Hacker News Reader

Comment by NetMageSCW | Hacker News Reader

And this is why most cops should be tarred with the brush of corruption - it isn’t that they broke the law, but too many are willing to cover up, defend and sweep under the rug those that do.

View on HN

Engaging in a cover-up is in fact a crime. Recently a Massachusetts trooper who engaged in railroading a fabricated suspect was exposed for sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers. But the names of those troopers and their own behavior remains opaque to the public. That's crazy! Nobody should put up with that.

>Recently a Massachusetts trooper who engaged in railroading a fabricated suspect was exposed for sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers. But the names of those troopers and their own behavior remains opaque to the public. That's crazy! Nobody should put up with that.

What does sending "sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers" have to do with cover-ups? Anyways my guess is that it's general policy for police/courts to not release evidence unless it's part of a trial, similar to how the Epstein files weren't released across 3 administrations and took an act of congress to get released.

>took an act of congress to get released.

I guess?

I mean you go ahead and call that a release.

If it brings you comfort.

The US government is just corrupt from tip to tail. Why everyone continuously acts surprised about these things is genuinely a mystery?

What really bothers me is how an independent investigator made a compelling case that identified a member of the DC metropolitan police as the suspect who placed a pipe bomb on Capitol grounds. Then after years of inactivity, the FBI suddenly broke the case and arrested a mentally unwell black kid.

The whole apparatus is shameful.

The "compelling case" was all based on gait analysis which is heavily debunked and while making the case they quoted from reports about gait analysis but left out all the parts about it being an extremely inexact process prone to false matches.

Ironically, gait analysis is considered iron clad scientific evidence when used against impoverished black guys like in the Taylor trial.

Just kind of displays the. corruption and duplicity of the US legal system.

There's a lot of junk "science" used in trials because there are plenty of "experts"[0] available to back it up for the prosecution and fewer funds to pay for the countervailing defense expert available to present the problems with it. Usually it takes a particularly bad case making it to a supreme or appeals court for that kind of evidence to be disallowed.

[0] The people paid to perform these analyses in the first place and then go testify convincingly for the prosecution about it but that's a whole separate rant.

Even if it is a criminal offense, a prosecutor still has to bring charges. No prosecutor is ever bringing charges against a cop unless there is an absolute media frenzy that pushes it beyond the point it can be ignored.

Prosecutors need cops. Cops bring them cases. Cops testify in their cases. If they piss off the cops they can't do their job.

This is fixable. Many jurisdictions have a provision for outside prosecutors appointed by courts.

They do, special prosecutors, but the court has to appoint them. The bar is extremely high for getting a judge (80% ex-prosecutors) to appoint a private attorney or outside-jurisdiction prosecutor as a special prosecutor.

Again, sadly, almost never happens.

I have to agree it almost never happens. It needs to be normalized among the public and institutionalized in governments.

This is, to a large extent, a US problem, because of the qualified immunity. Yet another cultural abomination that nearly doesn't exist anywhere else in the "developed" world.

The impact of qualified immunity is greatly exaggerated. All it means is that an officer can't be sued for performing their duties. They can still be sued for acts outside their authority. And more importantly, qualified immunity has nothing to say about criminal prosecution.

The real problem isn't the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, but the informal doctrine of "police don't get prosecuted for crimes, and if they are, they don't get convicted."

Just like "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine", people learned a new legal buzzword and think it applies to every story in the news.

In this very article the police department argued that taking a laptop and not entering it into evidence is protected by qualified immunity. People think that qualified immunity applies to every story in the news because the police argue that it does and the courts typically agree. I will be interested to see the outcome of this case - my expectation is that the court will rule that the police officer cannot be personally sued in this case, because of qualified immunity.

Theft is a criminal offense as well. The officer can be prosecuted for that.

Qualified immunity also applies to the officer who individually. The department can be sued still.

My point is simply that you suggested that qualified immunity doesn't apply to this case, and I agree that it should not in principle but my understanding of the case law is that it typically does.

People talk about qualified immunity like it means a police officer is above the law. That's not true at all. When qualified immunity is working correctly, all it does is shift the liability from the individual to a higher authority (the department/city/state/etc).

In this case, it doesn't apply because theft isn't part of an officer's regular duties. You can't sue an officer for taking your laptop and putting it in evidence. You can sue an officer for taking your laptop home.

And it only shifts civil liability. The officer is still (according to the law if not actual practice) criminally culpable for illegal acts they perform.

> You can sue an officer for taking your laptop home.

Again, I agree with you that this should be true in principle, but I don't have faith that it will apply in this case, and this is contrary to the stated position of the police department.

> When qualified immunity is working correctly…

When is this exactly? 52 years on this planet and am yet to witness this event… :)

They don't write news stories about dogs biting men.

Normal people are prosecuted for theft when they steal things like that. Qualified immunity doesn't cover that. This officer probably won't be prosecuted, but it's nothing to do with qualified immunity.

You're half right but missing the point.

Police probably shouldn't be sued for performing their duties. But the issue is that with a few choice words (I feared for my safety/life) their "duties" cover a wide array of actions that a lot of citizens would argue it shouldn't.

Example: There are many cases of Cops stepping in front of a moving vehicle when confronting a suspect, which then is used as a reason to shoot and kill the suspect because "their life was in danger". But it's very easy to argue that the Cop put their own life in danger by stepping in front of the vehicle. IMO, that should not be covered by qualified immunity, and yet it usually is.

My point is that qualified immunity is not the problem. In your example, the cop should be prosecuted. Qualified immunity doesn't cover criminal prosecution, and a lack of prosecution has nothing to do with qualified immunity. Being able to sue that cop would be a nice bonus, but what you really need is for the cop to be criminally prosecuted for their crime.

Getting rid of qualified immunity wouldn't do jack squat to change that. The problem is an informal culture where police are not prosecuted (or if prosecuted, not convicted) for crimes.

People forget the original saying was "one bad apple spoils the whole barrel."

That’s true, but people on HN have a habit of saying ‘most’ when they really just mean ‘many.’

But it’s not one bad apple. It’s one cop who stole someone’s laptop while arresting them and entire system that looked the other way and let the theft go unpunished.

And really it's just a few.

Coping by only hearing the first half of the expression. “Spoils the bunch” is just as important as the number of bad apples.

It's a "few" who actually commit the crime. It's the vast majority who refuse to prosecute them for committing the crime.

While in graduate school, the graduate student government had results from a student survey about their advisors. When presented with the results, nearly every administrator would give some response of "Well, it's really just a few bad apples," and we had to remind them every time of the actual meaning of the phrase!

I've done some digging on the history of the phrase, and find that 1) it's been in use for at least 80 or so years (several non-produce hits in the 1940s), and 2) clearly missing the "spoils the whole barrel" element seems to begin in the 1950s, with conspicuous application to police misconduct.

I'm strongly inclined to include the abbreviated phrase in a list of thought-stopping cliches if only for that reason (though not the correct and complete version you provide).

Google's Ngram viewer shows usage beginning in the 1930s: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fe>.

Application to police from The Nation in 1956:

<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Nation/Ay8QAAAAIAAJ...>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com