Civil asset forfeiture encourages criminality in police. This, along with qualified immunity, are significant drivers behind the 'defund' movement. Reforming these two policies would be entirely sensible, if the country wasn't so hopelessly polarized.
I agree with you. I don't like that being pro police became a cult of letting them do whatever they want.
I'm pro police and I believe they should be paid more, get more training, and be held to much higher standard which means relentlessly pursuing and strongly prosecuting corrupt police. It's a betrayal of an entire community in a profession where lives are often at stake.
Being pro police also doesn't mean making their job as easy as possible to the detriment of everybody else.
Good reminder to vote your district attorney or equivalent out of office every single election unless they are relentless about prosecuting police who break the law.
Weird examples that never go away, you can see instances of these every single day:
- Tons of LAPD drive with illegal tints & no tags on their personal vehicles
- Tons of NYPD park in the bike lane or on the actual sidewalk
There are twitter accounts that follow these easy to spot examples. Harder to track: abuses of power in small towns when no cameras are rolling.
DAs have even more leeway in some states than others, for instance in New York felonies can only be charged via grand jury unless waived by the defendant. This gives a DA unilateral power to sandbag any indictment they don’t feel like prosecuting without looking soft on bad cops (see the Buffalo shoving incident) with zero transparency.
IMO it would be a good idea to have a separate prosecuting authority for crimes by police. The regular prosecuting authority needs a good working relationship with police forces and will always find it hard to hold them to account.
Are private prosecutions a thing in the States? Sounds like an ACLU style organisation but focused on private prosecution of cops doing illegal things is needed.
It doesn't appear to be a thing in quite a few states, and where it is, it seems quite limited. Thus, the only legal remedy is lawsuits, which is why qualified immunity is such an injustice.
Don't know about the States. In the UK, private prosecution (for crimes) can occur but the DPP has the right to take them over (and drop them), so it's not usually worth it.
IA departments (more commonly called Professional Standards or PS these days) usually suffer severely from too close of a relationship with the officers they supervise. It's common for PS detectives to be former field division or otherwise non-PS officers, and often for their promotion paths to be back out of PS, so they're often very much on the side of the officers by default. Consider also that, in most departments, the union is a massive driver of the department culture and attitude towards compliance, and PS is represented by (and beholden to) the same union.
The most common attempt at a solution to this problem has been "civilian oversight," which typically takes the form of a new department of the city government that is responsible for auditing the police department and/or investigating department actions (in response to citizen complaints or on other triggers). The civilian oversight department is typically firewalled from the police department through means like a prohibition on staff moving from one to the other and an independent governance structure.
Because of collective bargaining agreement constraints there's usually still a PS division and some confusing work breakdown, where one audits the others work or the two perform independent parallel investigations or similar. There are some good reasons for that (doesn't necessarily make sense to have an independent civilian oversight agency reviewing every minor policy violation), but it often feels like waste.
The Buffalo shoving incident was almost identical to an incident in my state, and had an almost identical outcome because of the same problem: DAs who want to take the easy route.
Well IMO one of the problem here is thinking in either "pro" or "anti" group stances. I am neither pro police, nor anti police.
I am pro enforcement of laws that protect people from being victimized by others. That is a very narrow statement that does not require me to be "pro police" or "anti police"
>> I believe they should be paid more, get more training, and be held to much higher standard
This is often a position people take, but if fails root cause analysis. I am not convinced that more training, more pay, and higher standards will fix anything.
The root cause is 2 fold first over-criminalization of society, and the use of police to enforce things that should not be crimes in the first place, or should be left to civil enforcement. The second is then giving police more power than average citizen, and I am not just talking arresting power there is a solid case there. However governments pass all kinds of laws written that have specific carve outs for police, this creates a "higher class" member of society that allows the member of this class to believe they are the sovereign and we are the vessels this fly's in the face of governance "For the people, by the people" aka self governance.
IMO the law itself creates the logical end result of the policing we have today, unless we change the law the police no matter the pay, training, or standards will still be a problem
It strikes me as odd that you would even have a pro/anti position. To my mind that contributes to the division since it also happens to turn into an identity in some form. "As someone who is pro police...", "being pro police is about X not Y."
I find it mentally exhausting. It's like walking on eggshells.
> Civil asset forfeiture encourages criminality in police.
If you'll forgive a moment of polemic: In my judgment, civil-asset forfeiture is a crime, full-stop.
As a regular citizen without special legal training, it seems like as blatant a violation of the 5th Amendment as one could imagine.
Perhaps with more legal training I'd judge it differently. But I'm not ready to give the court system the benefit of the doubt on this. And I would be deeply skeptical of any argument to the contrary.
If the SCOTUS can justify civil-asset forfeiture (in its current form), then I don't see how the Bill of Rights offers any protection at all.
