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> Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police had also refused his multiple reques

> Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police had also refused his multiple requests for them to test his hands and clothing for gunshot residue. This is the same that giving queues to a dog to bark to be able to inspect someone or a vehicle. New tech, old tricks. No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt.

jaywalk 5y ago
It's no wonder why the cops love it. Although the actual usefulness is questionable at best (much like the dogs) ShotSpotter will cook up "evidence" on command to help with the investigation (much like the dogs).
slumdev 5y ago
Any lawyers in the house who could comment on their refusal to test his hands? Can they refuse to run a test because they're afraid it might produce exculpatory evidence?
- giantg2 5y ago
  Not a lawyer, but in my experience they don't need to do any tests. They usually have a policy that requires them to make a "thorough" investigation. Nobody holds them to that. For example, a trooper knew there were third party witnesses to a crime and did not seek them out. Granted, that trooper also withheld actual exculpatory evidence. Either way, nothing happened, because who watches the watchers?
- tjfl 5y ago
  IANAL, but curious and searched. > A number of techniques designed to detect gunshot residues (GSR) on the hands of a suspect or victim have been developed. These techniques range from the now-discredited paraffin test to the more modern techniques which use instrumental analysis or scanning electron microscopy. The limitations of all GSR techniques are that the residues can be removed by rubbing or washing the hands and usually must be collected soon after the firearm is fired, yet even valid GSR tests are not conclusive. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/forensic-science-gunshot-residue-tests https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/forensic...
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Very few forensic techniques are conclusive for a case. They are usually conclusive as in the test was either positive or negative. Then the forensic expert has to give testimony as to what it means. Just look at the medical experts in the Chauvin trial. It's just like many news articles today - the facts don't lie, but people can misapply them to say different things.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  The Supreme Court ruled that 5th amendment protects you from incriminating yourself even if you're innocent, and in some states that extends to investigations of your body. Never talking to or cooperating with police, unless legally required as advised by your lawyer, is what's known in legal circles as "smart."
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    That's not applicable here, because the defendant was asking police to timely collect additional evidence for its exculpatory potential.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      I was referring to the suspect declining to be tested for gunpowder residue, and the ensuing tangent.
- jonhohle 5y ago
  Not being in or having interactions with the criminal justice system, but having been involved in _many_ technology post-mortems, why wouldn’t you want to collect exculpatory evidence? Without it, and in the best case an innocent individual goes free, but with a cloud of uncertainty. In the worst case an innocent individual is convicted of a crime and the perpetrator goes without consequence. If LEOs and prosecutors are incentivized based on raw arrest or conviction counts, then the consequence for being wrong should be astronomical (say, the sentence of the wrongfully convicted times a ≥ 1x multiplier).
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If you start from a premise that law enforcement is searching for the truth above all else, your conclusions make sense.
    - jonhohle 5y ago
      I would think that as part of enforcing laws, truth seems like it would be relatively important. The idea of incorrectly convicting someone for a serious crime not only is an injustice to the innocent, it leaves the community in an unsafe and unwitting position regarding an actual perpetrator. In those cases it would be better to have no law enforcement involvement at all.
      - thaeli 5y ago
        The aftermath of many crimes, in America at least, would have been better with no law enforcement involvement at all. It's really that bad here.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        Anyone who is acting to infringe upon real justice is most apt to either be a sociopath who only cares about keeping score or a lot more likely a moral person but not ethical person who regards their job as getting criminals. If they truly believe you are guilty then convicting a larger portion of guilty people even via impure means is a net good for society and incidentally for their career.
ISO-morphism 5y ago
Nit: a queue is a line waiting for something (stuck in the queue), a cue is a signal to perform some action (that's my cue)
- Vaslo 5y ago
  Eh not a nit - I didn’t understand it until your context was added
dilap 5y ago
Yeah, I had my (completely clean) car searched because "the dog signaled". OK, sure. It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right to search you at will.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  > It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right to search you at will. Except they explicitly do NOT have that power. They found a "trick" to pretend like they are staying within the law, while really not.
  - lovegoblin 5y ago
    Exactly. Hence > It would be more honest
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    They don't have the "right" to, they have the "ability to do so without repercussions".
  - agency 5y ago
    There is a view, called “legal realism”, that what the courts and law enforcement collectively do _is_ the law itself. The rules as they are written down are useful in predicting or convincing how judges or other actors in the system will act, but that it all they are.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  What they should be required to do is keep records on a dog's record of false positives. If a dog fails to perform better than 95% I see no reason to use that as probable cause. Better yet, let's just get rid of pretext stops. Almost all traffic stops could be dealt with by the officer mailing a ticket. Safer for cops, safer for the public, but a lot harder to go fishing for felonies
  - giantg2 5y ago
    They treat K9s almost like officers (eg if you injure or kill one it will be a felony, likely similar to assaulting an officer, but varies by state). They should also then treat them like officers and keep Giglio records (not that they are good at that for human officers...).
ahoy 5y ago
No amount of new technology, training, equipment, or funding with change this. US policing is fundamentally a broken system.
asdff 5y ago
It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off body cams while on the clock. That should be considered an offense like a government official burning public documents, because that's basically what is going on when you turn off the video. It's uncanny how the cameras are almost always off whenever something controversial happens.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off body cams while on the clock. That should be considered an offense like a government official burning public documents, because that's basically what is going on when you turn off the video It depends on the jurisdiction. In some police departments, turning off a body camera is a punishable offense, up to and including firing. It's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and override the local police union's resistance, if possible.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    There has to be bathroom breaks right?
    - kbenson 5y ago
      From what I've seen, the cameras don't really catch those angles to give video on that, and even if they did, that's a problem easily solved through a piece of fabric around the problematic area (as opposed to on the camera, which could be accidentally left in place). Beyond that, requiring sounds from the bathroom be audible is not too much to ask, IMO. If it came down to it being absolutely essential, you could have one office take the camera off (but leave it running), and hand it to their partner to point at the bathroom door as that officer enters and uses the bathroom, and they put it back on as they exit the bathroom. The whole point of a camera system is to be a reliable audit trail of interactions that police have been in, for both their benefit and the public's benefit. Every exception you allow that lets things happen without the camera is a problem for an audit, so you try to reduce those as much as possible.
p_j_w 5y ago
The fact that they can get away with refusing to collect evidence like that is absolutely infuriating.
squarefoot 5y ago
> No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt. Not if the people above them are not. Sadly, the people above them need corrupt police because corrupt police is easier to control than the good one, and their members can also turn themselves into private police serving the same politicians who saved their asses. It's a "do ut des" scenario in which everyone has something to gain, except common people.
Leparamour 5y ago
>No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt. Put it on a blockchain then. Edit: I'm serious. Blockchain is exactly meant for application inside zero-trust environments. If you think it's impossible to put a video on blockchain, just have software making hash-fingerprints at regular time intervals and save those on a blockchain to make tampering with the video evident.

