Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

The question that I have every time I read about something similar to this is not about the law itself, but about the human who's applying the law: how/ why/ what is the line of thought that would lead them to (supposedly) knowingly do something like this? I realize that processes, bureaucracy and generally abstraction can allow people to do less than desirable behaviours, but I can't quite figure out which abstraction that would encourage people to do things like that (note: with the term "abstraction", I meant that by using incentives or measuring the wrong intermediate metrics, we've created a wrong set of objectives, which might be completely misaligned with the actual goal we're trying to achieve).

Laws are complex set of statements, which naturally will have more accidentally complexity as they're developed, a phenomenon that hackers are extremely familiar with. That's something to be expected. On the other hand, human, abusing the accidental complexity of law, is not ideal - as anything else, there should be place and time for trickery, but not the SOP.

That said, what's the rationale for the behaviour of law enforcement officer in pursuing various type of trap-y actions?

- Do LEO routinely believes that everyone they investigate to be committing the crime. Do we have a good priori of P(criminal | under investigation) that would support this?

- Did we actually manage to create a powerful enough abstractions that let actors within the system to, well, behave psychopathically (ie. this button should be pushed because I'm supposed to do that, I don't really know what happen behind it)?

- Trickery are generally being reported out of proportion, and should not be a general concern for the the majority of us.

- Malicious intention -- I will assume this percentage to be not higher than those from a general population.

I would say "all of the above."

LEO do routinely believe that people they investigate must be guilty. They don't investigate at random, but rather are prompted by some evidence of criminal behavior. That certainly doesn't mean that you must be guilty if they investigate you, but it sets them up to believe you are.

The system is set up with compartments so nobody sees the full consequences of anything and this sort of misbehavior is encouraged. If you send somebody to jail, they disappear from your life the moment the verdict is reached and you have no reason to dwell on the harm you've caused them. (And if you do, you probably think it's a good thing, because you think they're a criminal!) And you probably get a commendation for putting a bad guy away.

Bad behavior does get reported disproportionately. Most cops are good cops. For everyone like this, there are ten cops who find a lost cellphone and personally deliver it back to the owner, as happened to a neighbor of mine a few months ago. That doesn't make the news. Although that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a concern for the majority of us. Even a small risk of being falsely imprisoned is important, and there's no harm in taking the "SHUT UP" route with a good cop.

Finally, I would be wary of assuming that malicious intent is no higher than among the general population. Bad people tend to seek power over others, and what better way to wield such power than to do so legally as a member of the police? No doubt, the legitimate "protect and serve" folks still greatly outnumber the bad guys, but I would bet they're more concentrated.

It's dangerous to bandy around statements like "most cops are good cops" for which you don't have evidence. Instead, you might say "Some cops are good cops".

How is it "dangerous"? I'm expressing my personal opinion on a relatively obscure site on the internet. It is one of the least dangerous activities I can imagine.

Your argument does not rest on most cops being good cops, it stands if some cops are good cops. So why throw in an assertion you can't back up?

You asserted that it was "dangerous" for him to bandy around such statements.

Care to back up that assertion?

"Unnecessary" and "dangerous" are quite different.

The very blog post which prompted this discussion explains the danger of assuming even impartial investigative intentions of cops, let alone "good" ones.

The word "dangerous" is not exclusively used to indicate the likelihood of physical injury. It is also widely used to describe the likelihood of any undesirable consequences. The undesirable consequence in this case is a weakening of the argument being presented.

How does it weaken the argument? No one has put forth the idea that it is ok to talk to good cops. Don't talk to cops good, bad, or indifferent in nature.

Oh but he can.

See, he's not holding himself to your standard of evidence. That would require mass mindreading, plus the ability to irrevocably demonstrate the authenticity of such.

Rather, he's backing up that statement with evidence in the reader's head, counting on most readers to reflect back on their life experience and see if his statement fits. He has faith that it will. In my case, it does: I agree. I'll even upvote him.

Because this is an informal conversation, not some nitpicky debate society. Somebody asked a question and I gave my opinion as a response.

timv: the OP is warning people to avoid talking to cops. "Most cops are good" is a very common sentiment that is even inculcated in kids growing up attending public schools. This widespread common belief contributes to people speaking naively to police and thereby getting themselves in trouble. That is what I meant by dangerous. I didn't explain this in my reply to mikeash because it seemed to me that mikeash was being obtuse given the context of the OP.

Edit in reply to rosser: I agree with you there.

The good cop:bad cop ratio is utterly orthogonal to whether or not it's a terrible idea to talk to them without a lawyer present. They still have to do their jobs, and if you say something in the course of speaking with them that furthers their investigation, directly or indirectly, they're kinda obligated to pursue it.

Even if they're the nicest person you've ever met.

Can we agree that it's an assertion in advance of facts?

Strong disagreement.

If we are going to get real reform, we need the police to also buy in. Alienating them doesn't help.

The drive to consider oneself a "good person" is fundamental to human nature (yes, psychopathy is a pathology). The issue is that "good" is socially defined. LEOs operate in a very odd social space.

How do we get LEOs to want to align more with a more civil social space? This is the nut we need to crack.

When you become a cop (and I use that word loosely to mean anyone who is empowered by the broad law enforcement system) everyone else becomes a potential criminal.

"Bad behavior does get reported disproportionately. Most cops are good cops. For everyone like this, there are ten cops who find a lost cellphone and personally deliver it back to the owner, as happened to a neighbor of mine a few months ago. That doesn't make the news."

1. Name the town? (Make the news?)

2. I'm not going compare good/bad cops. (It's impossible to argue, unless the Federal government just finished an investigation. A investigation that didn't get much attention?)

