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It's weird how my perception of cops have changed. Actually that's a lie. I lost respect for the profession in high school. That said, my immediate thought i

It's weird how my perception of cops have changed. Actually that's a lie. I lost respect for the profession in high school. That said, my immediate thought is they (cops) were fooling around with their new toy. I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs.

alistairSH 5y ago
This wasn't a toy drone like a DJI Mavic or similar. Assuming they haven't changed hardware, it cost ~$125,000, takes a team of two to operate, and weighs 2.4kg (5.2lbs).[1] This is the damage done to the airplane.[2] It will require body work and an engine tear-down (prop struck the drone). If the drone had been a bit higher, it could have done major damage to the prop or worse the windscreen and possibly pilot. 1 - https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-police-second-municipal-force-in-ontario-to-operate-aerial-drone/ https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-pol... 2 - https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-by-drone-aug-20.jpg https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-...
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  That doesn't mean the officers operating it weren't treating it like a toy. Hopefully the investigation is exhaustive and objective.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s worth pointing out that “real crime” is a social construct. Petty crime is a prosecuted, despite being dwarfed by wage theft. Shooting someone is a crime, obviously, but purposefully starving thousands of infants to boost Nestle stock values is not. What you or I think of being the “real crime” that cops should focus on may or may not be what the laws define as real crime, which itself probably doesn’t map to what cops spend all their time doing
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  In the broadest possible interpretation, lots of things are social constructs, but I would imagine that any functional society would generally agree that murder, rape, assault, and theft should be discouraged.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tehwebguy 5y ago
    Police agree with you on 3 out of 4
    - epicureanideal 5y ago
      Yeah, the amount of "revenue collection" they do borders on theft I suppose.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      That’s unreasonably generous to cops, IMO. They have a pretty long track record of doing all of those and getting away with it.
      - bigiain 5y ago
        To be fair, I'm _reasonably_ sure most cops don't do those things. Most cops just let it slide while their "bad apple" colleagues do those thing. And are therefore complicit in perpetuating them. So you're still right about it being unreasonably generous to all cops, even if not all of them do that shit.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        It’s hard to say given that the stats are poorly kept, but it’s currently estimated that 40% of cops commit domestic abuse. Given that that’s a crime, a serious one at that, it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of them commit more petty crimes like theft.
mschuster91 5y ago
> I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection For that, you need political change. Many a constituency has elected to rip off their people with absurd policing tactics - including asset forfeiture abuse - that primarily target poor people to fund their operations, instead of properly raising taxes, because raising taxes is a hard sell "thanks" to decades of small-gubmint, trickle down propaganda.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Personally I don't want to pay more taxes because I can see how little the government cares to spend it with any sense of effeciency. I don't care how large the government is as long as it isnt throwing trillions of dollers into various money pits.
  - brutus1213 5y ago
    I saw a lecture from a poli sci prof at princeton. Taxes have generally not been going up as services have expanded. Debt is one answer and "revenue generation" is another. It is really shameful how traffic fines has become big business in most of north america. Is europe better on this?
coliveira 5y ago
Cops are there to maintain their jobs, and their leaders are there to expand the corporation and make more money. The companies that support policing are there to make more profit. For all this to happen, they need to manufacture more "crime", even though all statistics say that crime is in a long term decline.
candiodari 5y ago
> I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs. Then I would suggest you do not look up the statistics on how many "real crime" cases get solved. Murders, most of which are done in the moment and not planned out at all. Even premeditated must be understood to mean "X tried to extort Y, fight ensued, knife was used, Y died", and very much not "the butler, after 2 years of slowly preparing for the moment, set in motion his plan ..." like in the books. Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. Every other crime it goes down significantly (and theft is far below 10%). There's a reason actual premeditated murders usually make the news for a week.
- btilly 5y ago
  Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. The work of The Innocence Project makes me question how many cases they solve versus how many they found a targetable person to scapegoat instead. Certainly a lot of the "science" that gets used to identify who the killer is pseudo-scientific bunk. Very convenient for looking for a conviction, very bad for actually catching bad guys.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    the 60% figure is referring to the clearance rate, which is just the ratio of charges filed to crimes reported. so if by "solve" you mean "someone gets convicted", the rate is quite a bit lower.
    - pc86 5y ago
      Aren't something like 98% of criminal cases pled out before trial, and the majority of those that go to trial end in a guilty verdict? If you find yourself in a suit before a jury you're likely to have a bad time.
jollybean 5y ago
You must not know anyone who does heroin, fentanyl or addicted to scrip. opioids, and therefore would have difficulty imagining how free and open access to those substances would lead to something much worse than COVID for civilization, and therefore maybe don't get quite why in the 'Supply Demand' equation, that law enforcement in totality (not just Police) basically keep a 'lid on things' such that the cost (economic and social) for such things is quite high, resulting in only relatively marginal demand. Your statement also belies a couple of other misunderstandings in that 1) Police don't make the law and 2) 'go after organized crime' ... when almost all organized crime activity is actually drugs. Some drugs like mushrooms we can probably move off the watch list, others, like MDMA feel like there should be options, but we are just not structured well for it, but most of the more potent ones just won't work in society irrespective of how a relatively small group of conscientious burningman-ers can 'handle their stuff'. As for the drone - it was involved in some kind of operation, we have no idea the parameters of the situation or what kinds of risks were taken, why, or even where the civilian plane was at the time, hopefully we will. The Police obviously operate under a completely different set of parameters so it's hard to fathom what's going on. What's 'wierd' to me is how people can use such casual thinking to make such broad social assessments kind of devoid from reality. I think it has to do with the fact that all systems are imperfect, and when we see an imperfection from the outside, we tend to extrapolate that to the entire system and don't have a developed intuition at all for the material reality of it all. I'll bet anyone most police skeptics, were they to just ride with police for a few days, would be bored out of their minds at the relatively mundane applied pragmatic reality of it all.
- bigiain 5y ago
  > or even where the civilian plane was at the time From the CADORS report: "The instructor for a Canadian Flyers International Inc. Cessna 172N (C-GKWL) reported that they had just turned from base leg to final for Runway 15 at Toronto/Buttonville, ON (CYKZ) and were established and stable at 1100 ASL, or about 500 AGL, when they felt a jolt that pushed them back on their seat. " Pretty sure there's an extremely narrow left/right window either side to the runway centreline and a somewhat less narrow but still quite accurate distance from the runway that the plane could have been at "about 500 AGL" during it's landing approach. There is zero doubt that the police were operating illegally and recklessly here. No amount of "operational security" or "war on drugs" or "qualified immunity" can _possibly_ apply to or excuse anyone, police included, for operating a drone directly in the landing approach flightpath of an active airport, and especially not without notifying the air traffic control and all aircraft in the vicinity. Any attempt to argue otherwise is without doubt an "assessment kind of devoid from reality".

