Three young men knocked on the wrong door.
According to people close to the investigation, three young adults, after leaving a graduation party, attempted to go to a friend’s house nearby.
A source said, they mistakenly went to the next door neighbor’s home. After repeatedly ringing the doorbell and loudly knocking on the door, the homeowner, a state trooper, came to the door. When he opened the door and shouted at them, the three men ran away.
The three got into a vehicle and the officer fired three gun shots as they attempted to flee. The car became disabled approximately one half mile from the original scene. Two of the men were apprehended at the vehicle. The third, Matthew Mayer fled, according to local sources.
And then the police sent out search teams! A helicopter with a search light! Canine units! They scoured the area looking for this desperado. And they caught him!
The two men, John Baker-Marasco, and Jesse Farcorn, were taken to the Netcong Trooper Barracks for questioning and processing.
Mayer was eventually found and arrested. He was also taken to the Netcong Trooper Barracks. It is not clear what charges, if any, have been brought against these men.
They have no idea what to charge these 18 year olds with. No idea. Their crime seems to have been door-knocking late at night. And the asshole with a gun who opened fire on fleeing teenagers had no idea that a crime was being committed, but apparently annoying a cop justifies him trying to kill you.
We don’t have a crime problem in this country. We have a police problem.
One other strange thing: the three kids’ names are ALL OVER the media. They haven’t been convicted or even charged with anything, but they’re completely outed.
The police officer’s name is nowhere.
I hope the “investigation” is about what charges to file against the cop.
According to this followup article from the same site, he shot at them because he thought they were burglars who were trying to enter his home. Which makes all of the sense. Because burglars? The one thing they’re always doing is going out of their way to get the attention of the homeowner before beginning their burglarizations. That’s basically burglary 101 right there.
Don’t you see? That’s the genius of it!
I suppose it’s that “hiding in plain sight” thing, right?
“Listen up, people! The key to stealth is making sure that people are completely aware of where you are and what you’re doing at all times! If you ever, even for a moment, fail to be spotted, you have failed at stealth!”
Athywren, Social Justice Weretribble @3
Noone shoots at a fleeing car because they think the people in it are trying to rob them. Maybe he thought they had tried to break in, but then he is using deadly force to punish what he thinks is a property crime, not prevent a break in. There is no way it is justifiable to shoot at a fleeing car.
With cat-like tread….
OK, this situation isn’t that funny–they ran away from someone who was shooting at them, and that’s a chargeable offense? WTF?
What colour are these people?
And the cop will be supported by the same people who insist that universal health care is tyranny, rather than tyranny being, say, police shooting people with impunity.
The state troopers name is Trooper Kissenger Barreau.
https://www.tapinto.net/articles/source-trooper-kissenger-barreau-did-not-identif-1
… no charges for the arsehole who discharged a firearm on a public street with no reasonable justification?
Hell, I’m amazed he doesn’t get charged just for shooting at people who are running away. Here in the UK, you have a right to use “reasonable force”.
A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances for the purposes of:
self-defence; or
defence of another; or
defence of property; or
prevention of crime; or
lawful arrest.
In assessing the reasonableness of the force used, prosecutors should ask two questions:
was the use of force necessary in the circumstances, i.e. Was there a need for any force at all? and
was the force used reasonable in the circumstances?
If someone is running away, they obviously have no intention of immediately harming you or damaging your property, so any argument from self defence or defence of property is null and void. There’s plenty of legal precedent for this. This seems perfectly logical to me, and I’m amazed the US doesn’t seem to operate on similar lines.
The follow-up article also names the shooter.
Trying to shoot unarmed, fleeing suspects who pose no immediate danger to oneself or others is a crime, right? What the trooper did was attempted murder, wasn’t it? Or do the various Stand Your Ground or Castle laws also cover fleeing suspects?!
@jacobletoile, 6
I’m not saying it was justified. In fact, I’m going to say right here that I think it was very much unjustified, and that I’m completely in agreement with the apperent meaning of the two statements in the title of this blog post; that the man in question should is neither suited for police work, nor should he ever be trusted to own a gun. What I’m saying is that the reason he gave for shooting at them is because he thought they were buglars who were attempting to enter his house. After they repeatedly rang the doorbell, knocked on the door, and spoke with him on the doorstep.
(For clarity, that last sentence is meant to imply that I think that even that supposed justification is fabricated bullshit, meant to excuse the fact that he shot at people for disturbing him very early in the morning, and not that I believe that it is a true or valid justification.)
No one who wants to be a policeman should ever be allowed to be one.
Another follow-up article, published yesterday, appears to refute this assertion.
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/sparta/articles/attorney-general-off-duty-trooper-shoots-at-tire
We also don’t know the background of that particular area – have there been lots of late-night break-ins? Have groups of young men of similar descriptions been causing havoc in the area? Cops have access to information which tends to lend more context to situations like this. And very rarely is a story like this correctly captured in initial press reports.
Having said that, we do have a police and an overcriminalization problem in America – I’m just not yet sure this is a symptom of it.
I’m glad they’re all three still alive, and hope none of them meet with any accidents in police custody. Am I completely wrong to wonder that maybe they’re white? Because I have to admit, the first thing that came to mind when I set eyes on the post was to think oh shit, did they get killed.
Fleeing while being shot at by a law enforcement officer? That’s probably the textbook definition of ‘resisting arrest’. Well, police manual definition. The attitude towards firearms that seems to permeate the US – or at least the groups who tend to be involved in incidents like this – is truly appaling. If your reaction to someone banging on your door is to reach for a gun you either live in a really terrible neighbourhood* or you should not have a gun to reach for in the first place. That it was a law enforcement officer who was waving the gun made it worse and much less surprising.
I think the outcome of any investigation is predictable, with little or nothing of consequence happening to the shooter and – hopefully – nothing happening those men. Maybe you really should consider firing everybody and rebuilding law enforcement from scratch…
Society:\format police:
Are you sure? (Y/N)_
*c.f. Los Angeles in Demolition Man.
Regardless of whether or not the trooper genuinely thought those teenagers were burglars, there is no legal right to fire at people who are feeling. In no way shape or form does it fit the definition of self-defense.
What’s all this “state trooper” business then? Is that a soldier or a policeman? PZ seems to imply that it’s a policeman, but the story talks about “barracks”, which seems to firmly put it in soldier territory.
Are US police forces routinely styled after the military then? With military nomenclature and organisation and trappings? Because if they are then that’s one great big suppurating problem right there – police forces were invented precisely so that the military did not have to be used to keep law and order, and one does not use military force on one’s own citizens.
@Tom Weiss, 17
That was already linked, but I fail to see how it refutes anything? If they were criminals attempting to enter his home, why did they go out of their way to get his attention? That’s complete nonsense.
Well, ok, assuming everything in the article is true, they were attempting to enter his home – hence the knocking and doorbell ringing – because they thought it was a different house where a party was supposed to be happening… that’s not exactly the same thing as a crime being committed, though, is it?
@#17 (Tom Weiss)
I know the background of that area, because I live in a neighboring county. Sparta is a middle-class neighborhood with high property values and median income at least double the national average. It has very low crime rates. In fact, it’s one of the safest places to live in New Jersey. See, e.g.: http://www.movoto.com/nj/safest-places-new-jersey/
Hah. I love how Tom Weiss needed to put ellipses in. To include a new paragraph. That contains a phrase saying how one specific item in the official report differs from victim testimony. And makes it seem from Tom Weiss’ s conveniently manufactured quote that the difference is the officers claim that the people were trying to break in. It isnt. The report says that is officers claim but does not report it as fact. The key difference it notes, the only difference, in an article that elsewhere stresses how the official report corroborates the story of the door knockers, is the officer identifying himself as a trooper.
Nothing is fucking refuted in the article. Except Tom Weiss and the officer.
I sincerely wonder if there is any topic where Tom Weiss is not horrible.
Athywren: While I’m generally of the opinion that Tom’s waffling is full of manure (even if the officer had identified himself, firing at fleeing unarmed suspects is still a ‘symptom’ of overcriminalization and police problems, to use his phrasing), I believe he was referring to the claim made by the three youths that the officer did not identify himself as a cop, which was in holytape’s link at #10.
To add to my previous comment in response to Tom Weiss: even if Sparta was in fact a tough crime-ridden neighborhood (which it totally isn’t):
1. Knocking on a door — even at 3 am, even loudly, even persistently — isn’t a crime and does not furnish a probable cause for an arrest, much less discharging a firearm; and
2. A hypothetical high crime rate in a given town does not create a legal justification for shooting at people who are FLEEING.
Is this all you’re ever going to do, Tom Weiss? Be a deeply stupid contrarian? “The trooper said he suspected the men had been trying to enter his home” does not refute the assertion that the cop’s annoyance justified trying to kill them.
If you keep this crap up, you’re going to get banned. I expect people to have at least the ability to follow a logical train of thought comparable to a kindergartener’s, and if you can’t keep up, I’m not going to put up with the aggravation.
If someone I didn’t know was pounding on my door and ringing the bell in the wee hours, I wouldn’t open the door and yell at them.
I’d call the cops.
Freemage: that is what Toms article says. It is not what Tom is saying or presenting the article as saying, as far as I can tell. Otherwise the first part he quotes is irrelevant. And the quote he is responding to by claiming it is “refuted”, as far ad I can parse, is only refuted if the officer’s claim which he gives is taken as the truth as the matter. Which the article and report do not, but the ellipses in his blockquote help lend to the wrong interpretation that he seems to be relying on: that anyone other than him believes this was an actual attempted burglary.
cartomancer@21
Yes, US police forces are organized on a military model, with privates = “patrolman”, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors, and so forth.
There are local police covering a town or city, county sheriffs and their deputies, state police covering an entire state, such as Indiana or Utah. State police are sometimes referred to as the “Highway Patrol,” or “State Troopers.” I could be wrong, but I have heard that some states refer to the state police as the State Militia.
We also have school-district police.
fusilier
James 2:24
I hope that reporter had a bulletproof vest and danger money …
@ Tom Weiss #17
But literally none of that excuses his actions. If you genuinely think someone is attempting to gain access to your house, and your aim is to stop that happening without harm coming to yourself, then you stay inside, call the police, and make a lot of noise so they know someone is home. Maybe arm yourself in case they get in before the police arrive, I can understand that.
What You do not arm yourself, open the door (“I was afraid for my life and property, so I opened the door”? Seriously, who the fuck is buying that?), shout at them, and then shoot at them as they run away. That last bit is particularly important, because once they start running away you know you have accomplished your goal. They are leaving and no longer represent a threat to you or your property, so you have absolutely no excuse to shoot at them. None. Even if they really were a burglar.
The saddest thing about comment #17 is that it’s the most intelligent thing Tom Weiss has ever said on this blog. Hey, at least he wasn’t blaming liberals or regulation for this incident. For Weiss, that’s a major improvement!
Is our (overgrown) children learning?
Jesus fucking Christ. So Tom Weiss’ s quote? With the part about differing from the victim testimony, right after giving the officers testimony? That paragraph comes BEFORE they mention anything about the officers claims in the real article. This wasnt Tom Weiss being stupid and misreading the article. This was Tom Weiss deliberately and blatantly trying to mispresent what the article said. It isnt quote mining, it is quote doctoring. What a sleazy, dishonest shitstain.
To add to Thumper @33, if someone opens a door and starts shooting and chasing me the last thing I am going to do is stop because he says “POLICE”. At that point I have no reason to trust that this person is not going to hurt me!
