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Police who raided a marijuana store, destroying security cameras and the DVR, harassing the store's customers, consuming edible marijuana products, and playing darts, were caught on camera. The cops claim that said recording is illegal because the cops had an expectation of privacy after destroying all of the security cameras.
I wish I could make up this stuff.
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Police Claim Recording of Marijuana Dispensary Raid is Illegal
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Endless Loop, n.:
see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless, n.:
see Endless Loop.
-- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @04:22PM
Except that you dont see video of the 10's of thousands that just 'do their job' every day, properly and without incident. Much like if you work in 'customer service', you only hear about the bad experiences, and almost never the good ones. After a while your entire view of reality is shifted towards the red if all see is the bad.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Sunday August 09 2015, @04:50PM
You know what else we also don't ever see?
Honest cops defending the honor of the police by presenting an united front against the "bad apples."
Instead, we've got the exact opposite situation: the "thin blue line," the dishonorable code of honor that says that loyalty to the uniform trumps all else, including loyalty to the law, the society, and basic human dignity.
Were there any honest cops left in Santa Ana, they'd have already called a press conference and demanded the immediate resignation and / or termination of everybody who took part in this raid, including their supervisors all the way up to the Chief. That nothing remotely like that has happened tells us that the entire force is corrupt to some degree or another -- either they're as unabashedly dirty as those on the video, or they're non-objecting accomplices after the fact.
Indeed, that we find ourselves in a situation such as this where those caught on camera are whining about the fact they got caught instead of openly admitting that they fucked up and resigning on the spot tells you all you need to know about just how dishonorable a "profession" policing has become.
I mean, imagine if you had an after-hours drunken party at work where you smashed the place up good, gave some real frights to the janitors, and joked about how you were about to kick the gimpy one in the groin. And that it was all caught on surveillance tape. Would it even occur to you to protest to the boss that you shouldn't be fired because you forgot to turn off the surveillance system?
In what other context is even a fraction of this sort of behavior even remotely tolerable or excusable? Where else could you do this sort of thing and have all your cow-orkers support you?
Who else but a crime lord or his minions could even think of suggesting that there's nothing worth worrying about when something like this happens?
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Francis on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:07PM
Why bother? This view of the world isn't going to change no matter what the police do or say. I mean for heaven's gate, I saw somebody claim in all seriousness that Sandra Bland was lynched in prison despite no actual evidence that she hadn't hanged herself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:13PM
> Why bother? This view of the world isn't going to change no matter what the police do or say.
Oh please. The world is not binary. The fact that some people will always be suspicious doesn't excuse the fact that the police have a big and correctable problem.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:20PM
No, but the crazies in the black lives matter movement aren't likely to believe anything they get. A man was shot to death by police a couple blocks from here a couple weeks ago and people have already largely forgotten about it. No protests and very little press. Main reason was that he was a white man shot by police rather than being somebody of color. The black lives matter protesters are every bit as racist as the people they're protesting, but they would rather prevent Bernie Saunders from talking than engage in some real dialog.
Trying to negotiate with people like that does little other than waste your time and energy. Ever try debating a Klansman? I'm betting you wouldn't get anywhere with them either.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:35PM
> Ever try debating a Klansman?
Nope. But I'm getting a pretty good idea of what it would be like.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:06PM
Probably because you're a different kind of bigot. The black lives matter people focus on a tiny part of the problem that reinforces their previously held views. They're willing to let countless black men die young due to things like heart disease, diabetes and other preventable illnesses and choose to focus on a relatively rare problem. In the mean time people who aren't colored get killed by police and that's OK. No comment at all about police brutality or how that person shouldn't have been killed.
(Score: 4, Touché) by HiThere on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:40PM
On what grounds do you declare the problem to be "relatively rare"?
It may, indeed, *be* relatively rare, but the statistics aren't being honestly collected by an unbiased party.
That said, I also feel that if a person chooses to act in ways that shorten their life, that's their choice. But if they act in ways that shorten or diminish someone else's life...that's likely to be a criminal matter. This attitude comes with lots of difficult edge cases, but that doesn't change the core. And, no, you can't claim that because their friends are inherently affected by whatever they do that's grounds for overriding this. (Family is a more difficult case...but it should be their choice.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:14PM
the statistics aren't being honestly collected by an unbiased party.
Maybe their sources are wrong, but the Guardian is trying to just make the data available:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database [theguardian.com].
Currently: 340 white people killed by police, 179 black people, 101 hispanic/latino.
