13 ms·

Judge: Drinking tea, shopping at garden store probable cause for SWAT raid

254 points by eric_h 11y ago

jug5 11y ago
Maybe China will come and liberate the citizens of America from their oppressive regime.
y0ghur7_xxx 11y ago
"A state trooper had been positioned in the store parking lot to collect the license plate numbers of customers, compile them into a spreadsheet, then send the spreadsheets to local sheriff’s departments for further investigation." this sound a lot like a stasi operation. https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7209-what_does_big_brother_see_while_he_is_watching#video https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7209-what_does_big_brother_see_w...
- trhway 11y ago
  >this sound a lot like a stasi operation. the Stasi/KGB would be salivating at the scale and the capabilities that has already been deployed. They could only dream about automatic recording of every sound around any connected electronic device and automatic transription of it into a searchable database already containing all the un- and weakly-encrypted electronic communications of all your populace and all the movements of that populace. Add to that constant video recording from security, police and backdoored consumer cameras with automatic image recognition. Stasi/KGB was a kiddie game compare to that.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > this sound a lot like a stasi operation. No. Assuming that the parking lot is exposed to the street, there is absolutely nothing wrong with posting an officer in or near the lot and recording the plates of vehicles that travel near the area. The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve. Where this goes oh so wrong is when the PD posts a robot policeman [0] at the location, or a network of them throughout the district that record things (like license plates). There are only so many officers in a district, each of them can only be doing one thing at a time, and every one of them requires OT pay for extended work hours. This means that a district has to decide if plate collection at a location is the best thing that they can be doing with a particular officer. If a district can suddenly -for the price of one meatbag officer- dedicate ten new robot "officers" [1] to the task of car movement surveillance, then their powers have been greatly expanded. It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale. [0] AKA: a camera [1] who can work 24/7 and never require OT pay
  - hellbanner 11y ago
    You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. What their routes are, favorite stops, conversations, etc.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      It's not fine when it's expensive, it's fine when it's inherently limited and not omniscient. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. Nobody's debating that.
    - eximius 11y ago
      But citizens aren't incentivized to record police.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. You are following me. That's exactly what I'm saying. Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. 100% agreed. Because of the extraordinary powers they are entrusted with, on-duty police [0] should be held to a much higher standard than regular folks. Off-duty cops who aren't exercising police power? They're folks like any other and must be afforded the same rights and protections as every other regular citizen. [0] Or off-duty police who are otherwise exercising their police powers.
      - whoopdedo 11y ago
        > Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. But what we're describing is not a human using his judgment to select probable suspects for further investigation. It's a guy parked pointing a camera at all license plates and feeding them en masse to a computer for automated processing. It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.
- awqrre 11y ago
  But the bigger problem is that they started to use automatic license plate recognition with cameras around town and police cars to automatically log all license plates and their locations... (see this for example, in Florida: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5Gy32aqdo&t=1m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5Gy32aqdo&t=1m22s)
eric_h 11y ago
I think the most damning quote from the article is "He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate". Police are under no obligation to know that a tool they use is inaccurate? Would the same rules apply for the acquisition of, say, firearms - i.e. would the police be under no obligation to know that the glocks they're purchasing for their officers have a tendency to fire even when the safety is on? Edit: per comments below please s/when the safety is on/without pulling the trigger/ when reading this comment
- eric_h 11y ago
  Further - who is obligated to know that the testing field kits are inaccurate? Can police purchase marijuana dowsing rods and legally use those as probable cause for a search/SWAT raid? It seems to me that the rate of false positives would be roughly equivalent given the numbers stated in the article.
  - sitkack 11y ago
    > marijuana dowsing rods this is a great idea.
    - eric_h 11y ago
      Sounds like a great public benefit corp. Sell LEOs marijuana dowsing rods, donate all proceeds to something like the ACLU, then submit the names of all purchasers to review for dismissal/defunding.
      - DiabloD3 11y ago
        Pretty sure that's fraud AND entrapment.
        emp_zealoth 11y ago
        So standard police practice, isnt it?
OldSchoolJohnny 11y ago
How does the U.S. differ substantially from a classic "police state"?
- jMyles 11y ago
  The response I see most often to this question - and one that is clearly inaccurate - is that police don't target people for their politics or their culture. To my way of thinking, the entire concept of drug prohibition is an attack on a particular culture - a particular diet - which is strongly associated with a particular array of politics. I think it's reasonable to assess that the US today is a police state.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    The "Occupy" movement was targeted by police, as one example of a non-violent political group targeted by the police.* I agree that the US is a police state. *And by targeted I mean we had undercover police officer agent-provocateurs trying to encourage our local Occupy group to engage in serious crimes and provided materials for those crimes.
  - Someone 11y ago
    "The response I see most often to this question - and one that is clearly inaccurate - is that police don't target people for their politics or their culture." Also, if you acknowledge that ethnic groups can have separate cultures (not a bold claim, IMO) and look at the ethnic distribution of US citizens accidentally (giving them the benefit of the doubt) killed by the police I think that claim is hard to defend.
- youknowitstrue 11y ago
  Articles like this will likely be censored in 20 years
- colechristensen 11y ago
  'police state' isn't something well defined. In any case, regardless of the fact that these sorts of incident are not uncommon, they're not particularly frequent either. The term _police state_ has 'taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of the civil authorities' Which isn't at all the case for most people. More like isolated abuses of power than the pervasive control of civil authorities. It's a problem, and the problem is growing, but "police state" is an unhelpful hyperbole – using terms like that loses you credibility and distracts from the real discussions that should be happening.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
"Keep in mind that this was a ruling for summary judgment. This was not a trial. To dismiss the suit at this stage, Lungstrum [the judge] needed to view the facts in a light most favorable to the Hartes [the SWATed family]." Words fail me.
- flumpmastet 11y ago
