"A 911 call from the mother of now-deceased suspect Rhogena Nicholas put 7815 Harding Street on police radar. Sources close to the investigation say her mother called reporting the 58-year-old was doing drugs inside her own home."
So the mom of a 58 year old adult women called the cops on her own daughter? WTF is up with that??
What did she think was going to happen? Rainbows and unicorns?
Cops are basically the largest most successful criminal organization in the country and calling them on anyone especially family members very rarely ends well.
You know she has to be feeling very bad right now since she basically got her daughter killed but I honestly am finding it hard to feel much sympathy for her.
Does my new law fix the problem I say I am trying to fix?
This never seems to come up for some reason. All they care about is that they are doing Something/Anything so that it looks like they are in charge and know what they are doing.
Most of the time doing nothing is the best choice.
However for politicians that is not really an option because it is hard to earn bribes if you are not doing anything.
I look at the dumpster fire that the is the US political scene and think this is about as bad as it could get. Then I look to the EU and other countries and start thinking that maybe there is a contest I do not know about where the politicians of the world are trying to see who can screw up their country the worst.
There are plenty of examples of cops here in the US arresting people for making them look bad as well. Usually the DA takes drops the charges fairly quickly but even so the people arrested have to spend some time in jail and everything that goes with it. And then we have those times when the DA doubles down with the cops and it takes a long court case to tell everyone what we already knew. Which is that the whole arrest was unconstitutional and usually the tax payers have to write a check to cover the stupidity.
" But simple declarations and pronouncements don't really do anything useful in "solving" those issues."
Very little of anything politicians do has anything to do with solving problems.
They all have two goals. 1. More power for themselves and their buddies. 2. More money for themselves and their buddies.
Everything they do is based on doing these two things. They do not care about actually solving problems but they do care about looking like they are solving problems to whatever group will help them in their quest for more power and money.
Despite all the political rhetoric politicians of any party do not really care about us. Some of them are more open about it than others but none of them really care about anything other than their own power.
" What we see on the surface in the handful of cases that reach this level of review is only a tiny percentage of the legally-unreasonable stops made daily by law enforcement. And it's unlikely to change until more courts hand down decisions like this."
Even if the majority of cases are thrown out the cops are unlikely to change their behavior. Failure does not cost them anything so why would they change. They are playing slot machines with taxpayer money and even if they only win once in awhile why would they stop?
If the courts start making rulings like this common the prosecutors might drop cases quicker when they get push back as it makes them look bad when they have lost a lot of cases come election time. Even for them the downsides are not all that great because they will be able to get most people to plead out to some charge just to get out of the system and on with their lives.
They use a cellular connection or at least mine does not connect to my network as I have it locked down pretty hard.
You can buy ones that do not phone home but keep track of your usage on an SD card. Then when you go back to the doctor you give them the card so they can check and see if any adjustments are needed.
The thing is your insurance company probably gets the info anyway even if your machine does not phone home as they have access to your medical records.
The Govt and the FBI is trying to set another precedent where the keep getting to vacuum up more info without any real cause. Asking for all that info is just them not bothering to narrow it down, they are trying to normalize them being able to get all that info.
My big question in these cases is WTF is up with the judges signing off on these stupid requests? Their job is to keep the Govt from stepping over the line but that does not seem to be what is going on except in very few isolated cases.
You can buy them online fairly easily if you want to pay out of pocket. I just replaced one that burnt up with the rest of my house. Fire insurance covered it so I just went online and purchased one. I paid for the first one in cash as well but it was a few years ago and if I remember correctly it was not quite as easy to just buy one back then.
If you want to be able to track your stats online (which is actually fairly handy) but without everyone and their brother having the info you can just create an account with a false name which is what I did.
It does take more time and money if you want to keep your private info private. If you do not think about what you are doing, are signing things without reading them then, and not putting forth any effort you really should not be bitching when your privacy is lost.
It is not about any particular executive order or policy. It is about the fact that The Democrats were just fine with Obama bypassing Congress when Obama was doing it but when a Republican does it then all of a sudden it is a huge problem. The Republicans are the exact same way, when it is there guy it is all good but when it was Obama they went nuts.
It is not the policies that matter in the long run it is the process. Weaken the process for short term political gain is very bad for the long term stability of the country. Every time you weaken the checks and balances and give the Executive Branch more power you make it that much easier for others to do the same. In the long run that makes it easier for the country to slide from democracy to dictatorship.
