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Comment by midjji | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, but they could have broken it down, assaulted them, then claimed that they were violent. They get away with that kind of crap all the time, because mostly, they do this to criminals, and are friends with the local police. Sometimes they get caught, usually for things like shooting a dog that was chained and far out of reach, or because someone had it on video, but these thugs are the kind of people who got rejected from or fired from the police, so however incompetent, cowardly, and violent the cops are, these thugs are worse.

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>> but they could have broken it down

In the US, that would be an exceedingly bad idea on the part of the Pinkertons. They don't have the same protections law enforcement has: they are treated legally the same as anybody else, which means that in 38 US states they'd be justifying the homeowners use of deadly force.

I’m shocked the Pinkertons still exist. None of the bigger unions tried to pull strings to get them destroyed for past atrocities against the labor movement?

Unions are big, but Corporate Money is bigger.

Unions sadly have little power, especially in the US.

That may be starting to change, though.

They dont really, they are just an offbrand for securitas who bought up the trademark and brand after they went under.

Yes, and had they continued to insist, showed their guns, and refused to leave he would have gotten away with getting a weapon and shooting them. But most homeowners are both unwilling and unable to take down a couple of armed thugs, assuming he even had a weapon at home that wasnt a fantasy sword replica.

Had he escalated and then drawn a weapon, odds are they would have shot him and may well have gotten away with it, claiming they were just asking questions and he immediately drew a weapon and tried to shoot them.

Remember that when some rednecks hunted down and killed a kid a while back for running while black(Ahmaud Arbery) the police initially wanted to drop the prosecution, and its quite possible that without the national attention of the Floyed case, and the murderers being dumb enough videotape themseles, they may well have gotten away with it. The simple fact that it was a discussion of if they would get convicted at all is just as telling. And police will generally back security companies more than rednecks in court.

They get away with that kind of crap all the time

That's a big claim, can you cite an example or two of Pinkerton kicking down doors an assaulting the residents?

If you want to go back to the Labor movement, the Pinkertons practically committed war crimes. When people say the police evolved from a misanthropic idea of keeping the peace, they are specifically thinking of the Pinkertons as an example. Hired thugs meant to keep those in power in power, not to protect the citizenry.

If you want to go back to the Labor movement...

I do not. I would like an example from within the last, say, 75 years. Regardless, you didn't even cite an example.

I don’t know if the Pinkertons directly, but their competitors have caused a lot of problems during our eternal war in the Middle East. That’s a problem of using a private police force like an army, and while the US government and military paid the bills and made requests, the triggermen bear their share of the blame.

You’re trying to make an extraordinary claims play to deflect this part of the conversation and I’m not biting. If you don’t know the sordid history of private armies go do your own research. Don’t imply other people are wrong because they aren’t spoon feeding you facts that people who employ tactics like you won’t hear even if offered in earnest. As many people I’m the civil rights and LGBT community are now saying, it’s not my job to educate you for free.

I don’t know if the Pinkertons directly...

Then you probably should not have responded to a question specifically asking for an example of Pinkerton kicking down doors. As you've clearly stated that you can't answer the question, but rather prefer to go off on some vaguely related tangent, then I will go on about my day.

Dude, your whole energy is trying to shut down conversation and I already told you that’s not going to work.

I only knew the Pinkertons still existed reading about problems in the second gulf war, in which they were listed amongst the problem children. I thought that name was retired a century ago, turns out not. What I don’t know is any role they played in Afghanistan. Bracketing your base of knowledge is not weakness, it’s disclosure.

Also they all hire the same kind of people. Just because BP had the Deep Water fiasco doesn’t mean we forget about Exxon Valdez. There are no “good ones” just short memories and willful lack of imagination.

This is not high school debate class. Act like a grownup.

> Act like a grownup.

Dude... :(

> I would like an example from within the last, say, 75 years. Regardless, you didn't even cite an example.