  > words fail me Why? As you state, this was a motion for summary judgement, not a trial. The burden of proof for summary judgement is higher than for a civil suit trial. [1][2] While the information presented in this article raised disturbing questions and the family involved appears to have been subjected to unreasonable search based on faulty testing, the article is light on details for why the judge rejected the request for summary judgement. Has anyone found a link to the judgement? I hope the family continue to push their case - it appears the were a victim of 'war on drugs theatre'. [1] Burden of proof for summary judgement: The court shall grant summary judgment if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. The court should state on the record the reasons for granting or denying the motion. In civil cases, the plaintiff has the burden of proving his case by a preponderance of the evidence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56 [2] Burden of proof for civil cases: In civil cases, the plaintiff has the burden of proving his case by a preponderance of the evidence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    I hope the family continue to push their case... How can they do that? TFA clearly describes judgement in favor of the defendants' (i.e. the cops) summary motion to dismiss all elements of the suit completely. Read TFA more closely, please. [EDIT:] The comment to which I reply seems to misunderstand TFA to have referred to a summary motion by the plaintiffs, which is not the case. If appealing to a higher court rather than just getting the fair trial to which one is entitled seems like a trivial thing, then one must be either fabulously wealthy, or an attorney. We're certainly out of the $25k range mentioned in TFA.
draw_down 11y ago
Law enforcement do what they want. That simple.
- ypeterholmes 11y ago
  Agreed. However I wonder if this information age will change that? For example Netflix's "Making a Murderer" MUST yield some sort of fallout against that local department. Right? At the very least, I will be avoiding Wisconsin.
cryoshon 11y ago
FTA: "Once they had been cleared of any wrongdoing, the Hartes wanted to know what happened. Why had they been raided?" They got raided because in a police state, constant paramilitary raids happen whether or not the police have valid criminal targets. If there are no real criminals to raid, criminals will be invented. Poor quality contraband testing and the drug war itself are two such ways that criminals can be invented. The purpose of creating criminals and conducting armed raids is to keep the citizens afraid of their government. We've fallen a long way. In what world is the growing of a certain kind of plant a legitimate reason for a violent raid? Fascist behavior is exactly why I am purely indifferent when the police are killed or maimed: they have earned their reputation as oppressors and wear it with stolid pride.
- anon4 11y ago
  I hope this account isn't linked to your actual identity, because in a police state, stating that you're indifferent to police being killed is a very good way of getting very special attention.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    If someone wants to find something bad on the person, then it’ll be very easy. Bought fertilizer? said online that you’re indifferent to police being killed? "We have clues the person might have planned a bomb attack on local police headquarters". The whole issue of being able to use planted evidence, misinterpreted information, or faked witness statements to hurt some random person is real. As can be seen in the fact that a single call can lead to a SWATting.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    Pfft, we're all already "on the lists", and it's too late to care about that. The government has dossiers on all of us sitting in databases somewhere, detailing our political views, grudges, radicalization potential, etc. Sure, maybe by being a bit more edgy you get put on the next edgier list and there's more scrutiny, but let's face it, the government isn't even aggressive enough to stop the people on the no-fly list from weaponizing, so they are sure as hell not aggressive enough to bother people not associated with terrorism but who disagree with them overtly. As of now, there are not so many tangible consequences to disagreeing with the government in public. So, in short: the "attention" of the federal part of the police state is algorithmic, and, while malicious, relatively impotent in terms of effecting armed raids. The local cops aren't empowered to hunt down their detractors or federal dissenters so long as they don't demonstrate physically en masse.
ProAm 11y ago
What's the saying, "Don't expect a persons behavior or opinion to change when their paycheck depends on them having said behavior or opinion".
- kittenfluff 11y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get...
  - stillsut 11y ago
    Is this true, though? Does a judge's salary depend on him not understanding the fourth amendment? Does a policeman's salary depend on him not understanding appropriate search warrant tactics? I understand most people disagree with law enforcement's decisions in this case (I do too). But the only people who seem to refuse to understand the circumstances are those whose righteousness depends on portraying the police as cartoon villains.
golergka 11y ago
> both former CIA analysts Is it not related to the events? I only skipped through the article, but they didn't seem to mention it ever again. Smells... Interesting.
- pmalynin 11y ago
  Yes I though that mention would lead to some espionage investigation or something. Perhaps the whole "drug bust" thing was a farce designed to search for evidence of some other covert activity.
  - eric_h 11y ago
    I think, perhaps you're giving them too much credit, especially given that they stated that once they'd found no evidence of a grow op, they switched to searching for evidence of personal use (the absurdity of which is a whole other discussion). My guess is that they did no homework at all before performing this raid; they just built a spreadsheet of gardeners, started checking trash cans and raided the first house that had a positive field test.
    - golergka 11y ago
      Or thry had another reason for the search entirely which they didn't want to make public, so just switched stupid excuse for another one?
      - eric_h 11y ago
        Mention the CIA and the conspiracy theories just come flying in :P. I'm more inclined to side with both Occam's and Hanlon's razor in this case. Further, if we had data on the number of false positives these "4/20" raids turned up (which, per the article, seems like it could be quite a task to produce), we could come to a reasonable statistical certainty either way.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Were that the case, presumably it would have been a federal agency like the FBI or DEA carrying out the cover raid, not the local Sheriff's department, and it wouldn't have been part of a regularly-scheduled annual publicity-effort raids conducted on 4/20. Well, unless you get into a fairly deep conspiracy theory.
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fweespeech 11y ago
> Once they had been cleared of any wrongdoing, the Hartes wanted to know what happened. Why had they been raided? What possible probable cause could the police have had for sending a SWAT team into their home first thing in the morning? But even that information would prove difficult to obtain. Under Kansas law, the sheriff’s department wasn’t obligated to turn over any information related to the raid — not to the Hartes, not to the media, not to anyone. The couple eventually had to hire an attorney to get a judge to order the sheriff to release the information. They spent more than $25,000 in legal fees just to learn why the sheriff had sent a SWAT team into their home. Once they finally had that information, the Hartes filed a lawsuit. > He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate, nor were they obligated to wait for the more accurate lab tests before conducting the SWAT raid. This is bullshit. By this standard, Marijuana Dowsing Rods can be sold to the police and used to raid people's homes! Oh, and the police are under no obligation to disclose the fact they use dowsing rods as a primary method of "discovering" drug dens! > Keep in mind that this was a ruling for summary judgment. This was not a trial. To dismiss the suit at this stage, Lungstrum needed to view the facts in a light most favorable to the Hartes. And yet he still found that at no point did the police violate the family’s constitutional rights. Congratulations! We live in a police state if the most favorable interpretation of those events for the victims is "Nope, no problem here!"