Personally I was not a huge Obama fan for a couple of reasons but a third Obama term would have been much better for the country than Trump by any measure. I do not think we are even close to seeing all the damage that Trump is going to do to this country especially if he gets reelected in 2020.
I have to main problems with Obama.
1. He was elected as the anti-war President but doubled down on every bad Bush policy and ended up killing more people and destabilizing more countries than Bush managed to do. He could and should have pulled us from Afghanistan, the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden would have been a perfect time to do so though personally I think he should have started the day after he took office.
Countries have been invading Afghanistan for 100's of years and it always ends badly. When we finally do leave the country it will be the same as it was before we went there. Other than Nuking the whole country and turning it into a glass parking lot (something we should obviously not do) there is nothing we can do to change the country. It is just a black hole sucking down American lives and money for no good reason, the American people derive zero benefit from being there. I will stop here as could rant about this for a really long time.
2. He did little or nothing to change how the war on drugs is causing the mass incarceration of African-Americans. While the DOJ did some work on attacking police violence against minorities he could have done much more. An admitted pot smoker in college he did not even go to the effort to remove Marijuana from the schedule 1 which everyone knows is not where it belongs.
" (and, frankly, the Trump supporters here should learn to think beyond their obsession with defending "dear leader" in everything he does, because the same rules will apply when other Presidents are in charge, and they may not always like it in the other direction)"
We have already had this dance a few times and just in recent history.
Bush bypasses Congress the Republicans are fine with it and the Democrats lose their minds.
Obama "rules with his pen" and the Democrats rejoice about how great a job he is doing and the Republicans lose their minds.
Trump does whatever the hell he wants and pretty much tries to be a dictator and Republicans are happy happy and the Democrats are horrified.
Both parties are to blame for the strengthening of the Executive branch and a weakening of the checks that are supposed to keep it reined in. Without that weakening Trump would not have the power to do as much damage as he is doing or will do in the future.
Also there is certain amount of irony in regards to the press and how they are treated by Trump. One of the main reasons that Trump was able to win the Republican nomination was all the free publicity they gave him during the primary campaigns (especially early on). All that free attention sucked the air from the other candidates.
They wanted him to win because of course there was no way that such a buffoon would be able to beat Clinton.
The administration is not paying this out of pocket, they will make up the lawsuit spending by raising student fees and/or getting more money from the state.
Just like all the excessive force lawsuits. The cops do not care because it is not personally costing them anything.
Think about your normal sociopathic 2 year old. If every time he/she did something bad and you punished someone else they would never learn good behavior. Think of the admin and cops as 2 year old toddlers and you are pretty close to the truth.
Re: It's as if the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
Democracies always devolve into some type of Dictatorship/Police State of some type. The fact that the US is organized as a republic has slowed the process but has not stopped it completely.
The "Founding Fathers" were not a monolithic block that agreed on everything so part of the problem with the constitution like everything else political is that it was a series of compromises. That fact that they did as good a job as they did is actually pretty amazing when you compare it to all the politically compromised documents that have been created since then.
However it was and is not perfect protection which is why we are now seeing a accelerating fall into a police state.
While the consequences of these particular two laws are going to be particularly bad and widespread a high percentage (I personally would say most) laws do not pass the "Does it solve the problem is says it solves?" test.
You cover a lot of the tech laws that fail the test here and maybe if you were feeling extremely generous you could excuse politicians for not being tech savvy. However they do the same thing with problems that have been around decades or even longer.
For the most part politicians do not care about whether or not a law actually fixes a problem. All they care about is if it sounds good and appears to fix the problem to uneducated voters so they can increase their personal power and wealth.
That is not going to change until people start voting better and I am not going to hold my breath for that one.
The fact that staffing has decreased is not the problem.
The root problem is that a high percentage of politicians feel they have no need for technical or scientific help. It is not like they are shy about spending money, if they thought it was needed there would be more staffing.
Staffing is down because politicians do not feel that non-partisan facts are important. All that matters is personal (and party) power, worrying about all that science stuff is just a waste of time to them.
