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> This is a perfect example of the disconnect between "hackers" and the real world.

You're reading way too much into this. The OP's story is completely unrelated to "hacker" culture or the faux-libertarian belief system that is fashionable in SF/SV.

The OP's story is a perfect example of what happens when people who believe they're smarter than everyone else play games with people who don't play games. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The OP wrote that he was told by a police officer that his presence was no longer needed and he was explicitly asked to leave the scene. Instead he stayed and as the situation deteriorated just about every one of his actions had the effect of making his situation worse.

The common characteristic of each of the OP's actions? They were driven by the underlying belief that he was smarter than the people he was dealing with. With just a little effort he could convince the police officers to see things his way. And why not? Many "smart" people have never encountered a tricky situation they weren't able to wiggle out of using logic and reason.

The OP simply learned that you can be too smart for your own good. But let's be clear... as bad as the police state is don't pretend that there aren't other groups that would have responded even more harshly to the OP's attempts to prove his intellectual superiority.

Lesson? Please, understand that you're probably not that smart. Get yourself into avoidable situations that you have to try to talk your way out of at your own peril.

I wouldn’t really say that the OP thought he was smarter than the police officers. He believed could clear up a misunderstanding just by talking – and that may be naive, but it’s not arrogant. Now, if he knew that he had done something wrong and thought he could argue his way out of trouble, that might be thinking he was smarter than those who would get him in trouble. But he was just trying to clear up a misunderstanding – he wasn’t trying to fool anyone using cleverness. If anything, the OP was assuming that the police officers were equally smart as him, and thus intelligent enough to distinguish a threat from a misunderstood bystander.

He was also assuming that he didn't have to follow direct commands given to him because he was in posession of certain facts which, if the officers were made aware of them, would certainly countermand those orders. To someone who is in authority giving commands, to have those commands received as polite requests or invitation to debate, that could easily be perceived as "this guy thinks he's smart (or in charge)"

Ah, but trying to talk about a situation labels you as an elitist snob, or as Frito put it... "You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded".

Keep in mind we only have his version of the story...

Well, he called 911 himself. I think this part won't change from version to version. Now how many people who call 911 when they witness an accident actually are a "problem" enough to warrant an arrest?

Only the drunk, self-entitled assholes like OP.

Drunk? I suppose you refer to the 3 drinks they had in the course of 3 hours. And they probably had eaten not long before. Self-entitled asshole… You mean, working in a startup, and tell the policemen when asked what he does for a living?

And even if he was a drunk self-entitled asshole? Was he a hindrance? Was he dangerous in any way? My probability for both is extremely low. And even if he was a real hindrance or danger? Does that justify stomping on his fingers after having handcuffed him? No way.

I understand you may trust cops. But Officer Korr specifically doesn't look too trustworthy: she got sued.

Unless… the OP is actually lying. Not distorting the facts, or conveniently forgetting some details, and exaggerating others, but plain lying. That is indeed a possibility, but I'd think twice before suggesting it to the OP's face: if he wasn't lying, I'd be insulting a victim.

Apparently, you're not that cautious.

I (the author) understand the comments above and the reasonable skepticism about my self interest in portraying only one side of the story. I'm not an angel. This was avoidable. I can even understand the police perspective and sympathize with the difficulty of their job. For full transparency, I'm preparing a followup post with all of the assembled documentation, including the police report. And yet, this still should not have happened.

But at the time, it was all very sudden. I was being yelled at while my friend (and co-founder of a yc company) was being manhandled. The fact that I was "obstructing with the emergency response" didn't enter the realm of possibility, as I was on the periphery of the scene and far away from the medics. The fact that I was at risk of being arrested didn't cross my mind until the moment I was tackled from behind.

I tried to resolve my issue directly with the police. Mediation would have quelled my anger. Only when I felt that I wasn't being heard, I published. I didn't expect 365k views (and counting).

I think that these situations are common, but rarely do the victims take the time to write the story in full detail. I've seen it happen to others, and felt powerless to interject. And now that it happened to me, I felt an obligation to do my best to write it as accurately as possible. In the least, it's an anthropological case study, and I hope you felt it was an informative story that was worth your reading time.

