10 ms·

I disagree that it'd be safe to assume that the police forfeited ownership so if they claim the device is theirs it makes sense to return the device. However t

by munk-a 5y ago

I disagree that it'd be safe to assume that the police forfeited ownership so if they claim the device is theirs it makes sense to return the device. However the article pointed out (and it's pretty reasonable honestly) that when the woman first found the device she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device - if someone asks for the device returned you can explain the situation and, as long as you didn't clearly know what the device was (i.e. have search history for that exact tracker device or have testimony from a mechanic or technician who advised you on what the device is) then I think it'd be extremely difficult for you to be found at any fault. Car bombs are a thing that happens, they happen thankfully quite rarely but destroying a suspicious device is probably the best general course of action. Edit to add: I think there's also no reason to believe that someone planting a tracking device on your vehicle is working with law enforcement - it could easily be a stalker or someone acting maliciously. This actually seems like really risky behavior for the cops if they ever want the device back - I'd assume the devices they actually get returned are by pure luck alone.

DangitBobby 5y ago
I just became slightly enraged and irrational at the idea that I could potentially be stalked by hostile police, and any defensive behavior could result in them misrepresenting my behavior in a legal setting and successfully convicting me.
- munk-a 5y ago
  If you're walking down an alley one night and someone grabs you and you punch them any reasonable court will find assault charges levied against you completely bogus. Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer. Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people - that's partially for a good reason due to the line of work they're in - but some people do abuse it and leverage law enforcement privileges and equipment to abuse random folks. Like, for instance, planting a tracking device on your partner to see if they're cheating on you - probably illegal and IA will probably come down on that officer - but they're much more likely to get away with it scott free.
  - nickff 5y ago
    > "Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer." Well, you can be charged for anything, and criminal charges themselves do a lot of damage, but whether you get convicted is a completely different matter. That depends on the court; there have been cases of people shooting police who burst in unannounced, and having the charges dropped, or being acquitted.
    - 8note 5y ago
      For a criminal charge, you're also likely to be beaten or otherwise pushed to submit a guilty plea, no?
  - amelius 5y ago
    In some places, police officers are required to document all such events, using on-body cameras.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      We keep learning cops turn cams off when inconvenient, generally without meaningful consequences.
      - smegger001 5y ago
        honestly we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian. Arrest and handcuff someone with the badge cam turned off charge them with unlawful imprisonment. shoot someone with it off murder or manslaughter.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        > we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian. I endorse this.
        5y ago
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  That is a rational feeling.
- macinjosh 5y ago
  Governments are the same things as mobs of course this is how they would behave.
- macinjosh 5y ago
  Governments are the same things as the mob, of course this is how they would behave.
rolph 5y ago
i wonder how much it costs, to deploy a bomb squad, and how many times that will happen when compliant about the device come in. scenarios such as : 1] i see this thing on my car 2] a saw a sketchy dude messing around under my neighbours car 3] please pull over for secondary inspection before crossing the border
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think this is a completely reasonable way to respond to finding a tracking device and simultaneously discourage them from continuing the practice but please do drive out of county first so that the police officers that respond don't just say "Oh hey, Joe put that on this morning, we don't need the bomb squad for that."
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    You probably shouldn't drive anywhere if there's a bomb on your car.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      If it's reasonable to assume the device on your car was a bomb and you didn't take any actions that directly disproved you had that understanding - even if your actions weren't optimally logical - then that would probably make a reasonable defense if the city/state tried to go after you for destruction of property.
      - rolph 5y ago
        for comparison, [there used to be a video] a keyholder or a container about the size of the telemetry device will bare minimum blow a hole in the gas tank and explosively ignite however many gallons of gas in your tank, gasoline having the power of 12 sticks TNT per vapourized gallon is a big boom
teknopaul 5y ago
Of course they forfeit ownership, if this were not the case, you could stick and a sticker on cop cars and expect them to return the sticker to you without damaging it. Its not grafitti officer I'm just leaving my paint here, please give it back soon. The bin man's life would be complicated if everyone still owns what they put in the bin or throw in a river. If cops put a tracker on someone's car they can expect the same response to a bird shit on the windscreen.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  Why a sticker and not a tracking device? That’s even better and you can then track their positions across town. I knew someone who had done that in a small town. The batteries didn’t last long but it was a “fun” hacking experiment. Tracking was just a basic transmitter which transmitted a ping. The idea was to get a reasonable idea a cop car was “nearby”.
bb88 5y ago
Playing devil's advocate here. Let's say people start making car bombs that look like tracking devices. Or they modify the tracking device to become a bomb. Many police tracking devices already look similar to a pipe bomb: https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warrants-for-gps-tracking-devices https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warr... This gets kinda scary if the person you're tracking is a dealer working with a violent crime syndicate.
salawat 5y ago
>i.e. have search history for that exact tracker device or have testimony from a mechanic or technician who advised you on what the device is I disagree this should even factor in. If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. Knowing what the device is != knowing who installed it, their intent, or where the installer got it from. Nor do I think that a savvy criminal removing a tracker should become grounds for searching browsing history for parallel construction purposes since I somehow doubt third party records are answered in yes/no format, and the phrasing of query strings could be rather broad, leading to a reasonable request of search activity between the dates of installation and when they felt they "smelled a rat". In which could be bundled other incriminating evidence to spawn off new ledes. If actually telling the person you as a government agency installed it invalidates it as an investigative technique, maybe it shouldn't be being used in the first place. Police shouldn't have to resort to breaking basic decorum routinely in doing their job. It's just converged on that because the population under observation aren't necessarily well equipped or educated sufficiently to be savvy on this sort of thing, or to make enough of a stink. Law enforcement also relies on law abiding people to remain silent on these matters because "it'll never happen to me" when there is no guarantee you won't become persona non grata one day.