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jimrandomh 11y ago
The actual basis of the raid was a false positive by a field test kit, which misidentified tea leaves from the target's trash as marijuana. (They claim to not need a search warrant to look at trash.) The raid was conducted in 2012, and this article reports a test performed in 2009 which showed that the brand of test kits in question has a 70% false positive rate. It links to a video in which running the test without a sample (ie, just exposing it to air) produced a "positive" result. Notably, this was three years earlier than the raid in question, which means that they were still using the faulty test kits. There are only two possible reasons for a police department to be using a test like that. The first is ignorance, but of a degree and nature that is quite scandalous. The second is to commit fraud upon the courts, by claiming to have evidence of drug possession where no drugs exist. In light of the FBI hair test scandal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...) I think the latter explanation is fairly likely.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  This is almost as bad as the Annie Dookhan[0] incident, in which a crime lab chemist outright falsified evidence used in almost 40,000 cases. She planted drugs in some tests, or simply faked results for tests that she never actually performed. In at least some cases, she did this explicitly to aid the prosecution in securing convictions[1][2]. Spoiler: Dookhan got only 3-5 years worth of prison time for this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan [1] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/indicted-drug-analyst-annie-dookhan-mails-reveal-her-close-personal-ties-prosecutors/A37GaatHLKfW1kphDjxLXJ/story.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/10/massachusetts_crime_lab_scandal_worsens_dookhan_and_farak.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/1...
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    At least she made the news. I know of an acquintance of a neighbour from many years ago, who was working as a technitian for DNA crime testing lab, which also did paternity testing, rape kits, etc. That individual was selling their services to the highest bidder. I imagine over the years, rapists, killers, deadbeat dads and all kind of horrible criminals got away while that person acquired a nice fortune. When I think of an example of a horrible example of a human being, the lowest of the low, that particular person comes to mind.
clarkmoody 11y ago
It's time to start the conversation about Private Production of Defense.[1] Without competitive forces coming to bear upon the monopoly enjoyed by the law enforcement and judicial systems, we will see ever-increasing rights violations with no recourse from the citizens. Ending the War on Drugs is a great step in the right direction and make sense any way you look at it, but it will not end the systematic abuses of power perpetrated by the State. [1]: https://mises.org/library/private-production-defense https://mises.org/library/private-production-defense
- eric_h 11y ago
  This is a trivial criticism of a work that I do not presently have time to review, but I can't help but think of capitalist dystopia described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash when considering the delegation of defense/police forces to the free market.
  - marktangotango 11y ago
    Vernor Vinges "the ungoverned" puts a clever twist on this idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungoverned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungoverned
- anon4 11y ago
  If you have private police, don't you effectively have your own private state?
dragonwriter 11y ago
Just as a side note, the article kind of drops the ball at the end: > The Hartes are also a white, financially sound couple who both happened to have worked for the CIA. Most people on the receiving end of these raids aren’t white, aren’t middle-class, didn’t once work for a federal law enforcement agency and don’t have $25,000 to fund a fight in court. The CIA is not now, and has never been, a federal law enforcement agency.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  The CIA is not... Haven't you heard of parallel construction?
- eric_h 11y ago
  Eh, I think it's a minor gaffe. That both of them worked CIA means that they were _heavily_ vetted by the federal government. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that the vetting process for the CIA is even more stringent than the vetting process for the FBI, which is a federal law enforcement agency.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Funny, I came here to point out the same observation. I found the gaffe a bit disturbing.
- caf 11y ago
  s/federal law enforcement agency/part of the federal security apparatus/ doesn't really change the argument, does it?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > s/federal law enforcement agency/part of the federal security apparatus/ doesn't really change the argument, does it? Since there is no argument actually made, just a recitation of supposedly-relevant facts designed to create an emotional response, the argument can't actually be changed. But, yes, I think that the given that this is a non-security-related law enforcement issue, the change even in the fuzzy emotional appeal the reporter is making with that paragraph is radically transformed without the implication that he Hartes' have a background in law enforcement specifically giving them a notional advantage in dealing with this kind of law enforcement action.
geggam 11y ago
... that moment when you realize the system is the problem.
btown 11y ago
There's an interesting meta-question here about why the legal system relies so heavily on binary decisions, rather than taking uncertainty into account as far as possible. Imagine that in Bayes World, the presence of a positive THC test updates, in a way that takes into account the probability that the test gives a false positive, a random variable G|* representing the probability that, given all available information, the suspect is growing marijuana. Similarly, the event of the resident's visit to a garden store updates G|*. [0] Then, perhaps the Bayes City Police Department would use Bayesian Decision Theory [1] (perhaps with a custom loss function that takes into the account that a false positive for sending a SWAT team can actually cause needless loss of life!) to decide who to raid. The Judge (a trained statistician and data scientist) would supervise the algorithm and make sure that procedures are updated to constantly balance the case-specific "gut feelings" of the investigators with the need for a predictable system. And let's keep rolling with this! In Bayes World, we never think of "guilty" or "not guilty" as a set fact. If there's any uncertainty in the case, that's taken into account quantitatively in sentencing. A jury of the accused's peers, all educated in statistics (because in Bayes World, the politicians dispute certain assumptions going into macroeconomic models, but they grudgingly agree that investments in basic income and education have positive expected value when weighted by the likelihood of those assumptions... but I digress...) choose certain coefficients for sentencing based on the human factors of the case. But we don't live in Bayes World, so we get stories like this. [0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way... [1] http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~jcorso/t/CSE555/files/lecture_bayesiandecision.pdf http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~jcorso/t/CSE555/files/lecture_ba...
