Afroman found not liable in defamation case | Hacker News Reader

Afroman found not liable in defamation case

nypost.com

1,250 pointsantonymoose739 comments

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/afroman-trial-lemon-ca...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/18/...

I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they seem to keep them drawn and hair triggered throughout the search? :O

(on aside, I do enjoy watching British crime procedural shows as contrast, where seemingly nobody has guns and they have to call in a special unit if they actually need somebody with a handgun)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Warrior_Cop

Watch the short clip in https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/rcgkis/u... - American cops get shown Scottish cops' deescalation procedures, and they scoff at it.

"When you say preservation of life, it is… everybody's life. Ours has a pecking order. I'm just being honest."

I mean the key point there I think is the one where they point out that Brits simply wouldn’t accept police regularly shooting people. Policing for the people by the people.*

* and pretend Northern Ireland doesn’t exist, or course

It's rare even in NI.

PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.

Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".

That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.

True. The PSNI have had an excellent record – particularly given the difficult context they work in.

I guess the above poster is thinking of the shoot-to-kill era of the 80s (still well within living memory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-to-kill_policy_in_Northe...

Yeah, it was very different back then. And not just the police - we had the army on the streets with weapons drawn, routinely aiming at passersby.

The political situation in the late 1960s provided plenty of kindling, but it seems clear that most of the sparks that actually caused the conflagration came from the barrel of guns held by soldiers and the police. They were directly responsible both for the death of the civil rights movement and the collapse of the government, and without the heavy-handed response it's likely that the settlement of the late 90s would've happened 25 years earlier.

It's actually a great example of why the militarisation of policing should be resisted at all cost.

The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too.

Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.

Canada has the same rates of gun ownership as America and you don't see cops come up with guns blazing like they do here

If Canada is like New Zealand, which also has a similarly high rate of gun ownership - it's largely different types of guns - that is, guns for hunting, not for killing people - very hard to conceal a rifle or shotgun compared to a pistol.

To be fair, guns aren't exactly unknown in NI, either!

There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles.

And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry.

Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth.

So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.

Is it legal to carry firearms concealed in Northern Ireland? It's not the presence of guns in a guns safe that makes policing more dangerous, it's the fact the a sizeable chunk of the American public is actively carrying firearms.

Yes, at least for personal protection weapons. And, obviously, the unlicensed users (ie. members of dissident gangs) won't care whether it's legal or not.

PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition.

So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.

Google tells me 2,700 in Northern Ireland have authorization to carry firearms privately.

By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region.

We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.

Couches aren’t known to have guns and the cops in Afromans house search the couch as if it’s about to bite them.

It’s a very American mixture of fear and bravado in a feedback loop which means every piece of evidence of cowardice has to be compensated for with even more overt aggression.

Hence cops in full body armor with guns drawn behaving like black and tans in Palestine.

That is bad use of statistics. San Francisco forms the core of an urban conurbation of over eight million people.

Sure, but SFPD covers only the County of San Francisco which had a population of 827,526 in 2024.

It's certainly not a perfect comparison by any means - but that's more to do with the very different urban/rural splits, forms and structures of inequality, histories of segregation and political violence etc.

If you can suggest another American police department which would make for a better comparison, I'd be interested in seeing the stats... but I strongly suspect that they'd show a very similar contrast.

In Britain, there is independent civilian investigation when cops kill a person. It creates pressure to not kill, because you wont be judged by buddies.

Well, the IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct) has mandatory referrals, not only when police apparently shot somebody, or they die in police custody, or in a traffic accident with a police vehicle, but also cases where the police were recently involved. e.g. Sharon calls police because she says her husband punched her, when officers attend Sharon now says he didn't mean to and seems reluctant to leave or for her husband to be arrested, attending officers decide to leave it as it is, an hour later Sharon is dead and her husband is her presumed killer - that's a police involved death and so that gets referred to the IOPC even though nobody thinks a cop killed anybody.

However, the IOPC is not mandated to conduct investigations. So it is possible (though less likely for a shooting) that the IOPC will just kick it back to local police. It is also possible (and more likely) that they will oversee but use local police to do the actual work, just because that's much cheaper and their budget is limited.

Have you ever been to inner city America? Honestly curious. I couldn't imagine policing it without using a gun sometime.

So are we all just oblivious to the fact that in the US, civilians practically have access to military gear? How can you police that type of population with sticks and stones?

I can see the argument how you would treat a suspect with a gun differently than you would if they have a knife.

However, American cops also use guns against suspects with knives or other weapons that they also use in places like Scotland. Why couldn’t American police use these techniques when the suspect doesn’t have a gun?

I know the standard response is, “well, they COULD have a gun!”, but I don’t think that is a good enough reason to always go straight to extreme response. If a suspect is brandishing a knife, he probably doesn’t also have a gun.

Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default. But I disagree, I think brandishing a knife is already extreme behavior, I don’t think it’s logical to think “because he has a weapon he probably doesn’t have another!”. And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?

In most civilized societies, there's an extremely high chance that somebody wielding a knife doesn't have a gun.

Wielding a knife is a deadly threat so I am not sure what the relevance is.

The relevance is that you don’t need to assume that the knife wielding person can hit you from a distance.

One way or the other, this doesn’t seem to be a problem in other countries.

Pulling a percentage out of my ass that can't be terribly inaccurate, 99% of police encounters with guns drawn the police are under 21 ft away, at which distance a knife is as dangerous as a gun.

If someone is less than 21 ft from you and they are going to be using a knifes against you, then you should still draw a gun just as often as if they had a gun. So at <21 ft you think guns should be drawn less because they have knives you should also be thinking guns drawn the ~exact amount less no matter which of the 2 weapon they had.

And one way or the other, none of that is a problem is other countries.

I don't dispute that. But in most those 'other countries' literally anyone could be hiding a knife as easily as someone in US could be hiding a gun. So it appears in the vast majority of the cases where people are already right next to each other where both a knife or gun could kill someone, whether it is a knife or a gun is almost a moot point. It's only at a distance that you can treat a knife as a less lethal threat. Therefore the problem lies with the police, by vast majority.

A knife is not equivalent to a gun. One is a kitchen appliance that can be used as a rather ineffective weapon, the other is a tool literally designed for eliminating life as efficiently as possible

Disarming someone who poses a threat with a knife (especially via the use of modern equipment) is absolutely possible and can be performed in most cases with training, even with just one officer. Meanwhile, disarming someone with a gun is a much more complex task, often requiring a coordinated effort from multiple officers

>a knife (especially via the use of modern equipment) is absolutely possible and can be performed in most cases with training

I want to see you attempt that in real life when someone is within 21 feet. If you watched enough training videos and the literal flood of body camera videos that show even tasers are more often than not infective you would not speak so conveniently about a split second life or death situation.

> I want to see you attempt that in real life when someone is within 21 feet

Sadly I did not film it, but you could have been! I have attended multiple classes during which I had to disarm people with knives and other weird objects. It is absolutely possible with the right circumstances and training, but it's a completely different story when it comes to guns - the element of luck is much more meaningful, as a instructor who was shot quite a few times in their career has pointed out

You can but you absolutely should not try just because you can in training, its a last resort when it too late and all other options are not possible.

> You can but you absolutely should not try just because you can in training

For incapable civilians like me - absolutely. But I expect more from police officers than from myself when it comes to non-lethal disarming capabilities

>But I expect more from police officers than from myself when it comes to non-lethal disarming capabilities

It's asinine to expect someone to put there life in danger for little to no benefit just because they are trained for it and there is a chance it might go well instead of certain death.

If someone comes at someone with a knife (which is deadly force), they should expect to be met with equal or more force, this isn't some game with retries. Others don't have to go along your stupid games just because you drag them into them. Play stupid games win stupid prices.

> It's asinine to expect someone to put there life in danger for little to no benefit just because they are trained for it and there is a chance it might go well instead of certain death.

Whether it's asinine or not depends on context. Where I live, it is expected for police officers to protect you with their lives from a lethal threat if necessary, both legally and socially, and failure to commit to that means that you shouldn't be a cop

For the US, I think that the Uvalde shooting revealed a lot about what people actually expect from cops in life threatening situations, never mind what they are legally obligated to do

> under 21 ft away, at which distance a knife is as dangerous as a gun.

No, it is not as dangerous.

To use gun from 7 meters away, you have throw it, which takes way more movement hand movement and time. While you should not rely on it, it is very feasible to just move out of the way of the thrown knife.

Other possibility getting closer to you. Running will take 2 seconds. (Not a lot, but definitely not as dangerous as a handgun)

The statistic isn't related to thrown weapons. It's how quickly you can close the space between you and your adversary, as well as how much bearing drift you can create as you do so.

I'm glad you're making this point. It's something that only people trained in combat would know, and it's very non-intuitive. But it has to do with reaction times, how quickly the person wielding the gun can pull the trigger, and how quickly the person wielding the knife can move. That 21 feet can close blindingly fast.

> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.

What does the default have to do with it? We are already not in the default situation. Interacting with police at all is not the default! If you mean to say something like "it's not likely" or "they're not doing it in unreasonable cases" then your anecdote is not relevant.

> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?

Several reasons, which would be obvious if you tried to think of them. Most knife-wielding maniacs are, well, maniacs, and aren't fully in control of their actions. Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns accidentally or inappropriately (in fact, even police are frequently killed this way). People are routinely misidentified by police as carrying weapons when they aren't. Police often give misleading or unclear instructions while trying to de-escalate, and with a gun drawn, failure to comply can and does result in the suspect being shot.

Bear in mind that what you are excusing is essentially a (substantially increased likelihood of) extrajudicial execution. It should be a last resort. It's not enough to say "well he's clearly a bad guy, why give him the benefit of the doubt?".

> Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns

False. Innocent bystanders are killed by police discharging guns, but rarely. And, while the goal should be zero, it will never be zero

Why is it not zero? This strikes me as the exact sort of calculus they used way back when they stopped chasing fleeing suspects in vehicles: the danger to the public is too high to justify the use of force. If you can't hit your suspect without hitting other civilians, then don't fucking fire! And no I don't particularly care if the LEO's life might be in danger either, that's literally the job they signed up for: to put themselves in danger to enforce the law. It's ridiculous that cops just get complete power of life and death every time they feel a spot of stress, and have to be handled with kid gloves by the general public less they be murdered in the streets.

I will never be zero because perfection is impossible. It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities. We should work to get them down (enforcement against drunk driving, maybe checkpoints, stronger driving tests), but asking for zero accidents just isn't reality.

> It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities.

https://www.politico.eu/article/helsinki-no-traffic-death-ro...

"Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week."

"The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths. Data collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s traffic safety entity, shows Helsinki’s traffic fatalities have been declining ever since."

That's one city, for one year. Their rate of traffic fatalities is still above zero, I guarantee you.

That's not analogous at all. Everyone drives, and so everyone is a possible source of a car crash. Police are not (in theory) just whoever wanders into the goddamn precinct. They're (in theory) trained professionals, educated in what they do, and therefore entrusted with both the force of law, and the deadly force they wear on their belts.

And no we probably can't make it ZERO, but we could surely get it under 1,300!?

1300 is not the rate of innocent bystanders being killed. It's the rate of people killed by police period. Maybe if we didn't have police being killed by criminals in the USA then they wouldn't need to go in armed and scared for their lives.

By definition, every person the police interact with is innocent, because at such time as they are talking to a cop, even being detained by one, they have not been convicted of a crime.

That's not the definition of 'innocent', and that argument extremely falls apart when the word 'bystander' isn't omitted.

Come on, you know what people are talking about when they say "innocent bystander".

> That's not the definition of 'innocent'

No, it's the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and even if you'd like to craft a scenario next where we're going to talk about Officer Friendly stopping a rape-in-progress, yes, that person is almost certainly guilty, AND the punishment for that crime is usually not death, AND the cornerstone of our justice system says that the officer in question, no matter how pure of heart he might be, cannot exact a death sentence on a clearly guilty person because that is not how justice works.

A cop killing ANYONE, be they a bystander, or a suspect, or an assailant, should be RARE. It should be notable.

> No, it's the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"

It sure is! So let's not confuse it with something else.

> A cop killing ANYONE, be they a bystander, or a suspect, or an assailant, should be RARE. It should be notable.

That's a perfectly reasonable point but let's get there without mixing up two very different statistics.

Has anyone done a study on correlation between no-chase policy and increase in robbery or retail theft? Would be pretty interesting

Let's aim for a max of once every year, then, over the entire USA. And once that's achieved, let's aim for once every few years. Once a decade should be good enough, you probably won't get better than that.

The EU has a much bigger population than the USA, in a smaller space, and I'd bet they're already around this number.

The EU doesn't have armed criminals like the USA. The EU also doesn't have police being killed by criminals. It's close to 50 to 1.

Well... the sicilian mafia comes to mind... the french can be quite violent too... Western Europe is not so bad either, with guns.

I guess you mean "normal" non-criminal people in the EU are not allowed to have AR-15 assault rifles in their homes, that they can use if they have mental health issues.

I personally believe that is one of the reasons the USA has so much gun violence. Get rid of the guns in people's homes and things will change for the better.

I mean ... look at this ... Only in the USA!

https://dimages2.corriereobjects.it/files/image_572_429/uplo...

> And, while the goal should be zero, it will never be zero

Why the fuck not?

I got pulled over in Cleveland and had a cop point a gun at me and threaten to shoot - I was apparently wearing the wrong color on the wrong side of town with out-of-state plates and reached for my ID instead of waiting for the cop to tell me to get it. In later stops I've been admonished many times for not preemptively getting out my ID, but I really can't help thinking about almost getting my brains blown out for grabbing my ID too quickly.

Hands on the steering wheel for your and the officers safety until they ask you to do something. It really is not that difficult you can always just ask. Legally speaking a traffic stop means you are detained = follow orders.

They don't know you or what you could be capable off.

> It really is not that difficult

If you do that daily, sure it is easy. But a lot of human behaviour is automatic, based on what we are accustomed to do daily. (During covid there were many videos, where person on the screen says “… also avoid touching your face …”, while touching his/her face)

While this is certainly pragmatic advice, we should not normalize it for "what ought" to be. It should not be an individual's job to act perfectly (while being assaulted!) to compensate for police officers' (supposed professionals!) inability to remain in control of their emotions and properly judge what is going on. A police officer who is unable to remain in control in such situations should not be doing traffic stops (or really any interaction with the public) in the first place.

(Also there are some mistakes in your framing. For a regular motorist who isn't planning on attacking the police officer, putting your hands on the steering wheel does nothing to effect the officer's safety. We're talking about a point before they've given you any orders beyond signalling you to pull over, so there is nothing to follow. Furthermore they're also generally pointing a bright spot light directly at you, destroying your awareness and ruining your judgement, so it's reasonable to expect that orders are going to be followed sluggishly and imperfectly)

>For a regular motorist who isn't planning on attacking the police officer, putting your hands on the steering wheel does nothing to effect the officer's safety.

It very much does. Cops are humans if they see you know how to behave instead of making there job harder they will notice and appreciate that.

>Furthermore they're also generally pointing a bright spot light directly at you, destroying your awareness and ruining your judgement, so it's reasonable to expect that orders are going to be followed sluggishly and imperfectly)

Only if it's too dark to see, so once again help them to help yourself and turn on the light inside the car. If these simple instructions are too hard to follow you shouldn't be driving in the first place.

> making there job harder they will notice and appreciate that

Their comfort is not safety. Your original claim was that this had something to do with safety.

> these simple instructions

What "instructions" ? You have no authority to issue instructions that others must [0] follow. And if the cop hasn't gotten to the vehicle yet, then they haven't credibly given instructions (orders). So there are no relevant "instructions" here.

The reality is that the police officer is the party aggressing to create a confrontational situation. Therefore they are responsible for managing that situation. This includes not capriciously harming individuals who are acting reasonably but perhaps inconveniently. As I said, if they cannot handle their job of being public servants, then they have no business being in a position of authority over the public in the first place.

[0] "must" being implied by your general position of "[then] you shouldn't be driving in the first place" and the fact that similar "instructions" are often trotted out as a justification after the police kill somebody.

> Hands on the steering wheel for your and the officers safety until they ask you to do something.

Such advice always seemed weird to me, but I suppose that is because I just haven't ever encountered a paranoid cop

Personally as a teenager I’ve been met with a group of cops all pointing guns at me when I was just walking around at night with no weapons whatsoever. They got a call from a paranoid homeowner nearby. They’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

> They’re trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

If this was true, would you have survived?

They should not have guns out at all. Also, expectation on cops are super weirdly low.

Untrained random civilians encountering cops are supposed to have perfect sefl control. Supposedly trained professionals can be irresponsible, escalate for no reasom, risk others and shoot if they merely feel afraid - regardles of actual danger.