After a quick search there does seem to be some precedent but not a solid ruling from the Supreme court that someone can not be forced to give up the combination to a safe. In a 2000 ruling the SC clearly said there was a difference between giving up a key and giving up a combination in a ruling on how far courts could go in forcing use of "the contents of his own mind" in a ruling.
It seems like giving up phone codes should be the same thing.
While possible I would need to see some numbers from reliable sources.
However we are talking about two different things. There is a big difference in an off duty cop getting stopped for a DWI and a cop misusing his powers while being on duty.
Even if we assume that off duty cops are treated the same when they commit "regular" crimes there is no way they are treated the same while on duty.
Very rarely are cops held accountable any time they commit what are obvious crimes while on duty which is what this article is about. If anything at all happens they get a short paid vacation while the tax payers end up paying the victim or victims family.
Stupid cop doing something really stupid is bad enough but the fact that nobody in the chain of command bothered to stop this before sending out additional transportation to take all the girls to the police station is the most worrisome aspect.
We keep hearing "not all cops" but until the so called "good cops" start doing something about the bad cops then yes it is most definitely is "all cops".
The whole cops in every school thing really needs to stop. Somehow all the schools I attended managed to keep everyone in line without arresting students all the time.
I am so glad I am not a kid today. Between schools losing their minds and social media pressures it sure sucks to be a kid in school today.
While the company recording the calls obviously should not have been doing so the real problem is that the used the information from the calls.
What should have happened.
Global: We recorded some calls we should not have. OCSD: You need to fix that but in the mean time go ahead and delete the attorney calls.
If this had happened even if it was over a long time period there would not really be much of a story.
With the volume of calls they are dealing with I can see some calls getting recorded that should not have. No not as many as were recorded and not for as long as they were recording them but the fact that some non-zero number of call were recorded is pretty much inevitable.
The real crime however is that the cops and prosecutors used those recording to help prosecute those inmates.
Why not sue the police union or the cops themselves?
It seems if the police union was posting completely made up info then they should be libel.
I know you have to go pretty far before someone can win a libel case against you but to this non-lawyer person it seems that there should be a case against the union and the cops themselves. The information was malicious and completely made up which you would think would be enough.
Businesses are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to telling cops to hit the road. The percentage of citizens in this fair country that will drop to their knees and swallow before every cop they see no matter what they do is high enough that the blow back from refusing service is going to be pretty high.
On the post: Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid Apparently Predicated On Drugs A Cop Had Stashed In His Car
Thanks Mom...
"A 911 call from the mother of now-deceased suspect Rhogena Nicholas put 7815 Harding Street on police radar. Sources close to the investigation say her mother called reporting the 58-year-old was doing drugs inside her own home."
So the mom of a 58 year old adult women called the cops on her own daughter? WTF is up with that??
What did she think was going to happen? Rainbows and unicorns?
Cops are basically the largest most successful criminal organization in the country and calling them on anyone especially family members very rarely ends well.
You know she has to be feeling very bad right now since she basically got her daughter killed but I honestly am finding it hard to feel much sympathy for her.
On the post: Latest EU Copyright Directive Still Demands Internet Companies Wave Magic Wands
The question lawmakers never seem to ask.
This never seems to come up for some reason. All they care about is that they are doing Something/Anything so that it looks like they are in charge and know what they are doing.
Most of the time doing nothing is the best choice.
However for politicians that is not really an option because it is hard to earn bribes if you are not doing anything.
I look at the dumpster fire that the is the US political scene and think this is about as bad as it could get. Then I look to the EU and other countries and start thinking that maybe there is a contest I do not know about where the politicians of the world are trying to see who can screw up their country the worst.
On the post: Notoriously Corrupt Sri Lanka Police Force Arrests Citizens For Pretending To Bribe A Cardboard Cutout Cop
US cops as well
On the post: Cable's Response To Surging Streaming Competition? More Price Hikes
If Musk...
In fact if he manages to pull this off he could monumentally fail at everything for the rest of his life and he will still be in the plus column.
On the post: Pompous 'International Grand Committee' Signs Useless But Equally Pompous 'Declaration On Principles Of Law Governing The Internet'
Solving problems is not the goal...
Very little of anything politicians do has anything to do with solving problems.
They all have two goals.
1. More power for themselves and their buddies.
2. More money for themselves and their buddies.
Everything they do is based on doing these two things. They do not care about actually solving problems but they do care about looking like they are solving problems to whatever group will help them in their quest for more power and money.
