I think that that stories on HN about FBI abuses of power are popular because people expect more from the FBI. It's comforting to think that there is a highly trained law enforcement group that can intercede when a local department is incompetent or inadequate, and the realization that the FBI can be just as bad or even worse than local law enforcement is disheartening.
The growing size of cities and the creation of suburbs (especially those which do not support walking) have caused the beat-cop to become somewhat deprecated--in my home city right now there is a shortage of officers and dwindling pensions for the ones that are still on board.
So, instead of having Officer Bob the friendly cop who patrols your street, you have nameless squadcars driving seemingly at random--much like the beetles of Bradbury's literature. You have cops that are never seen, and when they are seen they typically are bad news.
This, taken in combination with the horrific perversion of justice that can occur in our adversarial system, causes a very definite sense of the "other". We have trouble feeling bad for these cops, because in a way they do not blend in with their community in a meaningful fashion. We do not help them, we do not like them, and they generally seem to return the favor.
Worse, we see an increasing attempt to bolster the average power of the cop with tools grossly out of proportion to their intended function in society: note that the two officers in this video appeared to be carrying submachineguns. What. The. Fuck.
With police seen as distinct from our communities and friends and families, and with government increasingly aloof in regulations and faceless bureaucracy, I very much fear for the next decade of the American experiment.
*edit: I should note that he was performing a valuable civic service by documenting the actions of the officers (as were the people in the car recording this video). We wouldn't be able to have these discussions without people brave enough to record our public servants' (mis)behavior.
You are assuming everyone's objective function is to minimize harm to themselves.
If you want to deter the police from using unreasonable force during an arrest, you can do that by filming them.
Edit: Oops, poster above did in fact throw down the victim blaming card. Indeed, the man did nothing wrong, but he could have a live dog right now by simply avoiding the police.
I hope some of these police officers lose their jobs, but apparently the laws no longer those who are supposed to enforce them. If our president acts like he's above the law, why shouldn't everyone else with even a smidgen of authority?
In any case, the video is horrible. As a dog owner, I can imagine the poor guys sadness and I can only hope he isn't persecuted (used to be prosecuted) for "having a dangerous dog".
You haven't noticed that the tech oriented people who populate this community also have a strong sense of social justice and care about civil liberties? Really?
Honestly does seem like pure politics to me. I don't see a discussion about how the inflation of cameras causes a rexamination of the rules, or how it's impacting things.
Frankly. That's a dubious connection at best. I know there's some people who don't like it. but I like hacker news to be about hackers.
As a citizen I find this interesting, as a hacker I don't.
Simple yes?
The dog's last lunge toward the officer who killed it was very fast and aggressive, and the officer had just a split second to react. He probably just reacted on a fight-or-flight instinct, and unfortunately, in this instance, it ended with lethal force.
If I was in the same situation at that split second, I might have done the same thing. I was once chased and attacked by an aggressive dog before, and I rank it as one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. Being attacked by an animal with clear intent to harm or even kill you is just so primally scary that there's no way to think and react rationally - you just do whatever you can to get away and survive.
It's a pretty crappy situation all around, and I feel terrible for the owner of the dog. I still blame the officers for initiating the situation, but I do understand why the officer reacted the way he did.
the dog didn't start without provocation - they attacked his owner.
>The dog's last lunge toward the officer who killed it was very fast and aggressive, and the officer had just a split second to react.
if that dog really attacked, instead of just lounging, these fat cops wouldn't leave unharmed.
>If I was in the same situation at that split second, I might have done the same thing. I was once chased and attacked by an aggressive dog before, and I rank it as one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. Being attacked by an animal with clear intent to harm or even kill you is just so primally scary that there's no way to think and react rationally - you just do whatever you can to get away and survive.
it is you fear speaking. When dogs attack with intent to harm - they harm.
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Seriously, cops seem to be the only government workers that need to shoot dogs to protect themselves from them. Everyone else somehow manages, including cops in many other countries. Maybe we should contract with some european police officers to train our police...
I don't think the arrest was entirely unnecessary. The guy was really provoking the police right from the moment when he arrives. He knows he's messing with them and I think taking that dog out of the car was just another thing done to annoy them. He was asking for trouble and he got it.
