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Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

I'm ready for a state to require verification of a crime before a person is detained. Put the person into the police car, connect to a video conference with a review board, review the footage of the police officer's FPV cam, and let the person go if no crime was committed.

Having the power to waste someone's time is too much power.

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Put the person into the police car, connect to a video conference with a review board, review the footage of the police officer's FPV cam, and let the person go if no crime was committed.

People might laugh at the idea above but we're operating with a policing structure that developed a long time before video recording and conferencing technology became available or cheap enough to be embedded with every officer. We have an abundance of people versed in criminal and civil law. Could you not automatically form a quorum of staff versed in legal matters from across the city/state/country to quickly give the thumbs up to an arrest over video conference? Sort of like a Mechanical Turk for legal matters? They could operate from a call center or home.

Imagine the benefits of this to regional areas where local/district courts have fewer resources than their city-based brethren.

> Having the power to waste someone's time is too much power.

Only if there are never repercussions for misusing it. If police got in trouble for detaining people who hadn't done anything wrong, it would happen less.

I think you're optimistic. What you'd have is criminals taking advantage of this up to the point where they'd get in trouble... then given the rise in crime people, the electorate, would demand the police "do something" about the crime and the police would get a mandate to arrest suspicious people again.

Criminals are savvy. They'd game it and people would capitulate.

I didn't say punishing police for such things would solve all our other problems, or even that it was a good idea. I said it would lead to less of said things.

In principle, any limitation placed on police could wind up helping criminals; nonetheless there must be some limitations. Things like citizen review boards would probably be a good idea here.

I'm amazed that nobody is doing this yet. The notion that states can act as laboratories, at least insofar as many of the most frequent interactions with government, isn't working very well right now.

In the big picture an arrest and the subsequent legal proceeding isn't a big deal in someone's life if they are exonerated.

We shouldn't short-cut the legal process with a quick, possibly faulty process.

> isn't a big deal in someone's life if they are exonerated

It is if they lose their job because they're in jail. It is if they don't have anyone else to look after their kid while they're in jail. It is if they can't afford court fees.

The current faulty shortcut is to plead guilty for a crime you didn't commit [1]. That is not justice.

Being processed in a time frame that matches the severity of the crime seems more fitting.

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-basics-plea-barga...

Courts are overwhelmed because laws rarely get revoked, revised, or modernized.

6th amendment to the US constitution:

  In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the 
  right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury 
  of the State and district wherein the crime shall have  
  been committed, which district shall have been previously 
  ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and 
  cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the 
  witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for 
  obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the 
  Assistance of Counsel for his defense

The fact that you're commenting on this site most likely means you're not in a position to make this judgement call. Perhaps you don't work at a job where you're expendable, where the management looks down upon you because you're "white trash" or an "uppity black", where telling your boss that you were unfairly arrested doesn't get you any sympathies(unpaid leave, or fired), and the bank supplying your mortgage certainly isn't sympathetic to your appeal that you lost all your money because you had to go and defend yourself in court instead of actually working.

The problem isn't me being pulled over and questioned. I can brush it off as an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise beneficial solution. Those people that live day by day and have no allowance to deal with this shit literally have their lives ruined by such an interaction.

This is only about stopping police misconduct before they maliciously charge someone with a crime. Provided this review process was suitably unbiased and not just getting a buddy to rubber stamp arrests that could be a good improvement over the lack of accountability and justice in the process currently.

> In the big picture an arrest and the subsequent legal proceeding isn't a big deal in someone's life if they are exonerated.

Says someone with a disturbing lack of empathy.

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