alistairSH 5y ago

This wasn't a toy drone like a DJI Mavic or similar. Assuming they haven't changed hardware, it cost ~$125,000, takes a team of two to operate, and weighs 2.4kg (5.2lbs).[1] This is the damage done to the airplane.[2] It will require body work and an engine tear-down (prop struck the drone). If the drone had been a bit higher, it could have done major damage to the prop or worse the windscreen and possibly pilot. 1 - https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-police-second-municipal-force-in-ontario-to-operate-aerial-drone/ https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-pol... 2 - https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-by-drone-aug-20.jpg https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-...

bastawhiz 5y ago
That doesn't mean the officers operating it weren't treating it like a toy. Hopefully the investigation is exhaustive and objective.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s worth pointing out that “real crime” is a social construct. Petty crime is a prosecuted, despite being dwarfed by wage theft. Shooting someone is a crime, obviously, but purposefully starving thousands of infants to boost Nestle stock values is not. What you or I think of being the “real crime” that cops should focus on may or may not be what the laws define as real crime, which itself probably doesn’t map to what cops spend all their time doing

epicureanideal 5y ago
In the broadest possible interpretation, lots of things are social constructs, but I would imagine that any functional society would generally agree that murder, rape, assault, and theft should be discouraged.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  Police agree with you on 3 out of 4
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    Yeah, the amount of "revenue collection" they do borders on theft I suppose.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    That’s unreasonably generous to cops, IMO. They have a pretty long track record of doing all of those and getting away with it.
    - bigiain 5y ago
      To be fair, I'm _reasonably_ sure most cops don't do those things. Most cops just let it slide while their "bad apple" colleagues do those thing. And are therefore complicit in perpetuating them. So you're still right about it being unreasonably generous to all cops, even if not all of them do that shit.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        It’s hard to say given that the stats are poorly kept, but it’s currently estimated that 40% of cops commit domestic abuse. Given that that’s a crime, a serious one at that, it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of them commit more petty crimes like theft.

