54 ms·

“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”

• llamataboot 13y ago
  Reposting this from the killed-dog-thread. It certainly won't help when the SWAT team is already in your home, but for the creeping sense of out of control cops everywhere: "Most of us carry video cameras in our pockets now. Filming police needs to become ubiquitous. There should be no police officer in the United States that doesn't know that at any time they could be being filmed and held accountable for their actions by the public they are paid to protect and serve. It is one case where I think constant citizen surveillance could be useful. After a few years of it and constant court rulings that it is protected, perhaps cops would stop yelling at people and arresting them for doing nothing wrong. Yes, I'm talking to everyone on this site. If you are walking back from grabbing a burrito and see the cops "talking to" a homeless person on the street, or pulling over a driver for running a red light or detaining someone, /you/ need to stop for 5-10 minutes, get out your camera phone, and start filming. Please. For the love of a police state run amuck."
  • GFischer 13y ago
    I don't live in the United States, but the LAST thing you want to do over there is to film an officer. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.html http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.ht... By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
    • llamataboot 13y ago
      You may be harrassed if you film cops, but it is plainly legal[1], and the courts have recently begun to be more aggressive about slapping down municipalities that try to restrict it.[2] Normalizing it will go a long way to keeping police from thinking they can harass activist-types that are filming cops. I have been filming cops with copwatch groups from the days we had to carry big shoulder mounted video cameras. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glik_v._Cunniffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glik_v._Cunniffe 2) http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/05/7-rules-for-recording-police http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/05/7-rules-for-recording-...
      • sophacles 13y ago
        Legality doesn't stop regular occurrences of filmers being arrested for "obstruction of justice".
        • sliverstorm 13y ago
          Then get arrested. What ever happened to civil disobedience?
        • llamataboot 13y ago
          Like I said, I have filmed a lot of police interactions. I have been harassed many times, but never arrested. I /have/ been arrested for obstruction of legal process once. Ironically, it was a time when I wasn't filming and just standing off to the side taking notes. If you do get arrested, you can both win damages for yourself and often change the entire written rules of a police department by suing. But again, normalizing this will go a long way to people not getting harassed and cops knowing that they could be being filmes in any public interaction at any time.
          • sophacles 13y ago
            I am arguing only that you suggest harassment is the worst that will happen. There is much much much documentation that the worst is far worse than harassment. I am not disputing the potential (not at all as certain as you seem to think) of getting damages even. Merely that arrest and court is far beyond harassment. I agree with the normalizing of the circumstances aspect of your argument. Basically I am saying the fact that you haven't been arrested does not in any way (logically, evidentially or even anecdotally) suggest that this the case one should prepare for.
        • jcromartie 13y ago
          The fact that people get arrested for exercising their rights is a fantastic reason to exercise those same rights as often as possible. Would you have told civil rights protestors to stop sit-ins or marches?
    • jcromartie 13y ago
      Thankfully those (grand jury...) charges were thrown out. The judge established, at least in Maryland, that police DO NOT have a reasonable right to privacy while carrying out their duties in public.
  • macspoofing 13y ago
    This may be one beneficial side-effect of Google glass and related products.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • seiji 13y ago
    Is there a service to record live streams online (easily, cheap/free) from phones? The key is to send the live stream out for storage. Common "we'll sync after the video is recorded" services are no good if you get your phone destroyed half way through trying to record.
    • cypherpunks01 13y ago
      A lot of Occupy Wall Street folks were using Bambuser (http://bambuser.com/ http://bambuser.com/) to do this, check it out.
    • Wingman4l7 13y ago
      I just read about a service that covers this use-case (sorry, I can't for the life of me find it now). It streams low-quality video to a server to cover for the eventuality that the phone is destroyed. I'm pretty sure it was some sort of open-source software that wasn't Bambuser.
      • arrayjam 13y ago
        OpenWatch: https://openwatch.net/ https://openwatch.net/ iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/openwatch-social-muckraking/id642680756?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/openwatch-social-muckraking/... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ale.openwatch&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ale.openwa...
    • spiritplumber 13y ago
      On slow connections you can use Robotsanywhere. No audio, but it will work well at 1G/2G speeds. If you can't find it on google play email robotsanywhere@robots-everywhere.com to get the latest build and/or source.
  • Ziomislaw 13y ago
    unless they see the camera and kill you for "espionage"
  • quantumpotato_ 13y ago
    An affordable Google Glass could make this a reality.
• alexvr 13y ago
  In order to stay safe from the government, 1. Don't buy sparkling water if you're a college student 2. Don't bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution 3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage 4. It's probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying "Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car" might give him reason to shoot you in self defense 5. You don't actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.
