16 ms·

> Eastern bloc level authoritarianism That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushk

• roywiggins 4y ago
  Not obvious to me that they could have sued and won, people sue for much worse things and lose under "qualified immunity." The bar is very high.
• ch4s3 4y ago
  You’re leaving out the part where the police got COS involved who then harassed the family for months. As others have mentioned, they’d have no ability to sue for the actions of the officers unless there was existing case law about almost the exact situation. Qualified immunity protects officers who do stupid shit like this.
  • bradleyjg 4y ago
    Qualified immunity does not protect officers, it protects municipalities. Indemnification protects officers, but no one ever talks about it.
    • ch4s3 4y ago
      Sure I'm glossing over that, but for practical purposes you have no redress because the officers were acting in their official capacity.
      • bradleyjg 4y ago
        They key difference here is whether you care more about bad officers facing consequences or the victims getting compensation. Eliminating qualified immunity only helps with the second part and does zero with respect to the first, but advocates of reform never make that clear. Even with qualified immunity sometimes victims win judgments. On the other hand indemnification is 100% universal and effective at protecting cops. No cop ever pays anything out of his own pocket, period.
        • landemva 4y ago
          Same with judges and court clerks. 'Because government'.
          • bradleyjg 4y ago
            They have absolute immunity. That’s a separate issue.
        • ch4s3 4y ago
          I have a feeling that if municipalities start having to pay out lots of settlements for civil rights abuses by police, they'll start reconsidering the limits of indemnification.
          • bradleyjg 4y ago
            It hasn’t happened in practice. NYC’s is way up this year, Adams is doubling down on supporting the police. Instead of hoping for trickle down to work why not attack the problem directly?
      • landemva 4y ago
        Practically speaking there is no effective recourse. For things to change, need USSC to remove the qualified immunity doctrine which USSC basically created on their own in 1970s. State law could put in a few fixes, but generally few people are really interested. A couple years ago BLM had energy yet was distracted and diverted from the enabling problem - USSC qualified immunity.
    • burkaman 4y ago
      Why do you say this? Qualified immunity explicitly only applies to individuals, not if you're suing the government as a whole.
      • bradleyjg 4y ago
        Police officers in the United States are universally indemnified by their employers. There’s no constitutional or case law which requires this it’s just the rule everywhere. Indemnification means that their employer (i.e. municipalities) must pay for their legal defense in a civil suit and any judgment that arises under it. 1983 cases are technically against individuals but not at all in a practical sense. For some reason activists have zero interest in tackling this issue even though it could be done on a divide and conquer basis and even though it would provide much more deterrence than eliminating QI. I almost suspect the influence of the plaintiffs’ bar is at play.
        • burkaman 4y ago
          Ok I see what you mean. I think you underestimate how hard this would be though. You'd probably have to basically eliminate police unions somehow.
        • technothrasher 4y ago
          I'm still confused on what your saying. If a public official wins a § 1983 suit under a qualified immunity defense, there are no monetary damages to be indemnified against. Their employers only have to indemnify them if it is found they did not have qualified immunity and then had a judgement against them. Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will almost always be indemnified anyway? I suppose this is true in a pragmatic way, but not in theory. As you say, there's no law that says the government agency has to indemnify. While I'd be surprised to find a case where the official ended up paying anything out of their own pocket, there are plenty of cases where the official has lost their job over a judgement against them and none that I could find where they won the case due to being covered under qualified immunity but still lost their job over it.
  • thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    I think the main issue in this story is that most Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving their kids outside by themselves, even though it’s really safe outside. It’s a real issue.
    • WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
      > I think the main issue in this story is that most Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving their kids outside by themselves Father of 5 here and you are fully correct. Our kids are not meaningfully safer with constant supervision - and by mandating it, we're knee-capping their ability to develop problem solving skills.
    • UtopiaPunk 4y ago
      It's silly to pretend that there are no people who might want to do harm to children, but as a father, I'm not really worried about them. I am, however, worried about the police hassling my kids and my family for the reasons presented in the article. My kids are very very little now, but it's something my partner and I discuss how to handle in the future. We live in a typical suburb now, but we're planning a move to the city for several reasons. Counterintuitively, we think this will provide our children more freedom to grow. Our impression is that police authority goes unchecked in the suburbs, while the city resists police overreach (sometimes).