As that woman said out loud in the video: "preservation of the pecking order" .

You start asking questions like this and it becomes clear how we voted in the current administration. We spent generations structuring around such buly mentality.

"Never point a gun at anything you are not willing to kill"

Actually same happened to me - small group of friends maybe ~14 years old walking around late at night through our middle-class very safe neighborhood.

Two cops in a car rolled up and jumped out of the car with guns drawn and screamed at us to put our hands up because we “looked suspicious”.

They then asked us what we were doing, we said “walking home”, and they put their guns away and said “be safe out there, we didn’t realize you were kids”.

Absolutely no idea why it warranted guns pointed at us

I had a rifle pointed at me about a week after I got my first car, because I accidentally drove on the wrong side of the median.

Guns are definitely pulled way more often by the police than they should be. but to your point I am okay with cops shooting anyone brandishing a knife or any other deadly weapon.

Was the couch brandishing a weapon?

I had a gun drawn on me and was told “I’m going to blow your f** brains out” because I was a stupid teenager toilet papering a house when I was young. That’s when fight or flight kicks in and logic goes out the window. Needless to say I didn’t fight.

> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.

How police respond to you is very dependent on a lot of factors, including your age, race, what you are wearing, where you are, and what time it is. I don’t think you should use your own personal experience as a universal template.

> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?

Because, as a society, we should do everything we can to prevent harm to everyone, even people who are acting erratically. There could be all sorts of reasons for the behavior. Anyone can have a psychotic episode, and that shouldn’t immediately earn a death sentence. Of course, I understand that even an innocent person having a psychotic episode can be very dangerous, and I don’t think they should be allowed to hurt others, and it may be necessary to use force, and potentially deadly force, to protect other people.

However, I think that is very different than saying “we shouldn’t worry about the perpetrators well being at all”, or that it is preferable to kill the person rather than take ANY risk that they could hurt someone. The answer lies somewhere in between.

... how do you know if they have a gun?

As a fun example I had a coworker who collected handguns. I once asked him how many he had and he asked for clarification, should he include unregistered?

Historically speaking, there were a few shoot-outs in the 80s and 90s. The Hollywood shooting and I think one historically bad incident with cocaine traffickers in Miami - bad days for the police showing up with .38 revolvers and a shotgun or two fighting against a dedicated enemy with AK style weapons and body armor.

The sadly predictable response of the police in America is to overmatch the “enemy.” Presume they have a weapon for crimes of certain classes, obvious violence crimes like kidnapping and also drug crimes, which poor Afroman was accused of both.

Personally, having been SWAT’d as a young man, it’s not that I think they shouldn’t have access to armaments. It’s that their rules of engagement are obscenely lopsided to the point that they just bring them always, all the time, and will not use common sense judgement.

This could have been a knock-and-talk from Officer Friendly and if things didn’t go well - send in a higher level of officer. Starting at bootleg Navy SEAL raids for every accusation is a blight in modern law enforcement.

> Historically speaking, there were a few shoot-outs in the 80s and 90s. The Hollywood shooting and I think one historically bad incident with cocaine traffickers in Miami - bad days for the police showing up with .38 revolvers and a shotgun or two fighting against a dedicated enemy with AK style weapons and body armor.

An important note for this is that this situation only happened because of Americas "war on drugs" strategy. The US government created those armed trafficker groups the same way they created the rum-runner mobsters of prohibiting.

The insanely armed domestic "enemy" generally exists because of the combination of high profit motivation with government threat. The more punishing the government is of the enemy group, the greater protective lengths they're going to resort to.

Most of the other places I'm aware of with such penetration of arms but no police basically rely on monetary bonds through family ties and intertribal appeals rather than trying to capture and imprison them. If the family won't accept the bonds and the criminal refuses to pay then they become an outlaw of sorts and have no recognition in society. A bit brutal, but then again so is mass imprisonment and a heavily armed police state. I make no claim whether it is better or worse.

> > I'm just being honest.

Just a salt of the earth officer telling it like it dog-gamn is. :|

I think she got a few "oh shit she spoke truth" reactions around her which is what prompted that.

That should be immediately disqualifying for an law enforcement officer. Saying that on the record should end their career immediately. Alas, we don't live in a just world and they will likely be continuously promoted.

So what happens to all the other cops that believe that but don't say it?

They at least know that it's not acceptable.

The same thing that happens to the folks that say it out loud now. Absolutely nothing.

Although just anecdata, I have heard the exact same point from US cops numerous times in private conversations

#1 - He's Black.

#2 - That's how the police in America operate now; even for the most common interactions w/the public.

I know this may sound like I'm being an asshole, but I'm not.

> That's how the police in America operate now; even for the most common interactions w/the public.

You cannot generalize police forces across the entire country that way. I've never had such an interaction with a police officer, presumably because the police department in my city is run better than that.

Are you white?

That's lucky. My county sheriff implemented predictive policing [1] until they were forced to stop because of many constitutional violations.

1. https://ij.org/press-release/case-closed-pasco-sheriff-admit...

Wow. I know people are talking about how they are using 1984 as an instruction manual. But I'd hope we wouldn't be stupid enough to try and re=enact The Minority Report , especially without the Sci fi psychic humans.

Its more likely because affluent people live in that area who can afford to drop $100k on a lawyer and sue the department. If you are in an area where people are poor and can't drop that kind of money on a lawyer and get the case pushed to state or federal courts the cops know they won't get in trouble for being pieces of shit and see citizens as an easy source of funding to exploit.

If you were to take a positive intent approach:

- the warrant was for distribution of narcotics and kiddnapping.

If I were to guess what a list of most dangerous warrants to execute, those two would be up there.

If you note in the video, he jokingly plays around the drugs part. I am not sure where the kidnapping part comes from, but Afroman is not necessarily a household name amongst middle-aged white police officers, so I imagine they just saw "drugs and kidnapping" and went for it.

And that's part of the issue.

The kidnapping claim was there was a sex dungeon in the house. The house does not have a basement.

And all of this was obviously pretextual, unless you believe drugs and women were hidden between cds or in whatever pieces of the kitchen they destroyed.

Gotta check between the slices of cake, never know what it could be hiding

They did the same when they raided Roger Stone.

Roger Stone had a history of making violent threats and long association with an armed paramilitary group. There was also the tape recording of him appearing to plan violence against two Democratic elected officials.

Afroman, by contrast, smokes a lot of weed.

American police are trained to be afraid. They escalate situations constantly. They're trained that every traffic stop is LIKELY their last.

I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.

“Warrior mindset”. When you’re trained to assume that everyone you interact with is a lethal threat, you tend to react as such.

They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.

If only your country operated on the Peelian principles of policing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Relevant fictional quote:

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. - William Adama

Is that a problem for the Gendarmerie?

In the US police have no obligation to protect the people.

indeed, and this is unironically cited by the "shall not be infringed" crowd as a reason that they should be allowed to bring guns anywhere and everywhere, potentially turning any movie theater disagreement or minor road annoyance (or traffic stop, to bring this back to the police) into a violent life ending incident. to quote jwz out of context, "now you have two problems".

This was downvoted so I'm not sure people realize that no, literally, the police have no obligation to help you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...

Unfortunately, the police in Adama’s world are different from our own:

> the other serves and protects the people

The only time this was actually true was at the advent of organized policing in the United States - there were two purposes for cops. In the north, they were meant to ensure the protection of property, particularly commercial.

In the south, it was the same except that usually meant slaves, so in the worst kind of technically correct sense, they did at one point protect people…kind of. Well, kept them “safe” from freedom and such.

> I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.

Something I learned from a friend is to ask permission for every movement or at the very least narrate and move slowly.

"I'm going to reach in the glovebox for my registration. Is that ok?"

I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.

Edit: friend and I are also white.

> I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.

“the only way” puts me in mind of The Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”

A black friend of mine did exactly this, asked for a permission to get a pen from his pocket. The cop laughed “sure” and the moment he put his hand inside his pocket they jumped him and arrested him.

With body cameras this is a lawsuit.

But is it a winning one?

Qualified immunity tends to chime in.

That doesn't mean what you think it means.

No? Jessop v. City of Fresno is worth a peek.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...

> The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity.

That's not exactly consistent with the given scenario. Use of force issues tend to have much better case law at both the federal and state levels than property related issues.

https://www.generalservices.state.nm.us/wp-content/uploads/9...

> Corbitt v. Vickers, 929 F.3d 1304 (11th Cir. 2019): Qualified immunity granted for officer who, hunting a fugitive, ended up at the wrong house and forced six children, including two children under the age of three, to lie on the ground at gunpoint. The officer tried to shoot the family dog, but missed and shot a 10-year-old child that was lying face down, 18 inches away from the officer. The court held that there was no prior case where an officer accidentally shot a child laying on the ground while the officer was aiming at a dog.

> Young v. Borders, 850 F.3d 1274 (11th Cir. 2017): Qualified immunity granted to officers who, without a warrant, started banging on an innocent man’s door without announcing themselves in the middle of the night. When the man opened the door holding his lawfully-owned handgun, officers opened fire, killing. One dissenting judge wrote that if these actions are permitted, “then the Second and Fourth Amendments are having a very bad day in this circuit.”

> Estate of Smart v. City of Wichita, 951 F.3d 1161 (10th Cir. 2020): Qualified immunity granted for officer who heard gunshots and fired into a crowd of hundreds of people in downtown Wichita, shooting bystanders and killing an unarmed man who was trying to flee the area. The court held that the shooting was unconstitutional but there was no clearly established law that police officers could not “open fire on a fleeing person they (perhaps unreasonably) believed was armed in what they believed to be an active shooter situation.”

(And a bunch of others.)

And a matching case has to be very specific:

> Baxter v. Bracey, 751 F. App’x 869 (6th Cir. 2018): Qualified immunity granted for officers who sent a police dog to attack a man who had already surrendered and was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air. The court held that a prior case holding it unconstitutional to send a police dog after a person who surrendered by laying on the ground was not sufficiently similar to this case, involving a person who surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up.

"No clearly established law", my ass.

What was the outcome of the lawsuits against the agencies? You don't have to win a suit against an individual. Most of the big payouts have to come from the cities.

Here are a bunch going the other way. https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/settl...

I never said that qualified immunity wasn't an issue, just that there tends to be more protections when use of force is involved than with property.

> Most of the big payouts have to come from the cities.

In other words, from the victimized populace.

I think a cop who steals seized evidence should be personally liable to the person they stole from.

(…and I'd note "v. City of Wichita" is clearly responsive to your question.)

I would probably say that both the city and the cop should, independently, be liable. Given the position of authority the city provides, it is ultimately responsible to hire and properly train people who will use that authority well, while the individual is also responsible for their own actions.

Both is good with me, yes.

If the cop is following procedure, the city and others who set the procedure should be liable. If the cop is breaking procedure, then they should be liable. If there is no clear procedure, then they should both be liable.

"In other words, from the victimized populace."

Sadly, yes. They're also the populace that voted for that leadership. There are many leaders of major cities that continually push policies that are highly probably to result in legal action due to their conflict with existing law and case law. I don't like it, but its true.

https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5d778b8b342cca3e584ef6...

The prior opinion in this case, found at Jessop v. City of Fresno , 918 F.3d 1031 (9th Cir. 2019), is hereby withdrawn. A superseding opinion will be filed concurrently with this order. Plaintiffs-Appellants’ petition for rehearing en banc remains pending.

I picked the second one to start. So I don't think that's a great source.

And handed down in only one circuit, so the other 80% of cops in the country can say "well, in my circuit there was no established case law that said stealing the property was a constitutional violation."

The city can still be liable, it's not as if there's no redress.

Yeah, the "qualified" part is relatively misleading, it makes it sound like there are clear limits to police immunity.

A famous case of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile where the man identitified he had a concealed carry, the cop told him not reach for it, he started to say he wasn't, he was getting his license the officer asked for, with the officer cutting him off repeatedly and the officer shot him because he 'feared for his life'.

All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.

"All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc."

That's not really true. The standard is a reasonable fear for your life. That's reasonable standard is evaluated in court by how a reasonable person would have reacted. Yes, they do give some deference to the individual who was actually there (police or civilian). The real problems happen because the DA and the courts tend to have bias when it comes to subjecting members of the system to the same process that others face.

Police officers in court cases don't have to meet that standard until it established that they do not have qualified immunity. In vastly more than 9 out of 10 cases, they do, and thus that standard is completely irrelevant.

Qualified immunity only applies to civil cases, not criminal.

Most (not all) cases against police officers for excessive/fatal use of force are civil (typically civil rights violations).

Oh good. So you'll still be dead, and they might get a reprimand. If you're lucky they'll lose their job.

> All they have to prove is that they fear for their life.

In which case, they should spend the rest of their life in a high-security psychiatric hospital.

They're obviously too mentally fragile to be allowed out in the world.

To some degree this is how they’re trained, and imo the people doing the training also need some form of repercussions - if you haven’t before, check out some information on the courses that are (were?) taught to precincts across the country: Killology. Yes, that’s the literal name.

Some more recommendations. Keep your registration and insurance in an easily reachable place like in the passenger side visor/mirror. Keep your hands on the top of the steering wheel where the officer can see them at all times. Keep your car clean.

The goals are to make the officer comfortable and minimize the time.

Could also be that this is at least partially justified due to the incredible pervasiveness of guns in the US.

No, treating people with hostility and escalating the situation only makes it more likely that someone will snap and attack a cop.

People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.

It started after the Iraq war. They got Hummers and vets.

A childhood friend's dad was a cop for 25 years; retired in the mid-90s. He never shot his gun, and only unholstered once in his entire cop career. My friend followed his dad, also became a cop in the exact same district; he's getting ready to retire. He's unholstered his gun countless times. He says he's shot at numerous people in his career, and even killed one dude. I once asked him what the difference was between his career and his dad's. He said crime was actually worse when his dad was a cop, a lot worse. But the big difference was the public's attitude and his training. He said the public had accepted the "tough on crime" narrative; that wasn't the case in his dad's days. But also, the training was straight-up military. He said that if he didn't use the military-style tactics, he would be sunned by his peers and even reprimanded. He said the training repeated one narrative, over and over: "It's us versus them."

He told me a story about a noise complaint. He said him and his partner banged on the front door of the house, but there was no response. He said they called in the status, but were told to wait. About 10 minutes later multiple SWAT vehicles arrived. He said one of the vehicles literally drove into the side of the house, making a huge hole in the house. About a dozen SWAT officers ran into the house, multiple shots were fired, the tear gas started a fire. The house was absolutely destroyed. ... No one was home; the house was empty. A kid left the TV on really loud when he left for school. A neighbor called it in, hoping the cops could just go into the house and turn off the TV. Worse, there was no punishment to anyone involved; the cops were doing as they were trained.

Your friends a liar or has fallen for the propaganda if he tells you crime has gotten worse. Other than a brief blip during Covid it’s been trending steadily down for decades.

"crime was actually worse when his dad was a cop" implies crime rate is going down

You’re right, I misread the sentence as the opposite

I find the noise complaint story hard to believe. Cops know what a "noise complaint" is.

This sounds like a generic urban legend "A friend of a friend told me".

If something like this happened, it would have to be in the news, right?

Are you sure about that? Police brutality has been reported as a huge issue in the US since at least the 60s. If anything, from the outside it looks like it's got better since Iraq.

The MOVE bombing was well before the Iraq war.

Not even the most dangerous job in the US. Forest workers, commercial fishermen, pilots etc are more dangerous. If we're talking about gun violence, your corner market cashier is more likely to get shot, Has anyone thanked a 7 eleven worker for their sacrifice thas you can get a slurpee at 2am?

I have seen some shit go down in 7/11's at 1am. You are not kidding.

Probably the most dangerous aspect of the job in the US is driving.

For a bit, it was COVID. https://abcnews.com/Health/covid-leading-cause-law-enforceme...

Its more dangerous being a spouse to a cop than it is to be a cop.

Curious how much this varies among police. Some jobs are by their nature always dangerous.

But there are a lot of cops in the USA, and plenty I'm sure have nice, cozy jobs, and then there are some who spend thee majority of their career policing areas that more closely resemble warzones or 3rd world nations but this isn't the majority by any means.

Roofing, I think, tends to be the most dangerous.

Depends on how you look at the numbers. But construction, logging, garbage collection and truck driving tend to be the most deadly depending on the specific metric (absolute, per capita, by industry, etc).

Expanding that, the deadliest part of being a police officer is almost certainly the driving component. No gun will save you from smashing your SUV into a pole. And the aftermarket modifications made to the vehicles aren't crash tested. A police cruiser is full of potential projectiles.

Depends how you define dangerous. If we look injury rates and not deaths, meat processing/packing is the most dangerous.