  • tokenadult 13y ago
    3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage Point 3 is patently false. All of my Facebook friends, and I, regularly say that the United States government abuses its power, some from the right, some from the left, and many from a general freedom-loving perspective, and we all go on posting as we please. All of these statements are exaggerations. Many of these statements refer to problems that are much worse in other places. (If you think that arbitrary abuse by the police is the worst it can be in the United States, you haven't traveled very much.) Sure, protest fearlessly about any abuse you find anywhere. But don't lose sight of reality. AFTER EDIT: People who follow my comments on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tokenadult will be well aware that I participate in public protests here in the United States, in full view of TV news cameras and police observers. (The last protest I participated in was across the street from the headquarters of the Minneapolis police department.) I am an equal-opportunity democracy movement activist, desiring more power for the people in every country of the world. As one of the grandchild comments to this comment has now said, it's silly to exaggerate conditions in the United States, as that just robs a comment of credibility. If you want to establish a better trend line for United States policy, be specific in your policy proposals, and make your policy proposals public fearlessly, early and often. Don't be an anonymous coward. Put your name behind your convictions. People power democracy movements that nudge countries from dictatorship to democracy can really work. I have seen it done. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution, http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in more than a dozen languages there to share with your friends around the world.
• bjornsing 13y ago
  In the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. http://www.restorethefourth.net/ http://www.restorethefourth.net/ comes to mind.
• Amadou 13y ago
  When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
  • glogla 13y ago
    In this case, I think the original "when you are a hammer" feels more right. Imagine what kind of person you must be to pretend to be someone's friend, make him commit crime and them murder him in cold blood, while thinking you did the right thing. Even then, hammers have uses. People like this don't.
    • brazzy 13y ago
      The victim here was not "murdered in cold blood", and the policeperson who shot him by accident was not the same one who'd goaded him into committing the crime.
• jMyles 13y ago
  Cool to see Radley's writing in the HN top ten. He's a great guy and a hacker at heart.
• mark_l_watson 13y ago
  Sorry if this is off topic, but: I think that taking reasonable steps for both protecting our rights as citizens and not screwing up the environment are sort-of the same topic: making sure that future generations have life as good as our generation (or my generation, I am in my early 60s) have it. Native American Indians have a philosophy that our actions should be guided by what is best for future generations. Being apathetic and sleep-walking into a less free future society, and screwing up the environment are selfish acts.
  • wavefunction 13y ago
    Not to take away from your message but you can just say "Native Americans" and leave the "Indian" part off. Otherwise I totally agree with your post.
    • jvm 13y ago
      Also generalizing to all native Americans everywhere is sort of a needless display of ignorance.
      • protomyth 13y ago
        Plus, it masks very real problems on the reservations with some "everything is groovy" crud.
    • jvm 13y ago
      Also generalizing to all native Americans everywhere is sort of a needless display of ignorance.
    • benihana 13y ago
      This comment sums up what Hacker News has become perfectly. Front and center is the sentence correcting some slight, inconsequential anachronism that has nothing to do with the overall point of the comment and only serves to show the perceived intelligence of helpfulness of the commenter. Then there is a short sentence, more of an afterthought, addressing the point of the comment.
• mnglkhn2 13y ago
  when your police department's funding depends on what you catch, coupled with a low crime level, you start SWATing things harder
  • a3n 13y ago
    Yeah, it's no so much mission creep as mission search.
• wavefunction 13y ago
  Again and again we see questionable or outright illegal police shootings of dogs and people and nothing ever comes of it. The responsible parties are never charged with manslaughter or even fired. I want to support the police, but the thin blue line bullshit has to stop! I get that police work is often dangerous but individuals that have shown poor judgement are retained on the force. That police officer that shot the dog 4 times had already shot and killed a developmentally disabled guy who was brandishing a knife but could have been tazed or bean-bagged. These are not the sorts of people to be handing out guns to.
  • ryguytilidie 13y ago
    I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that in situations like the one you describe where developmentally disabled guy is killed and there were 100 ways to avoid it. Those ways simply are ignored after the fact because people feel such a need to defend the cop that they can't even acknowledge that they might have done something wrong. It creates a situation where improvement is pretty much impossible, because to improve one generally has to admit that there is a problem.
  • codyb 13y ago
    The fact USPS receives training but our Police don't was astounding to me. "To serve and protect and kill you chihuahua if it barks at us wrong."
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
      • mds 13y ago
        I think he meant "training in dealing with barking dogs"
        • strathmeyer 13y ago
          No American police are generally resistant to training of any type, such as firearm training. They don't like other people telling them they don't know how to do their jobs, that would make them lose confidence. It's why they need to shoot at you sixty times in order to hit you once.
