jobs is a job description based on trust, and there should be mechanism to remove individuals who do not fulfill that trust. Governments should also be liable to their citizens, so when injustice occurs people should have the option to demand compensation from the government. This in turn put pressure on politicians to avoid injustice caused by the police.
A police force that protects citizens rights should be viewed as an asset to local government, and the opposite should be a harsh liability that local governments can feel.
I try to solve problems from a systems perspective. For example the common automobile stop and warrantless search allows officers to more easily abuse power and escalate situations quickly as cops no longer required a warrant from a judge. This was by design by the Supreme Court who ruled in 1925 to allow this exception in times of prohibition when an individual ran away from police with alcohol and they didn't have time to go get a warrant. Stop and frisk was an extension of this case law.
A more accurate comparison would be firing the whole team for inserting intentional backdoors and collecting fractional pennies from each transaction and depositing them in personal accounts.
Accidents happen to everyone. We often make trade offs. In the cases we're talking about, these weren't accidents or appropriate judgement calls.
Heh, so because he was the victim of a burglary the police decided to do burgle him again.
Total retail theft alone is well over $60b [2]. Adding in other crimes like employee theft, fraud, property crimes, and so on puts total US cost from crime well into hundreds of billions.
So no, police don't steal more than traditional criminals.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/afp/reports-0
[2] https://www.rila.org/focus-areas/public-policy/study-retail-...
And it doesn't actually affect the point.
When your world view is made of false claims and feelings and you ignore actual evidence, don't be surprised when people that do prefer evidence won't believe you.
Then people wonder why black people don't talk to (or call) the police. It has nothing to do with "snitching". It's about the fact that It never ends well, no matter which side you're on. Best to avoid the beasts entirely.
The aversion to police altogether, while I understand is akin to being overprotective as a parent, which can be more than just counterproductive but harmful as a whole.
However, there appear to be no good police unions. The unions bend over backwards to protect bent cops almost regardless of their actions. The "good cops" also support these unions - if they didn't, and if the "good cops" where the majority, then the police unions would reflect that
And one of the misunderstood things about ACAB is that it doesn't have to be literally true, if there are enough bad cops (and we know by now that there are), and if the bad cops are protected by the good cops (which we also know to be the case most of the time) then as a civilian you don't know which you're going to be dealing with in an interaction. The only safe thing to do is to assume that any given cop that you interact with is a bad cop.
The union is supposed to serve the police, and that includes legal protection... your lawyer is going to back you, that's how the system works. Would you want a defense lawyer that was against you?
I know it's pretty simplistic, but that's largely what it comes down to... I'm not supporting police misconduct at all. I think that civil asset forfeiture is a crime, I think that police spend too much time trying to make criminals out of innocent people... Once at an accident where I was rear ended, "why is your seatbelt unbuckled?" I was kind of pissed, because, "I needed to get my insurance and registration from the glove box."
In the end, I get it... I do feel, however, that the ACAB is oversized because a lot of it is over-reported or misrepresented.
I'm also not that inclined to generally and blindly support police. They are agents of the govt's interests and not yours. They serve the govt and the govt is too split from general good and in favor of the wealthy and powerful. And I also think that enforcing draconian lockdowns in many places didn't gain them any favor with anyone these past few years.
Again, most cops are mostly good, like most people. And like most people they will bend to peer pressure, anxiety, stress and their environment. You really want to see people with a bent personality, talk to the guys that have to clean up traffic accidents sometime... They're quasi police and complete alcoholics for the most part. That's a job nobody should have for an extended period of time. It's extreme, but only to show that one's own experiences will shape their perception.
Of course, I am biased, I just make an effort to be level headed as much as possible.
That's an interesting perspective and nuance! It gets really interesting when the same group is both responsible for "protecting the individual" and "protecting the profession". In most legal situations, you have a lawyer of your own and it's very crystal clear that their role is to protect your best interests. And I am one of the people who strongly strongly believe that, in the general legal perspective, "he got off on a technically" should almost always be replaced with "the legal system failed to do their job". For example, if someone is acquitted of a crime because of a poor chain of custody with the evidence, the fault 100% is on the people who failed to do their jobs correctly. When the state wants to strip someone of their most basic right (freedom), they had better dot their Ts and cross their Is.
> In the end, I get it... I do feel, however, that the ACAB is oversized because a lot of it is over-reported or misrepresented.
With the lawyer situation, I am paying my lawyer to represent me the best they can. With the police union situation, the good guys are paying union dues that go directly towards the defence fund for the bad guys. There's a very significant conflict of interest here as well; if a video leaks where I'm beating the shit out of someone while wearing my company uniform, my employer is almost certainly going to put out a statement about how my actions don't represent the company values and that I've been terminated. With the police and police unions, there's often complete silence or even support.
I have more thoughts, thank you for triggering a really interesting line of thought for me. Will try to come back to this but work's getting busy again...
That was after the civilian world had already reacted publicly. All of the police involved helped kill him or cover it up until the video came out.
"A bad system will beat a good person every time." -- W. Edward Deming
> The only safe thing to do is to assume that any given cop that you interact with is a bad cop.
True.
I was swatted. I had a puppy who was still in the barking and biting phase. My starting assumption was they'd shoot my dog.
Then I got conflicting instructions ("freeze!" and "lie down on the ground!"). And I thought, "Whelp, here it is."
Fortunately, we both lived. But it's sad that being shot in my driveway while wearing my PJs would be a "disappointed, but not surprised".
Due to the potential for an extreme outcome, I've long though Swatting should cop the 'prankster' an attempted murder charge. Which is in itself probably excessive, but hey.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/what-polic...