SFist contacted the SFPD for comment. Spokesman Albie Esparza explains that Partensky was arrested for interfering, resisting arrest, and public intoxication. According to police, he was both drunk and disruptive as police and fire department medical personnel arrived, he was told several times by officers to back up and remove himself. "If someone calls 911," Esparza says, "They are expected only to be a good witness, and to obey anything they're told to do by arriving officers." During Partensky's ensuing detention, one officer sustained an injury when Partensky swung his elbow and struck the officer in the eye. That there probably led to his subsequent poor treatment, though Esparza says he can not comment on what happened while Partensky was in the custody of the Sheriff's Department overnight.

I too understand the scepticism. But I cannot condone the insult. Sure, what happened to you was avoidable. But not just by you. From the look of it, you bear very little responsibility there. Your biggest mistake was in your model of the cops: you assumed they were trustworthy, and could be reasoned with. Some were not.

I would have made the same mistake. So, thanks for the tip. Your story was definitely worth reading.

> They were driven by the underlying belief that he was smarter than the people he was dealing with. With just a little effort he could convince the police officers to see things his way.

Uh, where are you reading all that?

The OP saw a friend being manhandled and didn't understood why. He said he'd like to go home with his friend. He got arrested.

Where's the "I'm smarter than all these people" coming from?

> The OP's story is completely unrelated to "hacker" culture

> [OP's actions] were driven by the underlying belief that he was smarter than the people he was dealing with.

Not unrelated in the slightest, imo.

This is a perfect example of the disconnect between "hackers" and the real world. I consider myself part of the HN community because I hope for a society shaped by its ideals, but the real world is so far removed that time spent here becomes more of a therapeutic escape than anything else.

You say that, but this ideal world is the world I live in, and have lived in all my life. You should consider moving to Europe (UK and Switzerland in my case).

As a realist, I wholeheartedly believe this to be the rational choice (and I've made it). As an idealist, I stubbornly have hope that like-minded intellectuals will affect change, not just for the US but globally. Moreover, fixing US domestic and foreign policies will have massive benefits worldwide (end of wars, arms exports, military occupations, arms races, etc.), such that I believe it to be a worthwhile cause.

I honestly wonder what a society would look like if we got a group of experienced system engineers with a deep understanding of human society to construct it from the ground up. Working incentives, set goals (science and technological progress), and, above all, a rational understanding of poor incentives and abuse of power.

Unfortunately, Startfleet has yet to be founded.

Edit: For those who want more information on the nature of power in the US, I would just like to honor Aaron Swartz's memory by referring to this excellent piece [1].

1. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany

Western Europe has its own problems.

The U.K. has "superinjunctions" and aggressively punitive libel laws and press restrictions.

In some places in Switzerland, relationships with non-Swiss residents are so strained that local authorities have sometimes sought to ban "asylum-seekers" from public places because they are seen as dangerous criminals ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/26/swiss-segregati... ).

In Ireland, police seized a baby girl from her family because she was blonde and did not look like her parents, who are from Romania; they returned her after performing a DNA test ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/blonde-girl-rom... ).

A bit of a nitpick:

Maybe you have their nationality from another source (though I googled the case and didn't find any articles stating their nationality), but this article does not state the nationality of the Roma girl or her parents.

Roma or Romani refers to the ethnicity of a people that emigrated from India as a group, and does not in itself have anything at all to do with Romania.

While Romania has one of the largest Romani concentrations, and there certainly are Roma that are also of Romanian nationality, many other countries - including Ireland - have populations of Roma that may have lived there for generations and whose ancestors may very well never have lived in Romania at all.

(The mother of the boy that was taken in a separate incident is mentioned in the article as being Romanian, on the other hand)

Oops, sorry, you're right — I had misread the Guardian's reference to a different case in which the parents were in fact from Bucharest and their son was taken from them.

No, I don't have any special knowledge about the nationality of the folks in Ireland whose daughter was taken from them.

But yeah, I am a little uneasy about the casual way the word "Roma" is used today to refer to people who were formerly referred to as "Gypsies".

It's particularly confusing to see this particular word ("Roma") used to refer interchangeably to three different, differently sized groups of people ("Roma", "Romani", "Romanichal").

I'm used to hearing "Roma" to mean a very particular sub-group of the Romani people who live in Central and Eastern Europe.

But in today's usage, the word also seems to be used to other folks from various subgroups of the overarching "Romani people" group. Many of the Romani people living in the UK come from a subgroup traditionally called "Romanichal", which is very much different from the "Roma" group — but in conversation today the distinction does not come up and we often see news stories use "Roma" instead of "Romani".