@MadHatter
Especially if he’s not in uniform, which the shooter presumably wasn’t. They didn’t even know he was police, and, as you say, even if they had known that it doesn’t mean he wasn’t going to hurt them.
of course!
the burglars were knocking, to double-check that the house was unoccupied. If no one answered the door, they would then break a window and loot. So the trooper was totally justified to just spring the door open, brandishing a gun, to deter the hoodlums. As they fled, (running away is always sign of guilt donchano) he aimed for their tires to slow them from fleeing in a vehicle, so he could wrestle them to the ground and manacle them.
ugh.
rationalization is such a fun exercise. The preceding was pure satire. I say it explicitly, cuz I am such a poor writer at making the satire itself obviously satire.
Next, on Cops Behaving Badly
At least this one has been indicted. For murder, no less! They didn’t even try to reduce it to manslaughter.
One might reasonably believe people are trying to gain access to one’s home via deception. Create a ruckus, and when the homeowner opens the door to see what’s going on, level a gun at them and/or charge in. Whether this happens in reality I don’t know, but it is certainly a staple of movies and TV shows, which shape our perception of reality.
That said, once the “intruders” are fleeing, shooting wildly down a residential street is irresponsible, fairly immoral, and possibly criminal (depending on local laws).
The problem is that even if there are laws against such a thing, they are not often applied the same to law officers as other citizens. I understand some of this leeway, but IMO “random guy in the middle of the night at home” is just a random guy, regardless of his dayjob.
[puts on fiction writer hat]
He lives in a nice area of New Jersey. I’m concocting a scenario where he’s in debt to the mob and thought they were coming to collect.
———
cartomancer@21: The US has a lot of big, empty spaces. The police are local to a particular town or municipality. This can be a two-person force in a town with a population of 500 people, or it can be the entire NYPD, which covers five counties all within the same enormous city. (We also have gray areas, which are police that aren’t entirely municipal. A university’s campus police may or may not be armed. The NYC transit system and their Port Authority (which is interstate with New Jersey) each have their own police forces.
State troopers are there to cover the spaces in between. The most common interaction the public has with them is probably when they pull you over for speeding on a highway, but they also conduct investigations for crimes committed outside any town’s jurisdiction, or if a crime covers a wide area, and so on.
In general, law enforcement officers are expected to reside within the region their group polices. When it comes to state troopers, that can be a large territory, and so they have central barracks at various locales. A state police barracks is kind of equivalent to a local police station or precinct house.
Tom Weiss:
Which has shit all to do with this situation. Law enforcement officers are supposed to be held to a higher standard. Law enforcement officers are supposed to be highly trained, to be cool under pressure, to observe, assess, then act accordingly. Deciding to shoot because someone is loudly knocking on your door? That’s a stupid, knee-jerk way to behave. If that cop was just so darn shook up by people at his door, perhaps he should have called for back up, eh? A gazillion fucking cops would have been there in minutes. Or, he could have just opened the door to find out what the fuck they wanted before deciding on any particular action. The list of things he should have done instead of opening fire could go on and on here.
re 31:
good presentation of the way the US tends to compartmentalize our legal enforcers into heirarchy of districting (town-county-national{FBI}-international{CIA})
sharing my poor understanding: <grain of salt>Troopers are dedicated to patrolling Interstate Highways for traffic infractions (moving violations), because local Police are limited to their district and on the highway, “speeding” can get the speeder into a different town faster than the cop can catch up. A Trooper however has the entire State as his “district”, so can chase the speeder to the border. Where, if the speeder crosses, is usually confronted by a whole bevy of Troopers lying in wait for speeders to cross into their State.
[Consults Magic 8-Ball…]
“Signs point to yes”
If people are running away from me and I tell them I’m a cop, they don’t need to stop. If people are running away from a cop who tells them he’s a cop, they do need to stop. How does that work, exactly?
It reminds me of the joke “How can you tell if a rhinoceros is male or female? You call it over. If he comes, it’s male. If she comes, it’s female.
News flash, Tom. Cops lie. They have been caught lying repeatedly. This also isn’t the first time someone was shot at for knocking at the wrong door. Also their car is missing since it was taken into police custody. What do you want to bet they’re going to find something illegal in there to justify the cop trying to kill them?
Right. I mean imagine if they were *injured* unarmed teenagers looking for help and instead of aiding them, he’d shot (at) them? Or, they could have been walking by and seen part of his house or garage on fire and been trying to warn him and his family of an emergency. Yet his first response is to go on a rampage and shoot at them as they flee.
cartomancer@21:
Historically in the United States (at least, in the northeast, presumably including New Jersey), “state troopers” were police employed by the state government to (1) do police-work in areas outside cities where the population density was low enough that whatever local government there might have been was not up to to the task of running a police force, and (2) patrol state highways (as contrasted with local streets and roads). Because the area which a given state trooper had to cover was usually quite large, and automotive traffic at the time still moved quite slowly (on roads that weren’t suited to high speed, with vehicles that weren’t either), many (perhaps most?) troopers were based in barracks (many, if not all, well outside cities—although now surrounded by often densely populated suburbs) where they ate and slept between several consecutive shifts on duty (alternating, I believe, with regular home leave). The “barracks” no longer serve as quarters, only as administrative hubs (and garages), but the name remains.
At least, that’s my understanding, based on some reading and years of observation in New England.
Tom Weiss, #17
Even if I grant you everything you’re saying here, you don’t fire three shots at people who are fleeing in a car and had previously attempted to enter your home (and didn’t even actually enter it on top of that).
And you definitely shouldn’t do it if you’re police because you’re supposed to know much, much better than that.
Ibis3 @ 46:
Some years back, someone was knocking on my door around 3, 3:30am. It was a pregnant teenager who had gotten into a fight with boyfriend, who dumped her out of the car and took off. She wanted to either use a phone or beg a ride home. I certainly did not answer the door with any weapon.
Also, I don’t know if this cop has kids of his own or not, but if he does – what do you suppose his reaction would be to someone opening fire on his children, for the crime of knocking on the wrong damn door?
Caine @ 49
Well, you’re not a cop, so you didn’t know the proper procedure. I’ll let you off with a warning this time.
As observed by others on the thread, this does seem to be symptomatic of the rampant militarization of the American police force – once you conceptualize law enforcement as a ‘war on crime’, and accept an ‘its them or us’ mindset, then it gets ever easier to start shooting first and asking questions later. Of course, this is no excuse for the behaviour of any of these violent cops – adopting a warfare lexicon and outlook with regard to civilian law enforcement is a clear failure on the part of the police officer in question to perform their duties in a safe and proper fashion, and creates a situation where gross police violence becomes all but inevitable. A person who thinks that law enforcement can or should be likened to a war should not be allowed to become a police officer in the first place, or to remain one if they are already in uniform. There can’t be many clearer warning signs of a dangerously warped attitude than that.
As for the questions over why the young men didn’t stop once they knew the idiot shooting at them was a cop, well, as others have noted, just because someone says they are a cop doesn’t mean it is true, and when they are already shooting at you you would justifiably harbour doubts about their intent not to harm you just because they can. I would actually go further than that – given the endless examples of cops murdering people in the US in cold blood for no better reason than being annoyed with them or harbouring some irrational prejudice against them, then if someone who is already engaging in violence toward you announces that they are a cop, I would think that it would be an entirely reasonable response to be more likely to run. After all, ordinary citizens who gun someone down might have to face some kind of consequences for that behaviour, but as we have seen in recent years in most circumstances cops can murder citizens with complete impunity (especially if their victims are Black), and what is worse they are fully aware of that fact, and exploit their get out of jail free card to the hilt.
The US police force really is the most dangerous and violent gang on the streets of US cities these days, and it is only the tireless spin-doctering and media manipulation of Faux News and the Republican Party that stops this being more widely accepted.
@Gregory Greenwood
I agree everything you say applies had they known the shooter was a cop. In this case, it’s pretty clear that they never did. The second thing* they did after getting to a safe place was to call the police to report the incident. When they observed police responding (cruisers with sirens, the helicopter etc.), they thought the police were trying to find and arrest the shooter, not themselves.
*The first was to call one of the boys’ mothers.
I saw recently former Baltimore cop Michael A. Wood interviewed by Cenk Uygur and Joe Rogan.
From the interviews I got the impression that bad behaviour by American cops is on a solid foundation of bad incentives, bad attitudes, incompetence, systemic racism and tribalistic loyalty. I was especially surprised that Police academy was only 8 months in Baltimore (here in Finland 3-year bachelor’s degree and the trainee period starts after 1,5 years of studies).
@ frog #40
If one believed that to be the case, then surely one would not open the fucking door.
And I’m not sure that’s ever going to be a “reasonable” belief, since what are the odds that the person banging on your door at that particular moment are going to be burglars attempting to gain entry by deception? Fairly slim, if I may hazard a guess.
chigau @29
First, make sure they aren’t black, because I’m pretty sure you’d be killing them in that case.
One thing everyone has skipped so far is that the car turned around and went past the house again because it was in a cul-de-sac. The online report:
The report continues to corroborate statements made by Mayer and Lindsey Baker to TAP into Sparta, The three young men, in an effort to leave the area, drove away, “turning around in the cul de sac at the end of the street.” They had to drive past the trooper’s house again to leave the neighborhood. It was at that point, the “trooper entered the road in an attempt to stop the vehicle.”
As the car continued past the trooper’s house, toward Sterling Hill Road, without stopping, trooper Baurreau “fired three rounds from his gun.” The report continues, “One round struck the front wheel of the vehicle,” causing it to become disabled a short distance away on Butternut Way, as reported on TAP.
So the trooper entered the road (or so the police report says; I’d like to hear what the three kids say), exposing himself, then fired at the fleeing car. Whether he fired before the car reached him or passed him is unknown. My guess is that no charges will be filed against anyone, including the trooper.
It’s not just the news, though, it’s popular TV like NCIS which gives the impression that a sufficiently powerful politician can, for example, tell the FBI to kill a suspect and they’ll be fine with the idea, to the extent of shooting multiple times through a toilet door at the “suspect” after luring him away from a place where civilians could be present. (Start of series 10, I think.) It (and JAG, and probably 24) are full of examples where the heroes are above the law and all that matters is that “bad guys” are arrested or killed.
I like watching NCIS, but some episodes are really extreme.
@Frog, #40:
No. Not really. At least not in 2 states where I’m familiar, and I believe that I’m correct that it doesn’t hold throughout (most of?) the rest of the US either.
Every bit of land in the lower 48 states is part of a County. It may also be part of a city, but it’s always part of a county. Counties provide sheriff’s departments who cover unincorporated land.
State police are not directly connected to the 911 system and don’t function like municipal LEOs or sheriff’s departments’ LEOs do. They exist to pay special attention to areas that are under the jurisdiction of other, local LEOs, but that the state government believes would be insufficiently policed if left to local priorities. They also provide security and LE services on state-owned property. State police departments investigate governmental corruption, primarily at the local level (leaving the feds to investigate a lot of the state-level corruption so that the investigators are, in theory, always investigating someone who has no special influence over those investigators or their budgets) and patrol the freeways that are created and maintained through federal/state partnerships with very little local money.
Back in the days before cell phones, a crash on a freeway may need a responder but not easily receive one. People where the phones were weren’t in a position to observe the accidents. People in a position to see the accident and resulting aftermath couldn’t call.
