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there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of these people. And then what? Will the platform also have a port

there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of these people. And then what? Will the platform also have a portal that will let people en masse vex the local PD with messages containing links to the video until the precinct assigns an officer to the case? What happens next? Is there going to be a timer or some kind of SLA on the platform that notifies people in the crowd "Sergeant Jones still hasn't found the bastard who stole from the Smith family down on the corner"? Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not sure we're prepared to go down (it also scares the bajeezus out of me because the general population, sorry to say this, aren't the rational actors I want involved in trying to identify perps so casually through 'platforms').

blueboo 8y ago
If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. Yes, it's a "rabbit hole [we're] not sure we're prepared to go down". We're not prepared. We're going down it
- fladrif 8y ago
  I don't think the correct takeaway is that we're OK with law enforcement looking the other way. Clearly that is the best route to solve this issue, and we need more oversight into why certain cases are handled in this way and why. What is the priority of law enforcement, and where is the time allocation for case follow-up.
  - blueboo 8y ago
    I agree with your principals, but I think that since people aren't spending political capital to change it, we're giving tacit approval -- however begrudging, however wrong-in-our-heart-of-hearts-we-think-it-is
- iamdave 8y ago
  If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. Post hoc ergo propter hoc make for valid public policy it does not. What source do you point to that we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way?
  - alangibson 8y ago
    Existence proof. Law enforcement looks the other way and we do nothing about it. Not being OK with something and passively accepting it is functionally identical to being OK with something.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      I don’t know what to do about such things. One of my exes is certain what to do, which is why she’s campaigning for the fourth largest political party in America. Me, I could work on AI to fully enforce all laws, but I suspect that would have unfortunate side effects like accidentally returning to feudalism after all but a few thousand Americans end up with multiple millennia of prison time because the laws themselves are overbroad… and if I limit it to just laws I agree with, well that’s exactly the sort of thing I would be appalled by if done by someone with whom I disagreed about which laws were just. What should we do, do you recon?
      - krageon 8y ago
        Move to a different country. Work hard and be an asset somewhere you do agree with society's laws, then help that country improve it's lot so more people can benefit. Why should a country be different than a company?
        tripzilch 8y ago
        I prefer my countries better than a company.
        ben_w 8y ago
- vec 8y ago
  > If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. You're excluding the admittedly somewhat bleak but still quite plausible third alternative: we as a society are in practice OK with this class of crime going largely unprosecuted. The legitimate authorities are resource constrained, the political process isn't prepared to allocate sufficient resources to change that, and the societal costs of allowing vigilanteism and extrajudicial punishment are broadly believed to outstrip the scope of the problem they would ostensibly be solving. This leads to an equilibrium where a lot of petty theft goes unpunished and we, as a society, are in practice content to accept it that way.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    That is an outcome, but not a particularly desirable one depending on the degree of pettiness and the frequency of these crimes. Interestingly if you loosen restrictions on self defense and maintain penalties for self-defense gone awry (I.e., your defense system injure an innocent person) then you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place.
  - thunfischbrot 8y ago
    Why are the as restrained as they are right now though? A state without a functioning law enforcement that is out to effectively protect citizens and actually enforcing laws is missing the point of being a state at all. Money: Reduce spending overseas by cutting down drastically on operations outside the nation's borders. Education: Establish longer training, covering more in-depth the actual goals of law enforcement, effective strategies in community engagement, de-escalation tactics, psychology and the justice system. Respect: Integrate law enforcement back into the communities they are supposed to serve. Reduce the barriers, demilitarize law enforcement from the look, equipment and the strategies employed all the way to the mindset of the law enforcement officials. Citizens (all humans in fact) should be viewed more like customers than like potential perpetrators.
- manigandham 8y ago
  We're not all OK with it, but that does not mean we should fix it by employing unqualified vigilantes instead.
hughvvd 8y ago
No, next you hire private security contractors since the cops are just state thugs who rob and kill the tax payer. You can't defend the inept killer cops, you just can't, stop it.
- iamdave 8y ago
  You can't defend the inept killer cops, you just can't, stop it. Where did I give you the impression that I'm defending "inept killer cops"? I'm asking for an inquiry of our expectations in crowdsourcing duties that the general public are not trained to conduct.
- vec 8y ago
  We don't need to defend the inept killer cops to posit that vigilante justice is even worse.