Neither working as a 7 eleven worker nor a cop is a sacrifice, it's a free labor market.

I don't think you can use this datapoint for this purpose. Cops are employing the paranoid strategies already, so there's no way to discern between 'these strategies are needless' and 'these strategies are effective'.

You could probably do a comparison between jurisdictions where police homicides are common and jurisdictions where they aren't common. Assuming that there are cultural factors anyway.

Like sure, areas with higher rates of criminal violence will probably have more police homicides, but it's likely enough that you can pair things up based on rates of criminal violence.

not only trained that way, the justice system upholds this by not prosecuting police violence in any meaningful way

This will be a controversial opinion but I think some escalation by police is warranted.

The reality is there are aggressive people in society that have a tendency to escalate things. If police are trained to only de-escalate, it removes a powerful check on aggressive escalation.

The second order effect is an increase in events like people being pushed onto train tracks, glass bottles being thrown if you glance the wrong direction, etc.

I think optimally you have a police force that is trained in de-escalation but also escalates things slightly more than the average citizen and thereby provides a service to society as a buffer.

I don't think you understand what "de-escalation" is. It's not ignoring antisocial behavior or failing to confront people.

I'm not claiming that de-escalation implies ignoring antisocial behavior or failing to confront.

I'm claiming that some antisocial behavior is only triggered by some degree of escalation.

I wonder what you base this on. What would statistics backing this up look like?

It's a good question.

It would be violent crime trend correlation with de-escalation training. Or even with complaints of police aggression.

Even more useful would be to separate out assault + battery where the victim is random vs. non-random, IE domestic or gang.

I had a look around and there is very little actual ecidence for detrimental effects. Most things seems to be exaggerations by politicians who want to be tough on crime.

Not only that but if they claim they were afraid for their life, that excuse is used to justify any action, which works short of admitting wrongdoing on video and in post incident interviews.

It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.

And police departments get sent videos of every officer death from around the country and regularly watch them for "training purposes". So it makes sense that they are in a constant state of paranoia.

> It's a country with a lot of guns. Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.

Call me naive, but I think this could be solved by stricter gun laws. Yes, bad guys might have guns, but that's the case everywhere around the world.

But being afraid that everybody could have a gun and use it against you while doing your work must clearly change something in your behaviour as a police officer... Why not calm down the whole situation by reducing the number of guns then...

> Yes, bad guys might have guns, but that's the case everywhere around the world.

The number of guns in the hands of bad guys caries drastically around the world.

You can’t reduce this to “it’s the same everywhere” because it’s not.

True!

What I meant is that I think German police, for example, are probably less worried that a traffic stop is likely to get them killed or have them escalate a situation to the use of lethal force.

I think this might be different in the US because guns are just much more common there.

I think that's true but it's not guns alone it's broadly cultural in nature. Different places are different. Even in the US there are vast differences between regions.

I think “culture change” is what is ultimately proposed here.

Yep, you definitely can't compare the USA to Germany. The rate of non-gun violence alone is a good starting point, then the slew of other stuff. Guns, mental health and tendencies towards violence in both rural and urban low income areas. Icing on top is the deeply polarized attitudes towards police. The list goes on and on...

That's like observing that we could probably solve the issue of people saying mean things on the internet by requiring ID to access it. You have to consider any expected negative consequences as well as if you'd be violating any rights.

We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.

We've also seen it go wrong plenty of times. They can do them and we can do us I figure; I'm quite happy with my gun rights thanks.

There are highly developed countries that tightly regulate speech and network access relative to most of the west. Does that mean adopting an ID requirement to post on Twitter coupled with anti hate speech laws would be an obviously good thing?

If tweets were a leading cause of death in children we should probably at least consider making it harder to tweet.

It was an arbitrary example. Try to see past the politically charged topic to the actual analogy that I'm attempting to make.

The point of my original reply wasn't about the position being expressed but rather the stated reasoning. If your logic amounts to "Y could solve X therefore we should be doing Y" notice that when applied to other things that line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up very well.

If you want to have a discussion about child mortality versus tail risks such as elections being suspended or the government murdering protesters a la Iran that's fine but please realize that wasn't the point of my earlier reply.

I don’t know if there is any precedent from taking away hundreds of millions of guns from an armed country actually

Australia de-armed pretty successfully.

Australia has more guns now, and more guns per capita, than it did at the time it almost unified all gun laws.

It didn't "de-arm" - it brought all states and territories into near alignment on gun regulation.

If you're interested I can link to good footage of my actual IRL neighbour shooting 24x24 inch targets at 5,000 yards, here in Australia.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE

Alternatively you might be interested in Australian footage of feral control, taking down 800 oversized wild pigs in 4 hours from a helicopter.

It significantly de-armed.

Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms. You have to be a farmer, hunter, or belong to a shooting club.

While the number of guns increased, the number of gun owners dropped. And the new regulations enacted this year drop the number of guns one can own even more.

There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns. See how the terrorists at the massacre last year were limited by the type of guns they had access to, only managing to kill 15 despite having all the time in the world. An Ar-15 or similar weapon could have been used to slaughter that 15 in under 15 seconds.

> It significantly de-armed

In the sense that there are more private registered guns than ever before in Australia, sure.

> Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms.

More importantly, it unified gun laws - before the Port Arthur shooting, Queensland, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, probably the Australian Capital Territory were all unregulated.

Unregulated states with no border control effectively made the entire Federation of States unregulated.

Regulated states, at least the ones that I lived in prior to Port Arthur, didn't have "self defence" as a reason for owning gun - it was always about hunting, feral control, specific security (regularly carrying money) etc.

The last I checked, the emphasis was more on where you intended to use / carry a gun; shooting club (common), carry for security in street (rare), rural (property owner or have letter of authority to shoot from a property owner).

> There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns.

Sure .. they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines is pig shooting, maybe camel control, and rat shooting.

Rats can be shot with professional BB guns .. a better choice when shooting in sheds, silos, etc - no spark or risk of punching holes in tin walls.

If you're pig shooting in bulk, that's a contract shooting licence.

> they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines ...

Did the Australian ban of "military style" rifles include a blanket clause that covers all semi-automatic fire? Or is it an almost entirely aesthetic category as it tends to be whenever such measures are proposed in the US?

When it comes to automatic fire there's a rather famous US case where someone was ultimately convicted for possessing a shoelace (IIRC) attached to some fastening hardware. As to larger magazines, those probably don't even meet the bar for an introductory level highschool shop project.

From what I understand most semi-auto guns are banned in Australia, but of course they never had a ton of those to start with. But there are still plenty of pump action, lever action, bolt action, etc guns which aren't meaningfully less capable. Shooting twice as fast doesn't mean you can kill twice as fast because you can't aim twice as fast. Like the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions which were quite obviously still capable enough to be deadly even to the top military in the world.

> but of course they never had a ton of those to start with.

Really? The vast majority of weapons in the US are semi-auto so I find this difficult to believe.

> the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions

Were they? I would expect they were AK-47 and similar although I've never looked into it.

> so I find this difficult to believe.

Extrapolating from experience in the USofA to other countries in the world is generally not a good move.

The actual numbers, from the time, suggest maybe 10-15% of guns in Australia were "self loading"

( 20% of guns purchased back, not all were semi-automatic, a good many were old unwanted guns that now faced a registration fee if kept )

From a US academic type study that looked at the Australian (and other) gun buyback scheme post Port Arthur.

  Between 1996 and 1997,643,726 prohibited firearms were handed in.

  Prices were set to reflect "fair value" (market value). Individuals with permits could also turn in firearms that they had failed to register.

  Total public expenditures were about $A320 million ($U.S. 230 million33), approximately $A500 ($U.S. 359) per gun. The buyback program was financed by an additional 0.2 percent levy on national health insurance.

  Estimates of the total stock of guns were few and drew on limited survey data.

  Estimates ranged as high as 11 million, but the high figures had no known provenance. Gun Control Australia cited a figure of about 4.25 million, building on the only academic estimate, then roughly twenty years old.

  The most targeted population survey of gun ownership was conducted by Newspoll; the resulting estimate was approximately 2.5 million firearms in 1997, after the gun buyback.

  If that is approximately correct, it suggests that there were about 3.2 million firearms in 1996 and that the buyback led to the removal of approximately 20 percent of the total stock.

  In U.S. terms that would be equivalent to the removal of 40 million firearms

~ https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/g/files/litvpz3631/files/pro...

( Note: I skimmed it, it looks more or less okay, several things caught my eye as problematic but the above passage looks pretty ballpark.

Further: I'm having busy days ATM - if I can claw out the time I might loop back to give a longer comment / reply to your upthread question(s) )

> We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.

Good for them. As an American, I'm quite happy with our Second Amendment rights, I'm not looking to roll that back in the slightest. And if anything, with the recent rise of the fascist authoritarian regime that we've seen, I'd think that maybe a whole lot of "anti gun" people here would be well on their way to becoming "formerly anti gun" people.

Can you tell me more?

As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?

Aside from the obvious (being ready and able to form an armed resistance) there's the deterrent. When you know that your populace has certain options available to them that will inform your actions.

> As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime.

See my reply above. But loosely speaking, you are correct when looking at things from a purely individual point of view. No one of us is going to topple an authoritarian regime by ourselves. But I don't think that was ever the point. It's an assemblage of large numbers of like-minded armed individuals who can effect change.

And just to be clear... I'm a peaceful person at heart (but not a pacifist). I don't want blood-shed, and I don't want to see an armed uprising or a civil war on many levels. But I'd at least like to see many of my fellow #2A advocates being more vocal and visible about stating our displeasure with the current environment, and our willingness in principle to take action if/when it becomes clear that it is necessary. That, ideally, in and of itself reduces the need for actual violence, by acting as a strong deterrent.

All my life I've heard that an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government. Now that we have creeping authoritarians running the country, where are all of those "second amendment solution" people? What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?

They either voted for the authoritarian or they don't care as long as the authoritarian doesn't touch their guns. Womp womp.

Recall that this authoritarian won the popular vote ~18 months ago.

The protection is against a minority authoritarian government. If half the populace supports the guy in charge then taking up arms is effectively a declaration of civil war. That's a case of the cure being worse than the affliction.

Fast forward a year or so, suppose popularity has hit single or low double digits, imagine a blatant attempt at subverting the election process, that's where an armed populace comes in.

> What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?

Critical mass.

Look, I could pick up a rifle tomorrow, and march on DC by myself with the intention of toppling the fascist regime. And what would result? I'd be quickly arrested or killed and nothing would change. So what's the point?

But if I was part of a group of 1,000,000 like-minded people, then I might still be arrested or killed, but at least there's a much higher likelihood that some actual change would take place.

Now, as a lifelong believer in the "an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government" mindset myself, I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in a lot of people right now. People that I grew up with, that I've always trusted, respected, and maybe even admired. Because while fascism metastasizes and spreads through our country nearly completely unchecked, they all seem unwilling to even speak up against what's going on. And I can't defend their choices, but I can say that I still believe that there is a tipping point, some event, or sequence of events, that would kick things into into gear if needed[1].

[1]: I say "if needed" because it's not 100% clear to me that the only possible way out of this mess is an armed uprising. We might still be able to "vote our way out of this" and the optimistic take is that many Americans are sitting on their hands as long as they hold a shred of hope that that is still possible.

The more pessimistic take is that a majority of the "second amendment to protect us from authoritarianism" crowd are hypocritical ass-clowns, who are actually OK with authoritarianism as long as "their guy" is the one in power. :-(

But you won't get that critical mass without a spark.

People need to see action and see it work without repercussions to the actor.

People will take notice when someone like Thiel, Bannon, or Miller are taken down with a drone and the drone operator escapes arrest.

They'll think to themselves "Wait a minute, if someone can take out a billionaire I can take out that cop who raped my cousin and got a paid vacation as punishment for it."

What comes after that is anybody's guess but I predict an impending moment where individual citizens realize that they're not as helpless as they have been lead to believe and that technology can help them eliminate long-standing criminals operating in positions of power with immunity in theiry local communities.

Realistically, it's more to protect from unhinged supporters of the current regime than the regime itself.

Youre aware that the rest of the planet have stricter gun laws and the American problems are fairly unique?

This is even after controlling for things that exacerbate crime like high economic inequality.

For instance, Brazil [1] (a much poorer and more unequal country than the USA) has lower murder rate than a lot of cities now than the USA. The murder rate of Rio seems to be about on the level of Houston (17/100k), or about a third of Detroit (47).

But Rio clearly has __a lot more crime__ than Houston. It's palpable when you're in either city. Even with the Favelas and heavily armed gangs, the murder rate is comparatively low because *normal people dont have guns at nearly the same rate*.

And it shouldn't take a leap of faith to figure out that higher gun ownership leads to more deaths. Guns are the one tool we have intentionally made to cause death.

1. I'm aware that Brazil has a higher murder rate, but comparing cities is a better pick. The northeast of Brazil is in another league than anywhere in the USA in economic conditions; it's not comparable. The only city I can think of with USA levels of economic development would be Florianopolis (murder rate 7/100k) or maybe Balneario Camboriu, or some parts of Sao Paulo like Vila Olimpia.

You are naive for assuming that the government aren't the bad guys with guns. Just ask the 30,000 Iranian protesters that were slaughtered if you don't believe me.

You can hardly make stricter gun laws; we have a right to them in this country.

It's hard to limit the guns without infringing on the right of the people.

Maybe that right is not worth the trade off

Unless you change the culture it will be just like the drug war. Firearms familiarity and possession are a cultural rite of passage for ~most males in the USA and there is no way to regulate that in a way that meaningfully stops it short of perhaps large-scale death penalty.

Pretty much everyone in Europe that wants a gun can have one within a couple weeks, the reason they don't only has a little to do with the law.

To get a gun in Norway i need 6 months in a shooting sports club. And then can only take the gun with me for shooting exercise. Strictly prohibited to have a round chambered when not standing on the shooting lane. And then only after an order from the guy running the training.

Again, a bit naive, but that actually sounds okay to me. You'll learn to use the gun responsibly and in a controlled manner. What else would you want to do with it and why?

Sorry for not making it clear in the first post. I just meant to say it's a little harder to get in some countries. The "Europe" is quite diverse.

Still, 6 months or not, from what I've heard, people have their gun permit applications rejected very rarely. Compared to Poland - it's much easier. Also just hearsay, but I've heard that it can be hard to get a permit and it's often rejected without any apparent reason.

But that was about pistols. Hunting rifles seem to be much easier to get in both Poland and Norway, though you still need to be a part of a hunting "club". Not sure what it's called, but it also takes some time and effort, just the rejection rate is lower.

Most people, including myself, have no interest in jumping through such hoops to exercise a constitutionally protected right. We also value the ability to carry (mostly) anywhere we see fit for the purpose of defending ourselves in a worst case scenario.

Yes, the American cultural preference for guns is well established. The GP's point was that in most of the world guns are more restricted and people are doing just fine.

Sure, but I could print a reliable firearm with ECM'd barrel and make ammunition within a couple weeks if I went to Norway and so could most of your citizens, just following FGC-9 and "but what about ammo" instruction guides. The law says 6 months but in practice that's not the limiting factor. And then with no problem chamber a round and walk around with it in a backpack. The same applies in most of EU; of course in someplace like France or Poland you can straight up buy a black powder revolver over the counter which although heavy works quite well for most self defense cases with a firearm.

The fact is if any particular Norwegian decides today they want a gun, criminal record or not, and they have very modest means by Norwegian standards they will have it within a few weeks, no problem at all. Of course in USA criminal have been found many times with these self-made guns, now quite reliable and accurate, but a great deal of culture here is people will bear arms no matter the prison sentence hanging over their head or what the law says, and that is the cultural issue you will run into trying to curb gun possession in America. The fact Norwegians don't I think has more to do is that they don't view gun's as integrally to their natural rights and cultural imperative as much as Americans do, the physical potentiality is there for them to bear arms roughly widely as Americans do even without a change to law.

The drug war that the US government created?

But not all States' gun laws are equally strict? So if the state with the stricted gun laws is acting in a constitutional manner then other states could also implement those laws but choose not to.

So a lot of this stuff is truly self inflicted and the result of poor policy choices -- not because of governments reluctantly but dutifully obeying the 2nd amendment.

As a matter of fact, the right for states to impose strict laws is before the supreme court right now.

I expect to see them reigning in the states. The 2nd amendment is unambiguous.

> You can hardly make stricter gun laws; we have a right to them in this country. It's hard to limit the guns without infringing on the right of the people.

What an odd take. Gun rights weren't dictated by a burning bush. A group of 39 guys decided for everyone else that that right should exist a quarter of a millenium ago. A completely undemocratic system. Every citizen should have a say and if they will it, anything in the constitution can be amended or struck off.