Also, TSA gets kickbacks from homeland security. If they see large sums of cash in your bags, they will contact the police in order to try and get it taken via civil asset forfeiture, and then they'll get a kickback for it.
I plan to start traveling with wads of prop money with a couple hundreds on the outside to get a lel out of the interaction when the cops inevitably show up to try and confiscate it.
> As a regular citizen without special legal training...
Living in a free society or not, you are fit to judge the rectitude of the law. To suggest otherwise implies a servile relationship of the citizen to the state. All manner of abominable laws have existed and been upheld under all forms of the US constitution. Qualified advocates argued against, and supreme court judges ruled against Dred Scott (7 - 2), for instance. As long as it has existed, the supreme court has been in a crisis of legitimacy, and upholding the appearance of legitimacy has been its prima causa.
What separates you and a fine judgement of what is just? Three years of sophistical "scholarship" and two summers of internships?
If only the legislature could sit down and write single-issue bills with clear bipartisan support... but I'm not sure you're right. The phrase "law and order" seems to shut down rational thought, and there are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle who appear to act at the whim of police lobbies. When confronted with the blatant unconstitutionality of the patriot act, Democrats and Republicans alike responded "yeah, but police are using it to fight crime."
for most political reforms it seems the news media purposely chooses the most polarizing examples of the problem to highlight.
Does not matter if police reform, abortion, welfare, or any other topic, the media chooses the examples that will most upset those opposing the reform.
This results in nothing getting reform, maintaining the status quo, and the media;s reoccurring revenue stream
The nation is hopelessly polarized as a direct result of media propaganda, I have encountered this everyday and when people are giving actual non-sensationalized facts it is very easy to come to compromise policy position.
The same polarizing media conveniently blamed Facebook and Twitter (though to a lesser extent) for all the polarization that they have been fomenting for years.
I guess that move wasn’t as surprising for me as seeing the number of people in SV who bought into that narrative.
Corporate media should not really be thought of as real journalistic entities.
Simple example. How in the world does CNN allow Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother. The fact that no one inside CNN publicly objected to this, walked away, protested, it tells me everything I need to know about the entire organization.
I don’t remember anyone at MSNBC making a fuss about it, nor at the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness).
Hmmm, yeah no. Whether it's Vanity Fair or other "liberal scions", they're as likely to point out the issues with this sort of self-serving coverage as your favorite hand wringer on Fox News, who themselves are almost entirely "entertainment" and have so much obvious conflict of interest in their coverage... and if the Jan 6 SMS messages are to be believed, simple out right lying.
> How in the world does CNN allow Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother.
To be fair to CNN, they did ban that from 2013 until it was temporarily lifted in 2020 because "Chris speaking with his brother about the challenges of what millions of American families were struggling with was of significant human interest"[1].
It was definitely a bad judgement call but hardly damning of the whole organisation.
If the only news media on consume is New Yorker, NYT and The Atlantic (all of which are rated as Left Bias news sources) then you are likely already in an echo chamber, so when exposed to a non-echo chamber source with comments (like HN) you come way with a false attribution as to what is propaganda, and what the source of that propaganda is
I think you're in the "New Yorker, NYT, and The Atlantic are echo chambers" echo chamber.
I don't believe or agree with everything that I read. I also read a fair amount of different opinions in these sources which leads me to believe it's more varied than you would like to believe.
It's interesting because I've always considered myself center/center right politically.
I thought those 3 publications were widely known to be left of centre so I have to agree with the person you're responding to, because if you don't know they're left of centre and that they clearly share an outlook, then you must be in an echo chamber.
As a simple test, do you think someone who says "I read the Federalist, Spectator and the WSJ" would notice a change if they read the NYT?
I know they all have some contributors that go against their own ideological grain, so to speak, but still, you provided a good example of what being in an echo chamber might look like.
Your opinion of those titles is irrelevant to the point. In fact, your calling the Federalist "polarizing garbage", and that you compared a magazine to the news section of the NYT and don't seem to know 2 of the most famous right-leaning titles in the world, should be a sign that you're not reading widely enough and that you're not doing it without bias.
What you should be doing is reading them, agreeing with them is beside the point - that's what getting out of an echo chamber looks like.
It is obvious that the Federalist is appealing to outrage with those headlines; which makes it quite hard to take seriously. But those headlines are legitimate issues. The right wing is being forced in to a position where it needs to build its own internet infrastructure, which is a big deal. The headline manages to make it sound stupid but that doesn't change the fact that it is worthy of being headline news.
And again with Baby Killing vs Boosters - one of the two papers is much better at writing headlines, but both of those go to largely the same issue which is how the state should interfere with individual medical decisions.
If you ignore the fact that the Federalist is targeting people who don't appreciate good writing, the dismissal of one and favouring of the other isn't as obvious.