• Lusake 13y ago
  So Shaq, Matt Damon and Steven Seagal participated in SWAT raids. Is this for celebrities only or anyone can sign up? Not that I would like to participate though.
  • allannienhuis 13y ago
    You have to convince a sheriff to deputize you first. For some reason this is easier for celebrities. Go figure. What does that say about the judgement of the sheriff that approve that sort of thing? Not sure what a sheriff's responsibilities are in the US system, but if that's the same person responsible for deciding that a SWAT team is necessary to investigate a poker game going on in someone's house, it's not surprising to see poor decisions being made in that area too.
• sgaither 13y ago
  We have to ask ourselves: where is the money? Our rights aren't being lost to a sprawling military-police state just because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution. Police departments grow the same way our project departments grow in engineering companies: by managers arguing for bigger budgets and spending more, sometimes wastefully, to justify bigger budgets come next fiscal year. These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
  • llamataboot 13y ago
    Don't forget all the war-on-terror funding and politics that have provided even rural police departments with armored personnel carriers and the like.[1] Or outfitting police departments with tons of equipment in advance of protests planned there which then filters down into daily use. In some cities, there is so little for the "anti-terror" cops to do that they have been conscripted into arresting drunk people and pot smokers.[2] 1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarization-9-11-september-11_n_955508.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/police-militarizati... 2) http://www.startribune.com/local/209811381.html http://www.startribune.com/local/209811381.html
    • alex-g 13y ago
      There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law enforcement mindset.
  • timmaah 13y ago
    Just think of how fun the bottom 1/4 of the U.S. will be once the border patrol gets to double its numbers.
    • gohrt 13y ago
      Bottom in economic status, or Bottom as in South?
• kdeberk 13y ago
  To me it seems that there are a lot of issues at play that led to the death of this man, but temporarily ignoring the fact that it seems hypocritical for a state to both punish gamblers while promoting a state lottery, it appears necessary that SWAT teams are required to arrest people within their own homes given the fact that people are free to own weapons and use those for protection. I'm not saying that firearms need to be outlawed for anyone but government agencies. I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise), police officers want also want to protect themselves in their line of work, so they necessarily need to create an imbalance of power for their own self-preservation. The victim was unarmed, so the use of SWAT teams certainly was unnecessary and he could have been arrested by two officers and a single patrol car, but given any other case, he might have carried a weapon and gunned down an officer.
  • noelwelsh 13y ago
    Well, you're wrong. From the same article: Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine. Summary: people who are committing minor crimes don't want to trade up to major crimes. Be reasonable and most people will be reasonable in return. The police increase the risk to themselves and to the citizens they are supposed to be protected by using unreasonable force.
    • kdeberk 13y ago
      > "Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door" Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do. What if it were firefighters who noticed a fire through his upstairs window? I don't think that they would just ring the bell and wait for an answer. I know that this a hypothetical situation, but it just seems a really stupid thing to just blindly fire at whatever is behind the door. The only people who claim that the police did not first knock on the door are the friends and associates of the victim. One of the two groups is lying, and both can be lying to cover their asses. I have too little information to know whether this is an actual case of police brutality, sorry. Edit: As a correction, the victim and his friends don't need to be lying. Perhaps the doorbell was broken, perhaps they didn't hear the police officers pounding at their door. I don't know, why should I jump to conclusions?
• nnnnni 13y ago
  Isn't the first story in the article a clear case of entrapment? The cop encouraged the guy to do something and then killed him for it.
  • mikeash 13y ago
    I think we can just call it murder. "Entrapment" implies that the end result was that he was punished in what would have been a lawful way if he had committed the crime of his own accord.
  • blendergasket 13y ago
    Entrapment seems to be a common tactic. The details of most of the arrests of would-be terrorists that they catch in the US are clear cases of entrapment. The FBI/NYPD/some paid informant finds some antisocial/inept guy who's floundering in his life and try to radicalize him and then give him a plan and tools to carry out some terrorist act. Here's one case, but there are many: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/26/taliban-sympathiser-arrest-fbi-informant-tactics http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/26/taliban-sympathi... Pay attention to the details next time you read about a foiled terror plot in the US. A couple of them seem to have been legit but most follow the pattern. [Edit] I became curious about what happened to this guy so I Googled him and found this: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sympathizing-felon-sent-to-prison-for-shooting-gun/ http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/alleged-taliban-sy... looks like they threw the book at him and sent him to prison for 8 years for having fired a gun at a firing range. [/Edit]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • tsotha 13y ago
    Entrapment laws are a defense from prosecution, and they're different in every state. Normally it's only entrapment if the cop is enticing someone to break a law he wouldn't have broken otherwise. In this case if the guy was betting on games every Sunday the jury probably would have taken a dim view of an entrapment defense. The shooting is another issue. The cop is saying it wasn't deliberate, and that's probably true.