I agree, but I also doubt you could get anywhere near the population needed to vote for strict gun control to start with. And if it was passed anyways I don't think enough people would accept it and give up their guns even if they had to hide or fight to keep them.

I personally don't trust the US government enough to willingly vote to give them a monopoly on violence even if I otherwise don't shoot guns very often.

This is all such a strange take. What do you think would happen, what's the expectation?

Everybody goes out and starts shooting down their local police force? The military?

I just don't get how people think this would work and if the government would be intimidated by that. I think they'd just shoot first and ask questions later and that's it.

I would say the same thing about the opposite. What do you think people are going to do, take time out of their way to go turn in thousands of dollars worth of guns and ammo for nothing in return? Do you think cops are going to go door-to-door seizing guns and that nobody is going to ever fight back despite being fed the fear of the government barging in and taking citizen's guns by force for their entire life?

I don't believe gun control is effective unless nearly the entire population is accepting it willfully, and if people wanted to do it willfully it would be easy to gain a large majority of votes for that cause. But even the democratic party in some of the densest cities struggle to gain a simple majority from voters on the issue.

I also don't think the government has the power to take peoples guns by force even if they wanted, it would collapse the US if even a tiny portion of people fought back and defeat the entire purpose of trying. Would the US military lose battles against citizens? No, there wouldn't even be very many. But they still wouldn't win the war when some random hillbilly takes a few pot shots at a sub station from 2 miles out and takes down the power for potentially millions of people and all the work and value they produce. Factories don't work without power, essential munitions don't get produced if they can't secure material inputs from across the nation or the world, and if financial institutions takes a dive in response to destruction and chaos there goes US trade power. And you can bet your ass that all the countries the US has been taking a dump on for nearly the last century are going to take advantage of a weakened US.

> Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.

I wonder what the ratio of police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants.

I certainly believe that bursting through someone’s door with guns drawn is a high risk activity. It seems like maybe no one needed to do that in this case, though.

I think the traffic stop paranoia stems from a couple high profile incidents like

(1) Brannan in Georgia

(2) Darian Jarrott executed after the feds/HSI setup a drug sting but use NMSP trooper as a sacrificial lamb and then mosie their way on over after for the aftermath.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Police_Shootout_-_De...

[2] https://youtu.be/NqxTf-Vz12o?t=475

I've seen police in online forums reference these a lot when any talks come up of toning down their immediate instinct to draw their guns.

Basically in the US the feds will use local/state police as a sacrifice and not tell them that they're part of a sting of armed violent criminals so they're basically getting set up by HSI etc on purpose for surprises.

I’m not sure there’s a general trend of federal officers using state/local officers sacrificially, but no doubt these cases are hammered into officers’ minds over and over.

It's worth pointing out that, while being a cop is a somewhat dangerous profession, it doesn't even crack the top 10. It's much more dangerous to be a tree trimmer, non-airline pilot, logger, roofer, etc. than it is to be a cop.

What's more, a significant portion of that danger comes from the fact that they're driving around a lot and spend a lot of time by the side of the road and that means they end up the victim of crashes while on the job. The biggest risk when conducting a traffic stop isn't the risk that the people you're stopping might decide to kill you, it's that some dumbass thinks his texting is more important than looking at the road, drifts onto the shoulder, and plows into you.

> police deaths during no knock raids vs peacefully served search warrants

Would have to be a randomized trial because right now obviously police only peacefully serve warrants in situations that are already very unlikely to be violent.

There's likely natural experiments in cases where police was misinformed either way about the danger of the suspects being arrested.

> Police do regularly get shot at when raiding.

Got any data?

It happens daily? Weekly? Monthly?

What is "regularly"?

Doing quick research says about 1 shot at per day, 1-2 fatalities per week, and about 26,000 assaults per year

That’s total officers shot, not specifically for raids.

A NYT investigation indicated there were “at least 13” officer deaths tied to forced entry raids from 2010-2016, so around 2/year. It’s unclear how many other fatalities happen in no knock raids. Given that there are only 50-60 total fatalities/year it’s surprising there isn’t comprehensive data for this.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-ent...

There are an estimated 20k-80k no-knock warrants in the US every year for context.

Policing isn't in the top ten most dangerous jobs. It's usually listed around the 15-25th most dangerous job in the US. Many Americans including myself are regularly in more danger.

Also around 40% of police deaths are accidents.

It's also interesting to note that while violent crime and homicide in the United States have been declining for many years interpersonal violence has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of police on the job deaths.

It seems unlikely the cause of this is more violence among Americans. Since the overall rate is going down. It seems like changes in policing and attitudes and tactics have resulted in more officer deaths from interpersonal violence. Perhaps more de-escalation would save more police officers lives.

>interpersonal violence has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of police on the job deaths.

Do you have a source for this? Not trying to argue, I would genuinely like to read more.

Upon closer inspection it seems it's more a result of decreasing accident rates than increasing homicide rates although that is a factor lately.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-police-officers-die-i...

That gives a homicide rate for cops of about 7.5 per 100,000. That's a bit less than twice the US national average, and about on par with the overall murder rate in the Carolinas or Mississippi. Seems pretty good for a profession that would logically bring a substantially increased exposure to murderers.

This is such a common argument that’s basically a fallacy. Many of those dangerous jobs are dangerous because of human error. So it’s funny that you think 60% of deaths being on purpose is normal, what other job in the dangerous top 10 has 60% intentional deaths? Like seriously?

> So it’s funny

They didn’t say it’s funny.

If you have something meaningful to say, then say it. Don’t twist someone else’s words instead.

> human error

Choosing to train police to act with an “warrior mindset” instead of training for de-escalation seems like it could be classified as human error, too.

I think intentionally and willingly doing something whilst informed of the consequence doesn't count as human error. At least not in this context.

Though it would make more sense, since these humans are likely largely erroneous.

I agree. It’s actually systemic error.

Tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year in the us is crazy stuff. In the early 80s the number was ~1500/year. More than an order of magnitude increase in no knock raids while violent crime has fallen.

I didn’t say that they said it’s funny. I was saying it’s funny. You just twisted my words.

It's a common argument because police and their supporters regularly claim they need to roll up in tactical gear and treat every encounter with civilians like it's a life-and-death struggle because they have one of the most dangerous jobs, yet the truth is they have about an order of magnitude fewer workplace fatalities than roofers and loggers.

This is despite the fact that police regularly escalate their encounters, making them more dangerous for everyone, police included.

Maybe loggers need to start doing their jobs with miniguns like that scene in Predator.

To really emphasize this, car crashes are the top source of police deaths. Yet less than 50% of police use their seat belts.

The justification most give is that they may need to be able to quickly get out of a car and pull their gun in a confrontation.

The only way this makes sense is that

A) Police aren't being properly trained based on data

B) People have an irrational psychological fear of murder over other types of death

A is the likely part.

B isn't necessarily irrational. Many other types of death are at your own actions. Things like drinking alcohol, eating whatever you feel like, not exercising, doing drug, even driving, etc provide some self-identified "benefit" to the individual that they choose to partake. It's rationale that someone is more afraid of dying from an activity they recieve no benefit from than an activity they do.

They should stop "raiding" people's homes.

They don't raid schools when there's someone actively killing children. They can just hold off a bit and get people when they're on the move.

They are supposed to. That was the lesson learned from Columbine.

That is also why the police response in Uvalde is highly criticized.

They should quickly move into schools, yes.

People's homes? No.

When you break into someone's home you want to be ready for people with guns shooting at you.

Politely giving them a few seconds of free shooting before you draw your guns is not a great survival strategy.

> When you break into someone's home…

So we're starting right off the bat with the false premise that this is the only approach cops can take in these scenarios.

Best to kill anything that moves; it's the only way to survive.

The department would actually prefer that to a scenario where someone is left alive to sue them for raiding 86 1st St when the unreliable informant said 96.

Dead men can’t sue!

If you break in with little to no notice or with a lack of manpower or if the occupant has nothing to lose, sure. This is why no knock raids are incredibly dangerous for all involved and generally a terrible practice.

With the number of officers they often have in most cases it would make more sense to start off slowly and unarmed, making an earnest attempt to communicate with the target. People won't usually choose to fight a suicidal battle. Even if they're extremely upset and disagreeable almost everyone will go along with it if calmly presented with a warrant and given some time to think things through.

and I would argue no knock is unconstitutional, the whole point of a warrant is to prove you’re allowed to search me and the law was written in a time where everything was on paper, we’re suppose to be secure in our papers short of a warrant, if you can’t show a warrant how do I know I’m not being robbed and need to defend myself? it’s totally bonkers

If you're there to arrest people, that seems reasonable. But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it.

I do have the presumption that when professionals do things that seem weird, they probably have reasons that I as an amateur don't immediately understand.

I've also read enough Radley Balko to know cops often get away with doing awful and stupid things...

I'm aware, but there seem to be an awful lot of instances where "high stakes high priority evidence collection" doesn't apply.

> But if the goal is to collect evidence, you can't give them time to destroy it.

Unless it's proven someone is on imminent harm, then they should find another way to collect evidence, or just not do it.

Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.

I'm not saying what they did was correct, but they were allegedly told that he had a drug operation and a kidnapping dungeon.

which is fine. But they didn't vet this info, just ran with it. Massive negligence & duty failure

A judge reviewed the evidence and signed the warrant. It's not like the cops just took what the witness said and ran with it.

Situational training is a joke (based in part on tactics developed in Israel/Occupied Palestine, i.e., for a literal military occupation), load-outs aren't designed around need but as a hand-out to our arms manufacturing industry (laundered through the military), and the cops involved in these sorts of raids are literally chosen to not be intellectually curious enough to question it.

I used to operate a firearms training system. To this day, I wish I'd stolen the videos that they use so that I can prove how ridiculously unprofessional and biased they are.

There's a reason we had a few years of heavy anti police protest across the US.

Let me outline how broken policing is an institution in the US:

1. Cops are generally stupid and untrained. You just had to watch them testify in the Afroman trial and you might think "geez these guys aren't the brightest bulbs". No, theyre not. But they are also the most average cops;

2. Cops are corrupt. They steal things all the time. "We miscounted the money". Yeah, right. You got got caught stealing;

3. Cops lie all the time. They'll lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testilying [1];

4. Cops never go after other cops. In fact, you're generally punished or even killed for going after other cops. It's career suicide;

5. If, somehow, you get charged with a crime, you as a cop have rights the rest of us can only dream about. You're not allowed to interview the suspect for 24 hours. Their union rep must be there and so on. Enough time to get their story straight. Why don't we all have those same rights?

6. Cops aren't trained to de-escalate. They're only trained to escalate, lethally. Cops kill over 1000 people a year [2]. A pretty famous example is the murder of Sonya Massey [3]. Sonya was lethally shot for being near a pot of boiling water. This case was also quite rare because somebody went to jail;

7. Some departments go so far to essentially be gangs. One of the most famous examples is the LA Sheriff's Department [4];

8. Should a prosecutor actually go after a cop, it's typically career suicide. Prosecutors live and die by conviction stats. It's how they get promoted and seek judgeships and higher office. Why? Because for there other cases, their cop witnesses will start missing court dates or even changing their testimony so your cases get dismissed or found not guilty.

A lot of TV is what's called "copaganda". It typically paints police as competent, not corrupt, honorable and not at all the job most likely to commit domestic violence [5].

One exception to this is The Wire, which is a portrayal of institutional failure at virtually every level of American society. For bonus points, We Built This City [6].

It's a much deeper topic why it is this way but unsurprisingly the answer can be overly reduced to "racism" eg the origins of American law enforcement are in slave-catching.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sonya_Massey

[4]: https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...

[5]: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/1862/

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Built_This_City

A big part of being police is the cosplay of being in the army. Why do you think airsoft is so popular?

It’s disturbing. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were pulled over and my window and door is closed. If I reach for the door handle will the cop think I’m reaching for gun? Do wait for him to scream at me through the window? How do I keep from things escalating? Is there a place in the US where the cops aren’t totally insane? SF? Santa Barbara? Maybe Marin County?

This place is out of control. It's not sane to think that every police encounter is going to be violent. And yes, there are different areas than California. Do you have a chance to be treated poorly or rudely by a police officer? Of course. Is that going to be all the time? Of course not.

I'm amazed at the number of people who are answering "this is just the way that it is in America".

I don't live in Adams County, but they are our direct neighbors here in rural southwest Ohio. We like Afroman over here. :)

I think the answer to your question is the warrant that they were serving involved kidnapping and an alleged torture dungeon along with drug trafficking charges. Yes, it may sound ridiculous on the surface, but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.

If one reads the warrant and considers the possibility that the testimony of the witness might have been true, then their show of force seems much less unreasonable.

Disconnecting his cameras? Stealing his money? That's absolutely not reasonable in any case. Afroman has a lot of support in our rural Ohio community, and we're all cheering for him. :)

Its not even police specific.

In any game, if one side has 10x more accountability for misbehavior than the other, the low consequence side will keep testing boundaries until they are stopped.

Sounds like swatting.

"an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it" sounds very far away from what I understand "swatting" to mean normally.

AFAIK we have no idea if an informant testified to it, or even if there was an informant. Cops claimed that someone had told them about it, and the judge signed the warrant.

Swatting is the action or practice of making a hoax call in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address"

Either there was an informant, and the false claim was made to a police officer, or there was not informant, and the cop made a false claim to the judge. Either way, the intent was to get cops to show up and screw with Afroman, and that goal was achieved.

I agree with you. It might not be "swatting" in the crank call sense, but it definitely feels like malicious lying (on the part of _someone_) to harass or cause injury through police action. So yeah, definitely feels like swatting to me too.

I want to point out that no, the contents of the warrant are in no way “the reason” for this type of raid. It is factually untrue to use that detail to suggest in any way that this is not business as usual in the US.

I cannot stress enough how factually untrue the comment I’m responding to is - it is more of a prayer than a description of the reality of policing in the United States. At best what GP meant to say is that to the best of their knowledge this usually doesn’t happen in the sparsely populated handful of square miles that they’re familiar with in the time that they have lived there and mistakenly given the impression that it is categorically uncommon in the US.

It is business as usual for the entirety of the country, though it’s I guess fun for the locals (?) to see some “torture dungeon” flavor thrown in there by a ‘witness’ that the public will definitely never hear from.

Finding examples of this is trivial. It happens all the time and if Afroman were not famous this would not have risen to the level of national news. It’s even somewhat common for raids like these to happen where they get the address wrong and raid the wrong house.

> I cannot stress enough how factually untrue the comment I’m responding to is

Which fact did I report incorrectly?

I was not answering the question in generalities. I was answering the question that asked for specifics about this case ("why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here?"). The answer: serving a warrant for kidnapping and drug trafficking.

You may disagree with my :opinion: (that armed response during the serving of a warrant for kidnapping is reasonable, or that the cops should not have disconnected his cameras), but you can't just claim that I'm lying about the facts of this case and then not bring receipts.

>but an informant apparently testified to this and a judge approved it, so that's the warrant they were serving.

And will they face repercussions for such an obviously false lead? You need a lot more than an "informant" to verify a search warrant. Especially under a local celebrity who has all kinds of people out there who want to harass them.

Considering this was a no-knock warrant, one of the probably causes being kidnapping (shady & possibly corrupt warrant in itself) where they broke down the doors, I'd say they expected some sort of gang activity or something.

Not a silly question. If you go back to the 2000s, you'll see the growing militarization of local police. This is partially an economic prop-up where the military can now sell police departments materials/arms/etc. and police departments can buy them. Thus the military needs more. Nice little situation they found.

At the same time as these departments getting more funding, it feels like most departments have decided its better to use taxpayer funds to settle court cases rather than train and be more selective.

One of my favourite little details in Jeeves and Wooster is that British cops are shown as bumbling fools who fit right in with the cast.

Meanwhile American police are consistently depicted as trigger happy, shooting at any minor provocation.

In Europe there's a maybe 0.1% chance that any random adult is carrying a firearm. And the vast majority of those are going to be rifles for hunting. In the US, it's more like a 3% chance. And firearms in the US tend to have higher capacity and higher rates of fire. Hence the default militaristic response from law enforcement. Or at least that's one of several reasons.

Not many people watch them, but there are countless videos of police stops where it's not the police drawing a gun, but the driver of the car pulled over. Often it's not just pulled- it's aimed and fired. Some cops die, thankfully many get hit in the arm and it's non fatal.

It happens so much in the United States that you honestly can't blame the vast majority of at least being ready. That's not saying there aren't cops that are TOO ready and unclip the holster just walking up to the car.

Being a police officer is not that dangerous. You are more likely to experience death or dismemberment in like 20 other jobs.