will_brown 8y ago
>What happens next? Well let me tell you of another event that occurred to me in 08/17. I was kidnapped at gunpoint from a gas station, forced to drive my attacker with a gun on my for 30 minutes, eventually after getting off the highway I jumped out of my own car in gear, escaped and called the police. First words out of the sergeants mouth responding, “cut the shit what really happened.” Despite my insistence I’m an officer of the court myself (attorney at Law) that there will be video from the gas station to prove my version of events, I was even told, “we aren’t even sure if you own a car and if you are just calling police for a free ride.” In that case, in 24 hours I located my car and the gunman and called the police and had him arrested. That’s not to say I did this voluntarily, luckily the gunman connected my WiFi only iPad to the internet and I got the location, of course I called the police first, who told me “they heard about my ‘story’ yesterday, and wouldn’t be going to the address until I drove to the station and showed them the Apple email”. I did just that and after keeping me in the parking lot for an hour and laughing at me 2 officers came out to me (this station was closed on Sunday) and took down the address, drive away and called my cellphone and told me go home they don’t see my car. Unsatisfied I went to the address myself, found my car and the gunman, called the police yet again and they finally came and arrested him. He bonded out Monday at 8AM. He has since been rearrested, bonded out yet again, rearrested yet again for violation of his bond vis—Avis his GPS tracker I insisted on. His trial is still ongoing. Someone stole my keys and ID, I should be entitled to know what they look like when 2 videos are available, crimes against me are ongoing, and the cost of the officers time (since you are so concerned about their $150/hour rates...which seem entirely made up, no offense) is a 1 minute reply to an email I forwarded him from foot locker loss prevention. Edit: I forgot my conclusion, which is, people who engage in these activities in many cases will even have friends and family who turn them in (i.e. the unibomber). But even if they don’t a public platform would be very helpful in deterring these activities, which is the ultimate goal.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  Ok, so you already realized that the police aren't useless - they are far worse than that. When are you going to take responsibility for solving your problems?
nitwit005 8y ago
The police officially crowd source investigations all the time. That's what a wanted poster is. We've been doing that for hundreds of years, so if there is a rabbit hole, we're at the bottom of it.
- iamdave 8y ago
  Right, the police have. Not a (presumably) revenue generating online platform. My position on this is, if we're talking about being frustrated with the police not generating the outcomes we want from petty theft, and if we're also experiencing gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth aimed at tech companies for things ranging from data breaches to questionable ethics and corporate responsibility (and in some cases, but certainly not all-with seeming impunity), why on earth would we ever conjoin the two roles like this?
bena 8y ago
You mean like when we crowdsourced the identity of the Boston Marathon bomber? Because it's all well and good when the crowd gets it right and the lynch mob goes to town on the bad guy. But the issue is when that mob gets turned on the wrong guy. The internet has a long memory and seldom admits when it is wrong. "Bob Jerry is the Boston Marathon bomber" sticks around much longer than "Whoops, our bad, Bob Jerry is just some dude"
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
danilocesar 8y ago
I used to be a name-and-shame supporter in the past, but if you think deeply about it you might realise it's a bad move. Name-and-Shame systems usually relies on unverified complains: One can "identify" the wrong individual or someone can make a fake complain - In both situations someone's reputation will be damaged, sometimes boyond repair. That's why police should take care of this. They are supposed to be unbiased, run propper investigation and do proper verification. The fact that they don't do that is a different problem. Before you argue something like "lets verify those complains", Let me put in a different way: If you keep playing the if-that-do-that game, at the end you are going to see that we have basically two options: Live in a system where lots of criminals goes to jail but more inocents gets falsely implicated, or one where we get less false-positives but we also miss some criminals. Modern society has chosen the second option for a reason.
cat199 8y ago
> Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not sure we're prepared to go down sooo, like, down with trial by jury?
- iamdave 8y ago
  If you're looking for me to respond, in seriousness to this I'm going to need some assurances that you know the difference between a criminal investigation and a court trial since my comment was about one of those things, and pretty emphatically not the other.
- tripzilch 8y ago
  Very different topic, but sure. Many well functioning legal systems in the world don't have it.
mcv 8y ago
This is why the police should be doing this. If the police refuses to follow up on these kind of crimes, it encourages vigilantism. If it's something that ordinary citizens can solve, it's something that the police should be able to solve. It's their job, it's a crime with real victims, there's no excuse not to do anything. And there are plenty of stories about police arresting people on trivial issues, questionable charges, there's stuff about how they shoot black people over nothing, there's civil forfeiture. But actual theft? That is what the police should be working on. If they don't, what are they for?