- rhizome 5y ago
  >If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. "Police say a lot of things and they're both trained and encouraged to lie in the execution of their normal duties."
wearywanderer 5y ago
> she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device Fair? Yes. It's 100% fair as far as I'm concerned. But rational? If I thought I found a bomb, I'd be running as fast as I could from it, then once I was a hundred meters away at least, I'd call the bomb squad. Trying to destroy the bomb myself sounds like a momentously stupid idea for a number of reasons. Foremost being, what if this homemade bomb with potentially unstable explosives goes off in my face? Or what if it's remote controlled and the bombman pulls the trigger once I start messing with it? Or what if I successfully destroy the bomb myself.... what do I tell the cops and my neighbors? That I blew up a bomb but it wasn't my bomb? How many weeks would I spend in jail before my lawyer manages to convince everybody that I didn't make the bomb I blew up and for some reason I never thought to call the bomb squad? I think an unlucky man might end up in prison for many years if he did that.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Well, if you had reason to believe that the police placed a bomb then it makes sense to me that you might not trust whoever you get on the other end of the line when trying to contact a bomb squad.
  - Google234 5y ago
    If you believe that the place placed a bomb on your car in the Us then you probably belong in a psychiatric hospital.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      It was in the news five years ago when the Dallas police (in the US) used C4 to blow up a suspect in a parking garage. It seemed to startle people then, mainly because they repurposed a normally bomb-defusing robot to do it. In fairness, while it was in a garage, it was not on a car. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777/for-the-first-time-police-used-a-bomb-robot-to-kill https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777...
rorykoehler 5y ago
Even if you do have a search history or whatever you can still claim ignorance of who put it there. Better yet reattach it to a long haul truck and let them have a great time trying to figure it out.
g00gler 5y ago
> Car bombs are a thing that happens, they happen thankfully quite rarely but destroying a suspicious device is probably the best general course of action. Why would you destroy something you think is possibly a car bomb or a detonator? Wouldn’t the best general course of action be to call the police? Possibly unless you’re a meth dealer as pointed out in a sibling comment, of course.
alexanderdmitri 5y ago
If you think it might be a car bomb, I would suggest not trying to destroy it without training. Best to call the police and let them deal with it.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  Considering the people who installed the malicious device was the police, I think it's questionable logic. For many people, the police are an actively antagonistic threat, not protectors of safety. In this very case, they used legal threats against her. Why would she trust them with her safety?
  - alexanderdmitri 5y ago
    It was a tongue in cheek comment on my part, but now that you mention it, I don't see how it wouldn't be a logical thing to do in this situation. First off, the issue would probably get routed to the local police who take these kinds of calls, not the state police who planted it. This would probably create some paperwork that would frame the event as a crime before it comes to light that the state police were behind the planting. Bring in a good lawyer and you might have a better shot in court over this nonsense. Regardless, if you're not trained, probably best not to destroy a suspected bomb on your own unless you have no choice.
    - ggggtez 5y ago
      This is some very "hindsight is 2020" thinking. She knew there were cops at her place asking around for someone, and the next day she sees men attaching something to her car. How is she to know that they were state vs local police, and whether they were working together. Besides, it seems clear to me she only "didn't know if it was a bomb" at first, but at some point likely after taking to NAACP, she found out it was a tracker. So therefore at no point in time was she thinking she was disposing of a bomb. That's a fantasy.
      - wearywanderer 5y ago
pc86 5y ago
Are car bombings common enough in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that it's a reasonable fear? Statistically, having a fear that you're going to die in a plane crash or terrorist attack is totally unreasonable. Even if we ignore that, how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear? Also I'm not sure destroying a device you suspect of being an explosive is recommended.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  I think the point is moot, since even if you thought it was a tracker, there isn't much reason to believe that you are required to act any differently.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear It's not clear which NAACP. The NAACP LDF (Legal Defense Foundation) certainly sounds to me like a good choice to call.
  - pc86 5y ago
    Does the LDF do a lot of bomb disposal?
    - munk-a 5y ago
      If you are a person who has been recently persecuted by the police and have a fear of police overaction contacting the LDF to help you navigate interacting with the police in any manner seems completely legitimate.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I think they have connections/lawyers that could help sue for civil rights violations. Also, if the police are doing something sketchy to one person, then it is probably not the only instance, and an organization like the LDF could pursue the broader issue. By analogy, if a corporation steals $20 from you, it may not be worth personally crusading for it back, but if you tell the right person about it, they might file a class action.
CaptainZapp 5y ago
I've they want their device back, which they attached to my car (or planted into my apartment) I don't think I have any obligation to return it. Same if you send me some junk with a bill for which I never asked. What they can do, of course, is find a judge who orders me to return it. Could be, though, that they have to answer a few embarrassing questions in the process.
- lordlimecat 5y ago
  Given that they had a warrant, a judge already signed off on this and would likely have no problem ordering you to return the device.
voisin 5y ago
> I disagree that it'd be safe to assume that the police forfeited ownership so if they claim the device is theirs it makes sense to return the device. Unless legislated law states otherwise, it is certainly the case at common law that they “failed to manifest their desire to exclude others” and forfeited ownership. This is the basis behind “possession is 9/10th the law”.

