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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's not bananas. It happens all the time. The police show up, check things out, and inform the caller that the person recording has a right to do so. In this case, it's even less bananas, because the people recording him were literally following him around, which is not what generally happens in these "audit" scenarios where someone parks themselves on the street outside a restaurant or bank.

There's pretty clearly a vibe on this thread that calling 911 is itself a use of coercive force. It is not. 911 is how you're ordinarily supposed to reach the police. In my neighborhood, it's how you'd report a stolen bicycle. It's the job of the police to handle those calls appropriately, and I don't see any indication that the call was handled inappropriately here.

The story doesn't want to give you that context because their goal isn't to inform you, it's to get your blood pumping.

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I’m very close with several current police dispatchers, and even have an expired state telecommunicator certification. Calling 911 can absolutely be a coercive force, and people use 911 to harass people all the time because in many instances the dispatcher has no choice but to send uniformed people over there to investigate. Police are equipped and trained to deal with certain kinds of problems, and they’re constantly looking for evidence to support a criminal charge. It’s their job. All they know walking into that situation— as human beings that aren’t immune to the power of suggestion— is that the caller, who is the complainant, says that the other person is doing something wrong. That is not a neutral action. If it was, many departments wouldn’t be adopting non-uniformed, unarmed social worker responses to non-violent situations.

When the police come, they bring with them a nonzero chance of violent, deadly force. Especially if the caller says one of a few magic phrases like “I fear for my life” and “I’m not sure if he has a gun but he might” and (in some areas) “Black male, six foot two.”

Calling the police on someone is like mailing them a bomb with a 0.1% chance of exploding. You have no idea if you are summoning a calm, experienced officer or a power tripping monster with an ego.

When people feel threatened, it is almost always better than they call the police than that they engage and try to resolve the threat themselves.

Seems like this was more an annoyance than a threat. So, to rephrase when people feel annoyed, its almost always better to ignore it than call the police.

TIL that 911 (Emergency Services) is how one should report a stolen bicycle.

Happy to help. 911 is the primary "call for service" channel for most police departments.

I've personally never come across a police department or sherrif in the U.S. that doesn't have a non emergency number. I'd assume thats what you should call for things that aren't an emergency? They've never told me to call back and call 911.

Allegheny County in Pennsylvania is one such department without a separate number. I don't think it's that uncommon.

I've tried calling the non-emergency number for my city, and they told me to hang up and call 911.

Just want to add that myself to the list of people who can't imagine calling 911 for a non-emergency. Never in my life have I heard anyone assume it's for that purpose.

Let's clarify things. You can call 911 for a non-emergency. That dispatch worker will then redirect the line to a non-emergency line based on the situation. They will also likely remind you of a faster way to reach the non-emergency lines in your area, because they do not want everyone clogging 911 with non-emergencies. But it is very technically a valid way to call.

I will still judge someone for doing it that way, though. Especially in a day and age where a simple search query of your non-emergency line will save the time of such dispatch agents. Or at least 411 if you're of an older generation (411 still works on more cellular lines than you'd think today).

I'll also remind people that abuse of the emergency dispatch lines are illegal (not that this is what happened here), so please do not consider pushing your luck with non-emergencies maliciously.

The key point here is hypocrisy. The very evident double standard.

A person holding a camera and following you around is an emergency or at the very least a suspicious act worthy of investigation and possible arrest.

A person attaching hundreds of thousands of cameras to poles calling the police to report this act is what is noteworthy.

Its not clickbait in the normal sense of overselling a series of un-noteworthy events IMHO.

> A person attaching hundreds of thousands of cameras to poles calling the police to report this act is what is noteworthy

That's one seriously impressive person. If they started as soon as Flock was founded and spend 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year installing cameras they would have to on average have installed a camera every 6 minutes.

Except that the reason that the YouTube “1A Auditors” get the attention that they do is that frequently it’s not a simple “check things out, and inform the caller that the person recording has the right to do so”, but the interactions often escalate to threats of unlawful arrest as police default to the side of the caller.

Calling the police, especially in America, can 100% be a coercive use of force. That’s why people threaten to call the cops/DHS/ICE all the time during arguments, and why things like SWATing are as big of a problem as they are. When the behavior of many policy officers is escalate first, ask questions second if at all, it does become a genuine threat.

I don't know what to tell you. I watch these videos all the time (it's one of my vices, bodycam footage in particular) and what I see every time --- when it's "auditors" harassing businesses, not when it's auditors confronting police at police departments --- is business owners being told to suck it up.

I know that in Summer 2020 there was a fashion for saying any call to the police was ipso facto a deployment of coercive force, but I'm rejecting that argument out of hand while also pointing out that in many regions 911 is exactly the thing you're supposed to do when you have uncertainty. It is simply not a demand for violence; it's a demand to have a trained authority come and resolve a situation, rather than having two private citizens with no training at all in the law confront each other and hope for the best.

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