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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there will be suspicions that this is an anti-police (rather than anti-police-surveillance-abuse) measure intended to intimidate and obstruct police work.

Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a minority mix of genuine victims of police abuse and political agitators using them.

Note this is not a criticism of representative community efforts to hold police forces to account for bad behaviour, but this particular approach seems to play an antagonistic role informed as much by political ideology as genuine concern about police overreach.

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They aren’t exactly shy about their goals:

“This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community”

“Political” is not the slur you think it is to activists. Ironically, the belief that good social action should be some sort of pure pragmatism unsullied by politics is itself a deeply embedded neoliberal ideology.

Plenty of people are anti-police, for good reason, and that position is just as ideological as yours. It’s fair to debate that position, but it’s naive to view political agitation as some sort of sneaky sinister plot. I promise these people, least of all the “genuine victims”, aren’t concerned with whether their tactics fall outside the Overton window of centrist-approved police protests.

Anarchism is a political ideology though. OP is saying that there is much more than simply holding police abuse accountable.

Where does anarchism come in? That seems like a pretty big leap in logic

I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better.

Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.

So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes.

Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?

> Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives

The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police.

Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems.

I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue.

But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”.

For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.

A tendency towards shooting civilians?

Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022:

https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022

When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.

> When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.

With cops and teenagers, the only narrative you're ever going to hear is whichever one paints them in a sympathetic light.

They would never do anything to provoke a violent response from the subject, no sir. They always announce their presence loud and clear and never surprise volatile subjects. They always opt for nonlethal measures before pulling out the service weapon.

Both cliques will also stick to their story even when you discover video evidence directly contradicting it.

> The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police.

Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have.

One could look to the twitter files to see how much the US government attempted and successfully controlled a public company to push narratives of the current regime and or censor dissenting views.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

Some tinfoils out there belief the Facebook (now Facebook) was originally LifeLog.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

The US gov and LEO have made social media a _national security issue_ which gives the government inferred power to abuse the data collected by these companies.

> Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have.

Of course they do, but the core point remains: the kind of power wielded is not the same. Pinterest can’t show up at your door with guns based on the things you pin. The reason police salivate is because of the possibilities unlocked by having such data while also being “the law”.

I’m in no way claiming that this power is not dangerous for other reasons in the hands of tech companies, but tech having this data means something entirely different than LEO having this data.

The implications and failure modes are quite different and worthy of examination.

Sorry I guess I'm not keeping up.

If tech has the data, law enforcement has access to said data. Simple as.

Law enforcement has a mandate and "lawful" monopoly on violence. Pinterest does not. A private citizen acting as a vigilante does not.

I find the fact that I cannot post certain ideas to Reddit in my local city subreddit without getting downvoted to Oblivion and then no longer can post at all due to negative karma problematic. In fact, I find this way more problematic for me than s handful of asshole cops. Should I start posting information about community managers or employees at Reddit who don’t help in this situation?

Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.

What kind of ideas?

Ideas like I’m not pro-Union and tend to vote republican. Just because people don’t like a side doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have voice.

I’m certainly not against investigating and punishing bad cops to the full extent of the law,but to post the names of all officers, many who are doing their job right and just, and many of whom are undercover? That’s ridiculous.

If the cops decide to beat your ass or follow you in reality your life is meaningfully changed, crying about post karma on reddit is so far divorced from the reality of the situation of cops killing people, stealing, and getting away with it.

My partner is an attorney and she just sued the cops for improperly looking up a specific woman tens of thousands of times, checking in on her, harassing her, following her, stalking her with his cop authority.

Now imagine the opposite, you are on reddit and someone wont stop replying to your comments, which one of these might need some accountability?

How does one cop unlawfully looking up and harassing someone justify producing all the names of all the officers including those who are undercover?

That’s like asking for every mod name to be revealed on Hacker News in order to be able to pushback against a ban.

I don’t worry about cops beating my ass. I always comply when I’m confronted and it’s amazing but they treat me with respect. I also don’t commit violent crimes, that helps as well.

> I find the fact that I cannot post certain ideas to Reddit in my local city subreddit without getting downvoted to Oblivion and then no longer can post at all due to negative karma problematic

In this scenario, who holds the power to downvote you to oblivion? Who makes the rules about participation relative to karma?