The stereotype is probably if anything less horrible than the reality. There was a notable situation where police were called because 12 year old Tamir Rice was walking whilst black with a bb gun. The officer exited the passenger side of the cop car so fast it was still moving when he jumped out. He immediately fired and executed the little kid. Despite the horror of the situation this is what would be colloquially termed a "good shoot" and officers faced no legal consequences.

Despite officer being 25th on the list of most dangerous professions falling below construction helper and farmer officers are trained as if they are going to war and equipped with many of the same toys. They are taught to prioritize preserving their lives over those they are supposed to protect.

Look up castle doctrine.

It's the laws that we have. Basically, if someone breaches your home, you're under no obligation to back down and if you respond with lethal force you have a lot of the benefit of the doubt, fear is implied in that situation. The police are treating it as if they were breaking in to one of their own homes, because if you or I did that, we'd get shot and killed. The only difference it that they have a legal document that allows it in that case, you have to serve that document though.

I had a coworker that lived on a street like "N 13th Avenue" and I guess there was some sort of crackhouse at "S 13th Avenue" one night the police served a no-know warrant, he was pissed and demanded to know what was going on, they shot his dog and killed his dog, he was shot in the hip and had permanent damage from it, his wife was marched out in cuffs half naked in-front of the neighborhood. When the dust settled the police realized they went to the wrong address. The police reached some sort of settlement with them, it never seemed remotely fair. (Think $700k in the mid-1990s) He was in his 50s when I worked with him, this happened in his late 30s or early 40s. He looked like he was 80 though, walked with a cane. He ultimately passed away at a fairly young age.

Positive reinforcement from Hollywood movies and TV shows.

Maybe 50 years ago Dirty Harry was an exaggeration but now you have several generations of wannabe cops, cops and their bosses who grew up watching those stereotypes.

Talk about shooting, how about shooting wearing a mask with no identifiable badge on then driving away in an unmarked car, and perhaps shooting more people who try to video you shooting people. Comparatively speaking there's nothing rotten in Denmark

because we have 500m guns in the country.. you can’t expect european style policing

i would follow that up with: Why do americans have so many cameras in their homes? not just afroman, but i see so many videos form surveilance cameras in living rooms etc, isn't that considered creepy?

Cops are trained as warriors now, and accultures to citizens being the enemy. Simply is now. Plus they statted getting all that cool military gear after the Cold War stockpiles were surplused over to them.

1. Unions - Police unions wield considerable financial and political power. They hold local governments hostage demanding higher worker protections for officers and larger pensions and benefits. - To offset these higher costs, departments have been mandated to become "revenue sources" by collecting more tickets, arresting more peoples, etc. --> The affected peoples are usually the ones of least advantage, illegal immigrants, low income, and others who are unlikely to be able to afford a defense. - Higher union protections proctect bad cops, who in many cases are simply repremanded or move to another town, different department. In many cases after committing capital crimes. 2. Recruiting - Previously police were recrutied from local communities and for their amicability, ability to defuse situations/work within the community as a member. Now increasingly military background, weapon training, or other prerequisites are sought; whereby the purpose of these trainings is to kill other people not diffuse situations. 3. Media Influences - U.S. media is extremely culpable of painting all police officers as killers and mobsters. This is a very small minority. 4. Law Enforcement Support Office - The D.O.D. began a program of distributing military hardware to police departments across the U.S. nearly for free. Causing absolutely ludicrous scenes of tiny police departments having armoured vehicles and drones.

A shady confidential informant lied and told the police that the house was a kidnapper's den with people chained up in the basement. The subsequent bad behavior of the police after they realized they were wrong prompted the drama to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y

This is the video in question, police again falling trap to the Streisand effect.

Yes, but not limited to just that one. https://www.youtube.com/@ogafroman/videos

He also has other videos where he calls one of them a pedofile, questioning their gender (Licc'm low lisa) and more.

This all feels extremely mild next to what these people did to Afroman.

I think you're confusing gender and sexual orientation. He's calling her a lesbian

No, I'm not. He also posted about her deep voice and people should check what genitals she really has.

> pedofile

apparently, the deputy in question has a brother who was a deputy as well but was fired and charged with a sexual misdemeanor against minors.

Afroman also said he steals money during traffic stops and he was accused of that multiple times.

Of course that's not bulletproof evidence but a reasonable person might assume these rumours are not completely unfounded

EDIT: also the deputy of course didn't steal the money. He miscounted - when seizing the money he put 4630$ in the envelope but wrote 5000$ on it (which is the amount Afroman thought he had there)

> but a reasonable person might assume these rumours to be true

From all the claims Afroman made, it seems the cop sued because of the whole "He claimed he had sex with my wife, which reflects poorly on me", presumably because he only has a chance to win the suit if there is actual lies. The same video seems to have texts about how he crashed into civilians, stealing pills/money and more, but none of that was brought up in the suit, only the cheating part.

We are, of course, not privy to the jury's reasoning unless they choose to divulge it.

Which is unfortunate, because we may never know if they concluded "Given who you've demonstrated yourself to be, your wife is justified in seeking other lovers whether or not this allegation is true" or if there were other factors involved.

Although funnily enough, when one of the questioned about if his wife had an affair with afroman he was like "I dunno". If he doesn't know it's a lie, kinda defeats the point of the defamation suit

To be fair, this raises an interesting question of epistemology. Can any man know for sure that his wife has never had sex with Afroman? It's almost always possible, however unlikely. One can and probably should trust that his wife hasn't had sex with Afroman, but it's rarely possible to be absolutely certain.

"Of course?"

Where is that coming from?

Do you seriously not believe (well, know) that sadly, many cops do this ALL THE TIME?

I thought it was big time defamation risk for Afroman to call him a pedofile.. but maybe the cop is afraid of discovery in this case..

This might be peak Streisand effect.

Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.

If they never did the raid in the first place, no music video, no "embarrassment". They could have cut their losses, and not made a big deal about it and probably way less people (including myself) would have ever heard about it.

Instead they decided to sue, which made even bigger news. Here they could again have chosen "You know what, maybe this is counter-productive, lets settle/cancel it", and again probably people would have cared way less about it.

Instead, they go to court, make a bunch of exaggerated and outrageous claims, one officer apparently cried as well, all in a public court room that is being recorded, again making it a bigger thing.

Finally, Afroman wins the case, leading to this now seemingly making international news, and the videos continue racking up views.

I know cops aren't known for being smart, but I have to wonder who made them act like this, don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not? Seems they almost purposefully and intentionally tried to help Afroman, since they basically made the "wrong move" at every chance they got.

> don't cops have lawyers who can inform them about what is a smart move vs not?

Generally, municipalities have at least some sort of attorney on retainer for this sort of thing.

Generally. I don't know if that's the case where he lives.

Either way, the police have to be smart enough to listen to that attorney, and have to be given a consequence for not doing so. If you can brush off everything as qualified immunity and say you were acting under color of law while a part of a union that would raise absolute hell for any sort of corrective action taken against you, you might not be introduced to said consequence.

I have no evidence besides my own experience, but I think that the "back the blue" mentality might skew their support staff's objectivity a bit. Especially in smaller cities and towns where cops aren't just law enforcement, they are foundational pillars of morality and governance. The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.

> The point I hope I'm making is that they are getting bad advice not because they are stupid, or the people around them are, but rather because it's inevitable due to complex social and psychological reasons.

Which basically boils down to when the men with the guns and the violence (or their string pullers) set down a dumb path nobody is going to say "that's fucking stupid, you're stupid, good luck with that". It's gonna be a bunch of tepid "well the odds are long but here's how you could prevail" type criticism that lets them think their path of action is fine right up until it hits reality.

This. The cops don't care if they "look bad" because looking bad doesn't cost them anything. They don't lose any money. The populace is no more entitled to resist them so their jobs are no harder, their KPIs are not imperiled. Etc. etc. At best the municipality will scold them because the municipality cares very little, but not zero about police optics because it impacts their ability to do things that are unpopular.

This has curbed somewhat in small cities because of the insurance industry. Turns out that small towns need insurance to cover police malpractice, and those insurers don't like high-risk or overly aggressive police tactics. Turns out the police can be reasonable, if only they are even slightly accountable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

AIUI they sued him in their personal capacities, not as the police department. Any taxpayer funded lawyer to defend the PD from such a thing would presumably not be authorized to work a civil suit for a person who happened to be employed by his client.

>I know cops aren't known for being smart

Even worse. Police departments can actively reject you for being smart.

https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...

(granted this is a one off case, but it is astonishing and speaks to the larger issue)

I suspect it was less about the legal merits and more about punishing (whether or not they won) through the lawsuit itself.

"The process is the punishment"

This may be true in many cases.

In this case however the story currently is two times(!) on the front page of haackernews (which isn't a music celebrity gossip site), bringing a musician into spotlight who's career was far from its peak. Hardly any better Marketing campaign one could imagine.

That was what I was thinking at first too, but if I was sitting on their side, my mind would still go for "Wait, if we sue him, won't this make the news and make things better for him?" immediately, rather than "Yeah, this will suck for him". I'm not sure how they thought this would be bad for him, legal costs?

You're assuming a rational, reasoned process, rather than an instinctive punishment of a perceived status challenge.

When you observe someone acting in a way that seems obviously against their self-interest, it is always worth considering the possibility that there's some interest you don't understand...but it's also worth considering the possibility that they're doing a bad job of considering their own interests.

This is an event that took course over 3 years! I could understand the initial actions, statements and whatnot from the department to maybe be instinctual and emotional reaction to events/messages, but during these 3 years, at least one of them must have had some still time to reflect on what they're doing.

It's very easy to double down and reinforce your own past thinking rather than re-examining it. It's also very easy to "play a role", even as consequences play out; "reasoning" like "I will do X, then they will do Y which I don't want", rather than stepping back and thinking "if I do X, Y is likely to happen, I don't want Y to happen, so what should I do differently".

They assumed they were going to win, and thus enact punishment for questioning their authority.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have already spent money in anticipation of a favorable judgement. Cops are largely immune from facing negative consequences so it was probably an incredible shock to lose.

Which is funny because they still don't get negative consequences. Outside of thr continuation of social shaming. This happened before ANTI SLAPP laws were passed in Ohio, so they just don't get rewards for their deserved shaming.

They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars.

This is a key insight.

Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted").

If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected.

I don't think this is "better" for him really. He didn't win any money afaik. He spent a lot of time defending himself against something that could have easily gone in a different direction given a different jury.

It's publicity and positive public perception for a guy who had one hit song decades ago. This is good market for him.

Of course. Questioning their authority is a status challenge, and they're accustomed to having their status go unchallenged. Hence, punitive punishment.

One of many aspects of improving law enforcement would be pointedly training out and averting any perception of being "above" people. "Public servant" is a phrase for a reason.

Yea it’s as simple and stupid as that. This (black) peasant isn’t respecting our authority and higher status. If we let one slide then everyone is going to think we are equal to them. In their logic, they have to fight in court.

This is a common archetype when people get challenged (escalation of commitment), they effectively double down. I don't necessarily think it was racially motivated (but also don't doubt that it could have been).

American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around.

And there is some evidence that the institutions themselves recognize this (or they did, until we elected an openly-corrupt white supremacist to the highest office): https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/us-doj-res...

> American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated

the history of the United States is a collection of States and territories, forming under very different legal conditions over 100+ years or so.. that blanket statement is without context or detail aka insufficient.

Hard to give an entire 8th grade history curriculum in this setting. So thars an exercise left to the reader.

ok - then most 9th graders would know that slavery was explicitly illegal in many US States from the day before they were founded.. Race-based slavery is not at all unique to the USA. Only people who do not know history think otherwise.. So this commentor a)does not know 9th grade level US history, and b) does not know high school level world history.

yes agree - education is an exercise for the reader.. you have to actually read something to learn from books.

You had a week to deliberate and digest this thread, and your retort shows you do not know what prima facie is.

And yes, slavery is not an American invention. But this topic is about American culture in regards to police and how they harass people (with a bias towards minorities) in "legal ways".

Again, hard to cover all the subtleties in HN. Research Jim Crow laws as a starting point for research.

Joe Biden left office Jan 20, 2025.

> don't necessarily think it was racially motivated

Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend.

And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared.

If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable.

There’s a name for that, SLAPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Many states in the US have laws to try to limit them by making them easier to dismiss etc.

Yeah, the only reason I'm not quite sure SLAPP is right is that he's a fairly prominent and well-off figure and they're a pretty small department. So I guess it's an attempted SLAPP suit, but they aimed too high (poor aim not being unfamiliar to cops).

Cops only know how to do one thing: escalate the situation.

Even when it doesn't make sense too. Like suing afroman. Like shooting blindly through a house like they did when they killed Breonna Taylor. Like the time they shot Charles Kinsey who was laying on the ground with his hands in the air. Like the deadly game of Simon Says they like to play. Like any of the millions of examples where they shoot someone who was submitting and defenseless.

Millions?

That's... A very big number.

Counting from the dawns of the various police forces in the country maybe? Impossible to know, but even then...

Hyperbole illustrates the point pretty well though

Billed to the public, too.

Adams County paid for their civil suit???

> Foreman was sued by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office

I presume this isn't coming out of the officers' paychecks....

I think that's just sloppy tabloid reporting. The actual lawsuit is from 7 individuals:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23721379/afroman-comp...

> way less people (including myself) would have never heard about it

I think the never here is a typo.

Thanks, `(subs "never" 1)` been applied now!

They would have individually gotten lots of money in compensation if they would have won. So maybe the motives on their side are a bit more materialistic.

If I were in a gang such that I routinely committed theft and violence without consequence from the government, I'd probably have internalized that I am superior to the plebs. So I would expect what is obviously SLAPP to actually come out in my favor.

> Also probably a rare case where there are a few Streisand effect's all packed together, where the cops at each step made it worse for themselves.

It is not even that rare; some cases covered by Audit the Audit or Lackluster (same guy), or the civil lawyer. The amount of incompetence among many cops is surprising. They really literally don't even know the law or constitution. Just about anyone is hired. Quality standards are mega-low.

I hope he makes another song with additional material from the court case.

His instagram has daily updates from the court case.

US Police are trained such that their first impression in any situation is to see how people are reacting to their authority, and if it's not acquiesced to go on high alert.

It's not that they couldn't understand; It's that it's a faux pas to question this way of thinking so nobody does.

Play that out long enough and you get clown shows like these.

Mega-streisand effect ... they stacked together so many of em

I hope they appeal this case just to stack together one more humiliation.

Tin foil hat version is that they’re looking for a payday where they can and if this didn’t work they can always check whether the police department failed them as an employer.

If the police possessed the self-control and critical thinking to not drag this whole thing into a lawsuit, I think the raid would likely have never happened in the first place.

I suspect that either this was some confidential informant who just reported false claims about Afroman and the police used it to get a warrant. Or the whole department is just corrupt and make up stuff to get a warrant in order to raid his house hoping to forfeiture his money.

They also claimed that they're received hundreds of calls one day, with violent threats from some anonymous individual, and when they tried to track the number, it didn't work, "the numbers didn't actually exists" or something like that, and there is no way of proving the calls actually happened, except for the call log at their police station.

So yes, there was an informant who was cited as the reason for the warrant, but the credibility is questionable. The informant referenced a basement that county records would show should not have existed - presumably the SWAT-like team doing the raid didn't bother to consult building plans for any planning, because that would have cast all the testimony into doubt.

This part I've heard from social media sources and haven't seen in reputable documents, but some of Afroman's claims about the police officers and their history of sexual abuse is apparently based on claims from the same informant that were never investigated.

The whole thing stinks and I'm glad attention has been thrown on that department.

In my view it's because the city or locality which those cops protect has been remiss, the community has been remiss in making sure that their police actually police in the way that the community wants them to police.

So obviously the community is getting exactly what it deserves by having its police force be legally liable for incompetent malfeasance behavior. Ultimately it will cost the community, Afroman himself, in tax used to fund the police, And then route that money back to afroman and his attorney for his legal fees.

An embarrassment. Humiliation of the community. Reinforcement and debasement of the community. Suppressed business attractiveness of the community for its plain lack of oversight.

I'm not saying that the public has no control over the police, but it does often feel like that.

> I know cops aren't known for being smart

Not only aren't they known for being smart, but they're known for explicitly filtering out smart people.

The 2nd court of appeals ruled in favor of a city (New London, Connecticut) which rejects police applicants for having too high a score on intelligence tests.

See: https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...

See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

I had never even heard of Afroman until 3 days ago when I saw some lawyers livestream the trial on YouTube. The whole thing seemed so bizarre and I was surprised why the case wasn't even summary dismissed by the judge in the first place.

Now Afroman has even more material to make YouTube videos of and humiliate these cops for eternity.