In many places the historic patrolling of these freeways continues to be a job for state police even though the reasons this job landed in state police hands no longer apply.
Finally, although state police are not typically connected directly to 911 services, 911 dispatchers have easy access to the separate dispatch staff that runs state police radios and, when I worked at 911, passed info back and forth through a version of instant messaging quite often. This doesn’t put the state police under a unified and coordinating comms system, but the state dispatchers (who don’t deal with direct calls from citizens through 911, but can answer some calls that come in through a regular landline) can and regularly do pass through info that originally came in through 911.
Re: Greg Hilliard #57
Either way there would still be the question of who – outside an action hero – thinks a reasonable method to stop a car involves firing at it. So the shooter hit a tyre by dumb luck. But he might just as well have hit the driver, killing him and quite possibly the passengers in a now out of control car which could go on to cause further damage before actually stopping.
I’d also have to question what supercop accomplished by disabling the vehicle. Police evidently still needed to organise (or felt like) a massive manhunt* to find those men in spite of two of them staying with the car. It would probably have been just as easy to track the car or just go by license plate. An experienced trooper would presumably have taken note of this given his suspcions and that the car came by a second time. It’s just not exciting as shooting at folks.
*Completely backwards: Manhunt for people being shot at. In the movies at least it’s usually done to find the people doing the shooting.
What, did they tie an oversized visa gift card to a balloon and slowly walk it away from the protected civilian area onto the free-hunting/free-stalking/free-fire zones?
How ridiculous! Where do writers come up with these ideas for tactics that have no real-life analogues???
Not quite, they had an attractive female FBI agent invite him to her apartment, where she let in some stormtroopers while he was was (Spoiler alert:) supposedly in the loo. If they could find him so easily, they (she) could just as easily have arrested him when he walked into the apartment.
Not quite. In Virginia, all cities are independent, which means they are not part of a county. There are a few other independent cities around (Baltimore, for example).
/pedantry
(My 63 @Crip Dyke, 59)
Athywren @14
Oh, well, buglers. They totally deserve it, always waking people up with their bugles, shooting’s too good for them, honestly….
@NelC, 65
The one time I don’t proof-read my comments… *theatrical sigh*
Still, it’s a valid point. John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman have been shown far too much tolerance. These antics must cease!
I am not sure what is keeping me from being totally disgusted with everything and just dropping out again (ala ’60’s) except for the observations of experience of all the years between that there is no place to go to, and no way to just allow things to go on as they are without doing something. The question is and always been what can I do that will be the most effective in helping to create the change that is so disparately needed?
uncle frogy
@frog
I don’t. I’m beginning to think that I think this sentiment is part of the problem. Cops should have absolutely no more leeway than any other citizen for use of force. IMAO, we need to start recognizing cops for what they are – paid bounty hunters. They’re paid by salary instead of by commission, and so they’re technically not bounty hunters, but they are mere bounty hunters in all of the relevant and evocative senses of the word. I have no idea why anyone should expect magically better behavior from bounty hunters when they’re paid by government salary instead of being contractors paid by government commission. We have standards of behavior for serving warrants, arrest, and so forth, and and I am now seriously asking the question why cops need any additional power to use force to do their jobs compared to the average citizen and “citizen’s arrest”. There was a time when the only kind of arrest was “citizen’s arrest”.
For example, one thing that really pisses me off is that cops can brandish their firearms at people with no good cause, and they do so frequently, and for anyone else that is a serious firearms crime. Yet no one complains when cops do it.
We live in a police state. It can be argued that the immediate primary cause of the American revolution was the creation of a police state by the British crown. The people were quite incensed at having a standing army in their presence enforcing the law, where that standing army had wide discretions on the use of force, ignored search and seizure rules, had relative immunity to prosecution for their misdeeds, etc. Remind you of anything? It should. It’s our modern US police.
Don’t believe me when I say we live in a police state?
In about half the US states, if a police officer with basically no cause demands to see your ID cards, it’s illegal to refuse. “Papers please.”
Police are almost completely immune to legal punishment for their misdeeds. Ferguson is one example. Here’s one of my favorite examples:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/us/georgia-toddler-stun-grenade-no-indictment/
One more example to support the reasonableness my comparison of the modern US police and the British standing army that was arguably the primary cause of the war of independence:
https://proxy.freethought.online/dispatches/2013/07/08/a-third-amendment-case-in-nevada/
The whole thing of qualified immunity for cops needs to go too in its entirety. Unfortunately, that might require a US constitutional amendment because qualified immunity for cops is an asspull creation by SCOTUS. Finally, throw on a rule disallowing collective malfeasance insurance for cops. That will force cops to get individual malfeasance insurance, and when they are sued over their misdeeds because they no longer have any special immunity, over time the bad cops will be forced out of the job by having malfeasance insurance premiums that are too high. Several US cities are trying this now. I wish them luck, and I wish more widespread use of this plan, but again for it to really work we need that constitutional amendment to fully repeal all special immunity for cops.
In my ideal world, also have a constitutional amendment forbidding “no knock, no announce” warrants, no exceptions except in times of war or insurrection – natural disasters do not count. There is no reason that such a thing as “no knock, no announce” warrants should ever be allowed. The idea that at any time, my front door might get knocked down and a bunch of people in full military might come in with rifled aimed at me, e.g. SWAT, is beyond ridiculous – especially if they get the wrong house, but even if they have the right house. I have a friend who had a minor drug charge, and because the police have nothing better to do with their SWAT team, 3 days later they came in just like you see in the movies because he sold 1 bottle of prescription painkiller to an undercover cop 3 days before.
With a warrant, before doing what would otherwise be criminal trespass and criminal breaking and entering, cops should have announce their presence, give reasonable time for someone to come to the door, and give a reasonable amount of time for the person who came to the door to read the warrant and call a lawyer before using the power of the warrant to forcibly and legally trespass, break and enter, etc. Also, probably another rule – perhaps less ironclad – against serving warrants at night time. Go back to the decency that was taken for granted as part of being “reasonable” at the time of the founding.
I have some more speculative ideas too, such as returning access to grand jury indictments to everyone, again how it was in the time of the founding, so that private citizens could seek a grand jury indictment to become a criminal prosecutor in a particular criminal case. That is an IMO important check and balance on government power that has been lost. Now, state prosecutors maintain an effective or official monopoly on access to criminal prosecutions, which means we the citizens cannot criminally charge police, and when that is combined with the relatively new bullshit rule of qualified immunity for police, and the corruption and complicity of police w/ state prosecutors, that means that the police are effectively immune to repercussions for misdeeds, and it should come as no surprise that professional bounty hunters who are the police in this situation would regularly abuse their power.
Related:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2015/07/27/in_iraq_i_raided_insurgents_in_va_police_raided_me_362000.html
I got home from the bar and fell into bed soon after Saturday night bled into Sunday morning. I didn’t wake up until three police officers barged into my apartment, barking their presence at my door. They sped down the hallway to my bedroom, their service pistols drawn and leveled at me.
(full story)
Apparently those pesky warrants are no longer necessary.
At least the guy wasn’t shot (he was white)
and didn’t have a dog to shoot
so nobody was killed, except the constitution bled a little bit more.
it’s popular TV like NCIS which gives the impression that a sufficiently powerful politician can, for example, tell the FBI to kill a suspect and they’ll be fine with the idea, to the extent of shooting multiple times through a toilet door at the “suspect” after luring him away from a place where civilians could be present.
Fred Hampton
Ibis3, These verbal jackboots were made for walking @ 53;
Good point. That makes it all even worse – some gun toting arsehat opens fire on them basically for no reason, and when they do what is supposed to be the right thing, and contact the police for help, the police then turn around and hunt them down for the non-crime of annoying a trigger happy cop that they didn’t even know was a cop. It sounds like something out of dystopic fiction.
goaded @ 58;
You are absolutely right – popular culture depictions of law enforcement have a great deal to answer for with regard to normalising heinous abuses of official power as notional ‘necessary evils’. And sometimes not even as evils, but rather as simply what ‘needs to be done’, and in the process often casts persons opposed to such abuses as malicious antagonists getting in the way of protecting the ordinary citizenry in the name of furthering their own status or bolstering their own egos. It has resulted in the normalisation of state sanctioned torture (and the infamous advent of the legal argumentum ad Jack Bauer), and this tolerant attitude toward unjustifiable police violence is another manifestation of the same problem.
Clarification: I foresee two difficulties with my seemingly extreme proposal of removing all special police power from the police.
1- Traffic law enforcement. I’m not sure how that would work in practice. I need more time to think it through.
As an aside, the case law here is quite interesting. It used to be established case law that the no one, agents of the government or otherwise, could legally stop and detain you and ask to see your ID cards without one of: a warrant, personally witnessing the crime, or having good information that the person is a felon (which used to apply to only the much more severe offenses compared to today). With the advent of cars and the possible (probable) need of licensing drivers, that right was slowly eroded globally, and now as just someone on the sidewalk, in half of the US states, the police can demand to see your ID card with basically no reason, something that would be flagrantly unconstitutional a century ago.
2- Health code inspectors, building code inspectors, and regulation inspectors in general. The problem here is that these inspectors have something that very much resembles a general warrant, and arguably the primary immediate purpose of the fourth amendment was to disallow general warrants in almost exactly the same circumstances. One of the big abusers of general warrants in the day of the founders was illegal import inspectors who had a general warrant to search anywhere for any reason for illegal contraband. I’m not a libertarian, and I really like health code inspectors and the like, and so I’m finding it difficult to formulate a rule appropriate for a constitutional amendment for what I want. Again, I need more time to think about it.
PS: I suppose maintaining jails and prisons is a form of police power, but that is not meant to be covered by my current rant. I very much want all prisons to be publicly maintained. Private prisons are ridiculous.
At least one person above linked to this article without pulling what I think is a rather relevant quote from one of the kids’ moms:
https://www.tapinto.net/towns/sparta/articles/source-trooper-kissenger-barreau-did-not-identif
If I lived anywhere near Trooper ‘Wyatt Earp”, I would have my house on the real estate market the next afternoon.
@ Komarov #60: I agree with you completely that the trooper’s actions were out of bounds. I still think no one will be charged. The kids get off because they didn’t do anything wrong. The trooper gets off because who are you gonna believe, a trooper or a bunch of delinquents? (This also answers Pieter B at #74 above; of course the mother is going to lie to protect her son. Just ask the cops.)
In some jurisdictions shooting into an occupied vehicle is a felony of its own. I don’t know whether New Jersey is one of those juridsictions, however.
The officer’s taser was subsequently found in all three would-be burglars’ pockets, so there must have been a struggle and he was entirely justified in shooting at them. Erm, he thought they had a gun because he could hear gunfire as they tried to get away.
</s obviously
@3, Athywren, Social Justice Weretribble
“The one thing they’re always doing is going out of their way to get the attention of the homeowner before beginning their burglarizations. That’s basically burglary 101 right there.”
Actually, it is. If you’re going to rob a house, you don’t want anybody to be there. So you check it out by knocking on the door to see if anybody’s home, if they have a dog, etc. If somebody is there, you come up with a story as to why you were knocking on the door. If nobody answers, you can then start examining the place for alarms, ways to get in, etc.
This in no way justifies the trooper’s response, but having someone you aren’t expecting knocking on your door late at night is suspicious.
@rrhain #79
No. It’s not suspicious. It’s unusual. It might be disturbing or annoying or even frightening or alarming (especially before you know who it is). Not, to a reasonable person in a middle class suburb, suspicious.