by munk-a 5y ago

DangitBobby 5y ago

I just became slightly enraged and irrational at the idea that I could potentially be stalked by hostile police, and any defensive behavior could result in them misrepresenting my behavior in a legal setting and successfully convicting me.

munk-a 5y ago
If you're walking down an alley one night and someone grabs you and you punch them any reasonable court will find assault charges levied against you completely bogus. Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer. Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people - that's partially for a good reason due to the line of work they're in - but some people do abuse it and leverage law enforcement privileges and equipment to abuse random folks. Like, for instance, planting a tracking device on your partner to see if they're cheating on you - probably illegal and IA will probably come down on that officer - but they're much more likely to get away with it scott free.
- nickff 5y ago
  > "Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer." Well, you can be charged for anything, and criminal charges themselves do a lot of damage, but whether you get convicted is a completely different matter. That depends on the court; there have been cases of people shooting police who burst in unannounced, and having the charges dropped, or being acquitted.
  - 8note 5y ago
    For a criminal charge, you're also likely to be beaten or otherwise pushed to submit a guilty plea, no?
- amelius 5y ago
  In some places, police officers are required to document all such events, using on-body cameras.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    We keep learning cops turn cams off when inconvenient, generally without meaningful consequences.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      honestly we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian. Arrest and handcuff someone with the badge cam turned off charge them with unlawful imprisonment. shoot someone with it off murder or manslaughter.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        > we should treat any cop without his camera on as a regular civilian. I endorse this.
        5y ago
lotsofpulp 5y ago
That is a rational feeling.
macinjosh 5y ago
Governments are the same things as mobs of course this is how they would behave.
macinjosh 5y ago
Governments are the same things as the mob, of course this is how they would behave.