• Ovid 13y ago
  Is this really the America that America wants? The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find? Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
  • akiselev 13y ago
    Americans vote for those who are tough on crime. I think CATO estimated (on the high end) about 40,000 SWAT/paramilitary raids a year and the public perception is that the targets are all criminals. To them this is just "acceptable collateral damage."
    • mtgx 13y ago
      The problem is the public thinks that those being targeted are all dirty evil criminals, and I also think America as a whole doesn't have an "innocent before guilty" mentality. It's not just the American leaders that have corrupt minds. It's also a lot of Americans, who are supporting this sort of stuff. The media is also not helping at all, and making the problem worse, because they are usually on the government's side when it comes to such issues.
      • jbooth 13y ago
        The media's on sensationalism's side, and the mob's side.
      • stcredzero 13y ago
        The presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the constitution, and in the case of some crimes, like rape, has been deliberately and explicitly weakened.
• wheaties 13y ago
  It could be a good story but after 3 pop up ads which were almost impossible to close on this device I gave up. What was the story, anyways? The first two paragraphs sounded interesting. I just couldn't get to the rest of the story to read it.
  • JabavuAdams 13y ago
    You could have been a good reader, but you gave up too easily.
  • sbornia 13y ago
    Yes I'm sure it takes more effort to close those ads than commenting here expecting someone will tell you all about the article...
• jonknee 13y ago
  The article's photo is from the 2012 RNC in Tampa, FL. Despite an army of police with all the equipment a paramilitary outfit could wish for, there were almost no arrests. In total for the week there were 2, far fewer than there would have been in a normal week. A year later and they're still riding around in their RNC purchased bicycles, cruising in RNC speed boats and zipping around in RNC bobcats. The high-tech CCTV system is also still in use (and has yet to actually solve a single crime). It's bizarre.
  • dmix 13y ago
    They did the same thing in Toronto after G20 in 2010 (where 700 were arrested). The police petitioned to keep all the CCTV cameras and all the equipment they spent millions of dollars on to prepare.
    • jonknee 13y ago
      Similar situation here. I spoke up at the city council meeting about keeping the cameras and the Mayor used some budgetary magic to make it something the council couldn't rule on (they bought the cameras with RNC money and built in a maintenance contract--the council could only get rid of them if it were a financial decision). Once you give a police force a new toy you will never be able to take it back.
• loginalready 13y ago
  Just a side note: certain countries in Europe have much more military style uniformed police force, including police living in barracks. None of them have the track record of armed violence the police in the US have. I'm just saying, the militarization is at most a symptom (one of many), not the root cause for the US "war against the people".
  • blue1 13y ago
    "Gendarmerie" is the word
  • JabavuAdams 13y ago
    Are you sure? Another possibility is that you're just not hearing about it, if they're disproportionately targeting groups that you aren't a member of. The U.S. is a weird case, because there are these very clear abuses, and yet there's a culture of uncovering these abuses even when they're not happening to one's own group.
• matwood 13y ago
  After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. All the more reason to never speak to the police. Ever. What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The police have made their jobs harder by systematically turning every citizen into a criminal and forcing every person to not trust them. If I were ever to witness a crime I would hesitate to contact the police at this point out of fear that I would somehow be blamed/included/railroaded/etc... I starting to see how in other police states throughout history the citizens did and said nothing.
  • dllthomas 13y ago
    Wouldn't this be reason to never speak to anyone, ever? It doesn't sound like Baucum identified himself as a police officer.
    • skore 13y ago
      No, I think the logic is straightforward: If talking to "anyone, ever" can become a fatal problem involving the police, that makes talking to the police directly an even worse option. "You shouldn't talk to anybody, especially not the police."
      • dllthomas 13y ago
        While I don't think the conclusion ("don't talk to the police") is necessarily wrong, I don't think the logic is valid at all, much less "straightforward".
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  • stcredzero 13y ago
    > What happened to 'protect AND serve'? The breakdown of community happened. Now citizens are just the environment from which an officer can harvest points for his record.
• PavlovsCat 13y ago
  "Botched Paramilitary Police Raids": http://www.cato.org/raidmap http://www.cato.org/raidmap
  • TeMPOraL 13y ago
    From the description of one of such "botched raids": "With an accidental weapon discharge, police fatally shot the 68-year-old retiree, who was not the target of the warrant. Police instructed Mr. Stamps to lie on the floor, and Mr. Stamps complied. One officer moved towards Mr. Stamps to check for weapons. The officer's tactical equipment made his movement awkward, and he lost his balance and fell. As he did so, his weapon discharged. Mr. Stamps died from the single bullet wound to his upper chest." Seriously? This is sick.
