A conversation with a newspaper owner raided by cops
thehandbasket.substack.com
thehandbasket.substack.com
But it was the newspaper owner, not the police chief, who was raided.
Actual article title and subtitle: "A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops / Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home."
That's what the title means.
There is only one person mentioned and therefor "his" can only refer to that person. "His" can not refer to the newspaper.
[0] "Paper investigating police chief prior to the raids on his office and home."
You knew because you're intelligent and were able to piece things together. Many in society are not so fortunate for one reason of another and so it's important to be precise.
If the surname of the newspaper's owner happened to also be Paper, then this might make sense. Otherwise it is very wrong.
Regardless, the title has since been edited. Controversy resolved, maybe now we can discuss the topic x.x
A simple change would make it clear:
Paper investigating police chief prior to the raids on owner's office and home
A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops
Yikes for the chief...he stepped right on top of a cherished American value. That's instant-villain territory.
I'm sure even a talented screenwriter wouldn't complain when huge chunks of a story offer to write themselves...
At least the _ideal_ was that this was a government by the people for the people. The goal being to align incentives to wield power appropriately. When you misuse your power against the people, the people take away your power.
How is the system working when clearly the newspaper is in a desperate search now for equipment to be able to stay in business after theirs got taken by the police? Don’t you think that is somewhat chilling of free speech?
What would be evidence of the system not working in your opinion? The editor washing up with a bullet in their head? All the journalist sentenced to 20 years of hard labour on the private farm of the police chief?
The system is clearly not working.
The fact we can read about this is evidence that it is working. Evidence that it is not working would be hard to come by because we wouldn't be able to read about it!
This is like saying we've cured cancer because you got a biopsy.
Literally the most idiotic thing I've heard on this website.
It's possible to assume that the system works if you assume that this is also the only time this has happened. How many times have corrupt cops such as these used the force of the state to silence their detractors and gotten away with it?
You tell me? What does the evidence say?
That is to say, you're confused. Corruption is the usual thing a small American city. A paper reporting when it gets out-of-hand is unusual. Cops screwing with the paper or anyone who reports their dirty dealings is normal. Cops getting flack when they do this happens but often they just get away it. Even when the cops get flack in the press, they usually come out OK in the long run. Even a paper gets a lot support and congratulations in the short, they often wind-up screwed in the long run.
And sure, a raid is kind of a crude reaction. Local corrupt officially usually have a more subtle way to send a message. Perhaps the local cops felt a need to make their point strongly.
"Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner"
"Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and the Marion County Record newspaper office Friday, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home."
> Cody said two priorities would be transparency and more responsive media relations.
That went well.
http://marionrecord.com/direct/marion_selects_new_police_chi...
Also encryption.
That’s really bad
[0] http://marionrecord.com/direct/updated_illegal_raids_contrib...?
That's concerning. Either the town's folk are all 'in' on it or we're only getting one side of this story and they know more about what's going on.
I'm withholding judgement until the other shoe drops and we get the full story.
Judges issuing warrants is one of the least accountable aspects of our legal system. Warrants can cause major damage, disruption, or even death. There are never consequences for a mistake (cf. Breonna Taylor incident).
They can also cause political interference and there's little mechanism to prevent abuses. The FISA warrants against Carter Page were later declared invalid[1]. Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump). There could be good reasons for all of this but there's not really any mechanism to sort it out. Next time there might not be good reasons, and the target might be a politician we desperately need (rather than Trump).
“Document mishandling” (with classified documents) always results in an investigation. When there is overwhelming evidence that the investigation is being actively obstructed, things get spicy.
There is no accountability.
If we call every legal action against a political candidate political interference, we have two systems of justice, and all you need to do to have no consequences is to keep running for office. Then any investigations on you or your family become a witch hunt.
The mechanism to sort it out is that the data must come to light at trial, and people can make their own minds regarding whether the investigation did everything that was remotely reasonable to get cooperation or not. But then again, thanks to the US media environment that is more interested in entertaining than informing, people's opinions might have little to do with reality, thanks to their own political biases. That allows someone to, on the campaign trail, call for locking up the opposition candidate, while claiming that everything is a witch hunt when any investigation heads in their direction.