The unions are literally the legal defense for the police... they are supposed to do that. And police protect their own, like most people in any tribalistic group. The power and repercussions for those that are bad guys in the system is definitely outsized in terms of influence and effect.
Again, and I feel I have to repeat this... I do not condone, or favor misconduct. I think police, generally speaking have too much power and gov't employees as a whole too much protection from liability for their actions. I'd like to see govt, and police reduced as much as reasonably possible, and strongly favor 2A and self defense.
According to a 2006 report [1] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (part of the DOJ), 25% of allegations of use of excessive force were unfounded. (This contradicts statements made elsewhere in the comments that "most allegations against police are falsified.") Keep in mind that these numbers are reported by the police agencies themselves.
(In the interest of beimg complete: In 23% of cases the officer involved was exonerated, meaning the "incident occurred, but the officer’s action was deemed lawful and proper". In 34% of cases the police agency didn't find enough evidence to either sustain the allegation or exonerate the officer. 8% of allegations ended with disciplinary action.)
Interestingly, when surveying citizens, the BJS found that 75% of citizens who experienced use of force thought it was excessive, although only about 10% filed a complaint with the agency employing the officer(s).
I wasn't able to find very much info on this, and I suspect there are probably some pretty big biases, so if anyone else has any info, please share.
It is not a matter of good cops and bad cops. The issues are systemic and often complicated.
That doesn't mean you have to be an asshole, and that doesn't condone asshole cops either. The point is, that broad brush strokes definitely don't help.
Personally, I'd like to see most govt minimized, including police and standing down the military. I'd like to see far more community engagement, and strongly support 2A and self defense, I don't like seeing that eroded for larger/stronger govt.
I was under the impression that the police in the US are not required to be truthful and it's perfectly legal for them to give false legal advice if it'll make their day go smoother?
That said, if it were anything more than something like a basic traffic stop, I wouldn't answer anything other than my name and providing ID without a lawyer. Pretty much every interaction with police (outside family/friends) has been a traffic stop, an accident, or otherwise reporting a crime.
If you are required by law to answer a question, you must do so. If you are not required to, you do not have to. What the police tell you has nothing to do with it.
There are very few occasions when you can be required by law to answer a question without a lawyer present (and without a judge compelling you to do so). These questions tend to be very limited, such as name and address, and may be even more limited in states without a stop and identify statute. You should research these questions before you need them.
The police are not required to teach you the law (with a very specific exception of reading you your rights when you are arrested) and are allowed to lie to you. They may also be simply mistaken about the legality of compelling you to answer a question. This may or may not impact the admissibility of anything you say, but generally provided the police officer reasonably believes what they’re saying is true, they will have qualified immunity and you will not be able to (successfully) take action against a police officer for lying to you.
In any case, you should take personal responsibility for learning what questions you must answer, and any questions other than that you should respond to with some formulation that makes it clear that a) you are aware of your legal right to refuse to answer the question, for example under the fifth amendment and b) you are exercising that right. You should answer all questions this way, even seemingly innocuous questions, as inferences may be drawn from your choice to stop answering questions. Courts have also established that if you are unaware of your fifth amendment rights, then they do not protect you. You should get legal advice at the earliest opportunity, but certainly before answering any question you are not required to answer. Police also receive training on how to make it seem as though you are required to answer the question without necessarily saying so. For example “how many people live in your house?” may be the question.
You might respond with something like “I would prefer not to answer that question”.
The police officer might then respond with something like “I need to know how many people live in your house so I can record it in the report/make sure my colleagues are aware that there are people at home/because I need that information to perform a proper investigation”. They may even threaten you with arrest for obstruction, but at this point they have likely crossed a threshold and anything you say past that point is probably inadmissible.
Although I’m not a lawyer, the above is my understanding of the recommendations of pretty much every lawyer about everything. You should do your own research or engage your own lawyer rather than listening to some loon on the internet with a Wikipedia degree.
Your understanding is absolutely wrong. There are no magic words that make your voluntary confession inadmissible whether intentional or not. l
The closest thing would be refusing to answer questions. Then, if arrested, demand your attorney and continue to refuse. Never try to rely on a Miranda violation.
Also, folks, find out if your state has a Stop & ID law and understand the details of when they can apply. You are always required to ID yourself if stopped for a traffic infraction.
Alec Baldwin, the actor, may have voluntarily talked his way into prison by saying too much after the recent accidental shooting on a film set.[0].
[0]https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/26/alec-baldwins-sad-str...
This is ironic reasoning for defending a body with a history of racial profiling, i.e. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/us-department-justice-ch...
Look, my initial response to this is here[1]... I don't condone misconduct... but I am at least attempting to have a level head and see more sides to this. I'm someone who would generally like to see most of the govt including police and military end.
In this case, it's f'd up, and the police in question, from what I recall were dismissed. The lawsuit itself is anything but okay imo, and they shouldn't have any expectation of privacy while on duty, period. And was my very first response in this post, if you care to look/check.
I'm a minimal govt libertarian, and that includes police. I'm just pointing out facts. How many times have you ratted someone out in an environment with oversized peer pressure? MOST people historically won't and don't.
> How many times have you ratted someone out in an environment with oversized peer pressure?
Why has this culture of oversized peer pressure been permitted to continue unabated for so long?
When I was in the military, there was an incident where someone witnessed another serviceman committing a war crime. The commander dragged us all out, stood us at attention, and made 3 things abundantly clear: 1) if we committed a war crime we would be punished. 2) if we witnessed a war time we were expected to report it. 3) failure to report is a UCMJ violation and will also be punished.
What's so special about cops? Why do they get held to a lower standard than the military?
Mine is let self defense reign supreme and vigorously defended #2A.