Off course it's sad that the dog was shot. That was handled poorly. I guess people do stupid things in stressful situations where they don't have time to think.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There is nothing Hacker News related here. At BEST we can tangentially relate it to our civil liberties, but that is a stretch. Let's keep things like this on Reddit and the other sites that will cover it in its entirety, and focus on technology here.
A community starts with a focus, and its core members join because they want a focused community. But they invite their friends, who aren't necessarily fully interested in the core discussion--so discussion drifts wider. And as discussion drifts, more secondary members (only somewhat interested in the core topic) and event tertiary members (not at all interested in the core topic, only in the secondary topics introduced by drift) join, until the community no longer has any core topic or core userbase whatsoever. The core members see the community as useless (because it no longer gives them anything they couldn't find elsewhere on the internet), and leave to find/start another community that actually has a focus.
The only way to stop this process, is to either disallow "open membership"--e.g. you can't invite your friends if they're not also hackers--or to disallow "front page should be a representative sampling of 'anything the membership likes'"--e.g. by requiring that people vote to a criteria other than "what you personally enjoy." The HN guidelines are an attempt at the latter.
I usually don't comment on this since it may serve to just exacerbate the problem, but this last year it seems like there has been a stronger decline in comment/article quality on HN than usual. I'm not sure what's going on - when digg started to feel this way in 2007 there was reddit and when reddit started to feel this way in 2008 I found HN, not sure what's next.
Actually, refreshing the thread now (this has taken off pretty quickly) there's very little relevant discussion, so I agree with you. I would have liked to see some discussion around the role of sousveillance but it's mostly just the typical reddit 'police are scum' discussion.
If you do this with enough banal content, the users who care, the users who want the site to be about interesting and important stories, leave, and the cycle continues. It ends up turning into an "Eternal September".
Use of smart phones (video apps etc) in the public space and it's implications are certainly HN-relevant.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/07/01/viral-video-appear...
Apparently happened in Hawthorne, CA.
I admit this is somewhat controversial. I grew up with large dogs (dobermans, german shepherds, mostly) from a young age and philosophies about this shift. That said, the dog doesn't appear to be wearing a choke or pinch collar and my personal opinion is that the action likely caused no pain or discomfort. Supporters of it would argue that it snaps the dog's attention from what it's doing (straying toward the street in this case).
That said, I understand if people find it unfortunate (or even disgusting) but to use the same word I did would cause people to infer that you might be comparing the two things (an almost-certainly unlawful arrest and murder of the dog, with the way the owner corrected him). I hope that wasn't your intention.
That being said they also recommended against the long flexilead (i think thats the brand) leash and/or having the window down far enough that the dog could jump out. My dogs never would have walked in front of me on a leash like that.
Within his rights, sure. Intelligent, not so much.
A.) Be pretty good at football, but not enough to go pro or college.
Edit: to the comment below, my old next door neighbor's 'star football player' but C- son got fired as a prison guard after beating the pulp out of an inmate who 'insulted his mama' just 6 months after graduating HS - the stereotype is true, especially so in the southeastern USA. This is just one of many examples.
I grew up living next door to a moderately famous federal judge. She was like a grandmother to me; brilliant woman (she passed away years ago).
She was a conservative (Reagan appointee) and definitely on the side of law enforcement. To qualify this statement without naming her, let's just say she might have presided over a case that sparked some civil discontent in Miami a while back when a cop shot a guy on a motorcycle.
Nevertheless, she always joked that "police departments are filled with those dumb guys from high school that were always lifting weights but never good enough to get a football scholarship."
So, it appears you're not completely alone in your view.
If anyone ever doubted whether memes (in the original Dawkins sense) are real, this is a good demonstration. Lately, police have just taken to shooting dogs willy-nilly.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/incoming-police-ch...
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2012-11-20/pet-owner-...
The penalty: one day without pay.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2013-04-04/officer-wh...
I used to take my son to that park. I've seen loose pit bulls out there before and I've been able to handle the situation without panicking like Barney Fife.