This apparently translates into:
- 1.72 in 1 million white folks is killed by police
- 4.28 in 1 million black folks is killed by police
- 1.87 in 1 million hispanic/latino folks is killed by police
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday August 10 2015, @04:32AM
To me this (the following) is kind of both shocking and dismayingly “normal” i.e. utterly fucked up in lots of different ways. I'm not letting the Guardian run scripts on my computer so I can't check anything there but their percentages look weird. Or maybe it's the use of percentages that makes it look weird when almost twice as many whites are being killed? White lives don't matter? Is the Guardian flaunting their racist oikophobic tendencies?
Be that as it may (it's a huge subject) maybe it's time for everybody else to also (additionally) focus on those 340 white people and 101 hispanic people? Stop focusing on race/color/whatever you want to call it and start focusing on criminals hiding behind a(ny) badge?
A white guy holding sunglasses should not be shot and/or killed just like a black guy buying a toy gun in a shop should not be shot and/or killed. Young kids of any color should not be killed. The message ought to be “All lives matter”.
P.s. any “PC leftists” (there are plenty at the Guardian) ought to be embarassed that it takes a “far right” person like me to point that out. They ought to have done that themselves and saved themselves the shame.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday August 10 2015, @08:36AM
1. You are right, we should also worry about other folk being shot by the police.
2. The percentages make sense if there are somewhere around 5 times as many white folks as black folk in the country.
E.g.: If there would be 200 black people and 1000 white people, then (with the above numbers) 90% of black folk would have been shot, while only 34% of white folk.
I couldn't find a clear statement on the distribution of race /ethnicity on the Guardian's site. From Wikipedia:
"White Americans are the racial majority, with a 77.7% share of the U.S. population. African Americans are the largest racial minority, amounting to 13.2% of the population. Hispanic and Latino Americans amount to 17.1% of the population, making up the largest ethnic minority."
So that bears out point 2: around 5 times as many white folk as black folk.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday August 10 2015, @10:29PM
Yes except percentages don't make sense the way they're used where a lower percentage is somehow “better” even when it means is that more people in a group are killed. It's a pretty good example of how to lie despite using the correct numbers. Yet another cognitive version of cooking the books.
You and me and everyone are not ((1/number of people in whatever group attributed)*100), we're all ((1/1)*100) while alive and ((0/1)*100) when dead :|
Whites are less likely to “interact” with cops, less likely to be pulled over, less likely to be searched, less likely to be harassed, and even less likely (that's a percentage after all) to be killed. Or so the usual MSM & “special interests” portrayal goes but even so more whites end up dead. There's something wrong with that so why is such a flawed angle being pushed and is it to lull non-blacks into apathy about the number of people killed, the randomness, the brutality, and the frequency, as has been successfully done before? That is how we got here. (And I'm not saying all of the MSM etc. are like the Guardian where plenty or all of the white people working there would be completly horrified if any white did anything against perceived oppression of whites, so there's more than that going on).
The MSM for whatever reasons is perpetuating the problems through social control/damage control and not as actual news or information, people need to call them out on it and not fall for it.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @12:33PM
Or in other words, according to that data, black people are 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police than those who are white or hispanic/latino.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:42PM
Fallacy of relative privation. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:35PM
So why aren't you protesting? Why aren't you pushing it on the media? You're just as guilty as the people you're chastising, hypocrite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @09:14PM
Tu quoque. Why aren't you doing so too? In fact, how do you know he's not? One person can only do so much, and few people are as charismatic as MLK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:50PM
Close, but I never stated or implied that the point wasn't valid or should be ignored based on his hypocrisy, which is what makes it a fallacy ('you're not also doing it, so your point is invalid'). There's nothing fallicious about simply pointing out hypocrisy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @12:06AM
Then it's not close; my implication that it was an example of tu quoque was simply incorrect. But it is hard to tell sometimes, as hypocrisy is often used as a way to dismiss someone's arguments in and of itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:07PM
Why would I be protesting? I'm not protesting the other ones. The protests are done in bad faith based upon the assumption that the police are wrong. By the time the facts of the case are known, the protests overshadow the facts and the actions of the parties involved receive an inaccurate re-appraisal in the context of the protesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @06:41PM
Murder is always wrong. Police are not judges nor executioners, if they kill anyone they are automatically in the wrong. This is not the Judge Dredd universe, the job of police is to bring in suspected criminals so they can go to court, not act as judge, jury, and executioner.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:55PM
Bingo.