3. I live in a low crime county, but I am seeing cops doing things they didn't do 15 years ago. My town is Marin County.

4. I'll start with Revenue collection. Yes--it's not about safety in my county anymore--it's about Tickets. The amount of tickets written is staggering. Many people honestly don't know what law they broke. It's gotten ridiculous.

5. "The broken window theory"! Yes--every town in my county is putting that theory to the test. They are stopping people, frisking them, and digitally taking their picture. They are harassing people. It's beyond disturbing to watch a group of officers swoop down on a female for sitting on a curb. Watch them frisk her.(they used a enthusiastic female cop for the frisk) Empty her purse. Take her picture. And then let her go?? (I won't bring up the metaphors.)

6. As to good/bad cops, I don't care; I don't trust any of them anymore. Yes, I can say that because I live in a low crime community, but I don't think it needs to be this way?

7. As to self preservation, just a name and address, but I'm polite. I do have front and rear cameras that turn on when I put the key in the ignition. When walking, riding, or running I always have a smart phone with video app queued up.

8. I am a middle aged white guy, and I feel like this?

9. I feel sick just writing about this. I might understand the mentality if crime was going up, but every decade it has decreased in proportion to population. It's about Revenue, and Gentrification, and yes--I recall a cop retrieving a lost cell phone. It made the paper. The kid said he found the phone. The cop accused the kid of lying. I don't know the outcome, but it did happen once--it's in the marinij.com somewhere. What's ironic is it only seemed to happen once? I wonder why? It's like getting a cop to come to the swap meet to retrieve your stolen bike--good luck! No revenue in the end? As to gentrification, it's even more ironic because local cops can't even afford to live in this county?

1. Fairfax County, VA.

4. The revenue generation aspect of traffic enforcement is deeply worrying. However, I don't think you have to be a bad cop to participate in that. The problem is the system, where the laws are written in a way that ignores how people actually behave, and thus virtually everyone breaks them. There's no need to entrap or falsely accuse people for the purposes of revenue generation, because there's more than enough true violations out there.

How are people in your area unable to know what law they broke? It's always been clear for everyone I know: exceeding the posted speed limit, parking where prohibited, etc. The issue is simply that driving the posted limit is nearly impossible in many cases (everybody else is going faster and it's dangerous if you don't too), parking signs have poor visibility and are difficult to understand, etc.

"Bad cops" is an easy answer to the woes of modern-day policing, but I just don't think it's the root of the problem.

Put yourself in the shoes of a federal agent investigating a crime. Crimes happen all the time; they're commmitted by people who then try very hard to hide what they did.

So a criminal investigator is going to treat everyone they interview with suspicion from the start. That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build. It's inherent in that type of job.

And investigators only have certain tools that they can use in order to find the criminals who are lying to them. If they get information the wrong way, even if it is accurate information about a real crime, it will be ruled inadmissable and the criminal will get away.

A big tool they have is relationships. If they can get one person in a criminal network to cooperate, then they can try to traverse the network and find the other criminals. Since criminals rarely want to cooperate with law enforcement, they use "gotcha" type tools to compel cooperation--like the false statement trap. They just need a little leverage on the person to get going.

All that you said is true, but I think it's orthogonal to what I was wondering about -- actually, it just raised more questions for me.

The common legal advice is "do not talk to cop", which presumably because on average, you will actually get into trouble with it. So in a sense, the question was "Why would LEO cause you trouble for those technicality if you're innocent?". I mean, let's say the first innocent guy who got into the false statement trap actually just cooperate, got himself proven innocent, and the investigator let him go from the technicality, and then that's ... it, right? But I don't think that's what the story normally is (is it?). There seems to be too many stories of people getting into trouble for technicality/ trap, while committing no crime originally.

There are several explanations I can think of for the behaviour (in which LEO follow up on trap when investigating innocence), most of them are quite unsettling. Notably, if criminal are getting good to the point that investigation can't truly tell without unreasonable doubt that a criminal has committed a crime, and so has to resort to trap to convict them (which leads using trap in any case they can), then well, isn't that just mean investigation are not effective as well?

I know what we should do to (try to) protect ourselves from the current situation, I was just wondering how we get here.

TL;DR: Law trap by itself is not good, however it's a necessity. But shouldn't it be used as last resort against criminal? Why does the population has to worry about trap as SOP of criminal investigator?

I hope more people start to ask your questions. Law enforcement in the US has drifted far from what most people consider moral or right.

> That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build.

There’s no reason to assume software being innocent/bug-free unless proven otherwise. This is not the case with humans, at least in civilized parts of the world.

There is an additional wrinkle here. The overwhelming majority of people prosecuted by the Feds are guilty of something (and not just of some "made up" crime). I worked for a federal appellate judge. Saw dozens of criminal cases come up on appeal. Didn't see a single one from the Feds where the evidence of guilt wasn't overwhelming (even if some convictions were defective for technical reasons, and even if some were for debatably immoral conduct like drug trafficking). They don't go around baiting random people they think are innocent to lie in an interview. They do it to make sure they have concrete points of leverage to get information about the rest of the crimes.

Of course, this really sucks if you're innocent (though even then, often your associates aren't and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time). When these guys see guilty people lie to their face day in and day out, it's hard to give the rare actually innocent person the benefit of the doubt. They have the moral obligation to do that, mind you. It's just understandably hard.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron was clearly guilty of the crime he was charged with.

You can debate the morality of that crime being on the books, but it's clear that he did what he was charged with.

It's not what he was charged with, it's the evil and horrid behavior of Carmen M. Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, after being charged that disgusts most people.

> The overwhelming majority of people prosecuted by the Feds are guilt.

That is not the right narrative for HN. The cop is the perp and the perp is the victim is taken as gospel here.

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