Any policing force will have power.
I'm curious as to where you got this information. After a quick search, a source of information said that 25% of allegations against police are falsified [1]. This is far from "most allegations against police". (I wouldn't be surprised if there were bias in favor of police in presenting this information either, as the organization putting it out states that a big part of their mission is "working to protect innocent law enforcement officers ... from wrongful allegations and convictions".)
It also doesn't make sense to me if most allegations are falsified, why aren't police unions in favor of more transparency and turning cases over to more objective parties to be investigated and cleared (i.e. civilian over-site boards instead of other police officers)? It's a bit alarming that an organization whose job it is, is to investigate crimes, wasn't able to either clear an officer or find him guilty of the allegation in 65% of situations (according to the statistics from the website [1]). (It's not worded the best in the report, so again, if you have other evidence that's both more objective and clear, I'd appreciate seeing it.)
I get that police shouldn't be automatically seen as the "bad guy", and I think it's sad that we live in a society (at least in the U.S.) where that is often the case. However, I think there are reasons for the distrust and defending against those reasons is counter-productive and not moving us in the right direction.
> they shouldn't have any expectation of privacy while on duty, period.
I agree with this (aside from minor exceptions), but police who destroy private surveillance systems and then sue when information gets out, presumably to create a chilling effect, go against what you seem to be arguing for: giving the police a chance at objective judgement. In my eyes, they do this to themselves.
> How many times have you ratted someone out in an environment with oversized peer pressure? MOST people historically won't and don't.
Just because most of us have fallen victim to peer pressure, doesn't mean it's right, and I don't think you are arguing that, but ignoring it in your plea towards empathy for police. I don't think claiming the police deserve more empathy in this story, than a man who was falsely accused of kidnapping and faced unfair repercussions because of it, is the right balance to strike. I would argue that we should be working to break down peer pressure and tribalism within the justice system, instead of excusing it.
> I'm just pointing out facts.
Again, I think the facts that you present are wrong (esp. that most allegations are falsified), and I'd genuinely like to see some evidence to back them up. I've seen plenty of evidence that police brutality and dishonesty is a problem in the past few years, and seems to me to be the bigger problem, so I have a hard time seeing from your point of view. (I'm often wrong about things, so I'd like help seeing it from a different perspective.) If you could present some evidence that might change my mind, I'd really like to look into it.
Anyway, thank you for the thoughtful discussion.
[1]: https://www.uncufftheinnocent.org/post/wrongful-allegations-...
Because most cops are bad. Plenty of good people become cops every day. But good cops have a half life of just a few years. The moment a good cop thinks "well I'll just overlook this one thing so that the guys will still like me" he becomes a bad cop. Whereas good cops treat it as a moral line and become former cops.
A police force that won’t expel and arrest one corrupt cop is an entirely corrupt force.
Aversion to police is just aversion to risk. You never know why a cop is asking you a question or what they are really investigating so even answering innocuous questions is massively risky. You never know if you match the description of someone they are looking for or if something minor like answering a question during a traffic stop. “I’m just headed home from the grocery store officer” could put you at the scene of a crime you didn’t even know about.
Misunderstandings are usually easy to clear up with most people but if a cop decides you are under arrest it would have catastrophic consequences for most people and everything you said prior to that arrest would immediately be stacked against you.
If YOU get pulled over and the cop is aware that you have police family they may give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are “one of them” and not “one of us”, for everyone else take the advice that every defense attorney agrees on: just don’t talk to them.
Would they really come home and mention all the shitty things they did to their child?
As long as we're talking about shoulds, we should have an independent body reviewing police misconduct and major screw ups. There should be very little "police policing themselves".
Police can police themselves when it comes to the kinds of things any other workplace handles themselves, like people showing up late for their shifts, or stealing office supplies. When police end up violate the rights of Americans though, let police handle that however they want internally, but that should always be in addition to what an outside body decides.
Honestly, the police should welcome the idea too. I'm sure there are plenty of officers who would rather be doing their job than spending time busting down the doors of innocent people and searching for fake kidnapping victims they'll never find.
The court and prosecutor’s office currently exists and are working as ill-incentivized, clueless, codependent body that mostly post-hoc justify actions.
I believe this is an unsolved problem, not inherent to US or any country.
I.e. civil society.
The criticism is pretty strong.
https://novaramedia.com/2022/11/21/why-are-we-still-pretendi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier
For like 11 years after Dickens handed over the dossier he could have just said who they were. He still had that same immunity he used to name the first one and could have told the world, but he apparently just decided not to even after seeing nothing came from his "explosive" report that was supposed to change everything, and even after having previously threatened to do exactly that and use his immunity to name the others.
So, why didn't he just do it? Why is the question all about where this guys one pedo report went. He knew what it said. Why didn't he just type up another one? Why not a bunch of them? How did he end up being the only person to get this information in the first place?
He said that he'd been threatened after naming that first guy, but that didn't stop him from compiling and turning over his dossier. I guess maybe the 8 powerful mystery people threatened him harder until he shut up, but if we can't blame him for not just saying who they were because of those threats, how can the IOPC or anyone else who tried to investigate it later be blamed. Couldn't they have been threatened into silence the same way?
It's really messed up if its all true, but the whole thing seems full of holes and uncertainty. Then again, that's just what I managed to get out of Wikipedia so what am I missing?
I'm of a mind that police officers should have to carry malpractice insurance like doctors and other professions do, and repeated incidents would jack their rates up and if they're out of control would be priced out of the profession, instead of moving to the next town over and continue dumping the lawsuit costs on taxpayers. But in this case even that wouldn't have done anything. There are bigger training and accountability problems.