- grecy 11y ago
  I think the other interesting question is why Law Enforcement feel the need to execute a search warrant like this with a SWAT team and a massive show of force. Based on the article, these people were not considered "high risk", in which case the Police could have politely knocked on the door, informed the residents what was happening without ever drawing a weapon, or forcing anyone to the ground. In the same way their decision making is binary, it appears their method of action is also binary - either take no action, or bring the big guns and go all out with a show of force and violence.
leepowers 11y ago
These type of police power abuse stories are depressing to read. It seems the whole legal system is designed to protect and perpetuate itself, with justice itself being a mere side-effect. It's hard not to be pessimistic, especially after having read Balko's (the article author's) book _Rise of the Warrior Cop_. Much of the problem stems from our hysterical over-reaction to the crime spikes of the 60's and 70's, where the citizenry clamored for and were provided with draconian laws and tactics. Combine this with an almost blind deference to police authority (both as a matter of law and public opinion) and the environment is ripe for abuses of power. That being said, this particular case did result in some small legislation to help correct the problems of police overreach. Which is small nudge in the right direction, away from the fear-driven policies of the past. But I'm still afraid - that the situation will get much worse, and the abuses even more egregious, before any substantial reform is enacted.
- hyperdunc 11y ago
  > It seems the whole legal system is designed to protect and perpetuate itself, with justice itself being a mere side-effect. This applies to almost every entity - whether a system, industry, organization or individual. Any value the entity delivers externally is of secondary concern to the entity, but it is also how the entity defines its usefulness in the eyes of others.
temac 11y ago
I more and more fail to understand why people from the USA tolerate their police / justice and assimilated services. From all the articles I see here they seem to do far more harm than good and to be populated with lots of insane people (how else would you define randomly spying on gardeners, then trashing them, then raiding them based on lousy evidences)? Do they ever do something good and not stupid? Are they ever accountable for they misbehavior and absurd investigations? Isn't there an inspection service that can investigate on police actions and actually recognize that they are insane when they are? Not that this is so much better in France. They recently administratively home arrested ecologist activists using extra power given by the state of emergency that was activated by the islamist terror attacks. That's beyond fucked-up, but given demonstrations were forbidden at the same time they could get away with that totalitarianism move without much trouble... :/
- eric_h 11y ago
  For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking to, etc. Naturally, every police encounter where a gun is not drawn/no one's rights are apparently violated will never make the news. It's the exceptions that make headlines, and it's the internet that has empowered those exceptions to be made public and spread much farther and wider than they ever had even 10 years ago (what with everybody and their mother and grandmother on Facebook these days). This is perhaps one upside of the true eternal September that we've entered (much more so than the advent of AOL back in the day). This is not to say that there isn't a problem. The fact that stories like these have popped up in basically every state in the US suggests that there is indeed a culture that has developed amongst law enforcement/government that facts and science and reason play second fiddle to a number of other factors (not to mention the "thin blue line"). I do believe that most cops in the US act in the public interest to the best of their knowledge/ability; the problem is that it's most and not all, and the minority with perhaps ulterior motives now has access to a great deal of surplus military equipment manufactured for various recent US military operations (and provided to local law enforcement at tremendous discounts), and laws that allow them to behave in ways that they should not be allowed to behave.
- awakeasleep 11y ago
zipwitch 11y ago
To sum up both the article and the judge's ruling: the idea of "Rule of Law" in the United States is a bad joke. This has been true for a while, but is becoming increasingly difficult for the public to ignore.
cmurf 11y ago
Please, it's a podunk middle-America state, full of ignorance and local Republican governments who are control freaks when it comes to this sort of thing. This is precisely the expected outcome of having such a state and local government. That's why I don't live there anymore. And it's not just simple ignorance, it's prideful ignorance, and active resentment of people who question the local politics, status quo, religion, and anyone liberal. And the judge in the case? George H.W. Bush appointed him. So yeah, this story is not a surprise to me at all. Now in defense of podunk, they're incentivized by our militaristic culture to behave this way. Not merely the violence, but also the money and arms the Feds have thrown at them in pursuit of "drugs" without respect to the drugs' relative risk factors. And these dense states who pay less in taxes than they take in are more than happy to lie through their teeth like in this story to get more Federal drug war resources.
- someguydave 11y ago
  Every single branch of the US government jealously guards its ability to keep secrets from the general population. Not holding the individual civil servants to account is a Republican and Democrat failure of the highest order.
- seandougall 11y ago
  An acquaintance of mine was recently arrested on suspicion of stealing a double bass from in front of a conservatory of music. Evidently, a bass was reported as stolen, and a complete description of the instrument was provided to police. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the conservatory carrying a bass, and that was sufficient to obtain a search warrant for his home. Never mind that he's a bassist, and the footage showed him carrying his own instrument. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and the one on the surveillance tape must be it. Upon searching his apartment, the police found not one, but two double basses in his possession. Never mind that he had documentation to show that they both belonged to him, and never mind that neither one fit the description of the instrument that had been stolen. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and these ... two ... basses, somehow, are ... it? I dunno, these aren't the same maker, and they don't have the same identifying marks, but hey, they have four strings! The one that's missing has four strings! Good enough, he must have just hidden the stolen bass under a rug or something. (They're easy to hide, right?) Let's just make an arrest and go home. So they arrested him, and (again, despite having conclusive proof that neither was the instrument in question) seized both basses, along with his cell phone, and held him on $100,000 bail. Astonishingly, charges were ultimately dropped for lack of evidence. This was in San Francisco -- about as un-podunk, un-middle-America, and un-Republican as you can get without showing a passport. Lazy police work is everywhere. It has nothing to do with politics or ignorance, and it doesn't really even have to do particularly with the war on drugs (although that certainly gives the police more opportunities to brandish their laziness publicly). It's a combination of pressure to show action by making arrests and an utter lack of accountability when those arrests turn out to be specious, and those two factors exist everywhere in this country.