    • anonymous 13y ago
      I concur. Even edgy teens on 4chan know about trigger discipline.
    • jeltz 13y ago
      The "I tripped" explanation is used in many of the stories. Including when multiple bullets were fired. Either it is a lie or they are very careless.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        Yes. Sort of like a dialogue from a random comic strip I heard about long ago: - Why did you shoot the suspect? - My finger twitched. - Eight times? On the more serious note, I still can't imagine that report in any other way that the person was either accidentally shot or executed. I mean, what kind of tripping you'd have to do to shoot a person on the ground in the chest? Geometry doesn't add up.
• danmaz74 13y ago
  Watching Hollywood movies, I often wondered if they weren't exaggerating the diffusion of SWAT teams in the US. Looks like they are not.
  • alan_cx 13y ago
    Not to mention the heroic worship of characters who break every law and human right going to get the bad guy. Well, I say get, I mean kill.
• parennoob 13y ago
  Slightly tangential, but Ted Dziuba makes a good case for gun control for these over-armed local police forces in this post http://teddziuba.com/post/37961127287/i-am-a-gun-owner-lets-talk-gun-control http://teddziuba.com/post/37961127287/i-am-a-gun-owner-lets-... Police forces seem to be totally exempt from, say, the ban on assault weapons or such in some of the States. Possibly a law that limits the weaponry that police forces can carry along with a reduction in civilian-owned guns might help curb some of these incidents involving trigger-happy cops.
• leke 13y ago
  Wow that was some article. If these kind of things happened in my country, I would get the fuck out of my country. Actually, I didn't like the way the UK was going, so when the opportunity came about, I moved.
  • tokenadult 13y ago
    To where did you move?
    • leke 13y ago
      Finland. It's not paradise, but I had a choice to stay in the UK or move. I moved and have settled here quite well.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• dclowd9901 13y ago
  > A columnist at the Fayetteville Observer remarked, “They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . What the hell do you think they're training for?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• mtgx 13y ago
  Thanks to the new immigration bill, the whole border with Mexico will become militarized, and will employ more people than the whole FBI, and will be under DHS. This is what the "war on terror" post-9/11 culture has created.
• idoescomputers 13y ago
  Was he reading Dreaming in Code? For everyone unfamiliar with this book, the co-founder of Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg, wrote a book called "Dreaming in Code" that's basically about why writing software is so hard.
• Apocryphon 13y ago
  It almost sounds like the situation in unstable Central American or Arab nations where the police are hated by the people, while the military is seen as their protectors.
  • stcredzero 13y ago
    That is the POV of many in the US.
• drone 13y ago
  It seems like every day, more and more political posts about the US are made here. It's getting to the point that it seems that 35% of the point of HN is about getting opportunities to make political statements about the US. There are so many, so so many, places to have on-going political arguments. I'm of the mind that any place that allows free commentary ultimately becomes a political discussion board, and HN is proving this well. It used to be that HN was a place to get away from that - but it looks like these days it's becoming not much different than the comment section on any political newspaper.
  • mindstab 13y ago
    I think hacker culture and freedom have always gone hand in hand. In bygone days hackers could claim apoliticalness in already "free" places which is also generally where they flourished. Now when they are realizing they are much less free than they thought they are seen/see themselves as "politicizing". But being a hacker always was a political statement, it used to just mesh more with the popular culture so they mistook themselves for being like everyone else, and having no agenda.
    • rz2k 13y ago
      Furthermore, here in particular, you have the instincts of a entrepreneurial community. It isn't difficult to conclude that the foundation of support for authoritarianism from the general population comes from a desire to preserve order, and a fear that unregulated or unrecorded speech and communication is more likely to enable bad changes and events than good changes. Entrepreneurs however tend toward believing that disruptive innovation on balance does more good than bad, and believe that one of the hurdles that must be surmounted is to undermine the influence of established businesses and centers of power that have a stake in limiting innovation.
  • bluthru 13y ago
    It's not clear why a place called "Hacker News" might be concerned with freedom?
  • hammerzeit 13y ago
• barking 13y ago
  In my country hardly anyone has a gun but you can gamble all you want, no one gives a shit about that.
• ferdo 13y ago
  We get the government we deserve. If we haven't been doing our jobs and keeping the State in check by asserting our rights whenever the State tries to impose upon them, then this is what we get. And we'll deserve it.