You forgot that they stole his money. When he went to get the cash, it was $400 short. They blamed a counting error, but it was supposedly in a sealed evidence bag, so how did it escape?

That generated a whole slew of extra stories, because it elevated the whole thing to a deliberate crime.

here appears to be his celebration of his victory, pretty catchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM8Ee6pcXvQ

> here appears to be his celebration of his victory

No, that video seems to be from 4 days ago, the verdict of the jury came yesterday.

even more amazing then

So, in the music video, the cops pretty clearly steal something (probably money, as alleged), and attempt to destroy evidence.

They’re facing charges too, right?

Right?

Yes and as a result they will give taxpayer money in a deal and, officer will be moved to nearby county.

Or just promoted. https://www.13abc.com/2026/03/18/toledo-police-promote-lieut...

No, no way they could have known stealing money and destroying evidence is illegal. So the Post-It note on the old court case gives them qualified (absolute) immunity.

Almost too good to be true. They didn't find large quantities of weed, and afroman had cameras set up and caught it on camera. I mean, talk about landing with your bum in the butter. His career just caught a major reboot.

Love the morons wearing desert/forest camo to an urban job. GI Joe cosplayers.

It's worth it for a spin at millionaire roulette.

They tell us over and over again that we should have no expectation of privacy or not being filmed in public. Well, IMO they should not have any expectation of privacy or not being filmed when on private property and conducting the work _that we pay for_. They work for us.

> They work for us.

Ooh sweet summer child.

well, to be fair, there are a higher-than-average number of business owners on here, so they really might work for them

Only insofar as those business interests align with the government's interests.

The police get paid by and do the bidding of the government. They work for the government.

While you can screech about the degree of overlap between government interests and big business interests, and it absolutely is something worth screeching about, acting as though they are one in the same is counterproductive to understanding either.

yes.

It is also worth noting that in some cases, government and business owners have diametrically opposed interests - namely governments can nationalize companies (and if I'm not mistaken, some governments, like the Nazis, did, or would use the threat of nationalization to make business owners do their bidding with no regard for the interest of the business owner)

Cynicism is very cooler-than-thou, but it's not because we don't know better.

It's because we do know how the system fails, and holding power accountable to those high aspirations is the only thing that pushes back the equilibrium.

It's logistically a fact. Their paycheck comes from taxpayers. If you believe they're doing a bad job it's unrelated.

er... if you'll excuse me confirming the "HN is the 'well actually capital of the internet' stereotype"...

If you look throughout history, you'll see that before the advent of what we'd call 'modern states', most people who got their paycheck from 'taxpayers' did not see themselves as working for said 'taxpayers'.

Example: Pharaonic Egypt. Alexander's Empire, Bourbon France, Tsarist Russia, or more generally any kingdom, empire or any sort of duchy/earldom/county/etc where you have someone (the King, Tsar, Emperor, Duke, etc), whose job it is to lord over the peasants and take a cut of their work, not because they are an elected public servant doing the will of The People, but because they believe God Almighty has decreed that living off the wealth of others, and occasionally wasting large amounts of that wealth on building palaces or waging costly wars is what they were born to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings

as such, if you view the modern state as "basically an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy", then the police are not in fact working for 'Joe Taxpayer', but are just playing the same role that medival knights played for the Kings of France - they are the armed force of the extractive state, whose job it is to keep the peasants in line via violence so that they can continue to live off the fruits of peasant labor.

I understand what you're saying, but I was speaking in the ideal or purpose, rather than the defacto/pragmatic.

That is not just your opinion, that is the opinion of multiple United States Court of Appeals circuits in many many cases, and by its declining to overturn these cases, that is also the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. The United States is a common law country, so really what that means is that your opinion is actually not an opinion at all; you have simply stated the established law of the land.

and I imagine that if the INVERSE of this case had come up, the police suing for defamation would have been protected by qualified immunity so no lawsuit would have been possible.

The police being able to leverage civil law against citizens to control their behavior in ways that citizens cannot leverage against cannot to comment on the abuse of power is entirely unacceptable no matter what our laws and judiciary chose to allow.

That is, in fact, what the law says and what the courts have agreed with multiple times.

> They work for us.

Who are you trying to kid? Sorry this obviously got under my skin a bit, but it is standing legal doctrine that the police don't even have to protect us. Work for us? They extort money from municipalities all over the nation and call it a "budget". They straight up steal from us through "civil forfeiture". They are assumed innocent in court, even when demonstrably guilty of breaking our laws. They most certainly do not "work for us" unless you specifically are one of the 0.01%

Edit: I see this is discussed further down. I absolutely get the point being made, I just cannot let it slide. Enough internet for today.

It gives me immeasurable delight seeing afroman at the top of HN.

Love me some freedom, sweet soulful music, and pie in the face of bad cops.

Dang/Tom, please don't downrank this. America needs this win.

I think this all started with cake in the face of a cop not pie!

Lemon pound cake you say?

I love the Afroman story so much. Everything about it.

It does more to expose just how incompetent, entitled and corrupt the average cop really is, something I wish was better known. The cops who brought this suit are basically the biggest crybabies, are too dumb to realize it and too entitled to realize that others wouldn't see it that way. It's fantastic.

Compare this to policing in Japan [1]:

> Koban cops go to extraordinary lengths to learn their beats. They're required to regularly visit every business and household in their districts twice a year, ostensibly to hand out anti-crime flyers or ask about their security cameras. The owner of a coffee shop told Craft, "With Officer Sota, we can say what's on our mind. He's really like a neighbor. Instead of dialing emergency when we need help, we just call him."

American cops are a gang, by and large.

Cops have absolutely massive budgets, from small towns to big cities. Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walking-the-beat-in-japan-a-hea...

> Let's not forget Uvalde, where the police department budget was ~40% of the city budget and it resulted in 19 cops standing outside scared while one shooter kept shooting literal children for an hour. Because they were scared.

Not only did they not stop the shooter, but they actively prevented parents—who were willing to risk their lives—from intervening. They didn't just not help, they proactively ran interference for the shooter.

Uvalde should’ve been the nail in the coffin for the thin blue liners. Turns out, not only do they not have a problem with cops murdering black people, they also have no problem with them standing by while their own kids are shot inside a school.

Hell of a death cult this country has turned into.

Uvalde was the moment my hopes for the future of this country died. The parents there voted to reelect the same people who stood around and let a solitary madman murder their children just a little while later.

To be fair, OK is rock bottom in things like literacy rankings and likely income as well. Something like that would not have gone over will in New Jersey. US is a patchwork quilt of very different places.

I wasn't gonna run from the cops...

Pretty funny, worth seeing at least once to be able to reference it at appropriate times.

Having had my house raided, I love this. Police incompetence should be exposed at all opportunities with the hope that it makes some small amount of difference to future competence.

Hoping it wasn't the SWAT guys. Those guys go hard and everyone is a meth terrorist until zip tied on the floor and proven otherwise. They also tend to shoot your dog. =(

Judging by the videos, they look like the typical American "deputy" that wouldn't even pass the fitness tests in other countries, which probably means it's easier to escape, but also that they are more trigger-happy.

Mime was in Australia, so much lower chance of violence, more polite.

The incompetence was:

1. The entire suspicion was based on an IP address

2. They did no background investigation for potential counter evidence - they didn't even know to expect children in the house (school aged children that have been attending public school for at least 5 years each at that point).

3. As a result of the above, one of my kids was somewhat traumatised by being woken up with a police officer in her room

7 cops. They called in two more because I had so much computer hardware, so 9 cops altogether for an entire morning.

8 months later I get told I can pick up my (~$10k worth of) gear that they took. No case to answer.

Should never have made it to a warrant. Useless, lazy, waste of a lot of resources. And creates an entire extended family with significantly diminished respect for, and increased suspicion of, the police force as a whole...

... you know, that whole erosion of trust in the system that's playing out writ large right now.

> In one of the music videos, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” surveillance footage shows officers swinging open a gate, kicking down a door, and roaming armed around a living room and a kitchen.

>The other, “Lemon Pound Cake,” shows one of the officers, gun in hand, pausing briefly in Mr. Foreman’s kitchen by a cake inside a glass cloche. “It made the sheriff want to put down his gun and cut him a slice,” Mr. Foreman sings in the song.

The man has a sense of humor.

Seems like the Streisand effect to me. Suing him over this calls attention to the inappropriateness of police raiding his house. I hadn't heard this story and now I took away from it some embarrassing stories about the cops.

He's also a savvy businessman, this will be great for his career

Unfortunately that might be all he gets out of it. He apparently lost the civil suit for damages to his house and the stolen property.

The lemon pound cake first features in the first video, "Will You Help Me Repair My Door" and seems to have become popular (a chubby sheriff deputy glancing at a lemon pound cake, gun in hand is a viral godsend!) so he made that second video about it [1] and it completely took off. I have watched videos outside the courthouse after the verdict and supporters were even handing free lemon pound cakes [2]. Has the apple pie got competition?

[1] https://youtu.be/9xxK5yyecRo?si=rnz34IxCeFPRKQ4M

[2] https://youtu.be/pSEOiu0RvLk?si=xx2ZrN1rzEg3n1Ve

>[2]>"I've handed out about 120 pieces of lemoncake today — this last piece is for you [to reporter]."

What a fantastic collection of Americans supporting each other.

#FragileBlueLine

"Mr. Foreman was not at home during the 2002 police raid, but a security camera system and his wife, using her cellphone, recorded the “faces and bodies” of the officers while they were on the property, according to the lawsuit"

"2002" New York Times, everyone.

Props to afroman for his perfect demeanor/attitude during all this.

2022. I'm not sure phones recorded useful video in 2002.

Right. It’s a little hard to parse but they’re saying “The NYT has a typo”

And what he's implying. "The NYT has a typo, it's all garbage!"

They're implying "An establishment calling itself a 'newspaper of record' can be expected to have high standards, such as correctly reporting dates, and I'll hold them to that"

If you can spot a typo in the first few seconds of reading a piece, so can the editor and sub-editor before it's published.

Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed.

I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."

Youd expect them to have a checklist too though.

Newspapers used to have copyeditors for this kind of thing. I thought NYT still did.

They do and yet they also can make errors

That's why all news stories are supposed to be reviewed before publication by a second person

The process these days is more like publish then do editorial review. See it on major outlets all the time - break the story as early as possible, get the eyeballs and ad revenue, then get it cleaned up for posterity.

Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”

Sony Ericsson P800 from 2002 had 640×480 videos captured from its camera :) While I wouldn't claim the quality is great, you could tell more or less what was going on.

There used to be a Twitter account that pointed out typos like this—I think exclusively—in the NYT.

Surprised they didn't write 2ÖÖ2, knowing the Times' predilections

You're thinking of the New Yorker, not the New York Times.

cries in west coaster

that's not how it works, you only need one umlaut

Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.

Or claiming you don't know what crime your brother was charged with that led him to resign from the same police department.

The ACLU called it a SLAPP lawsuit. If true, they probably didn't care if they won or not.

That said, going on stand when your opponent has proven they can and will use your words and actions against you in the court of public opinion is a... bold strategy.

Honestly it was pretty ballsy of Afroman to release songs during the trial (which did come up, but I think they sort of ignored due to some law that changed in 2024?)

>Going on the stand and stating that you "don't know" whether the allegedly defamatory statements you are suing over are true or not is a... bold legal strategy.

if the statement is true, that's a defense against defamation.

if the statement is not believable, that is also a defense against defamation.

it actually was legal strategy designed to dance around the legal strategy behind those questions being asked, taking the air out of your insult

I think comment was alleging perjury.

They do know the statement is true (and this is provable). Pretending like they "don't know" is a lie under oath.

That wasn't actually what I was implying. Just that if the plaintiff isn't even willing to assert that the statements were false, what are you wasting the court's time for?

  > He falsely claimed my wife is cheating on me!
  > So you assert that your wife didn't cheat on you?
  > No.
  > ???

Technically, the burden of proof is on the defendant.

Are you saying you believe the cop who said, under oath, he "doesn't know" whether his wife could be having an affair with afroman chose to do that as part of a deliberate legal strategy? And that you think this casts him in a more positive light than merely being clueless?

I highly recommend people watch video from the trial--specifically the officer testimonies. It's absurd this lawsuit was even fit for trial.

Do you have a link? There are plenty of snippets that are easy to find, is there one canonical full video?

Here's a playlist that includes them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcopJNj12opkoEDaj5lwP...

With some strange commentary, ended up watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ozZIWy7OWk from that playlist and I'm not sure it's AI or what's going on, at one point she said Afroman called one of the police officers a "PDF" which is the first time I heard, doesn't seem Afroman actually said something like that, and I also don't understand at all what's that's supposed to mean. Doesn't seem to be a typo either?

"PDF" is a zoomer euphemism for "pedophile".

Funnily, this started because their trying to avoid perceived insta shadow banning.

Yes, this sort of thing has been a plague against the English language for a few years now, responsible for such ugly constructions as "to unalive".

(I understand and respect the linguists who would maintain a descriptivist view of this sort of thing, but I'm not a linguist and I'm not required to suspend my aesthetic opinions whenever an ugly fashion rears its head.)

> It's absurd this lawsuit was even fit for trial

Is it just me or did the judge seemed biased towards the cops? He also dismissed Afroman's counter-suit.

Unfortunately, cops have the right to break down your door if the warrant warrants it--like having a sex dungeon.

"..raid my house and then get pissed, because the dungeon don't exist.."

Bars.

That guy is like a court jester of old unleashed onto an unsuspecting, (and corrupt), 21st century steward class.

The bits I watched were so captivating I had to take them off, otherwise I wouldn't be getting anything done this afternoon.

Honestly, someone could adapt it to a script and run it in a live theater.

Now I know what I'm watching tonight!

Those cops embarrassed themselves. Especially that one lady that was faux crying. Shameful behavior from the largest gang in the US.

That didn't seem like faux crying. Making fun of her in that way is the hardest to defend IMO, since it had nothing to do with her job performance or relevant character attributes. (E.g. how the other officer had been accused of stealing before, or had a brother resign from the force after being charged with a crime involving a minor).

That said, I don't disagree with outcome.

Aren't cops by default public figures? They're the de facto face of the police for the ordinary citizen, not sure they should be the type of individual who cries because someone calls them fat, lesbian or whatever. These people have the legal right to essentially execute you in public, I think we should set the bar a bit higher on who should be allowed to be a police officer in the first place.

I was raised by LEOs. My mother and all four of her husbands were career long LEOs in the South.

Of course this is just based on my anecdotes, but LEOs have some of the thinnest skin imaginable. The first time I fought a grown man was when I was 13 and I had to fight my mother's fourth husband. He was a Deputy Sheriff and combat veteran and that dude had the emotional strength of a 12 year old girl who didn't get asked to the winter dance.

It seems the job selects for those types. I suppose people interested in law enforcement / justice that aren't that way either end up as lawyers or working for the FBI or something.

If you don't have any kind of marketable skills yet want to make a decent living with plenty of benefits, becoming a LEO is the easiest choice for most people.

Or if you don't have any marketable skills yet have a spouse that has a job with health benefits, you can become a real estate agent.

Those two career paths seem to be the most chosen for almost all of the 'not so bright' folks I grew up with.

Other way around, right? Those types select that job. You're weak but you want to appear powerful, so...

It's a use it or lose it skill. When you carry a badge and gun around and can bark orders at people all day and they have to comply or face the infinite violence you can summon with your radio your skin will grow thin over time.

Power corrupts, or some half baked version of that.

>My mother and all four of her husbands were career long LEOs

how many of them physically abused her? the stats say 3 out of 4 did.

Only one abused her that I’m aware of, but I know she abused two of her husbands. She was a very violent lady.

She shot my biological father when I was 14 months old.

This is a career that quite literally selects for "not too smart" [1]

1 - https://www.wirthlawoffice.com/tulsa-attorney-blog/2013/07/c...

These people carry guns and can kill you on the street and they can't take getting called some bad names?

Yes, exactly. Try calling a cop a “pig” to their face. Or breaking up with a cop. Or just say no to something they’re asking you to do.

“Not all cops” and all that, but enough of them are like that that you have to be really careful how you engage with them.

> Try calling a cop a “pig” to their face.

At least where I live in Europe you aren't allowed to insult people and you can get fined for it. Be it a police officer or a any other person.

I cannot imagine living in a place where I can't tell someone what I think of them once in a while.

You can tell them they are doing a shameful job or that you disagree with their actions or whatever.

You just can't _insult_ them like a 6 year old on a playground. Why is the ability to do so valuable to you?

The first thing you described is an insult.

No, an insult implies insolence, rudeness, condescension, insensitivity. You can communicate a dim view of someone without being rude.

> You can communicate a dim view of someone without being rude.

I would agree in theory, but whom is the judge of whether communicating that dim view is an insult or not?