Despite all the political rhetoric politicians of any party do not really care about us. Some of them are more open about it than others but none of them really care about anything other than their own power.
On the post: Ignorance Of The Law Is No Excuse, Court Tells Cop
Playing the slots with taxpayer money.
Even if the majority of cases are thrown out the cops are unlikely to change their behavior. Failure does not cost them anything so why would they change. They are playing slot machines with taxpayer money and even if they only win once in awhile why would they stop?
If the courts start making rulings like this common the prosecutors might drop cases quicker when they get push back as it makes them look bad when they have lost a lot of cases come election time. Even for them the downsides are not all that great because they will be able to get most people to plead out to some charge just to get out of the system and on with their lives.
On the post: Dystopia Now: Insurance Company Secretly Spying On Sleep Apnea Patients
Re:
You can buy ones that do not phone home but keep track of your usage on an SD card. Then when you go back to the doctor you give them the card so they can check and see if any adjustments are needed.
The thing is your insurance company probably gets the info anyway even if your machine does not phone home as they have access to your medical records.
On the post: To Prosecute A Single Bombing Suspect, FBI Demands Identifying Info On Thousands Of YouTube Viewers
Trying to set another precedent
My big question in these cases is WTF is up with the judges signing off on these stupid requests? Their job is to keep the Govt from stepping over the line but that does not seem to be what is going on except in very few isolated cases.
On the post: Dystopia Now: Insurance Company Secretly Spying On Sleep Apnea Patients
There are options
If you want to be able to track your stats online (which is actually fairly handy) but without everyone and their brother having the info you can just create an account with a false name which is what I did.
It does take more time and money if you want to keep your private info private. If you do not think about what you are doing, are signing things without reading them then, and not putting forth any effort you really should not be bitching when your privacy is lost.
On the post: Judge Blocks White House From Pulling Jim Acosta's Press Pass, But The Battle Continues
Re: Re: We have already been to that dance.
It is not the policies that matter in the long run it is the process. Weaken the process for short term political gain is very bad for the long term stability of the country. Every time you weaken the checks and balances and give the Executive Branch more power you make it that much easier for others to do the same. In the long run that makes it easier for the country to slide from democracy to dictatorship.
Personally I was not a huge Obama fan for a couple of reasons but a third Obama term would have been much better for the country than Trump by any measure. I do not think we are even close to seeing all the damage that Trump is going to do to this country especially if he gets reelected in 2020.
I have to main problems with Obama.
1. He was elected as the anti-war President but doubled down on every bad Bush policy and ended up killing more people and destabilizing more countries than Bush managed to do. He could and should have pulled us from Afghanistan, the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden would have been a perfect time to do so though personally I think he should have started the day after he took office.
Countries have been invading Afghanistan for 100's of years and it always ends badly. When we finally do leave the country it will be the same as it was before we went there. Other than Nuking the whole country and turning it into a glass parking lot (something we should obviously not do) there is nothing we can do to change the country. It is just a black hole sucking down American lives and money for no good reason, the American people derive zero benefit from being there. I will stop here as could rant about this for a really long time.
2. He did little or nothing to change how the war on drugs is causing the mass incarceration of African-Americans. While the DOJ did some work on attacking police violence against minorities he could have done much more. An admitted pot smoker in college he did not even go to the effort to remove Marijuana from the schedule 1 which everyone knows is not where it belongs.
On the post: Judge Blocks White House From Pulling Jim Acosta's Press Pass, But The Battle Continues
We have already been to that dance.
We have already had this dance a few times and just in recent history.
Bush bypasses Congress the Republicans are fine with it and the Democrats lose their minds.
Obama "rules with his pen" and the Democrats rejoice about how great a job he is doing and the Republicans lose their minds.
Trump does whatever the hell he wants and pretty much tries to be a dictator and Republicans are happy happy and the Democrats are horrified.
Both parties are to blame for the strengthening of the Executive branch and a weakening of the checks that are supposed to keep it reined in. Without that weakening Trump would not have the power to do as much damage as he is doing or will do in the future.
Also there is certain amount of irony in regards to the press and how they are treated by Trump. One of the main reasons that Trump was able to win the Republican nomination was all the free publicity they gave him during the primary campaigns (especially early on). All that free attention sucked the air from the other candidates.
