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...law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits. That's just what I was thinking last time I held up the local liqu

...law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits. That's just what I was thinking last time I held up the local liquor store. Who knew I had so much in common with the police!

mhurron 15y ago
It's rare that you can have all the problems with something so well summed up in a single statement, but there it is ; all the problems with law enforcement agencies summed up in one statement.
- tptacek 15y ago
  "All the problems with law enforcement agencies". I think this comment sounds wittier than it actually is. Policing is a dangerous and often unrewarding job and even the worst cops spend most of their time dealing with toxic situations we rarely even imagine. I'm a civil libertarian, but I've found that I'm saner and my perspective much improved by remembering that the police are not an evil entity out to destroy us all, but rather a typically clumsy and inept collection of human beings trying to perform a vital task for society. Seeing the police this way lets you pick out the difference between, for instance, false-alerting drug dogs used to effect civil asset forfeitures on interstate highways from situations like "active investigations aided by cell tower locations".
  - psb217 15y ago
    Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice." The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence. I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed. In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes. Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      What you're saying here, I think, is that it's not fair to, in order to build support for policy, cast about for sympathy for the specific police officers who, for instance, get shot in the line of duty. That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that adversarial encounters with the police are in the general case far more likely to involve actual criminals than they do law-abiding people being oppressed by malicious or busybody government entities. I'm not saying that in order to advocate for a specific policy. I support increased oversight of the police. What I'm doing is objecting to sentences like "this sums up the whole problem with law enforcement". That wording clouds the issue. It makes it hard to distinguish between legitimate policing interests and illegitimate ones.

mhurron 15y ago

It's rare that you can have all the problems with something so well summed up in a single statement, but there it is ; all the problems with law enforcement agencies summed up in one statement.

tptacek 15y ago
"All the problems with law enforcement agencies". I think this comment sounds wittier than it actually is. Policing is a dangerous and often unrewarding job and even the worst cops spend most of their time dealing with toxic situations we rarely even imagine. I'm a civil libertarian, but I've found that I'm saner and my perspective much improved by remembering that the police are not an evil entity out to destroy us all, but rather a typically clumsy and inept collection of human beings trying to perform a vital task for society. Seeing the police this way lets you pick out the difference between, for instance, false-alerting drug dogs used to effect civil asset forfeitures on interstate highways from situations like "active investigations aided by cell tower locations".
- psb217 15y ago
  Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice." The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence. I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed. In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes. Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    What you're saying here, I think, is that it's not fair to, in order to build support for policy, cast about for sympathy for the specific police officers who, for instance, get shot in the line of duty. That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that adversarial encounters with the police are in the general case far more likely to involve actual criminals than they do law-abiding people being oppressed by malicious or busybody government entities. I'm not saying that in order to advocate for a specific policy. I support increased oversight of the police. What I'm doing is objecting to sentences like "this sums up the whole problem with law enforcement". That wording clouds the issue. It makes it hard to distinguish between legitimate policing interests and illegitimate ones.