It is viscerally against my cultural upbringing for the government to make illegal a verbal insult, it seems like an incredible overreach. I'm genuinely culture shocked hearing this. I'd be no more shocked hearing that it's illegal to dye one's hair.

Fyi, insults are illegal in the US, under certain conditions, under the fighting words doctrine.

being fined != physical, possibly fatal violence with body-cam turned off and irrevocable immunity

I do agree with you and the other comment in this vein. I have very little sympathy for these officers.

However, there are different situations. For example, I imagine this person is not very surprised or upset to be called "dyke" in a verbal altercation. That is different from sitting in a quiet courtroom, knowing it is being filmed, watching a popular video where your gender identity and expression is repeatedly insulted.

Let's say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it? We wouldn't even be having this conversation.

By all means, call cops pigs, liars, thieves, idiots. If you want to be racist, sexist, or call them pedophiles, I'll defend your right to do so but not be as sympathetic.

Otherwise we're just the hypocritical liberals as the right wingers accuse...

> say the officer was black, the defendant was white, and made a video with lots of racist stereotypes. Would we think that was funny and cool? Would we be surprised if the black man had a breakdown in the courtroom watching it?

This is very common in the US? Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show (Cross), which is to say the audience will be familiar with the material. Also explored in e.g. True Detective. No, the Black cop does not get to break down in court while being racially taunted. Either on TV or real life. This is expected by all to be a part of doing his job.

So? Even if the officer doesn't live up to our emotionally resilient ideal, it doesn't mean the stereotyped insults are any more acceptable.

And to the genesis of this thread, it doesn't mean I must believe the tears are fake.

I agree with you on the sentiment—I don't think it's cool to use racially charged terms or otherwise in degrading ways. That isn't to say my sympathy is lost. When you feel powerless you reach for power in any way that you can and trying to make someone feel bad for who they are is low-hanging fruit.

Serious question: how come the police have not paid for the damage they caused?

Qualified immunity.

which is double genius on afroman, because they forfeited qualified immunity to start this trial. now he can even sue further damages.

distrack as legal maneuver.

He is a seasoned professional at this. He was respected in the diss track game in his day, he definitely understands the boundaries of defamation. And what has long been known in rap in newspapers: even if you're right it's not worth it to be on the stand defending defamation. "It's average size your honor."

I'm going to keep this one... underqualified immunity :)

If the damaged party tries to sue the police for the damage they caused, the police can get the case instantly dismissed underqualified immunity.

Stealing things out of a person's fridge and eating it is not covered under qualified immunity.

Making up details of the incident doesn't help either. They didn't eat anything, a cop just did a double-take at the lemon pound cake, and Afroman wrote a song about how they wanted to eat it.

um it probably is. Wasn’t there a case a few years ago where a dispensary was raided and the cops stole marijuana, and got away with it due to QI.

Qualified immunity just protects the police, and other government officials personally. If there is grounds for a lawsuit then he could still sue the government that employs the police department.

I think in general, if it is a legit warrant, it is very difficult to win a lawsuit for damage. Though with that video, and how high profile this has been, he might be able to win something. though IANAL, and I'm just going off my gut.

The government has sovereign immunity which is why you usually have to sue the people involved rather than the government directly.

The government is sued all the time.

Police departments are sued constantly. Most major police departments even have dedicated divisions set up just to assess and respond to lawsuits. Oftentimes by just knocking on the door and handing over a check.

I didn't know about sovereign immunity, but I just looked it up and there are exceptions to it. I think this one in particular could fall under a civil rights violation.

People routinely get money from excessive force used by police officers, and I believe that does extend to property too.

Qualified immunity means it is almost impossible to sue the officers directly, which is why so many people have a problem with it. Not only do taxpayers have to pay for the actions of a bad police officer, the officer themself isn't held responsible for their actions.

On the other hand, you don't want officers afraid to engage with a dangerous situation because they might bankrupt their family if they do the wrong thing in the heat of the moment. It is a sticky situation, and before smartphones and body cameras there was no real way to know if an officer crossed the line. As technology improves, I expect there to be more personal accountability, while also allowing the officers enough leeway to do their jobs without hesitation.

The federal government and a most state governments in the US have laws that waive or partially waive sovereign immunity for tort claims against the government.

This raid was in Ohio. Here's their immunity waiver: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2743.02

Here's a page that links to a PDF with a table given cites and details for all 50 states: https://www.mwl-law.com/resources/sovereign-immunity-tort-li...

But these police don't work for the state government. They worked for the Adams County government. The immunity waiver you linked explicitly only applies to the state government.

> (A)(1) The state hereby waives its immunity from liability,

and then "state" is defined in https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2743.01

> (A) "State" means the state of Ohio, including, but not limited to, the general assembly, the supreme court, the offices of all elected state officers, and all departments, boards, offices, commissions, agencies, institutions, and other instrumentalities of the state. "State" does not include political subdivisions.

> (B) "Political subdivisions" means municipal corporations, townships, counties, school districts, and all other bodies corporate and politic responsible for governmental activities only in geographic areas smaller than that of the state to which the sovereign immunity of the state attaches.

Additionally even if the officers did work for the state, the immunity waiver still would not apply to the action of breaking down a door while executing a search warrant.

> (3)(a) Except as provided in division (A)(3)(b) of this section, the state is immune from liability in any civil action or proceeding involving the performance or nonperformance of a public duty

and Ohio state law specifically authorizes breaking down doors to execute search warrants so this action would be one "involving the performance or nonperformance of a public duty"

> (A) When making an arrest or executing an arrest warrant or summons in lieu of an arrest warrant, or when executing a search warrant, the peace officer, law enforcement officer, or other authorized individual making the arrest or executing the warrant or summons may break down an outer or inner door or window of a dwelling house or other building

https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2935.12

They chose not to do so. And the courts are no help, because generally speaking, you can't sue the government unless there's a specific law allowing you to do so (sovereign immunity). The police as individuals are generally immune from civil suits unless they violated some clearly established right (qualified immunity).

Eh? This falls under tort law for damages caused by the government.

The laws that provide a right of action against the government generally don’t cover damages caused by police in the lawful exercise of their duties.

So yeah, sovereign immunity.

Even though you would think that'd be a taking for public use.

Perhaps it should be, but the courts have not agreed. See Pena v. Los Angeles for an example of an appellate case that rejected this argument. It found that a "police power" exception to the takings clause applies in such cases.

Serious answer: cops are not accountable for their behavior, in the vast majority of cases.

They’re not liable to repair damage incurred from a raid or any other action. If the fire department has to chop your door open with an axe to gain entry to your home, they don’t pay for that either, you do.

If the police execute a search warrant on your home and kill your pet or a person, guess who is responsible for cleaning up the blood and mess? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the police.

There's even a legal case where police took a backhoe to a building and tore one wall completely out instead of negotiating during a hostage situation. The homeowner was unable to get compensation for their destroyed home.

His mistake was stopping when the lawsuit failed. Anyone can rent a backhoe. People forget that there is also a court of public opinion you can appeal to.

Are you suggesting a killdozer v2? I'm not sure what you're implying.

Just tear the wall off a relevant party's house and then return it to the rental place.

The thing I don't understand is why it isn't a felony for the police the disable the surveillance cameras! That alone should be a crime. I get that you need search warrants and protections, but you shouldn't be able to suppress the evidence of your work, since it's common for police to steal, plant evidence, or destroy property.

It is a crime, obviously. Things don't magically become crimes depending on the employer of the perpetrator - that's the whole point of "a nation of laws and not of men."

It's legal for you to arrest someone if you see them commit a felony. It's legal for you to arrest someone under a warrant if you are deputized by a Sheriff of the court (almost never happens, but legal). It's not legal for you, whether you are employed at a police agency or not, to vandalize someone's camera.

> "On March 14, 2023, seven Adams County police officers sued Foreman, alleging that his use of the video of the raid invaded their privacy."

THEIR privacy?!?!? Their privacy ... in his home? This is the most ridiculous claim I have ever heard.

The term I learned for this yesterday is “crybully”.

This is not some footage issue, there apparently was a smear campaign online.

FTFA:

> After making the music video, Foreman allegedly continued putting up social media posts with names of the officers involved, the lawsuit states.

> Several of the posts allegedly falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money” and were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,” according to the suit.

> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,” that Officer Brian Newman “used to do hard drugs” before “snitching” on his friends, and that Officer Lisa Phillips is “biologically male,” according to the lawsuit.

> falsely claimed that the cops “stole my money”

That appears to have happened; they're claiming it was a miscount.

> were “criminals disguised as law enforcement,”

Seems fair. (And opinion, which can't be defamation.)

> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,”

Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.

I'd note that the jury found Afroman not liable on all these.

> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,”

> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.

Interesting, is there a source or some data you’re aware of that suggests that it’s a statistically safe assumption?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

Where in this article does it suggest that it’s a statistically safe assumption that most cops are white supremacists?

Behold, the sea lion in its native habitat.

It's one data point in a pretty large body of evidence; the FBI thinks they're infiltrating law enforcement in a widespread fashion.

A fascinating study from Stanford looked at police traffic stops nationally around the daylight savings switch (as a natural experimental control) and found pretty hard evidence cops treat black drivers very differently during the day (i.e. when they can see their skin color).

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...

Additional aspect of this: "you're a white supremacist" is almost certainly a First Amendment protected statement of opinion that can't be defamatory.

Warnings going back to 2006:

* https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/24350/ocr

You understand that white supremacist groups existing as cops doesn't make the majority of cops white supremacists, right?

I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal.

> I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal.

Oh dear. I have bad news about cops.

Which is, apparently, a strategy you wholly endorse.

People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state to detain, arrest, and potentially deprive citizens of a free country of their life, liberty or property is asinine and shameful.

Cops want the power to do all this, do it incorrectly, be unable to be held accountable, and then cry like babies when someone makes videos and mocks them. He could have just sued them directly to recoup his financial losses from them destroying his house over a bs warrant but cops have qualified immunity. The justice system gives him no recourse. They sued him for videos meanwhile his countersuit was thrown out on this basis.

If you support the cops on this I see no reason why one should not conclude you "wholly endorse" the ongoing "law enforcement" assault on free Americans. What principles do you take the nation to be founded on? You realize red coats coming into people's homes under the color of the law is what instigated the war that bought this country its liberty 250 years ago? I fail to see how this is much different, armed goons with guns and badges invading private property that cannot be held accountable. No election he can take part in will reasonably solve this so he can sue in a timely manner, as the unelected justice system has unilaterally decided you cannot sue cops over this. This is anti-American. Go read the bill of rights and tell me it is consistent with the spirit of those hard fought liberties to support the cops on this. I hope if you actually endorse burdens of proof you will at least support local, state and federal representatives who will codify into law a "repeal" of qualified immunity so that cops who fail to meet that burden can be held personally accountable.

Note a case on that count would still need to prevail on the merits. That is how justice is supposed to work. Instead a carve out for law enforcement has been created where you can't even take them to court. Your case is going to get thrown out. The justice system should not be creating this special class of people, with great power and depriving them of the responsibilities common between neighbors in a free society. What they have done is really not unlike the British sending armed men into American cities to violate rights and then insisting they cannot be held accountable in colonial courts as a matter of principle. This is criminal. People should be able to sue police officers. If that makes the cost of waving guns in people's faces more expensive then so be it.

> People walking around with guns and badges should be held to the highest of standards. Suggesting an equivalence between the burden of proof on a hackernews commenter and individuals authorized by the state

Let's take a step back. OP, essentially, made a very basic logical error (actually not an error IMO, but a willfully misleading statement).

They said, "Statistically, [assuming a cop is a white supremacist] a pretty sensible assumption."

In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right. So it'd mean that greater than half of police are white supremacists. They then posted a link to support that statement which said that some white supremacist groups are instructing their members to join the police force. He's gone from the evidence of "some" white supremacist groups are telling "some" of their members among the police force to justify saying that it's a safe assumption to assume any officer is a white supremacist (greater than 50% chance for any random cop to be a white supremacist).

Considering that I strongly doubt the quantity of white supremacists that are members of white supremacist organizations in this county is even more than half of the amount of police officers, I very much doubt that the subset of individuals in the subset of organizations who were given this instruction and actually followed through on it comprises more than half of the police officers in the country.

To which I facetious said, "I'd hate to see someone use this kind of bad logic when deciding who is a criminal." Implying that, if the cops used the same logic on a neighborhood with criminals, it'd be sensible for them to assume every member of the neighborhood is a criminal. That point seemed to go over OPs head as he replied as if I wasn't making a facetious point and implied that cops do indeed do that. Presumably he thinks that's a bad thing when they do it but is perfectly reasonable for him to do.

I don't think anyone should be using faulty logic to make claims about groups of people.

> If you support the cops on this

I never said I did and, as such, the rest of this comment is not directed to me.

> In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right.

I assume I should buckle my seatbelt.

Not every car ride results in an accident. But enough do.

It's safe to assume you won't get in an accident.

You _should_ buckle your seatbelt anyway because it's low effort, high reward in the unlikely case you get in an accident.

> It's safe to assume you won't get in an accident.

If that were the case, I wouldn't need a seatbelt.

Indeed, your chances of needing a seatbelt for a particular car trip are very low but, over many trips, it becomes a safe assumption you'll be in an accident and, therefore, generally good policy to be prepared for that eventuality.

We can't on one side ask for people to not make judgment based on statistics and on the other side saying that making a shortcut based statistics is valid.

Won't someone think of those who falsely accuse someone of kidnapping when they get a similarly ridiculous accusation against them?

This is part of why we have juries. The letter of the law must be nullified sometimes in the interest of justice.

The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves [0]. It's well-documented [1]. We can try to argue whether modern policing carries that tradition, but case [2] after documented case [3] keeps bearing out more of the same. It's been the topic of research [4] and pop culture [5].

[0] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rodney-King

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/

[5] https://genius.com/123154

> The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves

I don't see how this supports the claim

You don't see how an organization founded to enforce a cornerstone of white supremacy may have a statistical likelihood of its members being white supremacists?

No, I don't think that this supports the claim that it's a safe assumption that any given cop is a white supremacist.

Not the claim made.

> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.

was the claim, ie. quite likely, tending toward more often than not.

Versus your phrasing that any given cop is

Your post is essential. No one is claiming 100% of cops are white supremacists. One is claiming that it's sensible to assume they are.

If 20% of cops were white supremacists, and I was a minority, it would be sensible to behave as if every encounter had a significant chance of being with someone is looking to ruin my day.

The majority do not need to be unsafe for me to feel unsafe around the community. You have to factor in the potential power they wield (to kill you or take your freedom or seize your assets), combined with the odds that one will do it because they have wrong headed ideas about race.

Is there evidence to support the claim that, more often than not, a given cop is a white supremacist?

> more often than not,

Again, that's _not_ the upthread claim made by somebody other than myself, a non-US read along.

Still, IIRC the US UCLA has written much on the matter, so perhaps start there if you're interested.

What has the UCLA written that agrees with this claim?

> They also falsely stated that the officers are “white supremacists,”

> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.

I've attempted to take your responses as made in good faith twice now, despite evidence to the contrary in other threads. I understand if this topic is uncomfortable for you, either because it challenges your world view or because it feels personally invalidating. It appears as though you're looking for one very specific statistic or logical vulnerability in what others are sharing to refute the overall claim. However, I can only lead you to water.

Sorry, just looking for evidence that supports the claim that was made. So far there isn’t any.

Pretty clear issues with this line of reasoning.

One, even if all police in the U.S. did start as slave patrols it is a textbook case of a genetic fallacy.

Two, your article discusses several origins of police forces in the US. In Boston it had nothing to do with slaves because Massachusetts was not a slave state when they created a police system in the 1830s. And since Afroman was raided in Ohio, also never a slave state, it does not make sense to carry over southern slave-catching history into modern police culture.

> In Boston it had nothing to do with slaves because Massachusetts was not a slave state when they created a police system in the 1830s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1793

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850

"It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate."

Boston's police department was founded in 1854.

> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838.

This is from your Time.com article.

Second, fugitive slave extradition was controversial in northern states and from your Wikipedia article several northern states even passed legislation to protect fugitive slaves.

And why would northern states spend their own tax dollars to fund police forces to capture slaves? It doesn’t make sense. They created police for public safety reasons in cities.

And even if none of that were true it still does not address the genetic fallacy. Just because some police forces started as slave patrols does not imply that all police today are inherently white supremacist.

Do you personally know any police officers? I do and, as a group, I've found them to be more racist than the general population. I don't know what the working definition of "white supremacists" is in this context but it doesn't make me blink.

This phenomenon happens with more than just police too—I've seen it happen with medical professionals, firefighters and EMTs as well.