If you said the same things in a local bar, would you find it problematic if people disagreed with you or maybe decided not to talk to you?

To find the behavior of privately moderated community groups more problematic than the behavior of bad cops - behavior that ruins or ends thousands of lives every year - seems like a major misalignment.

> Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.

In a discussion comparing things, equivalency always matters. The world is filled with systems, communities, and organizations that are wide open to abuse. That potential is not by itself an equalizing factor.

If you discuss your ideas in public on main street and people got mad at you would you feel the same way? Why is reddit special?

People are welcome to be mad, I don’t care. But the words should be allowed to be there?

I think audiences and communities are allowed to decide what they want to listen to, not to mention reddit is a corporation. The first amendment does not apply

> if there was a database of tech employees

You mean kind of like LinkedIn?

Of course LinkedIn has the whole consent thing going for it, people make their accounts there willingly (if we ignore the whole address-book farming they do/did). On the other hand the typical LinkedIn profile contains way more information, about people who are way less critical to public safety. But neither this LAPD database nor LinkedIn tell you where people live.

I don't remember the last time some tech company employees got together to beat someone to death and the companies mounted a defense for those employees.

Facebook employees triggered a genocide in Myanmar, does that count?

Individual Facebook employees triggered a genocide?

I don't think any of them were conjoined twins or borg-like linked collectives if that's what you mean. So yes they were all individual people.

Which ones, specifically?

The ones that ignored the warnings of what was happening and did not enforce facebook's own policies on hate speech.

I don't generally have to worry about a DBA shooting my dog.

> how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees?

There's probably 100 recruiter companies.

Police forces in many other nations can more or less be trusted to provide somewhat accurate data. When they don't, it often becomes a scandal. In the US them not providing accurate data seems more or less the rule. I once wanted to compare the numbers of bullets fired during service between different nations. There are nations where every single bullet that has been fired during service is accounted for and categorized whether ot was shot at a person, a warning shot, a shot at an animal and then there are areas where you won't even get a total number.

If you are a law-abiding citizen that wants a good police force, accountability needs to happen. And it is totally appropriate for citizens to take this into their own hands if the police departments and the political powers can't manage to make it happen. If people see that the LAPD is caught lying about cases and numbers repeatedly without consequences, what other course of action is there?

If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this.

A police force is provided with great power. And with great power comes great responsibility. And that responsibility is not towards your colleagues who killed innocent people, but towards the public. If you are proven to be unable to act responsibly it is in order for the public to find measures to hold you responsible. This is — by nature — political, but I don't think it is divisive.

A responsible police force should be in the interest of every political orientation, unless we are talking about authotarian or fascist movements — and then you got an entirely different set of problems, because they don't believe in the rule of law to begin with.

> If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this

I 100% believe you, and if I was an LAPD official I would feel the same way. However police themselves probably won’t react like this. I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it (take a more lenient position of hidden/obscured badge numbers, slow roll FOIA requests, idk), try to shut it down legally or harass the people behind it.

Don’t get me wrong it’s a good tool to have at your disposal and I think it’ll probably still help some LA residents with cases against the LAPD somehow.

disclaimer: I don't live in LA, have never interacted with the LAPD, have never even been there. This comment is purely based on the impression I get that some police in the USA are quite hostile towards their population and that the LAPD are one of the more notorious departments.

>I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it

they pretty much certainly will not behave better. the LAPD will always exist as long as LA does, and it will always have the power.

> Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web

Isn't that what many mugshots are? It looks like LAPD at least doesn't dump them online like some places do, but even things like https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ or https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/pro... could be just as damaging unless records are pulled offline when people are later found to be totally innocent.

I notice that news organizations are perfectly happy to post names, photos, and other information about suspects, but much less likely to publish information about police officers. I can't help but wonder if something like this watch the watchers site would even be seen as necessary if any search engine could do the job just as well.

I wonder if it would be legal to use home surveillance cameras to identify police car license plates, facial recognition, to track individual police officers. Then you can have a good argument when you are trying to sue for illegal surveillance.

You could do one better with SDR units and use trilateration of police radios/radar to track them in real-time.