I was targeted that night because the sergeant on duty had a real thing against my older brother (who was, admittedly, a hell raiser), but my brother had left town a couple of years earlier after joining the Army and so he directed his bullshit at me. This was back in the '90s in a small rural area in Ohio. A place very similar to where Afroman lives today, in fact only 2 counties away.
edit/ Oh, I see. It was Clermont County. Nope, not it. I don't want to place my younger self with pinpoint accuracy here but I grew up in southern/southeastern Ohio.
It would have been an interesting aside, but it wasn’t to be.
Afroman says they confiscated ~$5,000 and returned it $400 short.[0]
An 'independent' investigation (by another sheriff's office, two counties over) claims the bags were miscounted multiple times and the correct amount of money was returned.[1]
Strap in, Afroman's next single is gonna be wild...
[0] https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/12/01/afroman-hom...
[1] https://www.fox19.com/2023/02/16/investigation-into-afromans...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwZxxa8f-HA
And: Lemon Pound Cake
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqIRTkgukr2/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Police unions appear to be a significant reason why police officers are shielded from accountability. They make police disciplinary records private [1], are why officers receive excessive overtime pay [2], sometimes including kickbacks to their municipality/town, issue cringeworthy statements [3], and pour $ millions into elections [4]. The more I learn about them, the more disappointment I have in American policing.
Why does the American public tolerate police unions? Perhaps the better question is, who are the politicians that accept their money?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/nyregion/nypd-discipline-...
[2] https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Police-overtime-spen...
[3] https://www.nycpba.org/miscellaneous/anti-cop-city-council/
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...
I'm of a mind there should be more union protections for everyone, not fewer. The strong protections that police have should be the norm.
As for police reform, I moved from the US to a Nordic country known for professional and committed cops. Mind blowing, how calm and peaceful and unfraught dealing with cops are, here. When I first moved here, it was the police department that handled immigration matters and I nearly had a panic attack. Completely unnecessary fear.
To be a cop here requires 4 years of training, a degree, as well as ongoing psych evals. Everyone including the police are just so freaking reasonable it can be disconcerting!
I'm not sure what is going on in the US that makes the government so extractive. That corruption is the root cause of any police corruption. But more training and exclusivity couldn't hurt.
I agree the US generally doesn't have great worker protections and the situation should probably be improved.
On the other hand, when the public seeks redress against police misconduct, they have the unions to thank for serious obstacles they must face. Unions historically have succeeded in hiding disciplinary records from the public, apparently help "bad apples" quickly get re-hired the next town over, inflate salaries and are behind very expensive defined benefit pensions. It seems hard to argue that police unions are furthering the public interest. Combined with qualified immunity, which is nonsensical overreaching judicial activism, and the Supreme Court ruling officers have no duty to protect [0], American policing seems to fail its public terribly.
I've noticed certain YouTube channels seem to easily and consistently get endless examples of obvious police misconduct [1][2][3].
Meanwhile I've previously seen people argue that improving the pay [4] may help, but at least in some states when factoring in overtime and weird contractual rules+bonuses, total pay seems to be already very high.
The problems seem to run very deep.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@LongIslandAudit
I should say I’m not too well versed in this argument, so this is my vague recollection of its high level points.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-to-know-police-unions-l...
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trou...
https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o...
Interesting quote from there:
"Police officers hold office and are not employees. Each officer is an independent legal official and not an "agent of the police force, police authority or government". This allows the police their unique status and notionally provides the citizens of the UK a protection from any government that might wish unlawfully to use the police as an instrument against them."
The most reasonable explanation for benefits far in excess of what other unions can muster is the fact that they have a privilege simply by being police, which makes sense since they are largely the force used to suppress other challengers to the authority of employers.
In other words, they got these protections because their employers were willing to accept them, safe in the knowledge that they didn't need those avenues to extract accountability, not simply because their union asked for it.
No need to imagine: https://dfwa.org.au/about/
What's so strange about public sector unions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_and_Public_Sector_Un...
The problem with the US Police unions is they act to cover up bad behaviour, etc.
Police unions kind of invert the typical power dynamic of a union. Normally, a union exists to protect less powerful workers from more powerful bosses. Police unions as they exist today mostly protect more powerful police from less powerful members of the public.
Also, I'd like to see cops held liable for settlements, not the tax payer!
Both of these can be achieved by forcing cops to carry liability insurance. The more claims they get, the higher their premiums, and eventually bad cops will be uninsurable - thus unemployment.
but unions for public employment just don't make sense!
For private corporations, there's an obvious balance - if the union strikes too much, the whole company goes under (because all production stops).
But for public jobs (e.g. cops, or notoriously, London tube workers), the union can literally demand anything, and the employees can't be fired, and the employer (the government) can't go bankrupt... it's just the population that suffers.
Seriously? You think it makes no sense for firemen, teachers, nurses, paramedics and waste collectors to act collectively to protect their pay and working conditions? Do you really think that the only bad employers are private employers?
If they’re employed in public jobs, just their increase job & pension security strongly outweigh most other considerations.
If you want to know why the quality of education in America has dipped look no further than paying teacher barely above retail workers. No knock on the folks who work retail but there is a drastic difference in level of responsibility both to the individuals in their care and society as a whole.
I have no idea why we think that they are less deserving of good conditions and good pay if we can acknowledge we need them to do their jobs.
Job security doesn’t outweigh the need to have a living wage and decent benefits and decent conditions. Neither does a pension that some people won’t even live to enjoy.
Everybody deserves livable wages and good benefits, not just private employees. Everybody. I don’t care if your job is teaching, garbage collector, fry cook, reporter, city collections clerk, any job under the sun that needs to be done, and a human being has to do it, requires a living wage and decent benefits.