254 points by eric_h 11y ago

jug5 11y ago

Maybe China will come and liberate the citizens of America from their oppressive regime.

"A state trooper had been positioned in the store parking lot to collect the license plate numbers of customers, compile them into a spreadsheet, then send the spreadsheets to local sheriff’s departments for further investigation." this sound a lot like a stasi operation. https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7209-what_does_big_brother_see_while_he_is_watching#video https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7209-what_does_big_brother_see_w...

trhway 11y ago
>this sound a lot like a stasi operation. the Stasi/KGB would be salivating at the scale and the capabilities that has already been deployed. They could only dream about automatic recording of every sound around any connected electronic device and automatic transription of it into a searchable database already containing all the un- and weakly-encrypted electronic communications of all your populace and all the movements of that populace. Add to that constant video recording from security, police and backdoored consumer cameras with automatic image recognition. Stasi/KGB was a kiddie game compare to that.
simoncion 11y ago
> this sound a lot like a stasi operation. No. Assuming that the parking lot is exposed to the street, there is absolutely nothing wrong with posting an officer in or near the lot and recording the plates of vehicles that travel near the area. The notion that it is 100% okay that things that happen in public view may be subject to notice and recording at any time is very important to preserve. Where this goes oh so wrong is when the PD posts a robot policeman [0] at the location, or a network of them throughout the district that record things (like license plates). There are only so many officers in a district, each of them can only be doing one thing at a time, and every one of them requires OT pay for extended work hours. This means that a district has to decide if plate collection at a location is the best thing that they can be doing with a particular officer. If a district can suddenly -for the price of one meatbag officer- dedicate ten new robot "officers" [1] to the task of car movement surveillance, then their powers have been greatly expanded. It's very important that we protect the right to notice and record things that happen in public. I feel that it's equally important that we work to limit the damage that an entity can do when they have the resources available to record such things on a large scale. [0] AKA: a camera [1] who can work 24/7 and never require OT pay
- hellbanner 11y ago
  You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. What their routes are, favorite stops, conversations, etc.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    It's not fine when it's expensive, it's fine when it's inherently limited and not omniscient. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. Nobody's debating that.
  - eximius 11y ago
    But citizens aren't incentivized to record police.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > You're saying public recording is fine when it's "expensive" -- costing a human salary, but not when it's a robot? I'm not following you. You are following me. That's exactly what I'm saying. Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. > If police are going to record citizens, citizens should feel comfortable recording police. 100% agreed. Because of the extraordinary powers they are entrusted with, on-duty police [0] should be held to a much higher standard than regular folks. Off-duty cops who aren't exercising police power? They're folks like any other and must be afforded the same rights and protections as every other regular citizen. [0] Or off-duty police who are otherwise exercising their police powers.
    - whoopdedo 11y ago
      > Human scale surveillance is okay. Because the surveillance is carried out by a human on the scene, it requires the surveillers to decide who should be surveilled, and prevents or eliminates blanket surveillance. But what we're describing is not a human using his judgment to select probable suspects for further investigation. It's a guy parked pointing a camera at all license plates and feeding them en masse to a computer for automated processing. It is not functionally different than the hypothetical robot you described, only this happens to be a robot with an organic component.
awqrre 11y ago
But the bigger problem is that they started to use automatic license plate recognition with cameras around town and police cars to automatically log all license plates and their locations... (see this for example, in Florida: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5Gy32aqdo&t=1m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5Gy32aqdo&t=1m22s)

eric_h 11y ago

I think the most damning quote from the article is "He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate". Police are under no obligation to know that a tool they use is inaccurate? Would the same rules apply for the acquisition of, say, firearms - i.e. would the police be under no obligation to know that the glocks they're purchasing for their officers have a tendency to fire even when the safety is on? Edit: per comments below please s/when the safety is on/without pulling the trigger/ when reading this comment

eric_h 11y ago
Further - who is obligated to know that the testing field kits are inaccurate? Can police purchase marijuana dowsing rods and legally use those as probable cause for a search/SWAT raid? It seems to me that the rate of false positives would be roughly equivalent given the numbers stated in the article.
- sitkack 11y ago
  > marijuana dowsing rods this is a great idea.
  - eric_h 11y ago
    Sounds like a great public benefit corp. Sell LEOs marijuana dowsing rods, donate all proceeds to something like the ACLU, then submit the names of all purchasers to review for dismissal/defunding.
    - DiabloD3 11y ago
      Pretty sure that's fraud AND entrapment.
      - emp_zealoth 11y ago
        So standard police practice, isnt it?

OldSchoolJohnny 11y ago

How does the U.S. differ substantially from a classic "police state"?

jMyles 11y ago
The response I see most often to this question - and one that is clearly inaccurate - is that police don't target people for their politics or their culture. To my way of thinking, the entire concept of drug prohibition is an attack on a particular culture - a particular diet - which is strongly associated with a particular array of politics. I think it's reasonable to assess that the US today is a police state.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  The "Occupy" movement was targeted by police, as one example of a non-violent political group targeted by the police.* I agree that the US is a police state. *And by targeted I mean we had undercover police officer agent-provocateurs trying to encourage our local Occupy group to engage in serious crimes and provided materials for those crimes.
- Someone 11y ago
  "The response I see most often to this question - and one that is clearly inaccurate - is that police don't target people for their politics or their culture." Also, if you acknowledge that ethnic groups can have separate cultures (not a bold claim, IMO) and look at the ethnic distribution of US citizens accidentally (giving them the benefit of the doubt) killed by the police I think that claim is hard to defend.
youknowitstrue 11y ago
Articles like this will likely be censored in 20 years
colechristensen 11y ago
'police state' isn't something well defined. In any case, regardless of the fact that these sorts of incident are not uncommon, they're not particularly frequent either. The term _police state_ has 'taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of the civil authorities' Which isn't at all the case for most people. More like isolated abuses of power than the pervasive control of civil authorities. It's a problem, and the problem is growing, but "police state" is an unhelpful hyperbole – using terms like that loses you credibility and distracts from the real discussions that should be happening.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

"Keep in mind that this was a ruling for summary judgment. This was not a trial. To dismiss the suit at this stage, Lungstrum [the judge] needed to view the facts in a light most favorable to the Hartes [the SWATed family]." Words fail me.