All but the most rural police departments have long since moved to frequency hopping, encrypted radios thanks to DHS initiatives and funding, no? This also adds complexity to the task of triangulating them doesn't it?

At this point, there's so much tech emitting radio waves in the average police car you'd need bespoke methods to detect most of it. The stack and operational procedures change every 5-10 years too. They used to (~20 years ago?) drive around with active radar engaged so they could pull over speeders without having to stop and use the handheld unit, but this would broadcast their proximity to everybody with a radar detector as they drove around. Easy to triangulate with consumer hardware.

With object-detection tech being commodity, it might be easier to just deploy RPi cameras and flag any vehicle with "POLICE" vinyls on the side. They out themselves there since no civilian is driving a similar vehicle.

Undercover cars are a different matter. You'd have a hard time disambiguating service vehicles from civilian-owned. Most of those even retain the side-view spotlight. You could safely ignore any with "PRIVATE" or "SECURITY" written on the side though; the cops out themselves again since most departments don't buy slick-tops and then slap "POLICE" vinyls on it (though I think Georgia departments are compelled to do this; I've seen black vinyl lettering on black undercover cars which I assume was meant to skirt some law).

Option B: most departments outsource maintenance of their vehicles to contracted civilian mechanics. Drive around town enough and you'll probably find a lot with a bunch of police cars parked there. Plant an ALPR camera facing the lot and record plates. Then you can use ALPR around town.

Staking out the maintenance depot or department fleet yard is probably the most expedient solution to getting a database of the vehicles in the first place, you're absolutely right.

It is public information, this is just an interface to access it. Google LASD Gangs, we need more transparency, not less.

For reference

https://knock-la.com/lasd-gangs-little-devils-wayside-whitie...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

By the lords above, beside, and below I am not going to pearl clutch and nitpick actions that disrupt police. They already have the systemic benefit of the doubt and so much more. If we start torturing their families on live camera then give me a page but until then.... I sleep.

There's a power dynamic. Why should we have public sites like Rate My Professors but professors can't have a public Rate My Students?

the very concept of the police is a form of political ideology.

what an insane take. police has existed in every form of society and it is necessary for a civilized society to function. its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation.

the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.

LA isn’t “out of control” because of a lack of police, certainly. Do you think cops prevent crime?

Well... To a certain extent they do. You're not gonna rob a store if there's a cop standing outside

I love that the American solution to fire is... fire? We tried putting grown-ups with guns in schools after Columbine, and somehow more guns hasn't solved the violence problem. I don't think putting a cop outside each store will stop theft, especially when wage theft alone represents a larger loss than all larcenies, burglaries, and auto theft combined. [0]

> in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1]

[0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...

I don't think diordiderot is claiming more cops = better. They're giving one example of how police could stop crime, but one that is self-evidently not scalable. One cop per storefront would cause the number of police to explode, and even then only covers a specific subset of crime (i.e. I think they'd agree with you).

It is a common complaint that the police tend not to prevent crimes but instead just show up afterwards and at best shrug and move on (at worst they do pretty gruesome stuff like sexually harass the victim or shoot the person who called them in). So I'd agree that more police or more guns probably won't cure the causes of crime.

Our modern system of policing traces its roots to slave patrols and is a few hundred years old, at most. For the overwhelming majority of human history it was an ad-hoc community organization more akin to a watch. We get police from the Greek polis (city or polity) by way of the Latin politia (citizenship). The US idea of a civil force salaried and charged with deterring crime is something we inherited from England with the idea of "keeping the king's peace". We have slave patrols to thank for marrying the watch to the militia. [0]

Your last sentence ignores the possibility that the LAPD, a department downright infamous for its police gangs, could be a contributing or even causative factor for LA crime being, as you put it, "out of control".

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...

Minor nitpick, the agency infamous for gangs is the LASD which is separate. The LAPD is infamous in other ways though, Rodney King is going to stick in many people's minds for a long time, and there's an enormous "Corruption and misconduct" section in their wikipedia page that is full of some really awful stuff.

>police has existed in every form of society

"State enforcers to protect the politicians and people in power have existed in every form of society" * yes.

>its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation

Yes.

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