This is especially true of public jobs that we need people to do for society to function. We need teachers. We need janitors. We need people in all of these public roles. In fact, in North Carolina it’s a royal pain in the ass to get your drivers license renewed if you actually have to go to the DMV because they don’t have enough staff, because the pay sucks. That affects everybody.
Maybe private employers should have to pay more than public jobs to offset the perceived security of public jobs. But that’s not the same thing as what you were arguing here.
If so, I agree 100%.
Another viable alternative is to reject socialism (central planning) and embrace markets (e.g. I see no reason why janitors, garbage collectors and even teachers (giving parents actual school choice) couldn’t be employed by private corporations that compete to perform a public service.
Sure, you can simply privatize everything, and use taxpayers money to line the pockets of private shareholders. Taxpayers don't like that much, so in that kind of system people tend to oppose public services in general. And it involves the government handing out contracts for everything, which inevitably leads to corruption.
"Markets" have aggressively sought every way possible to get labor as cheaply as possible. The idea that privatizing public services is going to make things better for anyone other than the shareholders / owners of those companies is not only ridiculous in theory, it's proven to be false in practice.
One only need look at private prisons, private hospitals, private healthcare, and (as I referenced before) the NC DMV for evidence of this. Many of the license plate agencies and such are privately run, and they're worse for it.
Which is kind-of the point. Tragedy of the commons. The individuals (union members) gain while the public loses (more strikes, worse service, higher tax-financed salaries)
The true issue with public unions is that they can elect their own bosses. There can't be good-faith negotiation if the position of the "boss" is dependent on supporting the union.
In theory public sector unions cannot legally strike or engage in work actions but this constraint is ignored whenever they find it inconvenient.
They create a feedback loop between public expenditure and political power which is very bad for liberal democracy.
Corporate media shapes public opinion shapes political campaigns. Violent crime is historically low, but the public thinks crime is rampant and rising.
Because real money is on the line. From manufactured outrage (advertising) to the schools-to-prison pipeline to the penal industry.
Witness the Democrats ongoing "tough on crime" measures. Total kabuki. With real world consequences.
Witness the success rate of "progressive" prosecutors. Every one of them chewed up and spit out by The System.
--
FWIW, my best guess is successful reform will come from urban courts and judges.
My city's and county's benches are very progressive. Stuff like creating separate courts for vets, bringing wrap around social services to the court room, innovations such as restorative justice, a traveling court that brings proceedings to the communities, shepherding student courts, etc, etc.
Police should carry insurance against malpractice. When malpractice is carried out, the policeman (or union's) insurance should pay, not the taxpayer.
Let the God, aka invisible hand of capitalism, aka the greed of insurance companies, sort them out.
What was the probable cause which prompted the judge to grant a home search warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping here?
Why is there seemingly no accountability going on?
Armed police broke into someone's home, looking for drug trafficking and kidnapping, and it seems that evidence of neither was found. Why were they allowed to do this by the signing judge?
All of those supposed protections are meaningless in the face of the superior protection granted to police, judges, and prosecutors.
Or just punish them according to law and make it impossible for someone with a criminal record to work in the field (at least for a certain time, depending on the severity of the crime, someone that shoplifted once at the age of thirteen should probably still be able to become a cop).
Warrants are petitioned for by district attorneys, who are elected officials. In principle, the means of redress for inappropriately pushing for warrants and improperly using prosecutorial discretion is at the ballot box.
The NRA (Nat'l Rifle Association) very successfully used that playbook for decades. During which much of the electorate supposedly wanted much stricter gun control.
Maybe this parallel is obvious, but being the aggressor and seeing yourself as the victim is completely characteristic of some popular political groups and a certain warfaring dictator. They always seem to destroy themselves given enough time.
It is rooted in narcissism to be sure (which is probably where a lot of bullying is rooted in too).
I think the key here is that we all have different definitions of "benevolent." An awful lot of hate crimes have been committed in the history of the human race in the name of making things better. Almost nobody thinks that they are the bad guy. I hate to jump right to Godwin's Law here, but a lot of Nazis thought they were doing the right thing. Ridding the world of "undesirables" and so on was their (twisted, wrong) idea of bettering the world.
One thing smart people are undeniably better at is coming up with grand justifications for their crappy actions and then proceed to buy into their own bullshit. Think of how a skilled lawyer or rhetorician can construct a convincing one-sided argument in favor of almost any damn thing.
Dumb people can be shitheads too but only the smart shitheads will write a freaking manifesto about it.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there are no people who are both highly intelligent and also completely vile.
I'd like to think that a benevolent sort of mutualism is kind of an obvious higher truth. I certainly believe in it. If we work together there will be more for everybody. Very few things in life are truly zero-sum.
And I think for most of human history, things worked this way. In a small family/village/tribe, cooperation was essential, and there was probably a pretty strong evolutionary preference for those that were benevolent rather than evil, at least towards their own family/village/tribe. Smarter people would understand this better. Help your neighbor out, and he'll help you out, and maybe nobody has to get eaten by a bear.
But no more. Groups are so big now. There's no obvious personal benefit to being a "good person." If you act like a dick in a small village then maybe you die next winter because the grain never gets harvested and everybody starves. But in modern society, there's just not much of a penalty for being a dick.
bullies, especially the adult variety, is they’re
often non-thinking and inevitably hoist themselves
by their own petard
Adult bullies are in my experience typically waging some kind of information warfare -- spreading rumors and allegations. Either personal or work related. And/or they are exploiting some power asymmetry.
These are people who play political games at work or in other organizations, and/or spread rumors online. They know how to build social/political currency and then "spend" it by making allegations that are either difficult or impossible to disprove.