flumpmastet 11y ago
> words fail me Why? As you state, this was a motion for summary judgement, not a trial. The burden of proof for summary judgement is higher than for a civil suit trial. [1][2] While the information presented in this article raised disturbing questions and the family involved appears to have been subjected to unreasonable search based on faulty testing, the article is light on details for why the judge rejected the request for summary judgement. Has anyone found a link to the judgement? I hope the family continue to push their case - it appears the were a victim of 'war on drugs theatre'. [1] Burden of proof for summary judgement: The court shall grant summary judgment if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. The court should state on the record the reasons for granting or denying the motion. In civil cases, the plaintiff has the burden of proving his case by a preponderance of the evidence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56 [2] Burden of proof for civil cases: In civil cases, the plaintiff has the burden of proving his case by a preponderance of the evidence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof
- jessaustin 11y ago
  I hope the family continue to push their case... How can they do that? TFA clearly describes judgement in favor of the defendants' (i.e. the cops) summary motion to dismiss all elements of the suit completely. Read TFA more closely, please. [EDIT:] The comment to which I reply seems to misunderstand TFA to have referred to a summary motion by the plaintiffs, which is not the case. If appealing to a higher court rather than just getting the fair trial to which one is entitled seems like a trivial thing, then one must be either fabulously wealthy, or an attorney. We're certainly out of the $25k range mentioned in TFA.

draw_down 11y ago

Law enforcement do what they want. That simple.

ypeterholmes 11y ago
Agreed. However I wonder if this information age will change that? For example Netflix's "Making a Murderer" MUST yield some sort of fallout against that local department. Right? At the very least, I will be avoiding Wisconsin.

cryoshon 11y ago

FTA: "Once they had been cleared of any wrongdoing, the Hartes wanted to know what happened. Why had they been raided?" They got raided because in a police state, constant paramilitary raids happen whether or not the police have valid criminal targets. If there are no real criminals to raid, criminals will be invented. Poor quality contraband testing and the drug war itself are two such ways that criminals can be invented. The purpose of creating criminals and conducting armed raids is to keep the citizens afraid of their government. We've fallen a long way. In what world is the growing of a certain kind of plant a legitimate reason for a violent raid? Fascist behavior is exactly why I am purely indifferent when the police are killed or maimed: they have earned their reputation as oppressors and wear it with stolid pride.

anon4 11y ago
I hope this account isn't linked to your actual identity, because in a police state, stating that you're indifferent to police being killed is a very good way of getting very special attention.
- kuschku 11y ago
  If someone wants to find something bad on the person, then it’ll be very easy. Bought fertilizer? said online that you’re indifferent to police being killed? "We have clues the person might have planned a bomb attack on local police headquarters". The whole issue of being able to use planted evidence, misinterpreted information, or faked witness statements to hurt some random person is real. As can be seen in the fact that a single call can lead to a SWATting.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Pfft, we're all already "on the lists", and it's too late to care about that. The government has dossiers on all of us sitting in databases somewhere, detailing our political views, grudges, radicalization potential, etc. Sure, maybe by being a bit more edgy you get put on the next edgier list and there's more scrutiny, but let's face it, the government isn't even aggressive enough to stop the people on the no-fly list from weaponizing, so they are sure as hell not aggressive enough to bother people not associated with terrorism but who disagree with them overtly. As of now, there are not so many tangible consequences to disagreeing with the government in public. So, in short: the "attention" of the federal part of the police state is algorithmic, and, while malicious, relatively impotent in terms of effecting armed raids. The local cops aren't empowered to hunt down their detractors or federal dissenters so long as they don't demonstrate physically en masse.

ProAm 11y ago

What's the saying, "Don't expect a persons behavior or opinion to change when their paycheck depends on them having said behavior or opinion".

kittenfluff 11y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get...
- stillsut 11y ago
  Is this true, though? Does a judge's salary depend on him not understanding the fourth amendment? Does a policeman's salary depend on him not understanding appropriate search warrant tactics? I understand most people disagree with law enforcement's decisions in this case (I do too). But the only people who seem to refuse to understand the circumstances are those whose righteousness depends on portraying the police as cartoon villains.

golergka 11y ago

> both former CIA analysts Is it not related to the events? I only skipped through the article, but they didn't seem to mention it ever again. Smells... Interesting.

pmalynin 11y ago
Yes I though that mention would lead to some espionage investigation or something. Perhaps the whole "drug bust" thing was a farce designed to search for evidence of some other covert activity.
- eric_h 11y ago
  I think, perhaps you're giving them too much credit, especially given that they stated that once they'd found no evidence of a grow op, they switched to searching for evidence of personal use (the absurdity of which is a whole other discussion). My guess is that they did no homework at all before performing this raid; they just built a spreadsheet of gardeners, started checking trash cans and raided the first house that had a positive field test.
  - golergka 11y ago
    Or thry had another reason for the search entirely which they didn't want to make public, so just switched stupid excuse for another one?
    - eric_h 11y ago
      Mention the CIA and the conspiracy theories just come flying in :P. I'm more inclined to side with both Occam's and Hanlon's razor in this case. Further, if we had data on the number of false positives these "4/20" raids turned up (which, per the article, seems like it could be quite a task to produce), we could come to a reasonable statistical certainty either way.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Were that the case, presumably it would have been a federal agency like the FBI or DEA carrying out the cover raid, not the local Sheriff's department, and it wouldn't have been part of a regularly-scheduled annual publicity-effort raids conducted on 4/20. Well, unless you get into a fairly deep conspiracy theory.