Those who haven't done so yet need to find a copy of Frank Serpico's story of trying to root out the bad apples.
In a related storyline, a United Auto Workers local has called for the expulsion of the International Union of Police Associations from the UAW.
Why We Can’t Support Police Unions [jacobinmag.com]
Want to change the status quo?
What is needed to weed out bad cops is a Special Prosecutor who deals ONLY with police malfeasance.
Everyone should be pressing his gov't representatives at every level to implement that.
Getting rid of bad cops is an issue where Ralph Nader's Left-Right Coalition shows itself to be an excellent notion with a clear majority on each side of the traditional divide.
N.B. Current California Attorney General Kamala Harris is opposed to this notion and as a result I do not support her run for the US Senate.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:36PM
If only you were correct.
I am not so sure there are *any* good cops.
In the first 2 months of 2015, US cops killed 3 people per day. Unfortunately, we did not get many of these on video, so the cop stories *always* win. You know, "I thought he was reaching for a gun, so I shot him 30 times, in the back, while he was handcuffed, face down on the ground." Of course, not counted in this number are the number of people who "commit suicide" in their cells-- somehow beating themselves senseless, then hanging themselves in their cells-- sometimes while in shackles even! Houdini would be impressed.
Whenever there is an atrocity caught on tape, you see *all* the other officers who respond always trying to cover up the crime-- *never* arresting the cops who committed the original criminal act. They will seize bystanders' cameras / phones, to try to cover it up, even arrest witnesses who refuse, etc.-- these cops are all accessories to the original crime (often torture and murder).
And, then there are the videotaped incidents like the killing by 20 cops on the Mexican border in San Diego. All 20 participated in the beating of a man to death (his crime that enraged the officers to torture-murder him was asking to speak to an attorney). Not one fucking cop tried to stop it. Each one of them would walk up to the man being held down, and kick him in the sides and in the face (and especially in his leg that he had made the mistake of telling the cops was injured). Now the children of a man who was described as a devoted father are suffering too.
Occasionally, less horrific incident are filmed that demonstrate the sadistic nature of cops. Like the cop running out and pushing over a cyclist into the street, for no goddamn reason. Cops are indistinguishable from the worst of worst street gangs except that cops act with impunity.
So, tell me, what evidence to do you have that good cops exist, and that if they do, that they are not such a vanishingly small minority, as to not matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:07PM
To sum up an answer for you... Act like a thug, get treated like a thug. They should bring back old western justice, crime rates would drop fast.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @09:18PM
Most cops would get shot for acting like thugs or defending their thug buddies. They're lucky we don't have old western 'justice'.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:06PM
The 'good' thugs still enforce unconstitutional and unjust laws. The 'good' thugs defend the thugs who violate people's constitutional rights and abuse their powers left and right. There are a significant amount of thugs, and not enough actual police officers.
You have to be a freedom-hating authoritarian to defend thugs. No amount of abuses on their part will ever convince you that there is a serious and widespread issue, and an almost complete lack of accountability for those who abuse their powers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:40PM
Police are not lawmakers nor judges. Their job is to enforce the laws, not write them or repeal them, not pick and choose which ones they think should be enforced at any given moment. If there are unconstitutional and unjust laws on the books, that's your fault, as all the power of democracy lies with the people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday August 09 2015, @09:12PM
Police are not lawmakers nor judges.
They are human beings capable of controlling their own actions. 'Just doing my job' is no excuse, so don't even try it.
If there are unconstitutional and unjust laws on the books, that's your fault, as all the power of democracy lies with the people.
Technically, it's their fault too, then. They can help by not enforcing those laws.
But I wouldn't say it's any individual's fault. I and others use every available means to fight against these laws, but the ignorant and apathetic majority stands in the way. And two party winner-take-all systems don't encourage true democracy, because the majority is too stupid and short-sighted to realize that voting for The One Party instead of likeable third party candidates leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe it is my fault for not being omnipotent, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @10:58PM
You're right, I spoke too quickly without thinking it through properly so allow me a correction: as government agents, unconstitutional laws should definitely not be enforced - enforcing any law which violates the letter or spirit of the constitution should at a minimum cost them their job, however "unjust" laws are outside their domain and specialty. I don't expect them to be competent or informed enough to know what makes a law "unjust" (too subjective and too many ways a law could be "unjust", be it in its letter or in the consequences of enforcing it), however every officer of the law should be required to know the constitution inside and out because unconstitutional laws are void because they're unconstitutional.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 10 2015, @05:03PM
And two party winner-take-all systems don't encourage true democracy, because the majority is too stupid and short-sighted to realize that voting for The One Party instead of likeable third party candidates leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's a self-perpetuating situation. Given a choice between voting for the lesser of two evils and voting for a third option that everybody knows won't win, it makes sense to try to keep the greater evil out of office rather than wsting your vote.