• balsam 13y ago
  Has anybody had a difficult relationship with her parents? This, essentially, is what the dynamic is. Except the government is not actually parents and thus the guilt of hurting their children under the rationale of protecting them, though it exists, doesn't last very long. But the good thing is, their children will eventually forgive them too.
  • gohrt 13y ago
    No one forgives them. But ultimately, destroying the lives of 10% of Americans is an epic tragedy, but leaves the vast majority unaffected.
• steeve 13y ago
  Foreign America, coming to Homeland America.
• axuaq 13y ago
  The problem is that many Americans don't see anything wrong with their government depriving people of their human rights. And if you are an American that doesn't agree with this, you might just be detained or killed. And, of course, the first group sees nothing wrong with this.
• jcromartie 13y ago
  Serious question: why are private bets on private games illegal? Is it because money changes hands without the gov't taking a slice?
  • spiritplumber 13y ago
    I think it's part that, part that private games are easy to rig.
• adnam 13y ago
  It's becoming a frequent occurrence that the top post on r/conspiracy is the top post ok HN
• john_w_t_b 13y ago
  Could this be related to the heavily armed citizenry? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co... Cops in UK don't carry guns.
• pstuart 13y ago
  At the risk of sounding like a broken record (stuck cd player?), the foundation of this abuse is the War on Drugs. If you want these abuses to stop then you should be actively supporting the end of this war. By actively supporting, I mean be willing to discuss it with anybody who is willing to listen.
• mathattack 13y ago
  "In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery." Lotteries like this are a tax on people bad at math. How is this morally superior to an office pool? Though I do think viewing this as a "hit" enters the realm of tinfoil hats,
  • cheald 13y ago
    There's no question of "morality" here. The government just wants the monopoly on gambling.
    • mathattack 13y ago
      Isn't a government monopoly on anything a morality question? (Of freedom?) Or just economic efficiency?
  • throwit1979 13y ago
    Lotteries like this are a tax on people bad at math Most of the time, yes. Some lottery games with fixed odds and variable payouts have rare moments when the expected value of a ticket turns positive. I'm fairly good at math and I always play powerball every one or two years when this is the case.
    • gohrt 13y ago
      Powerball shares winnings, right? So you better hope the play-rate is levelling off, and not increasing exponentially until jackpot.
• Nrsolis 13y ago
  I knew Sal Culosi. He was a nice enough guy that used to hang out at Fast Eddies Sports Bar in Fairfax, VA. I saw him there often just tending a beer and minding his own business. If you can believe it, he was an optometrist at a Wal-Mart that just measured eyeballs and wrote prescriptions. If he was a bookie (as alleged) then I never saw anything that gave him away. I followed his story in the paper and was surprised to hear that a 17-year veteran of the Fairfax County Police was the one that shot him. Apparently, he said he was bumped and accidentally discharged his gun DIRECTLY INTO SAL'S CHEST. The police department eventually settled with the family for negligent homicide. That was only after they fought tooth and nail to protect a cop that didn't know how to control a deadly weapon. In the end, I think the cop got a 3 week suspension. AFAIK, he's still on the FCPD.
  • sneak 13y ago
    It's shit like this that flies in the face of all those "but most cops are not bad guys" arguments. If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that! It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops. Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment. Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside. Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally. Fuck the police.
    • saraid216 13y ago
      It's rhetoric like this that makes cops feel obligated to protect each other from other citizens. If you're accused of a crime, you deserve maximum legal effort applied for your defense.
      • 13y ago
• moondowner 13y ago
  We have a saying in my country, smoking weed gets you killed - if the police caches you.
• fmstephe 13y ago
  Is there a place where we can get this fact checked. I ask because this is cementing my opinion about, and fear of, the United States and I would love to know how true this all is.
  • vacri 13y ago
    Search for the names on the internet and find credible corroborating sources.
• merraksh 13y ago
  But the Occupiers, who tended to be young, white, and middle-to upper-middle-class, knew social media like few other demographics. They knew how to live-stream video directly to the Internet. They all had smart phones, so police couldn’t suppress incriminating video by confiscating one or two or ten phones—someone was bound to have video of not only the original incident but also of police trying to confiscate phones to cover it up. Looks like another good use of Google glasses, if used by protesters en masse.
  • spiritplumber 13y ago
    That's great, but terabytes of video from multiple camera angles don't help much if all the do is cause an internal investigation that never finds anything wrong.
  • oftenwrong 13y ago
    The US police have already learned! I have already seen articles about cell service being suspended to stifle protests. For example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/barts-cell-phone-shutdown-one-year-later https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/barts-cell-phone-shutd...