The process you describe is something burglars might do in the daytime to make sure a house is empty. Burglars in the middle of the night don’t want you or anyone else in the neighbourhood alerted to their presence.
@80:
Exactly. That’s why they knock. If you’re there, they’ll make up an excuse (perhaps, “I thought this was my buddy’s house.”) If not, they can then start robbing the place.
As I said, this in no way excuses the trooper’s behaviour. But, someone knocking on your door at an odd hour that you weren’t expecting is suspicious. I get the feeling we have a disconnect on what “suspicious” means with you thinking I’m insinuating going to the door with a gun.
What part of “in no way excuses the trooper’s response” are you having trouble with?
The contrary situation for cities in Virginia has been noted above.
In Massachusetts, it used to be the case that every piece of land was in a county, but several years ago a bunch of counties (mostly the ones in the Boston area) were formally dissolved.
However, what is true of Massachusetts (but not of, say, Ohio) is that every piece of land is either in a town (what might elsewhere be called a township) or in a city. The state constitution allows a third possibility, a “plantation unincorporated”, but there haven’t been any of those for a long time, and I don’t know if there is any mechanism by which new ones could appear—perhaps riparian accretion?
Besides sheriffs, counties (at least in Massachusetts) also have “constables”, who perform duties related to civil (vice criminal) law, like serving papers. I don’t think they’re armed.
He’s a cop. He’ll get away with it.
And wherever those kids live, the local cops will probably make their lives miserable for the next couple of years.
@NelC
Some day I’m going to murder the bugler
Some day they’re going to find him dead
I’ll amputate his Reveille
And step upon it heavily
And spend the rest of my life in bed.
–Irving Berlin
@Marcus Ranum in 69
Thanks for the link to the story. It’s refreshing to see a military vet seeing the obvious analogies to f’ing military raids in Afghanistan, and it’s also nice hearing how it was ineffective there, and it will be similarly ineffective here.
rrhain:
Not in the sense that you have a reason to suspect they want to rob you (or kill you, abduct you, etc.), more than being there for any other reason. Of course you can be paranoid about all sorts of things, but that doesn’t say as much about the things as it does about you.
I’m not sure exactly what I should be expecting in a case like that generally, but at least some burglars (most of them?) are more cautious and intelligent about it. Someone may not answer even if you do knock or ring, and it minimally involves waiting around at the front door for a lengthy period of time, which generally exposes you to detection visibly even if the noise doesn’t.
If basically any planning went into this crime at all, what I guess I would probably do is figure out how many residents there are and pay attention to when they leave. It takes time, but it’s actually fairly reliable, which is important since this is a crime that carries a lot of risks. I don’t think I would’ve prepared nearly enough if I only had come up with a lie for the person who answers. Most people aren’t usually away from their homes in the middle of the night (but they do leave for work/school), so it’s pretty obvious the odds are not good that a random house you knock on at that time will be vacant. So to have a reasonable chance of success, you’ll almost certainly have to do this a lot more than tell a single household a single lie about why you appeared at their doorstep, which unnecessarily increases the number of times you’re being detected, which is hardly ideal no matter how convincing you are as a liar. It seems like trying to raise as many suspicions as possible, without making the job any easier, which is not something criminals generally try to do. And you’ve basically guaranteed you can’t come back to the same place when the really person isn’t home, because they might be able to connect the dots and identify you later (or their neighbors might, blah, blah, blah). So it seems much easier and much more reliable and much more likely that they’d find out if anybody’s home some other way.
Jesus fuck, this reminds me of this horrific story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Yoshihiro_Hattori
I was woken once in my sleepy cul-de-sac around 1 in the morning. I decided if they were ringing my doorbell at that hour, they could stand to see me in my pajama shorts. I met them with a slightly open door, and said something like a groggy ‘Hello?’.
He had woken me because I had left my garage open and he was worried it could be burglarized.
I thanked the nice man and noted the small dog he was walking. Not sure why he was walking a dog that late, but I have done it myself a couple times due to work schedules..
At no time did I threaten him with a gun, yell at him for waking me, or fire shots into a fleeing car.
Since then I have made a habit of always checking my garage door on the way to bed.
The final paragraph from Marcus Ranum’s link @69
It is not too much to expect police to accept a risk level comparable to that of a garbage collector and an order magnitude less than that of a tree faller to reduce the number of people killed by the police.
I heard somebody pounding on my door late one evening. It turned out to be a woman at the wrong address. I never figured out where she was looking for, or whether she was drunk and/or had troubles. I got my car and drove her to where she lived, and watched to be sure she got in the house, such as it was. I realized that my difficulties were rather trivial, by comparison.
Pointing out that first reports in situations like this are typically wrong is reasonable. Pointing out that context matters is reasonable. Pointing out – based on evidence (available to you but not included in the OP) from the attorney general’s report – that you, in my opinion, went over the top in your characterization of the situation is reasonable.
This is your blog PZ, you can ban me at any point. I don’t think you and I are ever going to agree politically on much (even though we do agree in this case that there is a police problem in this country). Almost all of my comments here have provided evidence-based objections to political assertions. I have not been abusive (even though others have been abusive toward me) and I’ve tried at all times to enage in an honest, reasoned debate.
If you’re charging me with trying to challenge the way people here think, then I’m guilty. I’m trying to challenge myself at the same time and force myself to think through my arguments and rationally defend them. If this is the type of thinking you’d rather not see here then that’s your prerogative. I’ve quite enjoyed the debates (when people have engaged me honestly), but do with me what you must.
From OP link:
Wll now we have a quandary. According to Kissenger Barreau logic, being awoken by some noisy jerk means you get to attempt their murder. Which means anyone awoken by your attempts to murder said jerks get to murder you in turn, right Mr. Barreau (you fuckhead)? But then I suspect you would complain about it being “unfair this” and “overreaction that” and “oh my god please don’t kill me” and your utter selfishness and entitlement would be laid bare. You fuckhead.
Oh, please. You don’t get to call yourself “reasonable” when your argument was that the context was that the shooter claims to have identified himself as a trooper before opening fire on fleeing, unarmed 18 year olds. That excuses NOTHING, unless your authoritarian mind thinks that state troopers are allowed to shoot anything they damn pleased.
That’s a perfect example of the kind of bullshit you’ve been serving up, while claiming you’re just being polite and reasonable. I don’t give a flaming fuck about “polite”, and simply asserting that your pratfalls are honest and reasoned does not make them so.
Maybe you’ve enjoyed your ‘debates’ because you are smug and impenetrably stupid, have you considered that, Mr Dunning-Krueger?
Tom Weiss, #91
Almost* none of your comments have evidence behind them. There are too many witnesses here for you to be able to just lie like that.
* Only reason I say “almost none” is because I haven’t read all your comments.
Well, at least I think we can all agree that the situation would have been better for everyone involved if the kids had CCWs and pulled weapons, too.
Right?
…right?
This is so far removed from anything i know that i have trouble believing it can even happen. Who the fuck shoots at unarmed, fleeing teenagers?? What…? wh……
Must admit, I’m amused (and somewhat bemused) to see TW claiming to have adduced evidence for his assertions.
PZ
My argument was that none of us knows – least of all you or me – what the context of that encounter was. The cop may have lied when he stated that he identified himself. The kids may have lied as well, and indeed may have been trying to break into his house. In either event, the cop almost certainly did not shoot at their car simply because he was “annoyed.”
Very well. Name a dishonest argument I’ve made which is not based in reason and I’ll leave voluntarily and not come back. Lots of people here, including you, may not agree with the evidence or my reasoning, but that’s a different proposition. Look back at my response to your post on Coates’ book and the American dream. I’m sure you disagree with all of what I wrote but that doesn’t mean my argument wasn’t reasoned and honest.
This is an example of an idea I’ve been trying to challenge. Because my political views clash with many people here that translates, in your mind, to stupidity. That’s a closemindedness I have a hard time comprehending, especially coming from an educator. The things I’ve commented on here I’ve either had direct experience with, or have studied in some fashion, or have Capitol Hill experience with – military, economics, public policy, gun rights, etc.
And as for my politeness, I prefer not to abuse other people. That’s a personal choice.
Does insulting someone’s intelligence count as abuse?
Really, Tom Weiss? You’re not going to decry this as an example of creeping authoritarianism or the overreach of government, a perfect example of men with guns using force and violence to control people and violate their rights?
You’re pissy about men with guns when they’re theoretically going to force you to pay your taxes, but when an actual duly-appointed officer of the law (an arm of the government, no less) actually shoots at people, the victims probably had it coming?
I wish I could be surprised.
That’s because police are not undiscriminating in their shooting: they reserve their wrath to uppity plebs while universal healthcare is well known to increase uppity plebs’ lifespan, and as we all know, tyranny is all about taking privileges and preferential access to material comforts away from the Real-True-Well-Deserving-People
My argument was that none of us knows – least of all you or me – what the context of that encounter was.
First Tom Weiss claims he’s the smartest guy in the room. Then, when he’s proven shamefully wrong on that claim, he falls back on saying NO ONE even CAN know anything more than he does. This is classic authoritarian crap-artistry: “If I can’t pretend I know more than you, then no one gets to claim they know anything at all.” It’s as old a practice as authoritarianism itself, and it has an old name: obscurantism. See also know-nothingism.
And yes, unless the news articles we’re reading are pure fabrication, we CAN and DO know the context of this encounter.
Name a dishonest argument I’ve made which is not based in reason and I’ll leave voluntarily and not come back.
We’ve shown how MOST of your arguments here are both dishonest and not based in reason, and you keep on coming back. Your promises are as bogus as your reasoning.
Because my political views clash with many people here that translates, in your mind, to stupidity.
No, it’s because your political views clash with OBSERVABLE REALITY that we label you stupid. And your refusal to address this reality when it is pointed out to you only reinforces that label.
The things I’ve commented on here I’ve either had direct experience with, or have studied in some fashion, or have Capitol Hill experience with – military, economics, public policy, gun rights, etc.
The most charitable response I can offer here is HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW! After all the pure obvious stupidity you’ve spouted here, your claim of “experience” and “studied in some fashion” is just plain funny.
And as for my politeness, I prefer not to abuse other people. That’s a personal choice.
You say this after wildly accusing us of wanting to violate your body to make you feed us? Do you even listen to yourself? Do you even remember what you say from one hour to the next?
Attempt to pretend you have authority, making your claims nothing but an argument from your authority. Your authority isn’t shown by what you back up your claims with, which often refute your claims. That is Dunning-Kruger in action.
Really, Tom Weiss? You’re not going to decry this as an example of creeping authoritarianism or the overreach of government, a perfect example of men with guns using force and violence to control people and violate their rights?
Libertarians have been shrieking about “tyranny” and “coercion” and “fascism” since about 1978 — but they’re strangely quiet about actual instances of literal violence by people in authority. Like I’ve said before, the entire libertarian movement is a fraud.
Tom Weiss, I note you failed to address a VERY important part of PZs comment to you. That you failed to do so looks pretty damn deliberate, and is thus pretty damning.
The Tentacled One wrote:
Tom Weiss @ 98
Let’s check a recent comment of yours – say, comment 98 in this thread (emphasis mine):
So, none of us knows the context, but you know the context well enough to know one reason the cop wasn’t shooting.
And as you’re okay with unsolicited attempts to challenge the way people think, I’d recommend you read this: How to be a Responsible Devil’s Advocate. Though Miri wrote it specifically about playing devil’s advocate, I’d say it’s applicable anywhere where your opinions go against the majority – where people can’t tell if you’re a devil’s advoacte or an actual devil.