Of course, then I fell for it to. Politics here is bad enough but when people repost the lowest effort, lowest thought string-of-words they've been trained on... I mean, I could just go read Truth Social directly.
A corrupt LEO can get a warrant to search your house easily, and so getting a warrant for a (completely automated process!) that hands them your entire digital life is even easier. It just takes a message to google/apple/meta and they have access to.... your digital soul, basically.
Big brother is scary, but corruption at the local level is a very real threat to individuals and democracy as a whole. Imagine trying to run an election against a small town sheriff who is willing to abuse their power. Within a local political system complacent in that abuse? This isn't hypothetical. The judge in this case approved this warrant.
Anti-privacy efforts like the current trend of anti-encryption proposals really need to be better labeled as anti-democratic by the politically active.
Apples and oranges. Trump got raided because he refused to cooperate with the document investigators. And the only way to do that was to get warrants.
Something needs to change with Internal Affairs, also. Local police departments are often investigating themselves, with predictable results.
So much for "ignorance of the law excuses not", it does if you are a cop.
And for someone who invented “clearly established right"...
And if prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute cops, judge, jury, etc. isn't even involved.
https://supreme.findlaw.com/supreme-court-insights/pros-vs-c...
Well qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal cases, but civil suits are generally the only way survivors and their families can get compensation for violations of their rights.
Reading about egregious conduct where the government was somehow able to be granted qualified immunity will make anyone wonder how we could allow this to happen.
I don't know what the solution is.
Chicago has an agency specifically to report police misconduct, but it seems to get shut down every couple of years due to rampant misconduct inside the agency.
Also, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. Instead of pissing off the police unions and dealing with the eternal backlash from that, you could instead push for something like Florida’s Sunshine Laws which would provide needed transparency into universities, the police, and the government.
This is a confusing statement. Isn't it good if police aren't used to confronting armed criminals?
If the police aren't used to confronting armed threats, then clearly in the vast majority of cases they shouldn't need to be armed themselves.
Are you saying these officers' performance would've improved if they hadn't been armed? Why?
It wouldn't have helped in Uvalde if police weren't armed by default, but I'm not sure anything would have helped, because they already had all the tools they needed for that situation.
This couldn't be more wrong. Despite the existence of qualified immunity, the Texas police still cowered like cowards, and are using qualified immunity to shield themselves from the lawsuits of the families whose children they failed to protect.
They were afraid of getting shot, total cowardice with a lot of incompetence and nothing more.
When elites splinter into two groups, that's when you see some progress. Otherwise, two-tier justice is a common, hidden, feature of any system out there (be it Western democracy, communist, dictatorship, etc).
It's almost like a police force trampling on first amendment rights is appalling like a candidate trying to subvert the results of an election, incite a riot, pressure election officials, put up a knowingly fraudulent, illegal fake voter scheme, or pay off a porn star.
Whatever, you know this, you don't care.
I'm pretty sure the evidence points to the contrary -- police are less corrupt than ever before.
That doesn't mean there isn't still corruption (such as is claimed in this case), but you're claiming this is something getting worse.
I really don't think you want to go back to policing in the 1960's and 70's.
You can always cherry-pick examples of individual things getting worse, but I ask again: do you really want to go back to the 60's and 70's? Because yikes.
"Everybody knew" the sheriff took kickbacks from the bootleggers (it was, and still is, a dry county), and probably quite a bit more. I mean, I knew, and I was a high school kid. He did eventually get busted roughly a decade after I left.
Cities have corruption too, of course. But the hypocritical gaslighting nonsense about how pure and clean small town life is horse shit.
That whole region is fucked up. Did you know the Oklahoma Panhandle was a gift from Texas? The Missouri Compromise basically said no new slave states north of Tennessee and NC, so Texas chopped the top of their territory off and gave it to Oklahoma, which was already about 34 miles to far north.
Small town not far of me there were billboards up about how the local police are crooks and on and on. Someone really felt strongly about that topic.
The businessman who bought the billboards did an interview. Story was businessman supported the local police chief's election. Then business man's business partner was being investigated for selling drugs and the state police raided their business. Businessman called the local police police chief and told the chief to call off the cops. Police chief said he couldn't do that because he knew business guy and had to stay out of it.
Businessman got upset and bought a bunch of billboards about "corruption".
One man's corruption is another man's ethical choice.