    • merraksh 13y ago
      Hmmm, then they'll need to use local wifis.
• ypeterholmes 13y ago
  Excellent article but it fails to ask the question why. Why is this happening? Who benefits? Why isn't the people's will being realized politically? Why do the courts no longer protect our Constitutional rights? There's a critical piece missing in these discussions- the global banking cartel that has corrupted all of our political and social institutions. Until their agenda and activities are included in the scope of our analysis, things will just keep getting worse.
• flaktrak 13y ago
  America the land of the brave. The land of the free.
• drblast 13y ago
  The lack of accountability here disgusts me. Therefore, I propose a rule: Discharge a firearm while serving as a cop, no matter the reason, and that's it, you're no longer a cop. Take your toys and go home, thank you for your service. Yes, you'd fire good people, but you'd also remove any incentive for less-than-good people to act irresponsibly and ensure they thought twice about using lethal force. I'd argue that by far this is the greater good.
  • adambratt 13y ago
    So in an actual dangerous situation the cop would have the choice to either run or to fire his gun and lose his job. Would you really want someone to protect you at the risk of losing their job?
    • drblast 13y ago
      I think that if this were the rule, this would be understood going in, and it would be fair. The nature of police service would change. Why should being an officer be a lifetime career? We ask people in the military to protect us at the risk of losing their lives, why is it so much to ask for a cop to risk his job? Edit: I'm coming from a military background and the lack of accountability there is disturbing too. I think people with responsibility to protect and/or kill other people should be risking their jobs regularly. Otherwise, there is no real accountability. See here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-...
      • cheald 13y ago
        > Why should being an officer be a lifetime career? Because it's an occupation that takes training and experience to do well? But by all means, if you want a bunch of untrained newbies running around with guns and the legal standing to use them on the citizenry, your idea's a great one. The problem isn't police using their guns. It's the Blue Wall of Silence when they do.
• xmodem 13y ago
  USA you are a police state, and as long as this state of affairs continues I will never come near your country.
• madao 13y ago
  It is actually kind of sad, coming from Australia, Police are usually seen as a force of good. Granted we do not have as much corruption in this sense as America does but sadly these sorts of positions are built on power and violence (eg non compliance) I think the question you have is if the police stop protecting their own people when they are trying to do their jobs how will they attract new police? as a profession where you will have someone that will be in that sort of job for 10-20 years+ getting sacked does not really mean you will be able to get into another police force (quite the contrary) you will most likely end up in a very low end security position. This is not really a justification of all the shit they do rather an attempt to explain the insanity.
• mratzloff 13y ago
  Are the police as para-militarized in other first-world countries? Canada? UK? Japan?
  • joseph_cooney 13y ago
    Australia - no, not really.
  • jeltz 13y ago
    No, I do not think so. At least not in Sweden, Norway, or the UK.
  • maurits 13y ago
    Define "para-militarized" but France has the Gendarmerie, which is an army branch that does policing in small communities as well as over arching national task such as anti-terror and mountain rescue. The Italians have the Carabinieri.
• Spooky23 13y ago
  End of the day, swat teams exist because the guys on the department like cool toys, and the Feds pay for them via grant programs. My local police department has a "command center" rv and telescopic lookout post that the Feds paid like $3M for. The machine guns are usually bought with seized drug money, and tactical training paid for try the Feds. Most cities don't need paramilitary squads, so they end up using them for stupid stuff because they get to have fun, or they get extra overtime for a detail. Fire departments are similar. A local volunteer fire department near me got a $1M state grant for some insane fire truck with all sorts of gizmos and an aerial platform that can reach 5 stories up -- in a town with no buildings higher than 2 stories and about 70 total calls per year. (I think they had to call in another department for a fire because the thing is so big that it cannot make it down roads) Total waste of taxpayer resources, but at least the firemen won't kill you!
  • spiritplumber 13y ago
    This is actually why I advocate fire/police crosstraining and cooperation like San Mateo County does. Everyone is happy to see a fireman or a EMT. Having police answer routine fireman calls, and "wear that hat" during the call, would go a long way.
  • babby 13y ago
    I think a point you may not be considering is that the reason why they use these paramilitary squads for stupid shit is not just to have fun, but instead to justify the purchase of all of this gear and training in the first place. If you never use the stuff then it stands to reason that it may not make the budget in the future (assuming budgeting competence).
    • Spooky23 13y ago
      The training/gear isn't a budget issue, because it's externally funded via grants and seizures. Except for the largest cities, nobody is going to the mayor for $1M to buy something like this: http://gs.flir.com/integrated-systems/skywatch http://gs.flir.com/integrated-systems/skywatch . But when the Feds are giving away money for lookout towers, speedboats, etc, everybody needs two. What they DO need to justify is the overtime and the extra pay for being in the SWAT detail. That's where driving tanks through buildings to liberate and euthanize chickens comes in.
• AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >Since Seattle, this had become the template. At the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, police conducted peremptory raids on the homes of protesters before the convention had even started. Police broke into the homes of people known to be activist rabble-rousers before they had any evidence of any actual crime. Journalists who inquired about the legitimacy of the raids and arrests made during the convention were also arrested. In all, 672 people were put in handcuffs. And people question why the government collecting intelligence on innocent civilians is a problem.
• pico303 13y ago
  I wonder if anyone is considering or doing any kind of studies correlating the lack of investment in government (i.e. low taxes) and these kinds of problems with law enforcement? It seems like if we're investing less in government, which means less in police, fire, and the agencies that train and oversee them, we're not going to get the quality of service from our law enforcement officers that we're accustom to. Shorter training programs, fewer applicants due to lower pay, less oversite, higher workloads, etc. I don't know if this is the case, but in a country where we barely get that A leads to B, we might want to start taking a hard look at A to B to C to D.
  • gohrt 13y ago
    That doesn't compute. Spending goes up, not down, to buy all the war toys and pay back the campaign contributers. No one is complaining that the fire department sucks.
• ndesaulniers 13y ago
  Restore the Fourth!
• joewallin 13y ago
  This is a good argument to repeal most criminal law.
• Intermernet 13y ago
  "Denver police added that it was fairly common to take sports stars on drug raids." What possible justification is there for this practice? This completely baffles me to the point where I can't even come up with a plausible hypothesis.
• jmadsen 13y ago
  I think the real problem behind this is quite simple - studies have shown what we probably know from personal experience, that when you wear a "mask" - whether one of anonymity, or a "Robo Cop"-like getup, it makes you behave more aggressively. The reasons behind why every PD has all of this paramilitary gear is well-studied but best left for another thread; the fact is they have it, and when they wear it they are more likely to behave like any other human being who finds himself suddenly hiding behind full body armor. It's not the police that's the problem, it's the gear, and departments who ignore the mental impact of having it & don't adjust their training to match.
• morgante 13y ago
  Given that the police have decided to, essentially, wage war on the people why don't we try fighting back? The majority might not care, but "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world." (Margaret Mead) Dump money into personal lawsuits against officers committing negligent attacks such that they are financially ruined. Attend town meetings and demand sever cutbacks in the budgets of police departments acting this way. Put lobbying dollars to work and get change from the top down.
  • MattyRad 13y ago
    While that would probably work to some extent, it doesn't really solve the mentality of violence or outright ignoring Constitutional rights. (Assuming people have money to dump, which is not usually the case)
• Angostura 13y ago
  Why is this on the front page of HN? I just don't get it? Fantastic Reddit fodder? Yes. But here?
  • babby 13y ago
    Perhaps it feeds to a so called hackers lust for anarchy, rebellion etc. I don't know, maybe it is le reddit cancer.
• Tomis02 13y ago
  > Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting. Well, he had it coming. Excessive use of police force for sure but I can't feel sorry for the guy, only for the animals harmed before and during the police raid. Edit for the downvoters: the fact that you're not affected by the suffering of animals, even for the ones that you barbarically eat, says a lot about your degree of civilization.
  • gohrt 13y ago
    Care to wager how many of the cops that destroyed Llovera's house, and euthanised his chickens, were vegetarians?
    • Tomis02 13y ago
      > I can't feel sorry for the guy, only for the animals harmed before and during the police raid. I didn't think I had to repeat myself on HN.
• mrt0mat0 13y ago
  I know this doesn't necessarily belong in THIS article, but it's a general response to a lot of these governmental articles. Where are the debates at in the government? I never see debates taking place in Congress. I hear speeches and "thank yous" and even opinions, but no true debate. I know that I tune in to watch the presidential debates because even though they aren't always held accountable for what they say, there is the opportunity to be. I wish we had more debates like i see in these comments.
• squozzer 13y ago
  We're being hunted down by our own government. Time to repay the favor.
• briefthrowaway 13y ago
  It startles me that law enforcement can go over the top like this in their efforts. I've been trying to get a (bad) drug dealer arrested for over a year and the Seattle Police won't even return my communication.
• yaix 13y ago
  This is not about out of control police. This is the fight between rational people against irrational insanity. We started the fight for ratio hundreds of years ago, called it Enlightenment, and its not over yet.
• digitalpacman 13y ago
  Can't even believe this happened. We need to raise the IQ score of our police force.