mschuster91 5y ago

> I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection For that, you need political change. Many a constituency has elected to rip off their people with absurd policing tactics - including asset forfeiture abuse - that primarily target poor people to fund their operations, instead of properly raising taxes, because raising taxes is a hard sell "thanks" to decades of small-gubmint, trickle down propaganda.

thatguy0900 5y ago
Personally I don't want to pay more taxes because I can see how little the government cares to spend it with any sense of effeciency. I don't care how large the government is as long as it isnt throwing trillions of dollers into various money pits.
- brutus1213 5y ago
  I saw a lecture from a poli sci prof at princeton. Taxes have generally not been going up as services have expanded. Debt is one answer and "revenue generation" is another. It is really shameful how traffic fines has become big business in most of north america. Is europe better on this?

coliveira 5y ago

Cops are there to maintain their jobs, and their leaders are there to expand the corporation and make more money. The companies that support policing are there to make more profit. For all this to happen, they need to manufacture more "crime", even though all statistics say that crime is in a long term decline.

candiodari 5y ago

> I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs. Then I would suggest you do not look up the statistics on how many "real crime" cases get solved. Murders, most of which are done in the moment and not planned out at all. Even premeditated must be understood to mean "X tried to extort Y, fight ensued, knife was used, Y died", and very much not "the butler, after 2 years of slowly preparing for the moment, set in motion his plan ..." like in the books. Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. Every other crime it goes down significantly (and theft is far below 10%). There's a reason actual premeditated murders usually make the news for a week.

btilly 5y ago
Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. The work of The Innocence Project makes me question how many cases they solve versus how many they found a targetable person to scapegoat instead. Certainly a lot of the "science" that gets used to identify who the killer is pseudo-scientific bunk. Very convenient for looking for a conviction, very bad for actually catching bad guys.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  the 60% figure is referring to the clearance rate, which is just the ratio of charges filed to crimes reported. so if by "solve" you mean "someone gets convicted", the rate is quite a bit lower.
  - pc86 5y ago
    Aren't something like 98% of criminal cases pled out before trial, and the majority of those that go to trial end in a guilty verdict? If you find yourself in a suit before a jury you're likely to have a bad time.

jollybean 5y ago

You must not know anyone who does heroin, fentanyl or addicted to scrip. opioids, and therefore would have difficulty imagining how free and open access to those substances would lead to something much worse than COVID for civilization, and therefore maybe don't get quite why in the 'Supply Demand' equation, that law enforcement in totality (not just Police) basically keep a 'lid on things' such that the cost (economic and social) for such things is quite high, resulting in only relatively marginal demand. Your statement also belies a couple of other misunderstandings in that 1) Police don't make the law and 2) 'go after organized crime' ... when almost all organized crime activity is actually drugs. Some drugs like mushrooms we can probably move off the watch list, others, like MDMA feel like there should be options, but we are just not structured well for it, but most of the more potent ones just won't work in society irrespective of how a relatively small group of conscientious burningman-ers can 'handle their stuff'. As for the drone - it was involved in some kind of operation, we have no idea the parameters of the situation or what kinds of risks were taken, why, or even where the civilian plane was at the time, hopefully we will. The Police obviously operate under a completely different set of parameters so it's hard to fathom what's going on. What's 'wierd' to me is how people can use such casual thinking to make such broad social assessments kind of devoid from reality. I think it has to do with the fact that all systems are imperfect, and when we see an imperfection from the outside, we tend to extrapolate that to the entire system and don't have a developed intuition at all for the material reality of it all. I'll bet anyone most police skeptics, were they to just ride with police for a few days, would be bored out of their minds at the relatively mundane applied pragmatic reality of it all.

bigiain 5y ago
> or even where the civilian plane was at the time From the CADORS report: "The instructor for a Canadian Flyers International Inc. Cessna 172N (C-GKWL) reported that they had just turned from base leg to final for Runway 15 at Toronto/Buttonville, ON (CYKZ) and were established and stable at 1100 ASL, or about 500 AGL, when they felt a jolt that pushed them back on their seat. " Pretty sure there's an extremely narrow left/right window either side to the runway centreline and a somewhat less narrow but still quite accurate distance from the runway that the plane could have been at "about 500 AGL" during it's landing approach. There is zero doubt that the police were operating illegally and recklessly here. No amount of "operational security" or "war on drugs" or "qualified immunity" can _possibly_ apply to or excuse anyone, police included, for operating a drone directly in the landing approach flightpath of an active airport, and especially not without notifying the air traffic control and all aircraft in the vicinity. Any attempt to argue otherwise is without doubt an "assessment kind of devoid from reality".