They wanted him to win because of course there was no way that such a buffoon would be able to beat Clinton.
Whoops....
On the post: Iowa State Students Make Demands Over School Trademark Policy Public, Plan Possible First Amendment Lawsuit
Not Their Money...
Just like all the excessive force lawsuits. The cops do not care because it is not personally costing them anything.
Think about your normal sociopathic 2 year old. If every time he/she did something bad and you punished someone else they would never learn good behavior. Think of the admin and cops as 2 year old toddlers and you are pretty close to the truth.
There is no personal cost so why change?
On the post: Judge Says Memphis PD's Surveillance Of Protesters Violated 40-Year-Old Consent Decree
Re: It's as if the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
The "Founding Fathers" were not a monolithic block that agreed on everything so part of the problem with the constitution like everything else political is that it was a series of compromises. That fact that they did as good a job as they did is actually pretty amazing when you compare it to all the politically compromised documents that have been created since then.
However it was and is not perfect protection which is why we are now seeing a accelerating fall into a police state.
On the post: Small And Medium Publishers Protest EU Link Tax, Which Will Harm Them, While Helping Only Large Publishers
Most laws have the same problem
You cover a lot of the tech laws that fail the test here and maybe if you were feeling extremely generous you could excuse politicians for not being tech savvy. However they do the same thing with problems that have been around decades or even longer.
For the most part politicians do not care about whether or not a law actually fixes a problem. All they care about is if it sounds good and appears to fix the problem to uneducated voters so they can increase their personal power and wealth.
That is not going to change until people start voting better and I am not going to hold my breath for that one.
On the post: The Decline Of Congressional Expertise Explained In 10 Charts
Cause and Effect Mix Up
The root problem is that a high percentage of politicians feel they have no need for technical or scientific help. It is not like they are shy about spending money, if they thought it was needed there would be more staffing.
Staffing is down because politicians do not feel that non-partisan facts are important. All that matters is personal (and party) power, worrying about all that science stuff is just a waste of time to them.
On the post: Massachusetts Supreme Court Looking To Define Where The Fifth Amendment Ends And Compelled Decryption Begins
Combination Safe
It seems like giving up phone codes should be the same thing.
On the post: Philly Cops Face Criminal Charges For Performing An Illegal Pedestrian Stop
Re: Not new news...
However we are talking about two different things. There is a big difference in an off duty cop getting stopped for a DWI and a cop misusing his powers while being on duty.
Even if we assume that off duty cops are treated the same when they commit "regular" crimes there is no way they are treated the same while on duty.
Very rarely are cops held accountable any time they commit what are obvious crimes while on duty which is what this article is about. If anything at all happens they get a short paid vacation while the tax payers end up paying the victim or victims family.
On the post: Ninth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Arrest A Bunch Of Middle School Students To 'Prove A Point'
Supervision?
We keep hearing "not all cops" but until the so called "good cops" start doing something about the bad cops then yes it is most definitely is "all cops".
The whole cops in every school thing really needs to stop. Somehow all the schools I attended managed to keep everyone in line without arresting students all the time.
I am so glad I am not a kid today. Between schools losing their minds and social media pressures it sure sucks to be a kid in school today.
On the post: Another Prison Phone Service Caught Recording Privileged Conversations And Passing Them On To Law Enforcement
Recording is not the real issue.
What should have happened.
Global: We recorded some calls we should not have.
OCSD: You need to fix that but in the mean time go ahead and delete the attorney calls.
If this had happened even if it was over a long time period there would not really be much of a story.
With the volume of calls they are dealing with I can see some calls getting recorded that should not have. No not as many as were recorded and not for as long as they were recording them but the fact that some non-zero number of call were recorded is pretty much inevitable.
The real crime however is that the cops and prosecutors used those recording to help prosecute those inmates.
On the post: If You Value The Reputation Of Your Restaurant, Maybe You Should Stop Serving Cops
Why not sue the police union or the cops themselves?
I know you have to go pretty far before someone can win a libel case against you but to this non-lawyer person it seems that there should be a case against the union and the cops themselves. The information was malicious and completely made up which you would think would be enough.
Businesses are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to telling cops to hit the road. The percentage of citizens in this fair country that will drop to their knees and swallow before every cop they see no matter what they do is high enough that the blow back from refusing service is going to be pretty high.
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