How that happened, I dunno; maybe the words just all sound the same?

The big difference is that the cases you mentioned are exceptional and typically make the news.

From the looks of this thread, the situation with the Police in the US is an everyday, normal, expected thing... That's very bad.

Abuses will always occur. It's when they start to be normal that you should worry.

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The UK seemed like a strange example.

I too live in airstrip one, the most heavily surveilled non-constitutional democracy on the planet! Great, innit?! Remember to hate the bulgmanians. We have always hated the bulgmanians.

Europe is declining even faster than the USA. The worst part is that Europe is emulating the USA. Although I did find the recent Swiss immigration decision to be interesting.

That recent immigration vote has been a major point of discussion with every Swiss person I've spoken to since the weekend. It's not business as usual, it's very concerning, and people in the more populated parts of Switzerland are very much opposed to it.

I strongly suspect that something will happen in the three years that it will take to implement this nonsense that will invalidate it.

There is another disconnect. Calling the US a "totalitarian police state" without so much as a hedge is incredibly ignorant. While the US has the potential to become a totalitarian police state, it is far from one. You can go ahead and list all the violations of civil rights you want - the fact that you can do that, and that victims in those circumstances have a high chance of prevailing with the right representation, is evidence that you are terribly wrong.

Using this sort of inflammatory language is counterproductive.

Nominally, the US isn't a police state, but practically...

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

Your view is probably skewed by personal experience, but the fact of the matter is most people who have to deal with the police regularly do not get the "right representation." And of course, those people "can" talk about the violations of their civil rights, but what good has that done them? It's fairly clear that both the state and those with the means to change the situation are not listening.

This statistics is mostly War on Drugs. As soon as US citizens wake up and end it, this will drop pretty sharply (unless they'd do something as monumentally stupid as WoD again).

Reading your law enforcement stories, combined with mostly broken checks and balances due to an arcane election system, judging it from the outside and comparing it with what we have in my home country, I'd say you're not close but you're about half way there.

If there was a more sane way to introduce new law into your system, I'd suggest something like 'make it illegal to make their performance reviews depend on the number of arrests'. But how would you even start a movement like this? It is still possible to shoot down laws pending in congress (as demonstrated with SOPA), but actively steering into a new direction? I guess if you have a few hundred millions to get get yourself elected it would be possible - the problem is, having this sort of money is not a good filter criteria to get a balanced congress. So how to even start?

Reading your law enforcement stories

This is exactly the problem. You read the stories, that is, the exceptional cases. Don't extrapolate from exceptions.

I expected this comment and I phrased it specifically to get this reaction. Let me ask you this: Are you sure these cases are exceptional, not systemic? Naming something exceptional usually means that the system can be left alone. This might be the case, but I'm worried that you people are in a frog-in-boiling-pot situation.

So, let me rephrase: do you have trustable statistics showing that police brutality is not systemic? How about all those 'exceptional' cases where the system very much seems to work against correcting itself by protecting the offending police officers?

See, I'm not surprised that in a ~300M nation there are lots of cases of authority acting violently and that we only hear about those cases where people are treated badly - but what's worrying to me is how bad the 'exception handling' usually appears to work. If your program throws an exception every 10'000 users, but the exception leads to the user being electro-shocked, jailed and possibly loosing his job, wouldn't you throw in some additional exception handling?

So, let me rephrase: do you have trustable statistics showing that police brutality is not systemic?

I agree with the implicit assumption in your question. When trying to evaluate whether there is a serious problem, in any area, we should rely on data. These stories, heartbreaking as they are, are just anecdotes. Thus, lacking proper data, I can't tell whether there is a systemic problem with police brutality in the US: I can't answer your question. I'm sure such statistics do exist, but since I'm not from the US, it's not exactly something I tend to pick up on.

However, I am somewhat familiar with the dynamics involved with issues like this. There are usually some few exceptions that stand out enough to be picked up in the media, but most don't. I'd guess that there are an order of magnitude more cases that are either not severe enough to be reported on, or too common to be interesting, but are still beyond what a society would consider ideal, were they to come to light.

These stories, even if they are exceptions tell me:

1) The rate at which these things happen is sufficiently high that I see 20 or 30 of these stories a year without looking for them. My reaction is now "one more of these".

2) The system is very bad at dealing with these things even if they are exceptions. I'm ok with that when the system is "Google's tech support for free products" and not ok when it's civil rights.