>The right wing is being forced in to a position where it needs to build its own internet infrastructure
The "right" does not have to build it's own infrastructure, plenty of right wing media personalities and publications maintain a presence on Facebook/Twitter/etc... as long as they follow the rules of the platform. That headline is just clickbait nonsense.
Which are themselves politically bias to one world view, that of the US political left.
To be clear I am not talking about the enforcement of the rules, which is a problem in itself, but the actual rules as laid out are such they favor the identity politics of the modern "left" in the US.
Those that do not support, or agree with identity politics must do verbal, and ideological self censorship to exist on said platforms.
In the case of Trump, Twitter was actively interfering with one of the main channels being used by a Republican president, up to and including banning him while claiming "I will not be going to the inauguration" is an incitement of violence.
That isn't an acceptable situation for a wing of politics. The right will need friendly, or at least neutral, versions of the big social media platforms and they will keep losing elections until they figure that out.
People may or may not agree about the specific case, but looking at the capabilities in a strategic sense and it isn't something that can be glossed over. The outrageous treatment Trump received on social media is a big deal; insofar as the right wing is a political entity it has to respond.
The reason the right wing needs to build their own communication infrastructure is that they need to publish dishonest propaganda and they need entire organizations that are corrupt to the core.
In no way is the NYT any longer able to be called centrist from a UK outlook, that's long in the past, it shares a space with the Guardian now and seems happy to be doing so.
My position on those organizations political bias is from ratings by several independent organizations such as Ground News (but not only them) which I have been using more recently.
I read 100's of news sources weekly, and if topic I want information on I drill down beyond the news organization seeking out orginal sources (for example if a news organization is reporting on a COVID Study, I read the study. If they are reporting on the 6th circuits ruling, I go read the ruling.. etc)
It is ironic that someone the proudly proclaims they only consume information from 3 sources proclaims I am in an echo chamber but they could never be... lol
As for my political leanings, I more of a Political Compass person where by economics is Left/Right, under which I am almost exactly in the enter, but social is on a Authority / Liberty scale, of which I am on the extreme end of the liberty scale
Libertarians have been talking about it for decades, but it seems lately that even some public outlets have been talking about it. I don't know if it's getting worse or finally coming to public notice.
I'm also a supporter. I am a bit confused why groups I normally support on the left have this as a somewhat low priority relative to the equity issues. This has an equity component too. The folks most likely to be unbanked, carrying around cash etc are minorities.
The favored solutions for "equity issues" usually involve jobs for left activists or NGOs - "defund the police" transmutes into "we need half a department worth of various flavors of social workers".
It's a low priority because fundamentally fixing a problem will put the group out of business.
It's a tired outrage show. Wake me up when BLM starts demanding the removal of government immunity.
>It's a low priority because fundamentally fixing a problem will put the group out of business
Exactly. They can either go the way of urban democrats and persist by promising to solve problems you never solve (not that republicans have served rural voters any better) or they can go the way of MADD and actually make progress and then see interest wane. They chose the former.
Democrats and Republicans appear to be different when you listen to their speeches... but in the end, when you look at their actions or inactions, they are very similar on many topics.
Civil forfeiture is a dumpster fire. I don't know who thought giving an organization that has the power to extort -with legal backing, would result in anything else.
Good comparison. Other federal organizations have these, too. Many NASA launches have a black project that the public does not hear about. We should probably change the phrasing from black to something else, though.
Do 5g cell towers or carriers have any tech that would stop these stingrays? Or is there anything consumers can do, maybe a whitelist app or something to authenticate real towers?
Can't see why corporations would side with consumers over law enforcement. On the other hand, the very existence of stingrays suggests corporate cooperation isn't enough in some way.
Maybe Apple (and/or browser makers) could get away with a blanket "you're not connected to a publicly registered cell tower; proceed with caution" alert, like happens with SSL certs and HTTPS.
Apparently there are public databases of known cell towers (e.g. https://opencellid.org) some of which are crowd-sourced.
You can detect stringrays with iPhone apps even by accessing the limited mobile network info you get, the problem is Apple bans these apps for unknown reasons.
One of the luxuries about being a one party state is that you[1] never have to think critically about the means because you always agree with the ends. Massachusetts is going to be one of the last states that has that tough discussion about reining in the enforcement arm of government because it is a) so one sided b) rich enough to paper over problems for a long time.
[1] the theoretical average citizen who holds the average beliefs about everything
FYI - Massachusetts has historically had a Democratic legislature and Republican Governor, so it's not really a "one party state", though I think your point still stands. In fact, we had a republican senator not too long ago (Scott Brown).
While yes Massachusetts does elect Republican governors and Scott Brown became a senator (mostly because he ran against a lukewarm turd) it is very much a single party state. The legislature has a veto-proof supermajority. The Republican governors are forced to come towards the center to get any part of their agenda accomplished.
Everyone knows the Speaker of the House is the most powerful politician in MA.