Essentially, unless massively incompetent, they hold all of the power. And most of them have been practicing this since their school days.
It takes easily 10x the effort for you to disprove something as it does for them to make the allegation in the first place. Sometimes it's 100x, sometimes it's just impossible. And God forbid you're facing more than one of them. You really can't win, unless they lose interest in you.
As far as "non-thinking" goes? I dunno. Some are totally non-thinking, and some are sociopathically doing it "for the lulz," but a lot of them have thought deeply about what they're doing and are absolutely convinced that they are right.
Things we say to make ourselves feel better. A certain warfaring dictator has enjoyed a long life of unlimited power, riches, and indulgences.
I’m not sure we will see him in a jail cell, but currently he’s not exactly living his best life …
The whole State at this point is oriented against the People. Fighting the police is at best very inefficient, even when you're in the right. This whole neocon/neolib uniparty and corporatocracy running our country has to be ousted first. Local level policy will follow naturally from that.
IMO the most direct and safest route to that outcome is relentless and brave advocacy for election reform. Duverger's Law holds that first-past-the-goalpost-winner-take-all virtually guarantees a party duopoly. It may take a constitutional amendment, but proportional representation is the only way that could happen. All other fixes are useless band-aids or dangerous.
One serious problem is actually the law you mention - in proportional rep there's a plethora of parties, most of whom have no chance of ever governing or influencing policy. Two-party states are better in that the population can punish party A by voting for party B and vice versa. In a many-party-state, some people stop voting for party A but they split their votes between B, C, D, and E, none of which are effective in opposing A.
The other serious issue is that each party has a completely unaccountable and opaque system for deciding on a list of representatives. Getting on that list presents wonderful opportunities for corruption for bad politicians.
I now live in first-past-the-post Canada and it's so much better. I have an actual politician who is motivated to help me when I ask and read my letters because a couple of thousand votes can swing the local election; whereas before I was a faceless, undifferentiated citizen and went completely ignored.
I'm in a FPTP, two-party country, and strongly favour PR. But definitely not a PR system based on party list. That looks like the worst of all possible worlds, including FPTP.
STV (ranked preference); STV usually means multi-member constituencies.
AV/Instant Runoff; that's what I favour. It doesn't require huge constituencies or lots of representatives. It's not really PR though.
What I find objectionable about party-list is that the parties choose the candidates, so you can't have independents. The parties also rank the candidates, so you vote for the party, not the candidate. And the party machine can bury a disfavoured candidate at the bottom of their list. I want voters to be able to remove a useless representative that the party wants to keep, without actually assassinating him; you can't do that with party list.
Your former country may be seem a disaster to you, but it has been studied fairly extensively, and, among modern democracies, proportionality is very much associated with both positiive measures of function and with positive perceptions of function from those who are subject to them.
> Two-party states are better in that the population can punish party A by voting for party B and vice versa
In a mulitparty system you can pubnish any party by voting for any other party, whereas in a two party system you can only punish part A bv voting for party B, which means a strategy that makes both parties look worse but the other one by slightly more is a winning PR strategy. The results are predictable.
> The other serious issue is that each party has a completely unaccountable and opaque system for deciding on a list of representatives.
That's not a product of proportional representation, its a product of one particular system of achieving it, “party list proportional”.
Most PR advocates in the US (or Canada) are advocating systems with by-district elections, which mean you still have locally-elected by-name specific representatives, either Single Transferrable Vote (almost always this in the US) or Mixed Member Proportional.
Which seems like a no-brainer, but I found most of my erstwhile fellow citizens voting not for B but for B, C, D, ad infinitum.
Because parties B - Z are now tiny parties, they get no momentum, and nobody votes for them... because nobody else votes for them.
Leaving a huge voting block for A, who happily keeps ruling regardless of being unpopular with all but 30% of the population.
Better to have two parties that are balanced on a knife edge, and they have to perform or they lose.
Can't figure it out.
On the assumption that Party A just simply has the majority still? This objection lakes cogency, so maybe you could make this general objection more concrete by citing a country that finds itself in your abstract scenario?
National proportionality, abolishing state representation, would take an amendment. Using STV or party list proportional within the bounds of each states house seats would not.
The US, though, has a strongly Presidential system, which would favor duopoly without radical Cobstitutional reform, and the Senate is problematic as well.
Yes, well ...
I think he could just post his videos and be more in the clear, the claim is he is using their images for commercial activities.
I don’t agree with the cops but this is absolutely not his only route.
Also we don’t yet know the outcome yet.
I love the dude with the hard-ass tough-guy haircut: all shaved except the top of the scalp. It looks like a marine haircut, I think.
Such a massive civil uprising, with no legislative response except to perhaps retrench qualified immunity, is not the sign of a free country.
Yes, very much so. They don't even have to be on a raid, they can just be on patrol. After the Global War On Terror started, many police departments routinely cosplay as military.
>When cash seized during the raid was returned to Foreman, it appeared that hundreds of dollars were missing. A subsequent review by the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation determined that deputies had miscounted the amount seized during the raid itself.
It's disappointing that the AP doesn't even mention any of that, just a mention that some money was miscounted.
Will You Help Me Repair My Door [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34293904 - Jan 2023 (124 comments)
Also:
Rap artist Afroman sued by officers who raided his home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283145 - March 2023 (6 comments)
US Police raids home; sues homeowner over CCTV footage of raid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281258 - March 2023 (43 comments)
The difficulty with situations like this is when you have judges and lawyers who go along with it, which is a possibility. This is of course not counting the extreme cost to escalate it to appeal- or further if that fails. Or the time spent and having to deal with the damage, etc in the meanwhile. Per a Guardian Article he is losing gig opportunities due to the kidnapping charge on the warrant, even though it was unfounded- as an example of the damage continuing despite being false.