3) Even if the arrest itself is an exception the story that comes after (filthy cell full of people, verbal and racial abuse, etc) is incredibly consistent.

Perhaps the folks who report this stuff are the exceptions. If you find yourself in these scenarios and you're not white, or aware of your rights... who's going to believe the ramblings of some gaolbird?

What happened here is called "arbitrary detention and release". And is one of the characteristics of dictatorships or of a police state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_arrest_and_detention

Having one characteristic of a police state marginally met in a single instance does not mean sufficient characteristics are met most of the time.

I can guarantee you, living in San Francisco and having lived in actual police states, the US is not a police state and you do a disservice to those in Egypt or North Korea by suggesting so

Where exactly are you going with this? The author is doing something that they are passionate about and would seem to have an audience. Not only that it is more socially conscious than working for King or some other crap app factory.

So what's the beef and why are you so condescending about it?

Understanding the problem should not make you puss out and be wary of it and act scared all the time, avoiding those problems, because that's how those problems grow until you can't fight them anymore.

Explaining society doesn't justify the issues at hand.

Understanding the problems should allow you to see your errors and rectify and communicate your best intentions, and then tell you're sorry so you can get out of the situation.

OP demonstrate that if you don't have that essential pearl of wisdom to communicate your best intention and if you're not able to keep your calm in any situation, you will fall into this police jail trap.

I think this article should point out that it's stupid to argue that you should keep your calm, because statistically, many people will get an abusive treatment if they can't keep their calm.

If the police is preying of your lack of temper management to get a chance to get you, then that's a real problem, because if it puts a distrust in the police, it's potentially dangerous for society.

Understanding nature will help individual, but won't help society, because you can only help society by setting better standards.

The highest class in this country creates this reality. There is no police state if there is not economy to protect. There is not economy to protect if there's not huge multinational corporations. Legal violence is a tool used indirectly by the largest players in the economy.

Police and militaries preserve order which reduces risk to highly invested economic interests; it helps keep the growth curve slowly moving up and to the right.

As fucked up as that whole situation was, it's born out of a massive economic disparity and not a "deluded hacker" mentality.

> P.S. Just saw that immediately race was brought up. As a tip to anyone who wants to make a difference, people in power will divide you into as many groups as you let them in order to subjugate you.

You can simultaneously recognize that the system is biased against certain races while also avoiding infighting based upon race. It's kind of ironic that you tell people to pay more attention to reality and then essentially tell people to pretend racism doesn't exist in one of the most racist segments of US society.

> You can simultaneously recognize that the system is biased against certain races while also avoiding infighting based upon race.

maybe you and i can, but in practice, that doesn't really happen. one of the biggest problems with our social justice movement is the complete lack of unity. many times when i see privilege brought up, it's used to invalidate opinions and justify hate towards those with more privilege ("i'm oppressed so my hate is irrelevant compared to the oppression inflicted on me"), not as a simple reminder of people's relative advantages or disadvantages. the crux of the problem is that the issues of a minority community have a much greater chance of being solved with support outside of that specific community.

but groups that advocate for social justice for minority groups too often create a dialogue of hate and "oppressor / oppressed", and outright exclude those who don't belong to the oppressed community for which they are advocating. in this way these communities become insular echo chambers, since rather than taking outside voices with a grain of salt, outside voices are simply not tolerated. the dialogue becomes more and more partisan / hateful and the rift between relatively advantaged and relatively disadvantaged groups grows wider.

I don't identify with the "social justice" movement for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean racism doesn't exist, and that certainly doesn't mean it's productive to try to remove discussion about racism from an arena so profoundly racist.

Look up "The Southern Strategy" and its relation to drug criminalization. Look up "Stop and Frisk". Look up the reasons behind criminalizing crack at a higher level than cocaine. Incarceration rates, prosecution rates, execution rates, literally everything even vaguely related to this topic. It's pervasive. If you choose to ignore that, minorities who think you don't have their interests at heart probably have a point.

> that doesn't mean racism doesn't exist, and that certainly doesn't mean it's productive to try to remove discussion about racism from an arena so profoundly racist.

wat? i didn't say these things at all. we're on the same page. i agree with you.

> This is a perfect example of the disconnect between "hackers"

The people here aren't hackers. Hackers do not trust the system. These people want to manipulate the system for profit.