From Wikipedia[0]:

"In 2020, Matthew Dolloff, an unlicensed security guard contracted through Pinkerton, shot and killed Lee Keltner, a conservative protestor in Denver, Colorado."

Not exactly kicking down doors and assaulting the residents, I know, but hopefully we can agree that its adjacent.

Of course the premise is that "they get away with it all of the time." If such examples existed, citing them would be contrary to the act of getting away with it. I'm not saying that I know for a fact that the Pinkertons or other such similar organizations "get away with it." But I know the United States has produced numerous examples of police officers getting away with it, and in my mind it's very possible that detective agencies do all manner of reprehensible things, especially to people in poverty, and get away with it.

We're hearing about it in the case of a YouTuber because they have a platform.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

Nothing that isn't stories by friends working for securitas (the main company for which pinkerton is a brand), or anecdotes. I am certain I could find a story like that just by googling for it, but real statistics are what are interesting, and I cant be bothered to research it. So let me instead ask, what evidence do you have that they are better than the police? because that is what you are arguing. In general you can become a security guard in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to become a police, and they have much lower requirements compared to becoming a police. Oh and by the way, most of them believe themselves to have the same powers and protections as police, that they do not does not matter much. The real shitheads get pruned pretty quickly, but the middling level assholes instead sometimes get shifted into one of the offbrands.

They're not arguing that they're better than police, they're saying that police have protections other people don't, and those protections are the only reason they feel comfortable kicking doors down. You're very, very unlikely to find some private security guy willing to kick a door down for some trading cards, because pretty much the first time they're wrong about it they're going to jail. You don't get qualified immunity as private security.

And that's an awfully long paragraph when "no" would have sufficed just fine.

Those protections are not the only reason the police are comfortable doing things like that, those protections are there, because the justice system could not get police to stop doing that regardless, and in extraordinarily rare cases its justified.

You’re trying to assert that people making claims based on some knowledge are wrong because they don’t have every fact, while claiming that you have no facts whatsoever.

Do you not see how completely fucked up that is?

We don’t talk to each other this way here. We shouldn’t talk to each other this way at all. The “gotcha” structure of debate will be the death of public discourse and with it, democracy, and with that the rule of law. When we live in Idiocracy it will substantially be because of people trolling “prove it” because it gets them out of thinking about uncomfortable things.

But this response isn’t about you. Not even a little. It’s for the other people reading this tree of replies, for the next time someone is trying to shut down conversation.

We're an evidence-based group. I think it's perfectly fine to ask for sources on a claim. Your parent poster didn't say the claim was wrong.

> then claimed that they were violent

If you're assaulted at somebody's house but you overpower them, you don't get to loot them. This isn't D&D.

Its called fait accompli. If I go to someone who stole my bike, beat them and take the bike back, yeah I do get to keep the loot, even if they prosecute me, which is unlikely, and even if they succeed in prosecuting me which is also unlikely, I still get to keep the loot. Its not the way the legal system or the law is supposed to apply, but in reality the idea or intent of law is irrelevant, its its practical application that matters. It is why I explicitly say they get away with it because they mostly do it to criminals.

No one in their sane mind think the law is intended to allow the threats they made etc, or that they had the rights to do what they did, but they did it anyways, and as the story shows, they got away with it. Think about that again, they did this to some rich white geek with a platform and they got away with it. What do you think they would get away with against a known criminal...

Yikes. No, several times.

Fait accompli is not a legal defence, it's a description of something that is now irreversible. And taking things entirely reversible.

This is not the same as taking back stolen property from a thief. If you want to stretch analogies, it's like beating up the kid that bought your stolen [still disputed] bike from a bike shop. The kid here didn't do anything wrong. If the goods were stolen, there might be an argument for a civil process to get them back to their owner, but if you commit a crime in the act of repatriating stolen goods, you could lose you right to them.

In this case they "got away with it" because this kid didn't know his rights, fell for the threats and let them taken the goods. It's nasty but a hundred million miles away from the felony B&E, assault and theft being described as acceptable a few posts up.

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