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fweespeech 11y ago

> Once they had been cleared of any wrongdoing, the Hartes wanted to know what happened. Why had they been raided? What possible probable cause could the police have had for sending a SWAT team into their home first thing in the morning? But even that information would prove difficult to obtain. Under Kansas law, the sheriff’s department wasn’t obligated to turn over any information related to the raid — not to the Hartes, not to the media, not to anyone. The couple eventually had to hire an attorney to get a judge to order the sheriff to release the information. They spent more than $25,000 in legal fees just to learn why the sheriff had sent a SWAT team into their home. Once they finally had that information, the Hartes filed a lawsuit. > He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate, nor were they obligated to wait for the more accurate lab tests before conducting the SWAT raid. This is bullshit. By this standard, Marijuana Dowsing Rods can be sold to the police and used to raid people's homes! Oh, and the police are under no obligation to disclose the fact they use dowsing rods as a primary method of "discovering" drug dens! > Keep in mind that this was a ruling for summary judgment. This was not a trial. To dismiss the suit at this stage, Lungstrum needed to view the facts in a light most favorable to the Hartes. And yet he still found that at no point did the police violate the family’s constitutional rights. Congratulations! We live in a police state if the most favorable interpretation of those events for the victims is "Nope, no problem here!"

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jimrandomh 11y ago

The actual basis of the raid was a false positive by a field test kit, which misidentified tea leaves from the target's trash as marijuana. (They claim to not need a search warrant to look at trash.) The raid was conducted in 2012, and this article reports a test performed in 2009 which showed that the brand of test kits in question has a 70% false positive rate. It links to a video in which running the test without a sample (ie, just exposing it to air) produced a "positive" result. Notably, this was three years earlier than the raid in question, which means that they were still using the faulty test kits. There are only two possible reasons for a police department to be using a test like that. The first is ignorance, but of a degree and nature that is quite scandalous. The second is to commit fraud upon the courts, by claiming to have evidence of drug possession where no drugs exist. In light of the FBI hair test scandal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...) I think the latter explanation is fairly likely.

chimeracoder 11y ago
This is almost as bad as the Annie Dookhan[0] incident, in which a crime lab chemist outright falsified evidence used in almost 40,000 cases. She planted drugs in some tests, or simply faked results for tests that she never actually performed. In at least some cases, she did this explicitly to aid the prosecution in securing convictions[1][2]. Spoiler: Dookhan got only 3-5 years worth of prison time for this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan [1] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/indicted-drug-analyst-annie-dookhan-mails-reveal-her-close-personal-ties-prosecutors/A37GaatHLKfW1kphDjxLXJ/story.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/10/massachusetts_crime_lab_scandal_worsens_dookhan_and_farak.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/1...
- rdtsc 11y ago
  At least she made the news. I know of an acquintance of a neighbour from many years ago, who was working as a technitian for DNA crime testing lab, which also did paternity testing, rape kits, etc. That individual was selling their services to the highest bidder. I imagine over the years, rapists, killers, deadbeat dads and all kind of horrible criminals got away while that person acquired a nice fortune. When I think of an example of a horrible example of a human being, the lowest of the low, that particular person comes to mind.

clarkmoody 11y ago

It's time to start the conversation about Private Production of Defense.[1] Without competitive forces coming to bear upon the monopoly enjoyed by the law enforcement and judicial systems, we will see ever-increasing rights violations with no recourse from the citizens. Ending the War on Drugs is a great step in the right direction and make sense any way you look at it, but it will not end the systematic abuses of power perpetrated by the State. [1]: https://mises.org/library/private-production-defense https://mises.org/library/private-production-defense

eric_h 11y ago
This is a trivial criticism of a work that I do not presently have time to review, but I can't help but think of capitalist dystopia described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash when considering the delegation of defense/police forces to the free market.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  Vernor Vinges "the ungoverned" puts a clever twist on this idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungoverned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ungoverned
anon4 11y ago
If you have private police, don't you effectively have your own private state?

dragonwriter 11y ago

Just as a side note, the article kind of drops the ball at the end: > The Hartes are also a white, financially sound couple who both happened to have worked for the CIA. Most people on the receiving end of these raids aren’t white, aren’t middle-class, didn’t once work for a federal law enforcement agency and don’t have $25,000 to fund a fight in court. The CIA is not now, and has never been, a federal law enforcement agency.

jessaustin 11y ago
The CIA is not... Haven't you heard of parallel construction?
eric_h 11y ago
Eh, I think it's a minor gaffe. That both of them worked CIA means that they were _heavily_ vetted by the federal government. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that the vetting process for the CIA is even more stringent than the vetting process for the FBI, which is a federal law enforcement agency.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Funny, I came here to point out the same observation. I found the gaffe a bit disturbing.
caf 11y ago
s/federal law enforcement agency/part of the federal security apparatus/ doesn't really change the argument, does it?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > s/federal law enforcement agency/part of the federal security apparatus/ doesn't really change the argument, does it? Since there is no argument actually made, just a recitation of supposedly-relevant facts designed to create an emotional response, the argument can't actually be changed. But, yes, I think that the given that this is a non-security-related law enforcement issue, the change even in the fuzzy emotional appeal the reporter is making with that paragraph is radically transformed without the implication that he Hartes' have a background in law enforcement specifically giving them a notional advantage in dealing with this kind of law enforcement action.

geggam 11y ago

... that moment when you realize the system is the problem.

btown 11y ago

There's an interesting meta-question here about why the legal system relies so heavily on binary decisions, rather than taking uncertainty into account as far as possible. Imagine that in Bayes World, the presence of a positive THC test updates, in a way that takes into account the probability that the test gives a false positive, a random variable G|* representing the probability that, given all available information, the suspect is growing marijuana. Similarly, the event of the resident's visit to a garden store updates G|*. [0] Then, perhaps the Bayes City Police Department would use Bayesian Decision Theory [1] (perhaps with a custom loss function that takes into the account that a false positive for sending a SWAT team can actually cause needless loss of life!) to decide who to raid. The Judge (a trained statistician and data scientist) would supervise the algorithm and make sure that procedures are updated to constantly balance the case-specific "gut feelings" of the investigators with the need for a predictable system. And let's keep rolling with this! In Bayes World, we never think of "guilty" or "not guilty" as a set fact. If there's any uncertainty in the case, that's taken into account quantitatively in sentencing. A jury of the accused's peers, all educated in statistics (because in Bayes World, the politicians dispute certain assumptions going into macroeconomic models, but they grudgingly agree that investments in basic income and education have positive expected value when weighted by the likelihood of those assumptions... but I digress...) choose certain coefficients for sentencing based on the human factors of the case. But we don't live in Bayes World, so we get stories like this. [0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way... [1] http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~jcorso/t/CSE555/files/lecture_bayesiandecision.pdf http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~jcorso/t/CSE555/files/lecture_ba...