I do not think it can be pointed out too often that those who complain the most about the evils of government almost never complain about the two most concrete examples of governmental authority and force, the military and the police, rather telling that.
uncle frogy
@#50 Caine:
I’ve never seen this as a problem for a Conservative. Ever. If this cop has kids of his own, then those kids are special and deserve the benefit of special rules. Everyone else’s kids may go to hell. That’s why you have right-wingers who live comfortably on cushy government jobs, retiring early, collecting generous government pensions and bennies while screaming something about entitlement, dependency, and so forth. At this point, I’m not sure a Conservative can even understand the concept of consistency, must less strive for it.
So, Mr. Wiess, as a devil’s advocate, and by asserting nobody knows the context of what occurred, which of these justifies his actions based on the context that IS known and the only context that matters:
1. He shot at the fleeing persons because they banged on his door
2. He shot at the fleeing persons because they were fleeing or he thought they might get away (say, a ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ thing’)
3. He shot at the fleeing persons because he thought he was in immediate physical peril (that the fleeing persons might shoot him)
4. He shot at the fleeing persons because he didn’t know who the fleeing persons were or what they wanted or intended to do
5. He shot at the fleeing persons because he didn’t like them for whatever reason
6. He shot at the fleeing persons because he happened to have a gun in his hand and an itchy trigger finger…that itched 3 times
7. He shot at the fleeing persons because he’s a trooper and nobody’s gonna mess with him
8. He shot at the fleeing persons because he was scared or stupid or both
9. He shot at the fleeing persons because his training was inadequate to deal with such a situation
10. He shot at the fleeing persons because…[enter any excuse you like here]
Well, you can see why everyone is so upset over why you should be so obtuse. Your fake appeal to justice utterly ignores that this guy shot at fleeing persons. Get it?
Tom Weiss is going to insist that they are being perfectly honest, and reasonable, and basing their statements on evidence, and proving how Unreasonable PZ is, despite the fact:
1. Their “evidence” was has been confirmed by several commenters to not say Tom supposedly believes it to say.
2. Their “evidence” was deliberately mangled in order to say something that conforms better to Tom’s imagination (and thus serves to “refute” PZ) when the actual article says nothing of the sort.
Tom Weiss must be a Tinkerbell-like entity. Except instead of thriving and surviving off of hand clapping and belief, he prefers laughter and eye rolling. Or perhaps that is more a Donald Trump-like entity. Regardless, you understand my point.
In a recent argument over anthropogenic climate change, you argued that we should take no action to mitigate it until some completely unspecified means of generating energy that would replace fossil fuels was invented, which you claimed would happen if we adopted unspecified libertarian economic policies.
So far as I an tell this is the latest article so far:
====
Tom Weiss, no, I do not think you are necessarily stupid but i think you are definitely attempting to interpret the events to fit you preconceptions. You claim no-one knows what happens and yet we all have access to the exact same information that confirms a) the teens knocked on the door b) The trooper yelled at them and threatened them c) the teens ran away d) the trooper shot at the teens and e) the teens were arrested. The only ambiguity is whether or not the trooper identified himself. Other than that we do all have the information to evaluate it. Did the trooper think they were going to burglarize him? Sure, why not? That’s reasonable. Is it reasonable to shoot at people who knock on your door because you think they were intending to burgle you? Um… I’m sorry but no matter how I look at it I simply can not see any argument that this is reasonable. Yelling at them, displaying a firearm, threatening to shoot if they don’t leave… um, maybe (although not my choice of action) but shooting when they do leave? Simply unfathomable.
And then there is this: The cop may have lied when he stated that he identified himself. The kids may have lied as well, and indeed may have been trying to break into his house. In either event, the cop almost certainly did not shoot at their car simply because he was “annoyed.”.
Huh? How on earth do *either* of those cases negate he fired the gun because he was annoyed? In both cases he shot at the car because … they had knocked on his door and were leaving. Both cases support exactly what it looks like– that he shot at the teens because they annoyed him.
If I were to say “Your name is Tom Weiss so your initials are almost certainly not T.W. and your insisting that your initials are T.W. is only because your politics differ so I am reasonable and you are not” doesn’t make any of it true.
@Tom Weiss
“Possible, thus probable” fallacy. Of course it’s possible that something like that happened. That is not an admission that it is any appreciable level of likely that it happened.
On the evidence we do have, we have a very good idea of what has happened. Whether the cop identified himself or not is irrelevant. No one has yet presented a plausible scenario that fits the facts that justifies all of the cops actions. Not even close.
You’re right. It’s probably because he is a racist asshat, and IMHO equally importantly he is also a guy on a constant power trip. Throw on some bits of self righteous.
The “possible, thus probable” fallacy which you literally just made 1 paragraph up in your post.
I’m sure plenty of people here think I’m a libertarian based on the proposals I’ve made (even though I can assure you I’m not). At the very least, you could try to be intellectually honest and consistent and support my proposals if you really are concerned about overreach of government power and government tyranny.
– Reopen access to grand jury criminal indictments to everyone. Anyone can go before a grand jury to seek a criminal indictment, which allows the person to commence a particular criminal prosecution acting as the prosecutor. The purpose of the grand jury is thus to prevent frivolous criminal prosecutions (to avoid letting the person off due to double jeopardy protections), and to allow the person best suited to perform the prosecution to get the indictment.
– Ignorance of the law should not an excuse, especially for cops. Remove all special immunity of cops so that they are just as liable civilly and criminally for their illegal actions. They should have the same immunity as the average citizen.
– Cops should have to obey the same firearms laws as everyone else. For example, if a cop points a firearm at someone without due cause, that should be criminal brandishing just like if anyone else did it in the same circumstance. Dittos for shooting bullets in all cases. Dittos for mere ownership and mere open carry and concealed carry.
– Cops should have to obey the same rules governing use of force during arrest as anyone else. For a start, imagine if you would be ok with that kind of behavior from a cliche private bounty hunter. If you’re not ok with Dog The Bounty Hunter doing it, then it’s not ok for the police either.
– No one should be able to detain you without good cause, police or not. In general, good causes are restricted to: having an arrest warrant in hand (possibly electronic), personally witnessing the crime, having good information that the person is a felon who has an outstanding arrest warrant. There should be three levels of detention – 1- no detention e.g. “you are free to leave”, 2- you are detained while I get your name, date of birth, and address, and while I write a ticket, and then you are free to go, (or equivalently you are detained but only for the length of time that is required for me to serve some other legal paper), 3- you are formally under arrest for a certain specified crime. None of this bullshit where the police can detain you without good cause for “limited amounts of time” which today corresponds to whole days. That should not be allowed even for minutes.
AFAICT, this is perfectly compatible with modern conventional traffic law enforcement. Except of course for roadside sobriety checkpoints and for immigration checkpoints. Those would have to go, and I consider their removal to be a feature, not a bug.
– All search and seizure warrants should carry a requirement to announce yourself and announce that you have a warrant before committing what would otherwise be criminal trespass and criminal breaking and entering – except in times of war or insurrection – natural disasters are not sufficient reason to avoid the announce requirement. This is an ironclad rule. The persons serving the warrant must give a reasonable amount of time for an occupant to hear the announce, get dressed, and come to the door. The persons serving the warrant must then wait an additional amount of time to give the person a reasonable amount of time to read the warrant, and possibly call a lawyer. Only after that may they use the power of the warrant to commit what would otherwise be criminal trespass and criminal breaking and entering.
I see absolutely no good reason why we shouldn’t implement all of this right now. Doing these things would not noticeably restrict the function of the police, and it would put back much needed oversight, checks on their power, and ensure personal liability of cops for their illegal actions. IMO, we need to recognize the police as what they are – bounty hunters, a lot of personal power trips – and we need to regulate the police appropriately – as bounty hunters.
A police state is a state of affairs, or a state or country, where there is a standing army with superior powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure, and where the standing army has additional legal protections against misdeeds. The modern US police match that definition to a T. We live in a police state. We should fix that.
PS: I still need to work out how I should phrase a reasonable exception to allow powers like a general warrant for health inspectors, building code inspectors, et al, while carefully avoiding giving the power to maintain roadside sobriety checkpoints. I need to think if that’s even possible, or if I’m being inconsistent perhaps. I think no, but I’m not completely convinced yet.
Ah, if you google and get away from the local reporting and get toReuters you get this and others, which have more details although the names don’t completely agree (Jesse Barkhorn vs Barcorn vs. Farcorn; no indication of race of anyone involved– I’m assuming by names and lack of reporting otherwise that all involved were white but that’s just speculation)
So that’s something.
But it’s immediately preceded by
And for what it’s worth here’s more detail that the local reporting didn’t cover:
My argument was that none of us knows – least of all you or me – what the context of that encounter was.
Sounds like a good reason to have a trial, present evidence, and find out if someone needs sorting out.
@86, consciousness razor
It seems you are having the same difficulty over my use of the word “suspicious.” You seem to be of the opinion that I’m insinuating going to the door with a gun.
When someone knocks at my door at an odd hour and I am not expecting it, you’re damned right I’m going to wonder if they might rob me. Again, not to the level of me going to the door with a gun expecting a shootout because it is also quite possible (and more likely so) that they’ve just got the wrong door.
By the by, you’re assuming that the specific house is being targeted rather than just looking for any house that might be good. All it takes is one. Yeah, you can’t come back to that house, but you weren’t going to anyway. The guy in the parking lot checking doors to find the one that’s unlocked isn’t going to try your car over and over again. He’s just looking for the one he can get into.
Remember, we’re not talking about actual burglars in this case. The kids were not there to rob the place. We’re talking about being on the other side of the door, wondering who on earth is knocking at this hour. It could be the Prophet Elijah or it could be “someone who is up to no good.” You don’t get to decide for others what level of comfort they are supposed to have when in that situation. Schroedinger’s Burglar is just as legit as Schroedginger’s Rapist.
Again, let me repeat for the third time: This in no way excuses the trooper’s response.
What part of that are you having trouble with?
I’m curious why you are against sobriety checkpoints when drink driving is so very dangerous to everyone on the road. And are you also against the poaching checkpoints that game wardens set up to make sure people aren’t talking more fish or abalone or birds than they are legally allowed?
Thanks for those, woozy (#114). Found two bits from the quotes particularly interesting:
(Emphasis mine)
The implication of this is that on duty under the exact same circumstances, it would be more or less fine to fire at someone who has not committed an obvious crime and has panicked and is hence pretty much unable to respond to ‘lawful orders’. For this the LEO would have only himself to blame; de-escalation and making people fear for their life are on opposite ends of the spectrum of good policing.
The quote almost looks like an admission to that effect. Cops firing at people who might possibly (tenuously) pose a threat is par for the course. Standard procedure.
Oh dearie me. I, too, would like to get indignant about ‘almost being run over’ standing in the road after yelling at people, waving a gun around and watching them drive off hurriedly into a dead end.
Slightly more seriously, my counter would have been ‘Fuck off, muppet’. Stick a gun in my face and I’m gone, no matter who you say you are. Even if he had shown a badge I doubt I would have stopped for the nice copper who’s screaming at me and – for all I know – itching to punctuate the conversation with a gunshot.