Others have mentioned how they took money from him(caught on camera), and didn't return it all ,and a independent news station was able to get them to recount it- but they still didn't return it all.
And ,we don't know what they did once they started shutting off all his cameras they could find(his own video with the footage shows this)-
My favorite bit is where they're worried smart people will get bored and leave XD
This is a pretty startling statement for armed people who are supposed to understand and interpret the law, detect abnormalities accurately while not terrorizing the law abiding general public.
Here's a breakdown of appropriate jobs by IQ. Keep in mind the 100-104. This might be part of the problem.
https://www.schooldrillers.com/the-iq-level-you-need-for-dif...
Also it explicitly states a "Police Patrol Officer" is a job someone with an IQ of 100-102 could be expected to get. So it appears you didn't read it?
Aren't they persons in public practice, while on duty? How can official police work be "private"? A police officer on duty is a public figure. Of course they should get full privacy off duty... but while on the job shouldn't there be transparency about what they do?
I imagine that is why they added the fake kidnapping part, to justify it by some fantasy imminent danger. I'd be curious to know who whas the invented victim in that case.
Afroman, however, doesn’t appear to meet these criteria.
The question is whether Afroman's use of the officers' images is for-profit, or if it can be categorized as educational or journalistic. I am in favor of the latter characterization, as I found the videos newsworthy and educational, and illustrate problems with policing that I have primarily heard about by word of mouth.
What is super interesting to me is the damages theory, which is apparently that the cops themselves had the right to profit from their likenesses so Afroman making money damaged them.
Let's parse this out: these police personas don't have inherent value--nobody would pay for a picture of one of these people on his way to the laundromat. There is also nothing interesting about their behavior in the abstract. For example, it's not like they broke into his house and recited original poetry, which he then sold in his own poetry book. Afroman repurposed the harmful conduct of police into an artistic work. The value of their conduct to the artwork was that it was harmful to the artist. So their argument is that they were damaged when he profited from the harm they caused because they had the right to profit from that harm instead?
It's nothing more than an erotic fantasy of mine, but it is possible to sanction the lawyer who filed this pleading under FRCP 11 or whatever is the local equivalent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQcST-jdl7U
I guess these guys aren't aware of the Streisand effect.
Every criminal case goes before a jury. The jury's job isn't actually to decide guilty or not guilty, it's to decide punish or don't punish. Judges and lawyers do everything they can to align the system to "here are the rules, here are the facts, did this person break a rule?"
In reality the jury is meant to be a check on judicial overreach. A jury of one's peers decides if you should be punished. If enough cases are decided despite the letter of the law, the law will be changed. See prohibition for a prime example.
Unfortunately too many people can't afford to miss a single workday, and employers don't have to pay employees for jury duty.
I wasn't arguing that jury nullification is the best or perfect answer. I simply raised that I wish more people viewed jurt duty this way. The jury is in charge in a court room. No one gets convicted criminally unless they take a deal or a jury decides it. Short of blowing up the entire system, anyone with jury duty today could do somefhing about it.
If people vocally opposed the legal system and rallied around the idea that juries decide a person's fate rather than a DA, it might at least be less risky to go to trial. A BLM-scale movement for legal reform based on using the system against itself would go a long way to helping people at least make the decision whether they are willing and able to take the risk of going to trial.
On the one hand, courts of law mean justice will (read: should) be served out equally and fairly.
On the other hand, jurors having the final say on how laws are enforced means the people always have the final say as one of several lines of defence against government tyranny.
Jury nullification (what I originally argued for) can't fix the system but it sure as hell can throw a wrench in the works. The process of a case going to trial can be a nightmare, but ultimately if juries exercise their right and regularly decide a case by what they think should actually be punished in the first place we might just see less resources spent on BS charges that are arguably pushed through just to get the prosecutor a promotion.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
[2]: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/consider...
Talking about it in court WILL get you held in contempt of court, because you are openly declaring an intent to contravene the law.
No they don't.
>..... If enough cases are decided despite the letter of the law,
In the US, the process IS the punishment. So even if people are found not guilty, they still incur the costs of impound fees, forefeiture of property destroyed or taken during arrest/search, loss of lawyer fees, having to check the box on job applications and whatnot. And laws don't change for the better because people get off on charges.
My original point was simply that juries can be doing something about laws they disagree with now. Often this topic turns to a solution that is entirely rebuilding the system which is an almost impossible feat - the system is too bjgto just put on hold for a year while we all decide what to replace it with.
I don't know if you've ever been on a jury closely related to a case, but both the judge and prosecutor will describe the jury's job as hearing the law, revising the facts presented,and deciding if the law as written a broken. We have taken that lesson and treated it this way, but a jury can tell the lawyers to f$#& off and decide whether they want to punish not whether the law was broken.
Basically, for your plan to work, many people would had to self sacrifice.
I do completely agree the plan would require a huge saccrafice and risk for quite a few people and that's a terrible thing to ask for. Unfortunately that's sometimes the only way to enact change when the system is so massive and rigged against us.
Tearing down and replacing the legal system in one shot will never happen and comes with its own problems and unknown damage. Using the system as-is against itself at least has a chance. I'd argue it wouldn't take too many cases before DAs realize they're putting massive amounts of effort into petty drug cases, as an example, that continue to lose in court simply because the jury isn't interested in punishing their peers for what msy technically be illegal in that case.
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/ohio-right-publicity-law#:~:....
"The statute requires that any consent to use an individual's right of publicity for a commercial purpose be made in writing, which includes written, electronic, digital or any other verifiable means of authorization."