rolph 5y ago

i wonder how much it costs, to deploy a bomb squad, and how many times that will happen when compliant about the device come in. scenarios such as : 1] i see this thing on my car 2] a saw a sketchy dude messing around under my neighbours car 3] please pull over for secondary inspection before crossing the border

munk-a 5y ago
I think this is a completely reasonable way to respond to finding a tracking device and simultaneously discourage them from continuing the practice but please do drive out of county first so that the police officers that respond don't just say "Oh hey, Joe put that on this morning, we don't need the bomb squad for that."
- Y_Y 5y ago
  You probably shouldn't drive anywhere if there's a bomb on your car.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    If it's reasonable to assume the device on your car was a bomb and you didn't take any actions that directly disproved you had that understanding - even if your actions weren't optimally logical - then that would probably make a reasonable defense if the city/state tried to go after you for destruction of property.
    - rolph 5y ago
      for comparison, [there used to be a video] a keyholder or a container about the size of the telemetry device will bare minimum blow a hole in the gas tank and explosively ignite however many gallons of gas in your tank, gasoline having the power of 12 sticks TNT per vapourized gallon is a big boom

teknopaul 5y ago

Of course they forfeit ownership, if this were not the case, you could stick and a sticker on cop cars and expect them to return the sticker to you without damaging it. Its not grafitti officer I'm just leaving my paint here, please give it back soon. The bin man's life would be complicated if everyone still owns what they put in the bin or throw in a river. If cops put a tracker on someone's car they can expect the same response to a bird shit on the windscreen.

rdtsc 5y ago
Why a sticker and not a tracking device? That’s even better and you can then track their positions across town. I knew someone who had done that in a small town. The batteries didn’t last long but it was a “fun” hacking experiment. Tracking was just a basic transmitter which transmitted a ping. The idea was to get a reasonable idea a cop car was “nearby”.

bb88 5y ago

Playing devil's advocate here. Let's say people start making car bombs that look like tracking devices. Or they modify the tracking device to become a bomb. Many police tracking devices already look similar to a pipe bomb: https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warrants-for-gps-tracking-devices https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warr... This gets kinda scary if the person you're tracking is a dealer working with a violent crime syndicate.

salawat 5y ago

>i.e. have search history for that exact tracker device or have testimony from a mechanic or technician who advised you on what the device is I disagree this should even factor in. If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. Knowing what the device is != knowing who installed it, their intent, or where the installer got it from. Nor do I think that a savvy criminal removing a tracker should become grounds for searching browsing history for parallel construction purposes since I somehow doubt third party records are answered in yes/no format, and the phrasing of query strings could be rather broad, leading to a reasonable request of search activity between the dates of installation and when they felt they "smelled a rat". In which could be bundled other incriminating evidence to spawn off new ledes. If actually telling the person you as a government agency installed it invalidates it as an investigative technique, maybe it shouldn't be being used in the first place. Police shouldn't have to resort to breaking basic decorum routinely in doing their job. It's just converged on that because the population under observation aren't necessarily well equipped or educated sufficiently to be savvy on this sort of thing, or to make enough of a stink. Law enforcement also relies on law abiding people to remain silent on these matters because "it'll never happen to me" when there is no guarantee you won't become persona non grata one day.

rhizome 5y ago
>If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. "Police say a lot of things and they're both trained and encouraged to lie in the execution of their normal duties."

wearywanderer 5y ago

> she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device Fair? Yes. It's 100% fair as far as I'm concerned. But rational? If I thought I found a bomb, I'd be running as fast as I could from it, then once I was a hundred meters away at least, I'd call the bomb squad. Trying to destroy the bomb myself sounds like a momentously stupid idea for a number of reasons. Foremost being, what if this homemade bomb with potentially unstable explosives goes off in my face? Or what if it's remote controlled and the bombman pulls the trigger once I start messing with it? Or what if I successfully destroy the bomb myself.... what do I tell the cops and my neighbors? That I blew up a bomb but it wasn't my bomb? How many weeks would I spend in jail before my lawyer manages to convince everybody that I didn't make the bomb I blew up and for some reason I never thought to call the bomb squad? I think an unlucky man might end up in prison for many years if he did that.