0. Be a white person who has little to no interaction with non-white people in your day to day life.

1. Get a job where you interact with some of the dumbest people in the general public on the regular.

2. Some of those dumb people will invariably be, say, black. And you'll interact with way more black folks than the none you're use to interacting with.

3. Because you have no other association with that group your brain pattern matches and draws the connection.

4. Boom racism.

I find it hard to judge these people too hard because I haven't been "tested" in the same way. Like I want to believe I wouldn't fall down this pipeline but everyone says that.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the claim here is "majority of cops are white supremacists". Thats not the claim. The claim is that it is sensible to assume a cop is.

A very different bar. A minority of cops can be white supremacists and because of the power they wield it's still sensible to treat them like every interaction is with a a white supremacist. As an example, a cop can legally kill you in many cases (or deny you freedom or seize your assets). If you had, say, a 20% chance of encountering a cop who was a white supremacist it would be sensible to treat every interaction as if that were the case.

Consider how unevenly weighted the outcomes depending on whether you assume a cop is racist when factoring how sensible it is to assume they are.

Statistically speaking "murderer is black" is a sensible assumption in US [1], but I'd prefer it wouldn't be made

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The chance of a random black person being a murderer is substantially lower than the chance of a random cop being racist.

> Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption.

Also, you know, protected opinion.

It's not smears when it's (mostly) true or opinion.

Doesn't really matter since police officers are public officials. The bar for defaming a public official is actual malice, which is clearly not the case here. They need to prove that he deliberately said facts that he knew were false with the deliberate intention of harming them. It was also obviously a satirical song which further weakens the case. This is such a weak case it should have been thrown out before it ever reached trial.

Honestly, "actual malice" part probably the thing both parties here agree on existing. It's a series of diss tracks, they're inherently malicious.

You're just allowed to be maliciously right about things, if you like.

"Actual malice" is confusingly not about if the defendant was acting maliciously. It is specific legal jargon meaning that the defendant knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth made the false statements.

One of the songs claims he fucked one of the deputies' wives; I presume that, at least, fits it. (Unless it's true.)

It's a NY Post article. Expect some slant, and find a second opinion.

Civilians, in the middle of the forest: We want our privacy.

This flavor of police: You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place.

Afroman: Here’s a video of cops inside my home.

This flavor of police: Stop being mean!

I don't understand how they found nothing in the raid, wouldn't they normally bring drugs with them to plant? If they forgot those that's a whole new level of police incompetence.

You say that, but I’ve been watching a lot of those body cam channels over the past few years.

I remember one quite well, in which the police were raiding some suburban Texas home and decided to steal the guns and cocaine they found in it.

The kicker: They forgot to turn off their body cams while doing and discussing it.

I guess they assumed that a musician whose whole persona is built around weed would supply the evidence.

> Common enough to be a minor plot point in a current cop show...

You've reversed cause and effect. Cop shows don't base their plots on what is real, they base them on what people will believe is plausible.

> wouldn't they normally bring drugs with them to plant?

Why do you think they were so annoyed at all the cameras?

I was gonnna click the link, but then I got high.

I would’ve posted to say what I think, but I got high.

Can't be bothered to upvote, and I know why

Is the NY Post some kind of National Enquirer analogue? This article reads like it was written by a grade school child trying to emulate the voice of an villainous news reporter.

Yes, it's a right-wing tabloid. Our equivalent of the Daily Mail.

Yes, it's a pretty over the top paper. Feels like you're reading TMZ for stuff that didn't happen.

Yes. Here's an AP article:

https://apnews.com/article/afroman-police-raid-lawsuit-ohio-...

Thanks for sharing. Much better source.

Police, and government agents in general, should have no expectation of privacy when doing their job, period. If you have to hide your face then I don't trust you. And yes, that applies to all of ICE.

Interestingly enough this is not the first time cops have invaded a famous rapper's house and the rapper proceeded to make a music video out of the footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nfVWiXY3WY

Neighbors by J. Cole

Gotta say I love Afroman's choice of courtroom atire.

I made this joke in another thread, but: I keep imagining Afromans court getup as the formal attire for American civil lawyers. Like robes and wigs, suits n ‘fros.

I’ve had “lemon pound cake” stuck in my head all morning thanks to this

I've heard "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch, ooooh oooooh, uuh!" the entire day today after hearing the song yesterday, probably the most catchy one to come out of this whole story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AiuqQpB1U

My mind went to K&P rap confession skit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs

I haven’t found any information about what cause the police had, why a warrant was issued, etc.

I’m not suggesting suspicion has merit, but given all the idiocy I’m wondering what other forms of chicanery may have taken place to get a warrant.

Tip from a “confidential informant”, I believe I read somewhere.

From Afroman's BATTERAM HYMN OF THE POLICE WHISTLE BLOWER: https://youtu.be/HM8Ee6pcXvQ?t=190

Nah its just that simple. Racism is still alive and well. Don't overthink this.

Y'know, officers, if you'd shown up to his house after the raid and apologized and offered to buy the guy a new door of his choosing and the installation for it, we're probably not having this conversation.

They don't have the emotional intelligence for that.

They got what they wanted.

Afroman is the exception that proves the rule.

If you aren't a platinum-selling rap star they will abuse you without recourse.

Damn, that case took a long time to resolve. You know what they say about justice delayed...

That it's the only type of justice you can ever hope to get in the US, if any at all?

Those cops are the epitome of the term “cry bully”.

In case people missed it, here's the video that caused the lawsuit to get filed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y

Okay at first I was like this music is not my style, but the humor was so good.

Same. It was such low quality video and audio, but I stayed for the same reason you continue listening to a comedians story

I've only seen the clip where Afroman is escaping from that police lady zigzaging backwards, but that's enough for me.

How is it that a law enforcement officer can't keep up with a man in his 50s who isn't even trying to be the fastest?

Never thuoght i'd see Afroman at the top of the Hackernews articles haha

Makes me feel nostalgic for the 2000s.

Suing for invasion of privacy over a music video demonstrating how they invaded his privacy is wild!!

I know things are bad in the USA right now, but news like these show that you still have your basic rights. This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police. There have been some people abusing their freedom in recent times cough Kanye cough, but for every loud nazi there are ten more excellent people whose right to speak should not be infringed!

This wasn’t a 1A case, it was a civil defamation suit. He won because they failed to prove defamation, NOT because the judge threw out the lawsuit because of a violation of constitutional rights.

Separately: saying something shitty or unpopular that you disagree with isn’t someone abusing their rights to free expression. Expressing unpopular viewpoints that others consider abusive is exactly the point of such rights.

There’s a REALLY BIG reason it isn’t “freedom of expression, except for expressing racial hatred”, and it’s not because we like racism. Germany sometimes bans entire political parties that they declare unconstitutional. Now imagine that power in the hands of Trump. You can see what Putin did to Navalny for a preview.

Perhaps interesting here is that some of the things he said were definitely not defensible via "truth is an affirmative defense." But it's ultimately up to the jury, and they can also find him innocent because a reasonable person wouldn't be offended by outlandish accusations.

(Ultimately, though, they can find him innocent for any reason. If they decided he should walk because you can't legally offend cops, that's fine too.)

Truth is far from the only defense.

Opinion is not defamatory. Satire is not defamatory.

With public officials like police, even false factual statements are not defamatory unless you knew they were false and lied about it specifically to hurt them.

“walk” refers to criminal prosecution where the alternative is going to prison. This was a civil trial, he was not being prosecuted. The police, despite raiding his house, never charged him with a crime. He was not “found innocent” in a civil suit. He was innocent the whole time even if he lost this trial, it’s just a matter of monetary damage.

> Now imagine that power in the hands of Trump.

The Germans would argue such powers prevent the Trumps.

> Germany sometimes bans entire political parties

You make it sound like Germany bans political parties every other year.

Germany formally only ever banned two parties:

- Socialist Reich Party (SRP), 1952 - Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 1956

For context: The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949.

There are current discussions about banning - or evaluating a potential ban of - the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). If the ban went through (I think it won't), it would be the first in 70 years.

That’s just an example. Germany’s censorship (a violation of human rights to peaceful free expression) doesn’t just stop at political parties.

The fact that they are even discussing a ban of AfD shows how ridiculously dangerous such powers are when held by the state. The AfD is disgusting but until and unless they take up arms, speech is speech. “First they came for the racists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a racist. Then they came for the publishers of violent video games…”

There is no power that you can give to the state that they will not eventually abuse at their convenience. It positively astounds me that Germans do not understand this, given the nation’s history.

Many state AfD Organisations are classified as Right Extremists that want to violate our constitution, that's because they discussed concrete plans of violating constitutional rights of citizens.

We already experienced what happens when you don't stop antidemocratic parties, and we don't want to run the experiment another time.

It astounds me that you don't understand this simple concept.

Also the US Administration currently is a beacon of free speech, threatening senators with the death penalty for reminding officers that they don't have to comply with unlawful orders

> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.

I'm fairly certain you could do the exact same thing here in Canada. I honestly don't think it's as exceptional as you're making it out to be.

Canada has better defamation laws than most of Europe (as truth is an absolute defense), but the US puts the onus of proving falsehood on the plaintiff, not the defense, in cases concerning public figures. The US's freedom of speech laws are one of the few truly exceptional legal constructs we should be proud of. Most other good legal concepts the US has pioneered have been copied to similar or greater effect abroad, such as the ADA and worker's comp.

> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.

What? There's lots of antifacist/rather left-wing music that heavily critizes the police and their work. Usually not the one police officer himself but rather the institution as being part of a state who behaves injust (is that a word? non-native here...). I think that's fine and is part of a democratic system.

> This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police.

What? You have no idea what you are talking about.

As someone who has never seen that video before, could I respectfully say:

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Thank you, Ohio cops and lawyers, for bringing this to our attention.

I highly recommend watching the video that made the other cop cry.

Please post the link!

Licc’em Low Lisa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wWQxSV8CK8 (NSFW, depending on your workplace)

Oh my ... that is just gold ...

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

When he started reversing the video around lemon pound cake I really thought the officer was backing up to take a piece lol

One of my favorite parts is when Afroman is being cross examined about why he brought the media and his lawyer to retrieve his money.

He says, well that was for my protection because they came to my house with AR-15's and turned off the cameras. "I didn't want to get beat up or Epstein'd".

And the lawyer is trying to make that out to be unreasonable, that a black man in the US shouldn't be scared of the police. Afroman just continues to assert that of course he was scared.

https://archive.ph/sMpjA

This was also on youtube - Afroman made his points very clearly. That was an easy case.

Makes you wonder why taxpayers have to pay for incompetent cops all the time. I understand that some proection is needed, but the whole system is really defunct if such cases even (have to) come to court.

Related. Others?

Do the cops suing Afroman after raiding his home have a case? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36827566 - July 2023 (19 comments)

Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35284187 - March 2023 (551 comments)

US Police raids home; sues homeowner over CCTV footage of raid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35281258 - March 2023 (53 comments)

Is there anyone who isn't super rich who feels safe in america anymore?

Is it the same in other countries, can cops just raid you for no reason, or abduct people (ICE) and that's not the biggest story in the country?

One of the more interesting parts of the whole ordeal was officers getting on the witness stand and declaring that the lyrics that insinuated he had had sex with their wife were deeply traumatizing.

People keep throwing around 'cuck' as an insult, but if trained officers of the law familiar with application of deadly force when necessary can be severely traumatized by the notion of another man sleeping with their wife... Maybe the cucks have been the brave ones all along?

It's important to remember to thank them for their service.

How come so many cctv’s inside his house?

Maybe he’s justifiably paranoid?

He got burglarized before, and got threatened with arrest after demanding police investigate. https://www.tmz.com/2022/08/22/afroman-home-raided-police-oh...

It's a small county with an extreme minority of black people, like a couple hundred or less. It's quite likely he had personally encountered some of these officers before, and almost certain they knew who he was. Within the realm of possibility he saw something like this coming. Small rural sheriff depts are astoundingly corrupt.

> Foreman was sued by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office over a drug search at his home in August 2022 that resulted in no criminal charges.

This is a mad sentence.

Heh.

> their constitutional privacy

Isn't that something that people are always pointing out "is not guaranteed by the Constitution"?

The Constitution guarantees the right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects".

Which means what the Supreme Court says that it means. It's easy to imagine that it means something akin to what people mean by "privacy", but interpreting the Constitution is infinitely malleable so I don't have any idea what it means.

Suing for invasion of privacy over a music video demonstrating how they invaded his privacy is wild!!

Cops bust in searching for his drugs, then accuse him of invasion of privacy and humiliation...

Defamation is the most boring version of this case. Barring dishonest editing, of course it's fine.

There are hypothetical versions of this that get more interesting. Ohio is a one-party consent state. It's not clear what happens in a two-party consent state. Law enforcement has no expectation of privacy in public spaces. Private is "it depends," think cases where low enforcement is discussing something with one party in a domestic dispute. If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws. Is it public domain, and if not, is it sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use (think April 29, 1992 by Sublime).

> If he had used bodycam footage, then you get into interesting copyright laws

Not that interesting. The US government cannot create copyrighted works. Works created by the government are public domain. This is why Ghidra (made by the NSA), for example, has a really odd license, where the parts written by the government are "not subject to U.S. copyright protections under 17 U.S.C.", whereas future contributions by the public are covered under the Apache license.

I knew that about the feds, but does it also apply to the states?

I think most states don't consider it public domain.

The judge really loved the cops for some reason. So embarrassing for him.

Well, he probably interacts with them on a daily/weekly basis, or at least other people from their department, and probably don't want to end up on their bad side.

In the end, justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed, so doesn't really matter what the judge think/thought in the end.

If you think "justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed", then please consider the people who aren't famous and can't get media attention when this sort of thing happens to them. Justice and freedom of expression fail to prevail on the regular and this is just one win amongst many, many, many losses.

Even just in this instance justice would include damages for their destruction and an inquest into the warrant from the cop that wrote it to the judge that signed it.

For this one case. He seems to be a horribly biased judge though from what I saw in this case over the three days.

Justice didn’t prevail. Afroman had to spend THOUSANDS defending himself in this bullshit civil lawsuit, and his countersuit got thrown out because police have qualified immunity.

This is after they raided his house, bashed in his door, broke his cameras, stole his money, and then didn’t charge him with a single thing (and only returned part of the money).

There is no justice here.

One of my local (several states away) bakeries announced a "Afroman lemon cake macaron" today.

His legal costs are gonna be tiny versus his YouTube/Spotify revenue out of all this.

(And I wouldn't ignore the value he probably applies to being proven right in court, either.)

Which is great for him. The point being this happens to other people who aren't famous, and maybe don't want to spend their time asymmetrically fighting for themselves on social media.

That's fine, but "There is no justice here" is incorrect.

How so? The positives you described had nothing to do with the courts. That's just an outcome of his own savvy. If he didn't make the video or the song, he would be out a lot of money. That's not justice, that's an entertaining person using their virality to claw back some of what was taken from them. How would that go for Joe Average?

This is the story of a guy who got sued for being harassed and had to waste years of their time and money fighting it.

was this on the regular media? I've been bombarded by this case on tiktok for the last 5 days. and i don't follow police, law, celebrity, or rap.

Yes.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/entertainment/afroman-lawsuit...

Including internationally:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq57557d6p6o

gotta love some Streisand effect in the morning...

That lemon pound cake did look tempting though.

cowsay "lemon pound cake"

I would argue that using the footage ought to be legal; they are in his home.

Posting their names is questionable; as officers they are public servants, but naming them is perhaps invasion of privacy?

Lying however would be slander and illegal, in my humble opinion. Not worth 4 million in damages, but at least a cease and desist?

> naming them is perhaps invasion of privacy?

No. The President of the United states is Donald Trump. His address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his phone number is 202-456-1414.

> Lying however would be slander and illegal…

They couldn't prove he did.

I’d argue that’s rather different than just a cop somewhere.

He said they were criminals, and that the woman was actually a man..

> He said they were criminals, and that the woman was actually a man.

If that were defamatory, 90% of QAnon would be in court.

My understanding is he said "Adams county sheriff's are crooks because they took my money" (which is not disputed)., and individual officers, who weren't actually mentioned by name, sued because someone else was responsible for taking the money

As fellow Ohioan Chrissie Hine and The Pretenders said, "Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio."

Yeah, it was from "My City Was Gone," which isn't a pleasant song about the state, but pfft, it works here.

It works here because it isn't a pleasant song about Ohio.

This story should not be on HN. Shame on you folks.

This is the single funniest thing to happen in at least a decade.

You owe it to yourself to watch this testimony from the trial

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV_7xmAEfq0/

Apologies, I wish I had a less cancerous link

Heartily agreed. It is so good to see much needed shaming get doled out once in a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com