blueboo 8y ago

If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. Yes, it's a "rabbit hole [we're] not sure we're prepared to go down". We're not prepared. We're going down it

fladrif 8y ago
I don't think the correct takeaway is that we're OK with law enforcement looking the other way. Clearly that is the best route to solve this issue, and we need more oversight into why certain cases are handled in this way and why. What is the priority of law enforcement, and where is the time allocation for case follow-up.
- blueboo 8y ago
  I agree with your principals, but I think that since people aren't spending political capital to change it, we're giving tacit approval -- however begrudging, however wrong-in-our-heart-of-hearts-we-think-it-is
iamdave 8y ago
If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. Post hoc ergo propter hoc make for valid public policy it does not. What source do you point to that we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way?
- alangibson 8y ago
  Existence proof. Law enforcement looks the other way and we do nothing about it. Not being OK with something and passively accepting it is functionally identical to being OK with something.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    I don’t know what to do about such things. One of my exes is certain what to do, which is why she’s campaigning for the fourth largest political party in America. Me, I could work on AI to fully enforce all laws, but I suspect that would have unfortunate side effects like accidentally returning to feudalism after all but a few thousand Americans end up with multiple millennia of prison time because the laws themselves are overbroad… and if I limit it to just laws I agree with, well that’s exactly the sort of thing I would be appalled by if done by someone with whom I disagreed about which laws were just. What should we do, do you recon?
    - krageon 8y ago
      Move to a different country. Work hard and be an asset somewhere you do agree with society's laws, then help that country improve it's lot so more people can benefit. Why should a country be different than a company?
      - tripzilch 8y ago
        I prefer my countries better than a company.
      - ben_w 8y ago
vec 8y ago
> If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified. You're excluding the admittedly somewhat bleak but still quite plausible third alternative: we as a society are in practice OK with this class of crime going largely unprosecuted. The legitimate authorities are resource constrained, the political process isn't prepared to allocate sufficient resources to change that, and the societal costs of allowing vigilanteism and extrajudicial punishment are broadly believed to outstrip the scope of the problem they would ostensibly be solving. This leads to an equilibrium where a lot of petty theft goes unpunished and we, as a society, are in practice content to accept it that way.
- weberc2 8y ago
  That is an outcome, but not a particularly desirable one depending on the degree of pettiness and the frequency of these crimes. Interestingly if you loosen restrictions on self defense and maintain penalties for self-defense gone awry (I.e., your defense system injure an innocent person) then you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place.
- thunfischbrot 8y ago
  Why are the as restrained as they are right now though? A state without a functioning law enforcement that is out to effectively protect citizens and actually enforcing laws is missing the point of being a state at all. Money: Reduce spending overseas by cutting down drastically on operations outside the nation's borders. Education: Establish longer training, covering more in-depth the actual goals of law enforcement, effective strategies in community engagement, de-escalation tactics, psychology and the justice system. Respect: Integrate law enforcement back into the communities they are supposed to serve. Reduce the barriers, demilitarize law enforcement from the look, equipment and the strategies employed all the way to the mindset of the law enforcement officials. Citizens (all humans in fact) should be viewed more like customers than like potential perpetrators.
manigandham 8y ago
We're not all OK with it, but that does not mean we should fix it by employing unqualified vigilantes instead.

hughvvd 8y ago

No, next you hire private security contractors since the cops are just state thugs who rob and kill the tax payer. You can't defend the inept killer cops, you just can't, stop it.

iamdave 8y ago
You can't defend the inept killer cops, you just can't, stop it. Where did I give you the impression that I'm defending "inept killer cops"? I'm asking for an inquiry of our expectations in crowdsourcing duties that the general public are not trained to conduct.
vec 8y ago
We don't need to defend the inept killer cops to posit that vigilante justice is even worse.