      • matwood 4y ago
        Conversely, some neighbors just moved in from Seattle (I'm in an east coast suburb). They are ecstatic they can just let their kids play outside now. Something they said they couldn't do when living back in the city.
        • UtopiaPunk 4y ago
          Hope it works out better for them than the family in the article
      • idontpost 4y ago
• sasawpg 4y ago
  Fully agreed here - I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia, which while it wasn't part of the Eastern bloc, it wasn't too dissimilar. It was perfectly acceptable and expected for kids to be out and about without direct parent supervision. Neighbours knew kids from the surrounding and would take care of them as needed. At 11-12, I walked to the store by myself or with similar aged friends many times to buy beer for my dad. The store owner happily sold it to me as he knew my dad and knew if I did buy it for myself, it would take no more than a day or two to find out. Police would have never questioned any part of this behaviour, it was fully normalized. I'd say it definitely resulted in children being more independent.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    I bet the parents didn't watch the news there, either. Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex offenders?
    • sasawpg 4y ago
      I'm not sure what you're getting at. In ex-Yu, they'd go through criminal proceedings.
      • readthenotes1 4y ago
        it's a sincere question, though I was more intending to find out the severity of the penalty then the legal procedures
      • notch898a 4y ago
        Would they survive to make it to the proceedings?
    • pjc50 4y ago
      They probably did watch the news, but it would be very different news on the state-run Jugoslavenska Radiotelevizija. (If this incident had happened in Yugoslavia, or something similar with unjust police harassment, would anyone have heard about it on the news? Of course not.)
• EGreg 4y ago
  Throughout most of the USSR at the time, there was actually comparatively very little violent crime, including child kidnapping. Kids roamed freely. It is just as well, because USSR preceded USA and Europe by a few decades to have BOTH parents work and thus the actual neglect of the kids began. Under socialism this was “emancipation of women” and proceeded also in Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, where women now worked all day in the same professions as men. Socialists were far ahead by decades in this regard. But of course, this leads to a generation of kids who grow up without any parents most of the time, and raised by the state and the street — it is also what we have in the USA now too. The only difference is that most people work for large corporations instead of socialist cooperatives or government jobs: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Agreed. I am from ex Yugoslavia and for many... interesting things that growing up there entailed, my childhood was free. I walked to school starting grade 1! In a city of half a million I and all my classmates safely crossed intersections and walled to school every day. Now I'm in Ontario and statuary limit for leaving child alone is... sixteen years :O We can see school from out house but do not dare let our (independent safe and bright) child walk, not due to fear of crime, but the real fear of some overzealous bored neighbour calling it in. Boo.
  • eptcyka 4y ago
    I think the legal penalties for being negligent towards children stem from rich people making up laws as a response to narratives about rare occurences that take places in environments lawmakers have 0 experience with (low-income neighbourhoods). They feel as though less children would be harmed if they always had an adult present with them, which is feels like a solid assertion if you have the means to provide adult supervision at all times, ignoring the alternative costs of letting children experience independence and completely misunderstanding the every day reality of low-income parents.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      > as a response to narratives about rare occurences I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes happened to people you personally know, but probably not otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and therefore people had an intuitive understanding that those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this. The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and this has made the general population much more irrational about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public, but very often they induce a perception of reality that is less accurate than what people would have formed on their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal out of freak rare occurrences.
  • COGlory 4y ago
• oldsklgdfth 4y ago
  Tangent here. I grew up in Greece. Policing, but the culture of government in general is don't sweat the little things, but you better get the important stuff right. I went to a hospital and the building looked in rough shape not really clean. The examination room had a leak in the corner. But you bet the doc knew what she was doing, was thorough and sterilized everything. It's not pretty, but gets the job done. In the 2000s we used to pirate like there was no tomorrow. But cp is taken seriously.