@Rowan vet-tech
Because I am taking a principled stand against tyranny and a police state, because I fear that the inevitable consequences of tyranny and a police state hugely outweigh the costs of drunk drivers.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
From the f’ing US Declaration Of Independence:
Sound familiar? It should. Consider the facts of civil forfeiture law. Consider the facts that good estimates show that the police shoot and kill as many people every year as non-police firearm deaths in the US every year. Consider the fact that almost never are police held criminally accountable for misdeeds. Whenever you read a quote about the US founders complaining about standing armies, keep in mind that a proper translation to modern English and modern situations is that “a standing army” in this context should be translated as “a modern police force”.
I haven’t been able to confirm all of the following link yet, but I’ve been following up on its sources, and it’s been mostly holding up thus far.
> ARE COPS CONSTITUTIONAL?
> Roger Roots*
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm?PageSpeed=noscript
Our entire system of criminal justice is fundamentally different than the founder’s, and many constitutional protections simply no longer exist. Several of those constitutional protections are things that the founders went to war over, such as the offenses laid out in the declaration of independence, of a police force that is not accountable to the people through conventional criminal trials brought by normal citizens through a grand jury indictment. Instead, the British King had show trials for misdeeds of his standing army, and today we have plenty of show trials of misbehaving police by state prosecutors. It’s the same thing.
From a phampleter of the time:
Remember how many people are killed every year by police. Remember civil forfeiture law. Just remmeber all of the non-fatal cases of police brutality.
I used to believe that a standing police force with superior powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure, was necessary to maintain society. However, when looked at more closely, the claim just falls apart.
I do want government paid police, because the alternative is that private companies like the Pinkerton Detective Agency would rise again, and at its height Pinkertons outnumbered the actual conventional standing army of the United States – a horrifying prospect. However, these government paid bounty hunters which we call police do not need nor deserve any additional powers nor immunities to do their job.
Rowan, I mean no particular offense, but I find your sentiment to be childlike. You see a problem, and your solution to the problem is to find a parent to take care of the problem and to take care of you. You are giving up your rights and liberties for safety. What you don’t realize is that you are doing more harm to yourself by doing so, because when you give these “parents” more power, they will invariably abuse it, exactly like we see now with the rampant and systematic corruption of police, state prosecutors, and state crime labs.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
I’m not looking for an adult to take care of me. Getting hit by a drunk will curtail both *my* liberty and safety.
@118 komarov.
Yes, the difference in charges between cops and non-cops gave me pause too.
However if you use my emphasis and read the quote as “If he’s not treated as an officer for his role in the shooting, he could still face several other charges, Bianchi said” then I come to a different interpretation. I see it that an an officer he should face charges for not handling it right. Private citizens however do not have follow the same procedures and have some leeway. However there are other options and privileges to cops that citizens aren’t allowed.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I guess, I’m okay *if* these are clear and reasonable exceptions and accountability. A citizen in a life threatening situation is first and foremost innocent and with limited recourse so there ought to be some leeway that he/she should be able to do what she/he can to protect him/herself. A cop with training and obligation to keep the peace should *not* be given so much leeway and should be held to a greater degree of accountability. On the other hand (supposedly) we entrust cops with greater authority and access because we rely on them to keep the peace, so they should have options available to them which Joe Blow wouldn’t have. However, we assume they will not abuse this contract*. So I guess I’m okay with this. In theory. And with accountability.
* (My current feeling is that the police system is thoroughly broken; The cops have systematically broken and created a culture of abusing the contract and trust we have given them. They no longer remember they are working for us and we can no longer trust them with the authority we have ceded them. Accountability has been tossed out the window.)
=====
Anyhoo, for the “none of us know exactly what happened” I think the accounts are all pretty clear. I’m willing to believe the trooper might have thought they were burglars and I’m even will to consider that in the heat of the moment he thought they were swerving at him (although it’ s a stretch). And, fuck it, you want to claim he identified himself, I’m not going to try to prove he didn’t (although I really doubt he did). But it’s still *absolutely* clear he initiated the gun and the shooting and he was utterly and complete irresponsible and wrong. Criminally so.
rrhain:
What I basically said is that that’s not a plausible way for a robber to act. If they’re going to rob your house, they could come up with much better plans. I’m making no assumptions about what you will or won’t do in response to your suspicions, like arming yourself. Instead, if you’re suspicious, maybe you’d call the cops or someone else, try to hide or escape, etc. — that doesn’t matter to me. I’m saying it’s not a reasonable suspicion to have, because it’s not a reasonable way to model the behavior of a supposed robber; and I’m not saying anything about the reasonable or unreasonable actions you’d take in response to that.
And you only have to win the lottery once. But in this case, you don’t just lose a few dollars on a lottery ticket. You might go to prison. People understand the stakes are very high, so they act accordingly and try to come up with something better than half-baked plans that probably won’t work and unnecessarily increase the risk of being caught. If there’s any value at all in not being detected or identified, you’d want to avoid such interactions if possible. And it is possible to do that, by having so many other (better, less risky) ways of finding out whether anybody is home.
The guy in the parking lot obviously doesn’t need to knock on a car window to determine whether someone is in there.
We’re talking about having a suspicion that there were actual burglars, and that isn’t very well supported by the evidence of someone knocking on your door late at night. That’s evidence of lots of different things, not just burglary, and actual burglaries are more likely to not present you such evidence because they’re actually going to be conducted very differently most of the time. I couldn’t tell you the stats, but it’s plausible that this is the least likely way for an actual burglary to happen.
I’m not saying how comfortable a person should be. I wouldn’t be surprised if such discomfort causes a person to make unreasonable inferences given their evidence. So it is understandable, but perhaps there are better explanation’s of the trooper’s behavior: maybe he already believed he was in some kind of danger because of previous events, and that’s why he felt and responded the way he did. Anyway, from a sort of third-person perspective in which we can think about this calmly and rationally (if we leave out speculations about what was already going on in the trooper’s life), it doesn’t look like there’s a good reason to believe burglaries usually work this way.
And do you know anyone you would trust with that authority? Look around you. Corrupt cops, state prosecutors, and state crime labs are the norm, not the outlier. That’s a direct and predictable consequence of policies of the kind which you propose. No, we need to go in the other direction, severely curtailing police power. In the ideal situation, police should have no more police power nor immunities than the average citizen with regard to every law.
PS: Again, health code inspectors, building inspectors, etc., may require an exception, and I am loathe to admit that I think I favor the issuing of general warrants to enable such inspectors.
And you call me naive. At the same time you realize negative aspects of human behavior, your solution appears to be to let people do whatever they want and somehow it will all turn out alright.
EnlightenmentLiberal wrote:
“Corrupt cops, state prosecutors, and state crime labs are the norm, not the outlier.”
No, corruption is not the norm. State and local police law enforcement agencies employ around 1.4 million people. You may read about corruption, after all, that’s what makes the news, but it is definitely not the norm for over one million people.
I fail to see where I said anything like that. I said that we should still have government paid bounty hunters which we call police, and they should still be able to arrest people, and the state prosecutor should still be able to seek criminal indictments from grand juries. I just said that the police do not need nor deserve additional police powers nor immunities to do so. One lucky consequence of that is that no one should be able to stop on me the road with zero cause, no matter whether they are in the employ of the government or not.
You are the one who adopts the magical thinking that because they are “trained”, or because they are appointed by elected officials, or something, they’ll adopt magically better behavior when they are not held personally accountable. Remember the old adage, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I do not know why you think the government-paid bounty hunters which we call police are somehow exempt from this adage.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm?PageSpeed=noscript
Some more:
I couldn’t find a link in a couple seconds of searching, but I’m sure you can, but it has been exposed in several cities that upwards of 75% of the cops regularly carried a second throwaway gun to plant on people that they shot so they could claim self defense afterwards.
And that’s just the cases that we know about.
Some more:
Consider this, same source as above:
That’s the IACP. It describes itself as “The world’s oldest and largest non profit membership organization of police executives, with over 16000 members in 94 different countries.”.
This is an endemic problem. Corruption and contempt of the public is the norm. Good cops are the outlier.
All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. All it takes for bad cops to flourish is for good cops to cover for them, not report them. All it takes for civil forfeiture law to remain on the books is for cop unions to lobby the US congress to not fix the problem (by hopefully banning the practice – except perhaps forfeiture after a relevant criminal conviction).
This right now is the problem – public sentiment like yours. The problem is not a few bad apples. The problem is fundamental to the nature of the systems of modern criminal justice. It creates this corruption because there is no check on their power. Again, please read my link. It’s shocking how little of this is known to the general public.
I didn’t emphasize it enough to my satisfaction. You should really read The Atlantic piece, and then you should be horrified. Here’s the link again.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/
Again, endemic problems that are caused by the structures and systems in place in our modern criminal justice system. Our modern criminal justice system needs to be completely overhauled and redone from the ground up.
Yet you think dangerously drunk drivers should be allowed on the roads because freedom?
I don’t understand your question.
I don’t want drunk drivers on the road.
If I had to choose between 1- living in a world with the fourth amendment, or 2- living in a world with roadside sobriety checkpoints, then I would choose the fourth amendment.
Apparently you are in favor of tyranny and a police state. Gotcha. Glad to know where we both stand.
@122, consciousness razor
For all your protests, the fact of the matter is that that is the way that robbers behave: Knock on the door before you rob the place to make sure nobody’s there. That is one of the guidelines that police will tell you with regard to robbery: One tactic that is used is that they will knock on your door to see if you are home.
When it’s late at night, it’s more likely to be a home invasion than a straight-out robbery, but the point remains the same: Someone knocking on your door that you are not expecting is suspicious.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/doorpound.asp
http://abclocal.go.com/story?section=news/7_on_your_side&id=9322372
http://fox4kc.com/2015/01/10/womans-quiet-afternoon-takes-scary-turn-when-armed-robbery-suspects-knock-on-door/
Yep, you only have to win the lottery once and you only need to find one house that is unoccupied to break into it without worrying about the occupants being home.
“Half-baked”? How is it half-baked to actually try and make sure that nobody’s at the place you’re trying to rob by doing something so simple as knocking on the door?
Yeah, the guy in the parking lot doesn’t need to knock on your door, but he does need to pull on the handle. Upon finding that it’s locked, he doesn’t try again. He moves on to the next car. The guy trying to rob your house, upon finding out that you’re home, isn’t going to try again. He moves on to the next house.
Yep, we’re talking about suspicion of actual burglars because this is an actual tactic that actual burglars use. I don’t know if the person on the other side of the door is just a bunch of kids who have the wrong house or are somebody who has nefarious purposes in mind. You don’t get to tell me not to worry.
Despite your claims to the contrary, if we think about this calmly and rationally, it looks precisely like there’s a good reason to believe that burglaries work this way.
Because we can directly watch them happening this way. This is not speculation. This is direct observation.
Or is that not good enough for you?
@ #128
I have read your link. I’m not horrified. For one thing, DNA profiling comes up in less than 1% of all criminal cases. Of course there should be more oversight, which is true in many areas. Your statement was, “Corrupt cops, state prosecutors, and state crime labs are the norm, not the outlier.” This is bullshit.
@consciousness razor
Also, you’re assuming perfectly rational criminal actors. Might I suggest that many criminal actors are not the best at determining odds, expected payouts, and doing proper personal cost benefit analysis for the long term? I think your analysis assumes these things, which makes your analysis quite suspect.