DangitBobby 5y ago
Well, if you had reason to believe that the police placed a bomb then it makes sense to me that you might not trust whoever you get on the other end of the line when trying to contact a bomb squad.
- Google234 5y ago
  If you believe that the place placed a bomb on your car in the Us then you probably belong in a psychiatric hospital.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    It was in the news five years ago when the Dallas police (in the US) used C4 to blow up a suspect in a parking garage. It seemed to startle people then, mainly because they repurposed a normally bomb-defusing robot to do it. In fairness, while it was in a garage, it was not on a car. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777/for-the-first-time-police-used-a-bomb-robot-to-kill https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777...

rorykoehler 5y ago

Even if you do have a search history or whatever you can still claim ignorance of who put it there. Better yet reattach it to a long haul truck and let them have a great time trying to figure it out.

g00gler 5y ago

> Car bombs are a thing that happens, they happen thankfully quite rarely but destroying a suspicious device is probably the best general course of action. Why would you destroy something you think is possibly a car bomb or a detonator? Wouldn’t the best general course of action be to call the police? Possibly unless you’re a meth dealer as pointed out in a sibling comment, of course.

alexanderdmitri 5y ago

If you think it might be a car bomb, I would suggest not trying to destroy it without training. Best to call the police and let them deal with it.

ggggtez 5y ago
Considering the people who installed the malicious device was the police, I think it's questionable logic. For many people, the police are an actively antagonistic threat, not protectors of safety. In this very case, they used legal threats against her. Why would she trust them with her safety?
- alexanderdmitri 5y ago
  It was a tongue in cheek comment on my part, but now that you mention it, I don't see how it wouldn't be a logical thing to do in this situation. First off, the issue would probably get routed to the local police who take these kinds of calls, not the state police who planted it. This would probably create some paperwork that would frame the event as a crime before it comes to light that the state police were behind the planting. Bring in a good lawyer and you might have a better shot in court over this nonsense. Regardless, if you're not trained, probably best not to destroy a suspected bomb on your own unless you have no choice.
  - ggggtez 5y ago
    This is some very "hindsight is 2020" thinking. She knew there were cops at her place asking around for someone, and the next day she sees men attaching something to her car. How is she to know that they were state vs local police, and whether they were working together. Besides, it seems clear to me she only "didn't know if it was a bomb" at first, but at some point likely after taking to NAACP, she found out it was a tracker. So therefore at no point in time was she thinking she was disposing of a bomb. That's a fantasy.
    - wearywanderer 5y ago

pc86 5y ago

Are car bombings common enough in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that it's a reasonable fear? Statistically, having a fear that you're going to die in a plane crash or terrorist attack is totally unreasonable. Even if we ignore that, how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear? Also I'm not sure destroying a device you suspect of being an explosive is recommended.

ggggtez 5y ago
I think the point is moot, since even if you thought it was a tracker, there isn't much reason to believe that you are required to act any differently.
perl4ever 5y ago
>how is calling the NAACP an appropriate reaction to that fear It's not clear which NAACP. The NAACP LDF (Legal Defense Foundation) certainly sounds to me like a good choice to call.
- pc86 5y ago
  Does the LDF do a lot of bomb disposal?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    If you are a person who has been recently persecuted by the police and have a fear of police overaction contacting the LDF to help you navigate interacting with the police in any manner seems completely legitimate.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I think they have connections/lawyers that could help sue for civil rights violations. Also, if the police are doing something sketchy to one person, then it is probably not the only instance, and an organization like the LDF could pursue the broader issue. By analogy, if a corporation steals $20 from you, it may not be worth personally crusading for it back, but if you tell the right person about it, they might file a class action.

CaptainZapp 5y ago

I've they want their device back, which they attached to my car (or planted into my apartment) I don't think I have any obligation to return it. Same if you send me some junk with a bill for which I never asked. What they can do, of course, is find a judge who orders me to return it. Could be, though, that they have to answer a few embarrassing questions in the process.

lordlimecat 5y ago
Given that they had a warrant, a judge already signed off on this and would likely have no problem ordering you to return the device.

voisin 5y ago

> I disagree that it'd be safe to assume that the police forfeited ownership so if they claim the device is theirs it makes sense to return the device. Unless legislated law states otherwise, it is certainly the case at common law that they “failed to manifest their desire to exclude others” and forfeited ownership. This is the basis behind “possession is 9/10th the law”.