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think a lot of folks in the US don't realize that even some (some!) countries we think of as authoritarian feel freer, day to day, than the US does, let alone other liberal democracies. We have elections... but having some wine at your picnic in the park may get you a citation. We have elections... but, this article. We have elections... but civil forfeiture. We have elections... but you'll spend tons of your "free" time fighting with our healthcare system, should you ever actually need to use it. Ditto the time and contortions required to navigate our benefits systems if you ever hit our "social safety net". In either case, you're not gonna be feeling all that "freedom". We have elections... but an LOLWTF-high incarceration rate. We have elections... but are constantly scared shitless of civil litigation and liability and there are rules and disclaimers posted on every flat surface. We have elections... but no mandatory annual leave, with the result that for most people 2 weeks off a year is considered decent. How many people feel "free" at their job? But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)
  • notch898a 4y ago
    As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked. >(I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns Yeah I often imagine myself in the scenario of what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms. I calculated it would take me about 2 weeks to print an FGC-9 and source the various ammo components (by doing things like using primers from nail gun ammo etc this can be done all from unregulated sources).
    • scrose 4y ago
      > As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked. In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most of what police consider ‘low-level’ infractions(ie. Covering a license plate, speeding, etc…). Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone or listen to you when you get profiled for no good reason. I guess it’s technically not a bribe since no money is exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card raises ~$150/year for the police union. [0] https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-card/ https://www.the-sun.com/news/4212777/what-is-a-pba-card/
• COGlory 4y ago
  >That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested. Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
• petre 4y ago
  > Babushka's Dumpling Shop Except babushka didn't have a dumpling shop because private enterprise was outlawed. You probably mean the Pastry Workers' Cooperative, an organization that didn't actually make dumplings because flour and vegetable oil was ratoinalized. The state was exporting those ingredients to the West at a loss in order to obtain dollars and pay back the IMF loans. Instead, the PWC shop had lots of vinegar and pickled cucumbers for sale. Which was too bad, because nobody wanted to buy those things.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    Come now, everybody likes a pickled cucumber.
  • bundze 4y ago
    Funnily enough, I'm from the Eastern bloc (Poland) and apparently my grandma used to run a grocery store for some time in the 1980's. It could have been technically government owned, I never inquired. Whatever was the legal status, it was called "Grandma's store" in my family.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ninjagoo 4y ago
  >> Eastern bloc level authoritarianism > That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested. I gently suggest that you might be missing the forest for the trees here. OP is referring to the well documented (Eastern block level authoritarianism) practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).
  • Clubber 4y ago
    >practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved). That happens here, it's just not coordinated before the fact. If you piss a policeman off by taking too long to pull over, they will beat you and get away with it. There are many examples of this on YouTube, here is a relatively minor one. This poor woman will be forever traumatized by this event. Those police won't get fired and it's pretty obvious they have some serious anger issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vFupklNSs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vFupklNSs0 I feel policing and the overall justice system is the single largest threat to our country right now and if it isn't rectified will lead to massive civil unrest. This channel covers a lot of it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA This is a more recent channel that covers quite a bit as well. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMcW0MFzOAgfQ-7et47zw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMcW0MFzOAgfQ-7et47zw
• btilly 4y ago
  You'd know what happened if you'd read the article. The police did drop charges. But then a social worker got involved and they had years of grief afterwards because of it. Which couldn't have been reported on back when the event happened, and makes it a lot more than just "stupid cops got immediately corrected". Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. Which is another can of worms.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. QI doesn't stop you from suing “the police” (as in, the public agency responsible), it stops (absent clear precedent eatablishing the right on which you are suing) individual public officers.
    • btilly 4y ago
      Yes. But as soon as the charges got to the department, they dropped it. The police department did nothing egregiously wrong. It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here. And if they were, then it would do a whole lot more to dissuade other police officers than any official department policies. And that is exactly what qualified immunity keeps from happening.
      • dragonwriter 4y ago
        > But as soon as the charges got to the department, they dropped it. So? > The police department did nothing egregiously wrong. Insofar as the officers, as agents of the department, were trained and supervised in such a way that they did something egregiously wrong in the conduct of their duties, the police department did, in fact, due something equally wrong. > It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here. Then you should favor suing the responsible department because, given QI, you need a clearly established right for their to be personal liability, and the only way to get there is to sue someone to clearly establish the right. Which can't be the individuals, because QI. (Even without QI, you should favor suing the deoartment, because individual officers can be disposable and replaced with people selected and trained for the same tendencies, but department leadership and policies that keeping turning into a liability hole for the local government are more likely to trigger more significant changes.)