Here in LA I regularly hear stories like this. I don't know the local stats, but in NYC apparently the city has paid out over $500million in litigation settlements, including those for false arrest. [ see http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/10/wrongful-dru... ]
The situation should never have started, but once it did, they didn't have much choice in protecting themselves. If that dog had been a dude with a rudimentary weapon on the level of a vicious dog bite, dude would have been laid out just the same.
The larger question is whether or not the officers had any business with the dog's owner in the first place. If the answer to that question is no, then none of their actions have any justification, shooting the dog included.
And unless there's more to the story about what Leon Rosby was doing (if he wasn't simply filming), then the answer to that question is in fact no.
Firing a gun without knowing your backstop is generally bad, but angled down and in self-defense it's not the worst thing in the world.
The dog in question was large and probably could've done some decent damage. It's not right what the officers did, but it wasn't unreasonable either once the animal went nuts.
The dog angle just makes this a particularly egregious abuse of power. I'd be willing to fork over a significant bit of money towards making a very public example of the officers involved.
:(
Even worse, the owner of the dog DID put it in the car, I believe so he could confront the cops without the dog threatning them... But it did not worked :(
That said, yes the police did instigate this in the larger sense by (I guess?) arresting him for taping the incident.
2. Take the cuffs off the guy you're kidnapping.
3. Let the victim of your sociopathic aggression calm his dog down.
Something about killing aggressive dogs makes people seem to forget that they are _aggressive_ dogs. If it had been an aggressive bull or a bear, this would have been a non-issue.
Edit to expand on my thoughts.
yes, the guy they illegally arrested presented real and clear danger - he was black (notice the white girl at the end of the video - she obviously wasn't a danger and wasn't arrested)
California Police Arrest Man for Video Recording, then Kill his Dog
In one of the most shocking videos I’ve seen
since launching this blog six years ago...The government power (at all levels) has become really intrusive and unchecked during the last decade i've been living in the US. You guys going the same road - 2 castes, one above the law and one under.
At 3:23, a cop shoots the dog four times. The dog wither and dies.
What did you expect?
With that said, this guy is an idiot, the cops overreacted initially, and this huge ass dog let off a dozen warning barks. Once he went to protect his master from 'harm' the cops reacted in a way that put the dog into fight or flight mode.
They should be better trained to deal with dogs, and also should be brought up on criminal charges for arresting a man who did nothing wrong, and consequently killing an animal that posed no true threat to the half dozen officers on the scene.
I disagree with you, because this is possibly a crime, non labeled graphic content, should be covered on the TV news, etc. Therefor I think it is probably off-topic. HN is not a general cali news source in my personal opinion.
Also from the guidelines.
Silently being relegated to a second-class account (not a "hell ban" at least, I guess) has made me less interested in participating at all. I don't even know why I'm logged in right now.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/30/local/la-me-0701-pol...
May I ask whether you have you ever owned a dog? ;)
I can't think of any quicker and overall safer means of sedation than simply shooting it in the head. It's sad that a dog has to die, but compared to the mess an angry dog can make, its life is simply not worth much.
Not that I really want to sound like I'm defending the policepeople in question here, because that dog shouldn't have died - but it shouldn't have died because there shouldn't have been a situation where they needed to shoot it, not because shooting an attacking dog is the wrong thing to do.
(Yes, I have had a dog. I loved it very much, and it seemed to return the favour. But you have to be clear-eyed about these things.)
A dart gun is useless for stopping animals that are attacking. That's why there is always someone with a shotgun ready to kill the animal that's being darted.
BUT... Every officer near where I live carries a nightclub/billy stick/baton etc. I've been in situation with aggressive dogs out in the country and often a simple kick is enough to back them off... Discharging a firearm at a fast moving animal is reckless and begging for a bystander to be injured.
I love dogs, I've lived with several (medium and large), but you don't mess around with something like that if it decides to get dangerous.
This is the same reason that cops are trained to shoot center-mass and until the attacker is down; this officer responded quickly under stress and safely dispatched his attacker, preventing possible serious injury to both himself and his partner.
If you want to argue that the cops shouldn't have cuffed the guy, I'd absolutely agree. A polite "Now, son, why were you phoning at us?" would've avoided all this nonsense. I can't in clear conscience disagree with the self-defense the officer used.
Also animal control traps or nets the animal before attempting to sedate it. You can't just stick the needle anywhere.