jaywalk 5y ago

It's no wonder why the cops love it. Although the actual usefulness is questionable at best (much like the dogs) ShotSpotter will cook up "evidence" on command to help with the investigation (much like the dogs).

slumdev 5y ago

Any lawyers in the house who could comment on their refusal to test his hands? Can they refuse to run a test because they're afraid it might produce exculpatory evidence?

giantg2 5y ago
Not a lawyer, but in my experience they don't need to do any tests. They usually have a policy that requires them to make a "thorough" investigation. Nobody holds them to that. For example, a trooper knew there were third party witnesses to a crime and did not seek them out. Granted, that trooper also withheld actual exculpatory evidence. Either way, nothing happened, because who watches the watchers?
tjfl 5y ago
IANAL, but curious and searched. > A number of techniques designed to detect gunshot residues (GSR) on the hands of a suspect or victim have been developed. These techniques range from the now-discredited paraffin test to the more modern techniques which use instrumental analysis or scanning electron microscopy. The limitations of all GSR techniques are that the residues can be removed by rubbing or washing the hands and usually must be collected soon after the firearm is fired, yet even valid GSR tests are not conclusive. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/forensic-science-gunshot-residue-tests https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/forensic...
- giantg2 5y ago
  Very few forensic techniques are conclusive for a case. They are usually conclusive as in the test was either positive or negative. Then the forensic expert has to give testimony as to what it means. Just look at the medical experts in the Chauvin trial. It's just like many news articles today - the facts don't lie, but people can misapply them to say different things.
robbedpeter 5y ago
The Supreme Court ruled that 5th amendment protects you from incriminating yourself even if you're innocent, and in some states that extends to investigations of your body. Never talking to or cooperating with police, unless legally required as advised by your lawyer, is what's known in legal circles as "smart."
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  That's not applicable here, because the defendant was asking police to timely collect additional evidence for its exculpatory potential.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    I was referring to the suspect declining to be tested for gunpowder residue, and the ensuing tangent.
jonhohle 5y ago
Not being in or having interactions with the criminal justice system, but having been involved in _many_ technology post-mortems, why wouldn’t you want to collect exculpatory evidence? Without it, and in the best case an innocent individual goes free, but with a cloud of uncertainty. In the worst case an innocent individual is convicted of a crime and the perpetrator goes without consequence. If LEOs and prosecutors are incentivized based on raw arrest or conviction counts, then the consequence for being wrong should be astronomical (say, the sentence of the wrongfully convicted times a ≥ 1x multiplier).
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If you start from a premise that law enforcement is searching for the truth above all else, your conclusions make sense.
  - jonhohle 5y ago
    I would think that as part of enforcing laws, truth seems like it would be relatively important. The idea of incorrectly convicting someone for a serious crime not only is an injustice to the innocent, it leaves the community in an unsafe and unwitting position regarding an actual perpetrator. In those cases it would be better to have no law enforcement involvement at all.
    - thaeli 5y ago
      The aftermath of many crimes, in America at least, would have been better with no law enforcement involvement at all. It's really that bad here.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Anyone who is acting to infringe upon real justice is most apt to either be a sociopath who only cares about keeping score or a lot more likely a moral person but not ethical person who regards their job as getting criminals. If they truly believe you are guilty then convicting a larger portion of guilty people even via impure means is a net good for society and incidentally for their career.