Here's the key part of Ohio law it references: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2741.09
You can gauge how deep and normalized the corruption is by how blatant some are about it.
It's sad, because a lot of people join the police force because they want to do good for the community, and they're colleagues with people like this. The good people end up leaving or getting corrupted.
"As one bad apple spoils the others, so you must show no quarter to sin or sinners."
We've let this fester for decades. Also, this attitude and blatant disregard for citizens rights is at all levels of policing; local, state and federal. It's a cancer that has riddled the country.
There is no major party in the United States advocating for police reform.
> Ohio officers, who conducted a botched raid of rapper’s home, are suing for invasion of privacy and emotional distress
That was Afroman's point... he and his family were on the receiving end of an invasion of privacy and emotional distress.
(Without getting into value judgments and the wider context around this, of which there is plenty to say and which other commenters have covered pretty thoroughly)
Is this the stop hitting yourself defence?
First you have to put aside whether they should have been there, and whether they committed crimes while on his property. Basically start by assuming the police in this situation are unsympathetic criminals.
What rights do they still have even if they’re the bad guys here?
They don’t have a right to privacy. It’s fine to publish videos of them stealing his money. It’s fine to make fun of them.
But do you have the right to use their image in a video, for profit?
Where’s the line between being allowed to make, own, and publish a video of someone, and being allowed to profit from it?
If Tom Hanks visits your restaurant and is on your security camera, that’s legal. You can own that, and even publish it as a fact.
But can you make a commercial showing him eating in your restaurant? No. You’d need a model release for that.
You don’t get to use a video for commercial reasons, even if it’s ok to use it for editorial reasons.
For ex, I don’t think police should ever have the right to privacy while on duty. Turning off body or security cameras should be a crime for them, and anything that happens after should be assumed to have been done with criminal intent.
But I don’t think they should have their faces used in ads without their permission. That seems like a weird difference to apply to them.
I was going to ask you to uncuff me so I could get consent but I was high.
Now you’re embarrassed AF for wasting time and money and I know why.
Because you’re high because you’re so high, because power makes you hi-igh. La do da da da dah!
You wouldn't be getting these outcomes if police were held as equal under law to everyone else, and private prosecution was still available.
There's no need to reach for either extremes of "defund the police" and "defend the police (no matter what they do)".
All that's needed is to restore previous law, and apply it equally to everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQcST-jdl7U
I don't want to be inflammatory but it's hard as hell to see this and not think "garbage country".
They're not public figures, and the law lets them sue over use of their likeness. And any misconduct is almost certainly covered by their immunity.
They can almost certainly get the video taken down, and a good chance of monetary damages. And no consequences for anything else.
Just because that's an obvious travesty doesn't mean it isn't the most likely outcome.
"Ultimately, the reporters “found 300 cases in the past decade where an officer helped expose misconduct…The vast majority of those cases ended with those whistleblowers saying they faced retaliation.” Carroll’s piece continues to delve into different reporters’ thoughts about the whistleblower cases they analyzed and the stories they learned about. Read the article here."
Policing in its current state can't be reformed. Either that or we've got a lot of weeding to do.
https://whistleblowersblog.org/government-whistleblowers/new...
Gee, I wonder how one might have felt in that being the one raided, all to have the charges dropped.
Exactly what is wrong with the US.
Then I thought about it for another hot minute, and realized that Afroman (and his legal counsel) may be just canny enough to take this all into account. Think of the optics of the cops suing this Black man trying to get at his honestly earned cash. Think of how that will play out in the public square. Who's a more sympathetic figure here, win or lose? There's no such thing as bad publicity!
So I think Afroman may have counted on this whole lawsuit debacle and he's going to get enormous mileage and notoreity out of it. Kudos to him for this. I love these videos. This guy is da bomb. Hilarious.
The law may be clear cut ... who knows what the court will decide. I was saying I don't know what you think the link means, what you think /= the law.
As for the actual topic I don’t know what you think the link means. That’s too general a topic to just just know what you’re trying to say.
If you think the article is too general, I think you have not read it. There is very practical information as to how this law works in various jurisdictions. You can also see Wikipedia for "model release". You will see contradictory information of course, because it's not a clear cut issue. But the takeaway is, if I take a video of you at a mall being weird and use it to make a viral music video on which I capitalize and which makes you uncomfortable, guess what you can (and should) sue me. Will you win? Maybe not, maybe yes, depends on how prominent your role is in the video I guess.
It's interesting that so many of them share a surname.
The cops will lose this.
It's pretty much their business model to publish fake news. While they'll have to redact the articles later, they've already made their money by that time.
While I can't speak for the legality of using photographs from people for profit without their consent, I'm sure that the magazines would still do it, even if it wasn't legal using the same tactics.
The same excuse the magazines use for the articles would be just as applicable with these pictures, as we thought it was legit transfers directly over to we thought they'd given permission.
It's all fine legally as long as the articles are retracted for missinformation
What you're thinking of is getting damages/convictions because of the misinformation. That's indeed quiet hard and will require proving that you've actually been harmed, which is extremely challenging, generally speaking.
Funnily, Afroman's video mostly showed us non identified cops being stupid.
Now Shawn D. Cooley, Justin Cooley, Michael D. Estep, Shawn D. Grooms, Brian Newland, Randolph L. Walters, Jr., and Lisa Phillips made sure 8 billions people have access to their name and can find their home address at will. [1]
Good job guys. If anything, the humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, loss of reputation and embarassment is self inflicted.
[1] https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2023/03/23/adams-co-deputie...
There’s an appetite for lies about murders committed in daylight and on camera. And there’s appetite for news footage of police beating peaceful protestors.