The simplest remedy to change this dynamic is a preferential ballot -- you get to specify a first choice, a second choice and so on. If your first choice doesn't get in, your ballot gets transferred to your second choice.
This makes it feasible to vote for the third option without wasting your vote.
True proportional representation s my preferred voting scheme, but it isn't practical in situation s where there has to be a single winner, and it's is a much larger change than switching to a preferential ballot.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @12:59AM
and voting for a third option that everybody knows won't win
Do you honestly not see the problem with this logic? You're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And even if they have 0 chance of winning, I will never vote for evil freedom-hating scumbags, because I actually have principles. If that's the kind of thing you want to show your support for, you are the problem. I don't care if it's a 'lesser' evil.
But third parties don't even necessarily need to win. Enough votes for third party candidates can scare candidates from The One Party into adopting some of their policies.
This makes it feasible to vote for the third option without wasting your vote.
The only wasted vote is a vote for an evil scumbag. I only vote for third party candidates, but not once have I ever wasted my vote. Not once.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:03AM
Not to mention, if you keep voting for 'lesser' evils, the candidates can get ever more evil; it's just that one has to be less evil than the other.
I do agree that our voting system is complete garbage and needs to change. But guess who benefits from it? That's right: The same evil candidates that people keep voting in. Our voting system won't change unless people stop being short-sighted. Voting for evil is not and never will be strategic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:38AM
The "self-fulfilling prophecy" is there whether you liked it or not.
You could call it the prisoner's dilemma, but it might be just a related phenomenon with similar consequence. The core problem is that optimizing for what's "good" for each individual voter (the lesser evil) does not yield globally optimal solution (3rd party).
If people had a true hive-mind they could just take logical advantage of the expectation that everyone else will do the same and jump over the "cliff", but unfortunately we just aren't like that in the required magnitude.
Don't confuse this with advocating voting for the lesser evil. That yields horrible results in time. The point is that the solution lies elsewhere if it exists at all. (ie. convince the rulers that changing the voting system is in their interest)
Alternatively, you can buy that "scare the scumbags into adopting 3rd party policies" actually works.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:50AM
The "self-fulfilling prophecy" is there whether you liked it or not.
People create it. So yes, it is there whether I like it or not. Most people are extremely short-sighted and I do not expect anything else, but the answer is not to give up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @03:03AM
So they can do anything they like, as long as they can say "I was only following orders" ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @10:42AM
The police is generally not an expert on lawmaking so it might be not be reasonable to expect them to know what is just and what isn't. However, in cases where it indeed is, and obviously so, your line is known as the Nurenberg defense.
The fallacy there is that one entity being responsible for the outcome doesn't mean that others aren't as well.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Monday August 10 2015, @02:52PM
Their job is to enforce the laws, not write them or repeal them, not pick and choose which ones they think should be enforced at any given moment.
Not true. In the U.S., each branch of government (legislative, judicial, executive) has unique abilities that act as balances against the abuse of powers in the other two. The police (which are part of the executive branch) absolutely have the right to pick and choose which laws to enforce; as a city, state, and nation the law enforcement community has the authority to ignore unconstitutional/unjust laws such that they are never brought to trial.
Lawmakers hate it, as they like to think that their "I will make it legal" powers are absolute; unfortunately for them, the founding fathers anticipated the results of an out-of-control legislature and built a solution into the system when our nation was founded.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by compro01 on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:47PM
Yes, then I see those "good cops" forming a blue wall to protect these cops.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:43PM
ftfy
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BasilBrush on Monday August 10 2015, @12:00AM
Except that you dont see video of the 10's of thousands that just 'do their job' every day, properly and without incident.
If we don't see them, what's to say they exist? Power corrupts, and the more we get to see, the more it appears that the people who are not corrupted by power are the very tiny minority.
Cops are the most powerful gang in town. That's all. It's possible there's the odd good one to the same degree that it's possible there's the odd good member of any other gang. But in either case, very few are good enough that they would actually whitleblow on the rest.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday August 10 2015, @04:37PM
I make a point sometimes to go to customer service and tell the how much I'm enjoying the product I've bought.
Sometimes it confuses them.