ISO-morphism 5y ago

Nit: a queue is a line waiting for something (stuck in the queue), a cue is a signal to perform some action (that's my cue)

Vaslo 5y ago
Eh not a nit - I didn’t understand it until your context was added

dilap 5y ago

Yeah, I had my (completely clean) car searched because "the dog signaled". OK, sure. It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right to search you at will.

brianwawok 5y ago
> It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right to search you at will. Except they explicitly do NOT have that power. They found a "trick" to pretend like they are staying within the law, while really not.
- lovegoblin 5y ago
  Exactly. Hence > It would be more honest
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  They don't have the "right" to, they have the "ability to do so without repercussions".
- agency 5y ago
  There is a view, called “legal realism”, that what the courts and law enforcement collectively do _is_ the law itself. The rules as they are written down are useful in predicting or convincing how judges or other actors in the system will act, but that it all they are.
dghlsakjg 5y ago
What they should be required to do is keep records on a dog's record of false positives. If a dog fails to perform better than 95% I see no reason to use that as probable cause. Better yet, let's just get rid of pretext stops. Almost all traffic stops could be dealt with by the officer mailing a ticket. Safer for cops, safer for the public, but a lot harder to go fishing for felonies
- giantg2 5y ago
  They treat K9s almost like officers (eg if you injure or kill one it will be a felony, likely similar to assaulting an officer, but varies by state). They should also then treat them like officers and keep Giglio records (not that they are good at that for human officers...).

ahoy 5y ago

No amount of new technology, training, equipment, or funding with change this. US policing is fundamentally a broken system.

asdff 5y ago

It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off body cams while on the clock. That should be considered an offense like a government official burning public documents, because that's basically what is going on when you turn off the video. It's uncanny how the cameras are almost always off whenever something controversial happens.

reaperducer 5y ago
It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off body cams while on the clock. That should be considered an offense like a government official burning public documents, because that's basically what is going on when you turn off the video It depends on the jurisdiction. In some police departments, turning off a body camera is a punishable offense, up to and including firing. It's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and override the local police union's resistance, if possible.
- xupybd 5y ago
  There has to be bathroom breaks right?
  - kbenson 5y ago
    From what I've seen, the cameras don't really catch those angles to give video on that, and even if they did, that's a problem easily solved through a piece of fabric around the problematic area (as opposed to on the camera, which could be accidentally left in place). Beyond that, requiring sounds from the bathroom be audible is not too much to ask, IMO. If it came down to it being absolutely essential, you could have one office take the camera off (but leave it running), and hand it to their partner to point at the bathroom door as that officer enters and uses the bathroom, and they put it back on as they exit the bathroom. The whole point of a camera system is to be a reliable audit trail of interactions that police have been in, for both their benefit and the public's benefit. Every exception you allow that lets things happen without the camera is a problem for an audit, so you try to reduce those as much as possible.

p_j_w 5y ago

The fact that they can get away with refusing to collect evidence like that is absolutely infuriating.

squarefoot 5y ago

> No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt. Not if the people above them are not. Sadly, the people above them need corrupt police because corrupt police is easier to control than the good one, and their members can also turn themselves into private police serving the same politicians who saved their asses. It's a "do ut des" scenario in which everyone has something to gain, except common people.

Leparamour 5y ago

>No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt. Put it on a blockchain then. Edit: I'm serious. Blockchain is exactly meant for application inside zero-trust environments. If you think it's impossible to put a video on blockchain, just have software making hash-fingerprints at regular time intervals and save those on a blockchain to make tampering with the video evident.