grecy 11y ago
I think the other interesting question is why Law Enforcement feel the need to execute a search warrant like this with a SWAT team and a massive show of force. Based on the article, these people were not considered "high risk", in which case the Police could have politely knocked on the door, informed the residents what was happening without ever drawing a weapon, or forcing anyone to the ground. In the same way their decision making is binary, it appears their method of action is also binary - either take no action, or bring the big guns and go all out with a show of force and violence.

leepowers 11y ago

These type of police power abuse stories are depressing to read. It seems the whole legal system is designed to protect and perpetuate itself, with justice itself being a mere side-effect. It's hard not to be pessimistic, especially after having read Balko's (the article author's) book _Rise of the Warrior Cop_. Much of the problem stems from our hysterical over-reaction to the crime spikes of the 60's and 70's, where the citizenry clamored for and were provided with draconian laws and tactics. Combine this with an almost blind deference to police authority (both as a matter of law and public opinion) and the environment is ripe for abuses of power. That being said, this particular case did result in some small legislation to help correct the problems of police overreach. Which is small nudge in the right direction, away from the fear-driven policies of the past. But I'm still afraid - that the situation will get much worse, and the abuses even more egregious, before any substantial reform is enacted.

hyperdunc 11y ago
> It seems the whole legal system is designed to protect and perpetuate itself, with justice itself being a mere side-effect. This applies to almost every entity - whether a system, industry, organization or individual. Any value the entity delivers externally is of secondary concern to the entity, but it is also how the entity defines its usefulness in the eyes of others.

temac 11y ago

I more and more fail to understand why people from the USA tolerate their police / justice and assimilated services. From all the articles I see here they seem to do far more harm than good and to be populated with lots of insane people (how else would you define randomly spying on gardeners, then trashing them, then raiding them based on lousy evidences)? Do they ever do something good and not stupid? Are they ever accountable for they misbehavior and absurd investigations? Isn't there an inspection service that can investigate on police actions and actually recognize that they are insane when they are? Not that this is so much better in France. They recently administratively home arrested ecologist activists using extra power given by the state of emergency that was activated by the islamist terror attacks. That's beyond fucked-up, but given demonstrations were forbidden at the same time they could get away with that totalitarianism move without much trouble... :/

eric_h 11y ago
For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking to, etc. Naturally, every police encounter where a gun is not drawn/no one's rights are apparently violated will never make the news. It's the exceptions that make headlines, and it's the internet that has empowered those exceptions to be made public and spread much farther and wider than they ever had even 10 years ago (what with everybody and their mother and grandmother on Facebook these days). This is perhaps one upside of the true eternal September that we've entered (much more so than the advent of AOL back in the day). This is not to say that there isn't a problem. The fact that stories like these have popped up in basically every state in the US suggests that there is indeed a culture that has developed amongst law enforcement/government that facts and science and reason play second fiddle to a number of other factors (not to mention the "thin blue line"). I do believe that most cops in the US act in the public interest to the best of their knowledge/ability; the problem is that it's most and not all, and the minority with perhaps ulterior motives now has access to a great deal of surplus military equipment manufactured for various recent US military operations (and provided to local law enforcement at tremendous discounts), and laws that allow them to behave in ways that they should not be allowed to behave.
awakeasleep 11y ago

zipwitch 11y ago

To sum up both the article and the judge's ruling: the idea of "Rule of Law" in the United States is a bad joke. This has been true for a while, but is becoming increasingly difficult for the public to ignore.

cmurf 11y ago

Please, it's a podunk middle-America state, full of ignorance and local Republican governments who are control freaks when it comes to this sort of thing. This is precisely the expected outcome of having such a state and local government. That's why I don't live there anymore. And it's not just simple ignorance, it's prideful ignorance, and active resentment of people who question the local politics, status quo, religion, and anyone liberal. And the judge in the case? George H.W. Bush appointed him. So yeah, this story is not a surprise to me at all. Now in defense of podunk, they're incentivized by our militaristic culture to behave this way. Not merely the violence, but also the money and arms the Feds have thrown at them in pursuit of "drugs" without respect to the drugs' relative risk factors. And these dense states who pay less in taxes than they take in are more than happy to lie through their teeth like in this story to get more Federal drug war resources.

someguydave 11y ago
Every single branch of the US government jealously guards its ability to keep secrets from the general population. Not holding the individual civil servants to account is a Republican and Democrat failure of the highest order.
seandougall 11y ago
An acquaintance of mine was recently arrested on suspicion of stealing a double bass from in front of a conservatory of music. Evidently, a bass was reported as stolen, and a complete description of the instrument was provided to police. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the conservatory carrying a bass, and that was sufficient to obtain a search warrant for his home. Never mind that he's a bassist, and the footage showed him carrying his own instrument. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and the one on the surveillance tape must be it. Upon searching his apartment, the police found not one, but two double basses in his possession. Never mind that he had documentation to show that they both belonged to him, and never mind that neither one fit the description of the instrument that had been stolen. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and these ... two ... basses, somehow, are ... it? I dunno, these aren't the same maker, and they don't have the same identifying marks, but hey, they have four strings! The one that's missing has four strings! Good enough, he must have just hidden the stolen bass under a rug or something. (They're easy to hide, right?) Let's just make an arrest and go home. So they arrested him, and (again, despite having conclusive proof that neither was the instrument in question) seized both basses, along with his cell phone, and held him on $100,000 bail. Astonishingly, charges were ultimately dropped for lack of evidence. This was in San Francisco -- about as un-podunk, un-middle-America, and un-Republican as you can get without showing a passport. Lazy police work is everywhere. It has nothing to do with politics or ignorance, and it doesn't really even have to do particularly with the war on drugs (although that certainly gives the police more opportunities to brandish their laziness publicly). It's a combination of pressure to show action by making arrests and an utter lack of accountability when those arrests turn out to be specious, and those two factors exist everywhere in this country.