You don’t have to choose between those, because it is a false choice, because roadside sobriety checkpoints aren’t an instance of “tyranny and a police state” and the Fourth Amendment hasn’t been repealed. The relevant case is apparently Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, with the SC concluding like so:
@tomh
Did you read the part about fingerprints? Did you read the part about how state crime labs are often paid by how many matches for the state prosecutor they find? Finally, your “1%” number is innumerate. You effectively made the argument that my data corresponds to only 1% of actual cases, and thus it is an outlier. You quote a 1% number of criminal cases involve DNA evidence, but how many cases involve official state crime lab analysis? Maybe 5%? Maybe 10%? Thus, the 1% of all criminal cases might itself be 50% of all use of state crime labs. I brought up the stories on state crime labs as just evidence for a trend. Obviously state crime labs are not used in all criminal cases, and attempting to extrapolate as you do is wrong.
Further, as I mentioned several times, this is just the cases we know. It’s likely this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s likely that the actual cases which have been exposed are just the tip of a much deeper and widespread phenomenon. Given the current institutions in place, plus the widespread testimony of people inside the institutions, we have every reason to believe that they will lie to cover other people in the institutions. We should expect that we should only find a small number of police misconducts because of the way the system is currently set up to obstruct and hide all investigations into police misconduct. IIRC, there’s actually laws passed by the US congress or some such to forbid funding and/or publishing data on criminal activities by cops on the job.
Given that we have found such widespread and pervasive abuse, and given our good reasons to expect that the actual problem is much much bigger, I do again assert that police corruption is the norm.
Further, you ignored several other points of argument I made, such as the largest police union lobbying congress to ensure that civil forfeiture law stays. Or the cases of several cities where the majority of the cops carried throwaway guns to plant on their victims – that is the victims of the cops – so that the cops could claim self-defense. Or the other stories of cities where it was standard operating procedure amongst all of the cops to rough up inhabitants on the way to the station. What was that recent case where that poor person had their back broken during the police ride? IIRC, they died shortly thereafter from their injuries, right? Investigation and testimony revealed that many cops did it for decades in that department, and everyone knew about it. Who knows how many other cities have cop departments that do the same thing?
In addition we have the common practice of lying before a judge about confidential informants to get search warrants. Reports indicate that this is common practice everywhere.
As I alluded to elsewhere, it’s also common practice everywhere in the US for SWAT teams to break down doors, with guns drawn, and order everyone onto the ground, over petty offenses like petty drug offenses. I’ll call that corruption for the purposes of this conversation.
Then of course there’s all of the evidence I could bring up regarding the disparate racial impact of policing and conviction. Massive amounts of that.
You’re simply not engaging with reality. Reality is far more bleak than you want it to be, and your apparent statist policy has failed. Our criminal justice system is horribly broken. Embrace reality, please, and help me and the rest of us fix it.
@consciousness razor
I am aware SCOTUS has decided otherwise. This particular SCOTUS decision is flagrantly wrong, and it’s just another example in the long list of examples of how our rights are being eroded and the police state has come to be.
For example, do you agree with me when I take complaints and critiques of the founders against the standing army of the British crown, as found in the Declaration Of Independence and elsewhere, and apply them to our modern police force? Can we agree that many of the constitutional protections were a direct result of the standing army of the British crown, and that several of those critiques apply equally so to our modern police forces? Again, such as superior powers of arrest without warrants, superior powers of search and seizure without warrants, lack of personal liability in court, occasional instances of show trials, and so forth.
The founders of this country fought a violent war of revolution and independence where the primary cause was the standing army of the British crown – again as made abundantly clear in the Declaration Of Independence and other sources – and many of those complaints apply today to our modern police force.
All of the founders, and a large super-majority of the American public at the time of the founding, would not see a significant difference between our modern police forces and the standing army of the British crown which they just fought a violent war of independence to rid themselves of.
Again, I urge you to read this link:
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm?PageSpeed=noscript
Please follow its sources.
So, what then is your position? That the constitution is a “living document”, and the constitutional protections no longer apply because our culture has changed? I always hate that argument. To that argument, I have to ask: Will there ever come a time when it would be properly constitutional for the US congress to pass a law requiring attendance in a church of a particular Christian denomination? Or are only some things open to revision, and some thing never are?
Many of the protections of the bill of rights are aimed to prevent the shenanigans of standing armies, e.g. our modern police force, including such ridiculous things as detaining / arresting someone without cause. If that happened in the days of the founding, or even approx 100 years ago, the victim could go before the grand jury, get a criminal indictment for criminal wrongful arrest, prosecute the case, and if their evidence was good that it happened, then secure a conviction against the government agent that performed the wrongful arrest.
Roadside sobriety checkpoints are just one example. So is “stop and frisk”. So are the laws in half the states that require you to present ID cards to police when demanded – in a car or not, including just standing on the sidewalk. Again, “papers please”. We live in a police state. The fourth amendment was clearly and unequivocably intended to stop shenanigans like this, but the fourth amendment is pretty dead compared to what it was intended to be.
Again, please read the link, check the sources, educate yourself.
PS: Or just say that you think the original intent and original understanding of the majority of constitutional law at the time of the founding is a bad idea, and you think that we should ignore it and ignore the rule of law. I think that’s a preposterous position, but I would not be surprised if you held it. I find too many people, liberals and otherwise, who are all too ready to throw out the rule of law when it suits them. Again, just another case of sacrificing essential liberty for temporary safety. Another case of sacrificing the protection of the law in general, the rule of law, because you don’t have the support of the majority necessary to change the law – in this case the fourth amendment.
What makes it flagrantly wrong? Deal with the reasoning in that case, without going into another of your long and irrelevant diatribes which don’t even touch it. Just say clearly and succinctly which part of the court’s opinion is incorrect (and perhaps which parts are right, if any).
How so? A public road is blocked, so everyone traveling on it is stopped for a short time. If any are found to be drunk driving, they get the standard protections anyone else does in court. They’re not in any sense “arrested” when the police have stopped traffic, and that’s not any great or tyrannical intrusion into their private lives. Since it is a public road and drunk driving is a serious public safety issue, police should have some reasonable ability to enforce such laws which promote public safety, as long as their actions don’t lead to anything worse than the problem itself. And that isn’t worse than the problem itself. There should be restrictions on what police are allowed to do in such situations, along with oversight when they overstep their bounds, but those aren’t restrictions which disallow all possible roadside sobriety checkpoints.
@ #135
I agree with you that more oversight is needed for forensic evidence, more government regulation is needed to root out corruption where it is found, better laws need to be passed, and better enforcement by government of existing laws. I’m sure we can agree on this. My objection was to your sweeping generalization of corruption, then trying to prove it by focusing on a narrow, specific area.
@consciousness razor
Yes they are. Even the wrongly decided SCOTUS decision regarding roadside sobriety checkpoints says that roadside sobriety checkpoints are a search and seizure for the purposes of the fourth amendment. It’s going to be hard to continue this conversation if you’re going to redefine terms to suit your ends, and if you proudly display your own rank ignorance on the topic and pretend that you know something when you haven’t even read the SCOTUS decision.
Jese, next you’ll argue something ridiculous like driving is a privilege and not a right. (Another thing which the current SCOTUS precedent says is bullshit.)
PS: The SCOTUS decision in question does adopt the rest of your reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that roadside sobriety checkpoints are constitutional. The SCOTUS decision states that the search and seizure is a minor inconvenience vs the compelling state interest of stopping drunk drivers, and thus it is “reasonable”. As for probable cause – what’s that? (/snark)
What why is that wrong? And why is implied consent in getting a driver’s license wrong? If driving is a right, cite the constitution where it is a right. I don’t it there….
I don’t see how. Suppose the police stop traffic on a public road, because they have reason to believe a murderer (or a whole bunch of murderers) is somewhere hiding in plain sight in that traffic, which they know because (in this artificial case that’s not like murder) it can be determined the rate for the population (not an individual) at certain times/places is especially high. If I’m not a murderer but I am stuck in that traffic briefly, they are not thereby arresting me for murder or for anything else. They arrest people who actually do present evidence of having been involved in a murder, and they’re simply doing the minimum that they can in such a situation to see if there’s evidence on the basis of which I would be arrested.
They can rightly conduct that kind of search, because that is a reasonable way to do it in that kind of situation, because it’s not being any more intrusive than necessary and in fact traffic on public roads is a moving target that would have to be stopped somehow. I have no clue how a person signing a paper ahead of time, to “warrant” it, would substantially change anything about the situation, either what happens to me or to anyone who actually is caught drunk driving and actually is arrested. And I can’t imagine why it would be right for me to lawyer my way out of a conviction by tossing out the evidence, on the basis that it would’ve been slightly inconvenient for me to be stopped in traffic if I were not driving drunk. That’s not taking the problem of drunk driving seriously at all, and it looks more like an excuse to whine about your wacky interpretations of generic abstract principles than anything having to do with reality or any practical ways to deal with criminal activity.
If it’s possible to enforce laws against drunk driving which actually helps to prevent it happening in the first place, what the fuck would a reasonable way of doing that look like to you?
@Nerd
It’s the same place that we get the rights to contraception, rights to gay marriage, rights to engage in gay sex, etc.
IMHO, this should really be the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
However, more often than not, SCOTUS gives this answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
As for the specific case which I referenced, here it is:
Bell v. Burson
402 U.S. 535 (1971)
SCOTUS
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/402/535/case.html
Quoting from the majority opinion:
Bolding added:
SCOTUS case law is that the states have the standard of “shall issue” a driver’s license when requested unless there is a compelling state interest to the contrary, and once that license has been obtained, it shall not be revoked without a compelling state interest to justify it.
Driving is a right. A licensed right, but totally a right. The word “privilege” in the common language has the connotations that it is granted at the arbitrary discretion of some higher power, which has things ass backwards. That kind of language and thinking is one of subservience and slavery to the government. Thankfully, SCOTUS is still on the right side of this general issue insfoaras the government shall not grant arbitrary rights or privileges. It runs afoul of several constitutional principles, such as the constitutional rules against bills of attainder, and the due process requirements of the fifth and fourteenth amendments, and the equal protections requirement of the fourteenth amendment, and so forth.
It is a right in the sense that it cannot be denied arbitrarily, and barring a compelling government interest to the contrary, the persons of the country shall be able to enjoy that right as they please.
…
@consciousness razor
Look. We need to start at square one. When the police put up a roadside sobriety checkpoint, and a car comes in, the driver is legally obliged to stop the car as per police instructions, and the driver and the car are not free to go – they are being legally detained. Can we agree to this? We need to start somewhere. This detention counts as a search and seizure for the purposes of the fourth amendment’s restrictions on searches and seizures. The person and the car have been seized – they are not free to go. A detention is a form of (temporary) seizure of the person and of the property. Further, they are obliged to show identification and proof of insurance. This counts as a search of the person’s “papers and effects” (quoting the fourth amendment), and again this counts as a search and seizure of the person’s papers and effects for the purposes of the fourth amendment. If you’re not with me thus far, then you are far out in left field, going well beyond even what the IMO wrongly decided SCOTUS case said.
Michigan State Police v. Sitz
496 U.S. 444 (1990)
SCOTUS
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/496/444/case.html
Can I please get some explicit agreement on this point before we try to move forward? Or are you going to continue to say that roadside sobriety checkpoints do not count as searches as seizures for the purposes of the fourth amendment?
Contraception: Not a hazard to other people.
Gay marriage: Not a hazard to other people.
Consensual intercourse of whatever flavor the people involved want: Typically not going to be a hazard for other people.