will_brown 8y ago

>What happens next? Well let me tell you of another event that occurred to me in 08/17. I was kidnapped at gunpoint from a gas station, forced to drive my attacker with a gun on my for 30 minutes, eventually after getting off the highway I jumped out of my own car in gear, escaped and called the police. First words out of the sergeants mouth responding, “cut the shit what really happened.” Despite my insistence I’m an officer of the court myself (attorney at Law) that there will be video from the gas station to prove my version of events, I was even told, “we aren’t even sure if you own a car and if you are just calling police for a free ride.” In that case, in 24 hours I located my car and the gunman and called the police and had him arrested. That’s not to say I did this voluntarily, luckily the gunman connected my WiFi only iPad to the internet and I got the location, of course I called the police first, who told me “they heard about my ‘story’ yesterday, and wouldn’t be going to the address until I drove to the station and showed them the Apple email”. I did just that and after keeping me in the parking lot for an hour and laughing at me 2 officers came out to me (this station was closed on Sunday) and took down the address, drive away and called my cellphone and told me go home they don’t see my car. Unsatisfied I went to the address myself, found my car and the gunman, called the police yet again and they finally came and arrested him. He bonded out Monday at 8AM. He has since been rearrested, bonded out yet again, rearrested yet again for violation of his bond vis—Avis his GPS tracker I insisted on. His trial is still ongoing. Someone stole my keys and ID, I should be entitled to know what they look like when 2 videos are available, crimes against me are ongoing, and the cost of the officers time (since you are so concerned about their $150/hour rates...which seem entirely made up, no offense) is a 1 minute reply to an email I forwarded him from foot locker loss prevention. Edit: I forgot my conclusion, which is, people who engage in these activities in many cases will even have friends and family who turn them in (i.e. the unibomber). But even if they don’t a public platform would be very helpful in deterring these activities, which is the ultimate goal.

mdpopescu 8y ago
Ok, so you already realized that the police aren't useless - they are far worse than that. When are you going to take responsibility for solving your problems?

nitwit005 8y ago

The police officially crowd source investigations all the time. That's what a wanted poster is. We've been doing that for hundreds of years, so if there is a rabbit hole, we're at the bottom of it.

iamdave 8y ago
Right, the police have. Not a (presumably) revenue generating online platform. My position on this is, if we're talking about being frustrated with the police not generating the outcomes we want from petty theft, and if we're also experiencing gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth aimed at tech companies for things ranging from data breaches to questionable ethics and corporate responsibility (and in some cases, but certainly not all-with seeming impunity), why on earth would we ever conjoin the two roles like this?

bena 8y ago

You mean like when we crowdsourced the identity of the Boston Marathon bomber? Because it's all well and good when the crowd gets it right and the lynch mob goes to town on the bad guy. But the issue is when that mob gets turned on the wrong guy. The internet has a long memory and seldom admits when it is wrong. "Bob Jerry is the Boston Marathon bomber" sticks around much longer than "Whoops, our bad, Bob Jerry is just some dude"

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

danilocesar 8y ago

I used to be a name-and-shame supporter in the past, but if you think deeply about it you might realise it's a bad move. Name-and-Shame systems usually relies on unverified complains: One can "identify" the wrong individual or someone can make a fake complain - In both situations someone's reputation will be damaged, sometimes boyond repair. That's why police should take care of this. They are supposed to be unbiased, run propper investigation and do proper verification. The fact that they don't do that is a different problem. Before you argue something like "lets verify those complains", Let me put in a different way: If you keep playing the if-that-do-that game, at the end you are going to see that we have basically two options: Live in a system where lots of criminals goes to jail but more inocents gets falsely implicated, or one where we get less false-positives but we also miss some criminals. Modern society has chosen the second option for a reason.

cat199 8y ago

> Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not sure we're prepared to go down sooo, like, down with trial by jury?

iamdave 8y ago
If you're looking for me to respond, in seriousness to this I'm going to need some assurances that you know the difference between a criminal investigation and a court trial since my comment was about one of those things, and pretty emphatically not the other.
tripzilch 8y ago
Very different topic, but sure. Many well functioning legal systems in the world don't have it.

mcv 8y ago

This is why the police should be doing this. If the police refuses to follow up on these kind of crimes, it encourages vigilantism. If it's something that ordinary citizens can solve, it's something that the police should be able to solve. It's their job, it's a crime with real victims, there's no excuse not to do anything. And there are plenty of stories about police arresting people on trivial issues, questionable charges, there's stuff about how they shoot black people over nothing, there's civil forfeiture. But actual theft? That is what the police should be working on. If they don't, what are they for?