Driving a multi-ton metal box on wheels at high speed: Very much a potential hazard to other people.
Driving also typically occurs on tax-payer funded roadways; public streets if you will. Which means many members of the public are using that road, and paying for that road, or are walking beside the road. The roads are available for driving use provided certain criteria are met; a test to show that you are aware of traffic laws and can (mostly) abide by them, and that you are actually capable of the act of driving, a license showing the passage of this test, and insurance so that should an accident occur the person not at fault is not left in crippling debt because of the irresponsible or completely unpreventable actions of the person who is ‘at fault’. The reasons for these criteria are many, some of which include the fact that this is a multi-ton metal box on wheels capable of causing large amounts of death and destruction, and the fact that roads are a vital infrastructure for the running of a town and that blockages from accidents or damage can cause widespread financial or physical injury to businesses or those have an emergency.
Also, that you *honestly* are comparing driving a multi-ton metal box on wheels to *contraception* shows just how incredibly out of whack your perceptions are, and why what you say has at most a passing acquaintance with how reality works.
I read it as a privilege.
Implied consent. What is your problem???
@Rowan
The question was asked. I answered honestly. The right to drive and the right to partake in gay sex comes from the same places in the constitution. I’m not sorry that you don’t like the answer. Your reply is an irrational emotional outburst. It makes no sense. Please try again.
I never tried to draw an equivalence in any relevant sense between driving and having gay sex. For example, I never made the argument “You don’t need a license to have gay sex, and thus you shouldn’t need a license to drive”. I also didn’t make the argument “You need a license to drive, and thus you should also need a license to have gay sex”. Had I made some argument like that, then your post would be applicable. But I did not.
For the matter of public record, I am completely ok with requiring a license to drive, and I am completely against a hypothetical asinine attempt to require a license to have gay sex, for precisely the reasoning you laid out. They are not comparable in that sense.
You need to step back and calm down. You’re not being reasonable here, and you’re attacking me for things I didn’t say because you don’t like the things I did say.
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@Nerd
As usual, no reading comprehension. I give a verbatim quote from SCOTUS that says calling it a right or privilege does not matter, due process still applies, and the state must issue without a compelling reason otherwise, and the state cannot take it away without a compelling reason – then Nerd says that it says it’s a privilege not a right. Classic Nerd.
As this decision and others make clear, the state can put in place requirements to meet in order to drive a car. So-called implied consent laws require drivers to submit to a breathalyzer in certain situations or lose their license. Under the reasoning of the court, this does advance a compelling government interest, and there is no less intrusive method that would meet the same interest, and an interest balancing approach shows that the net benefit of safety is worth the net cost of liberty. That’s probably incomplete, but that’s a good start of the analysis of “implied consent” laws w.r.t. SCOTUS case law.
My problem is that implied consent is not boundless. Conventional implied consent case law states that if the officer has reasonable suspicions or probable cause (not sure which offhand), then you can be compelled to take a breathalyzer under penalty of losing your license. In this case, there is an element of individualized reasonable suspicion / probable cause. In the scenario under discussion here, that of roadside sobriety checkpoints, that same element of individualized reasonable suspicion / probable cause is entirely lacking, which IMHO is the biggest argument one can make against it.
Justice Stevens in his dissent (link above) also makes several other good arguments against it, such as: There probably are other programs that do as well as roadside sobriety checkpoints that do not involve suspicion-less seizures. The seizures are random and at night, a hallmark of repressive regimes. The native of the stop (looking for alcohol intoxication) and the environment of the stop give a wide range of discretion to the cops which can easily be abused, much moreso to a fixed regular stop during daylight hours such as screening for airline passengers or for permanent border checkpoints where the search is expected and not surprised, where it’s not at night away from others, and where the rules for searching allow very little discretion of the cops.
First, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has concluded, after numerous field studies, that the number of DUI arrests made by roving patrols is nearly three times the average number of DUI arrests made by officers at a sobriety checkpoint.
Since the Supreme Court held that these checkpoints–usually set up around holidays–must be publicized, lit, staffed, and stocked, let’s use the money for that operation for things like free or reduced charge taxi service. That would see more drunk drivers in back seats than behind the wheel. Heck, let a portion of the DUI fine go to the account, too. In my state, drug and alcohol probation includes “voluntary” monthly donations to some educational and/or deterrent programs; add this fund to the list of the possibilities. Let a portion of the liquor licensing fee go to it. Let those in the general public take a tax break with a charitable donation to it. I can envision a heart-tugging campaign around keeping Christmas merry and bright with the gift of safer roads for holiday travel. Such a campaign could personalize LEO and EMS who have to deal with the aftermath, as well. (I had to do that as an EMT in 1981. It’s still no fun when it doesn’t involve another vehicle.)
I’ve gone through two DUI checkpoints, and I’ve silently given them my printout from the National Motorists Association both times. A checkpoint is not reasonable suspicion, and I’m not going to interact with them in any way that they might use to interpret such from my behavior.
When I get my license, I sign it, stating I will obey the traffic laws. Only if you don’t have a license, do you have a point. And I don’t want to be on the road with anybody who feels their actions are above the law, because they are dangerous simply because of their attitude. I don’t, and won’t, have an absolutist attitude toward traffic laws. They are required for safety. And you can’t prove that your attitude makes the roads safer. They don’t.
@Nerd
The government cannot put whatever conditions suits the whims of the person at the time on that “contract” that you have to sign. SCOTUS has clearly ruled this. If they put some condition that had no bearing to a compelling state interest, then it would be illegal by SCOTUS case law. SCOTUS case law is very clear on this topic. SCOTUS case law is very clear that the only things that the government may require must meet the criteria I laid out above (approx – I’m probably getting some of the minor details wrong). The government does not have unlimited and arbitrary power to demand you do anything that it wants in order for you to get a driver’s license.
You’re still operating under the false notion that driving is a privilege not a right, and that the government can require anything of you in order to get a driver’s license, and the general false notion that you are a slave to the government.
Again, this misunderstanding is understanding because many DMVs regularly post lies such as the classic “driving is a privilege not a right” despite clear SCOTUS case law (cited above) to the contrary. Another sign of the times and the present totalitarian police state that is the United States.
You can read, right? I did explicitly say it’s a search, a reasonable one given the circumstances, and I’ve been agreeing with the court that it’s consistent with the fourth amendment. But you insisting on the term “arrest” suggests a lot more than that, which isn’t appropriate here. And as far as I can tell, you haven’t said anything about what’s supposedly unreasonable about it.
Maybe ask yourself what you think it means to say “chances are good that somebody in this group is a drunk driver.” That should be enough to do something very minimal about that, even though it’s not “we have evidence this specific individual in the group is probably a drunk driver.”
If you had good reason to think there was a thief in a group of people walking around in a public square (or in anywhere), you could prevent them all from walking away without knowing which one it is, while you find out who is responsible. Notice that the evidence in the kind of case we’re considering (that they’re drunk) can’t be hidden or separated from the person, and it can be determined quickly, easily, without a significant burden on any innocent parties, etc. And people do sobriety checkpoints when/where drunk driving is most likely to happen, not least because it is a drain on a department’s finite resources to do it any other time.
The minimal thing you’re doing is what gives you an opportunity to have evidence for a given individual, because they’re in a situation where they could otherwise evade the public’s enforcement of the law on public roads and be responsible for death and destruction. You’re not subjecting one person to this, for arbitrary reasons and in arbitrary ways that have nothing to do with the possible criminal activity in question. And if you don’t get such evidence about an individual, like I said, then there’s no real harm done. There’s just your ridiculous squeamishness because you think somehow things are supposedly to work ideally without having any concrete and practical way of actually doing anything to solve the problem.
Your complete dodge of my post immediately prior to 144 is noted, as is your absurd claim that I’m becoming ‘irrationally emotional’, which is also delightfully sexist of you.
What you are mistaking for ‘irrationally emotional’ is, in fact, utter astonishment at your failure to see blatant distinctions. Distinctions like this one, that I typed previously, up in post 143 which you entirely and utterly ignored to instead make a really poor attempt at gaslighting.
See that part, where those 3 things you mentioned are NOT hazardous to other individuals? And then see that other part, at the bottom of the quote, that makes mention of the fact that cars present a considerable potential of danger to other humans, especially if operated in an unsafe manner? That part that you completely and utterly ignored, because I stated clearly the vast differences between cars and contraception?
@Rowan
No idea what you’re talking about. I addressed that head on when I said:
I have not said anything to the contrary. Again, it’s in your mind, not on paper (electronic text).
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@cs
Earlier, you said this:
That’s still wrong. They are “arrested” for a very relevant sense when police stop traffic.
However, I see I read too far into what you said and didn’t say. I agree that under current SCOTUS jurisprudence, mere detention does not count as formal arrest, and the standards of suspicion and cause are different for mere detention and formal arrest. However, I strongly disagree with this bullshit legal principle too. It’s an abhorrent abuse to allow such things. There’s no good reason to allow thinks like “stop and frisk”, which the moral equivalent of what you’re defending cs, and it’s wrong for all of the same reasons.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms. That’s not how policing should work. AFAIK, in this particular instance, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like this in a majority of circumstances. If a shopowner discovered missing merchandise, he has no authority to lock his shop and prevent customers from leaving until he discovers the thief. The situation should not materially change with the introduction of a police officer.
@136 EnlightenmentLiberal
Just a quick comment on your application of DoI to modern police.. The DoI largely expressed a problem with all of those things happening without us having any representation in the government imposing them. Today we at least theoretically do. Even in practice, if enough people bothered to look up from their iPhones long enough to demand change from the politicians I’m sure it would happen.
The police are out of control because we let them be .. in many cases even cheered them on.
That is what needs to change. And I think it is beginning to, ever so slightly – evidence is a couple cops actually getting indicted recently. I’m not convinced I like the idea of stripping them of all their powers, but insisting they comply with their own rules, and be at least as honest as a fourth-grader, would be an awesome start.
@eternalstudent
Yes and no. If you’ve read enough of the founders, they were concerned about standing armies being imposed by the federal congress too. Their problem with the British standing army and with our equivalent modern police forces would not evaporate just because they happen to report to elected positions. Sure, that was one of their concerns that it was being imposed without representation, but that’s far from the only complaint. I identified several others from the Declaration Of Independence itself, such as: not being held responsible for the murders they commit, being subject only to show trials, and so on, and especially the very presence of that standing army to begin with to enforce the laws. The modern police force are anathema to the constitution and the founders. They called it tyranny, and if it was approved by the federal congress or the states, they would still call it tyranny.
Safety on the road isn’t a compelling state interest? Having everybody on the road licensed and insured isn’t a compelling interest.
The “sobriety” checkpoints, in my area, do a much better job of finding those without a valid license and and no insurance. I don’t, and won’t, have a problem with that. It is a compelling state interest, which you totally ignore in your absolutism. Get real, and I might agree with you. But it requires you to acknowledge that the state has a compelling interest in road safety.
It is the militia, which is in the constitution. Only you don’t recognize the history.
The difference is that I think that giving certain powers to the police will either corrupt existing police, and/or attract corrupt people to the position. Power corrupts. The difference is that you trust the police and the government way too much – in spite of the massive evidence in recent times that the police are not to be trusted. Ferguson for one. See up-thread for more. Our police system is completely broken. It’s beyond the pale. The simple fact that there was no indictment for the police that did a “no knock” search, threw a flash-bang in a hole in the door because the door was “blocked”, blocked by a baby in a baby’s crib – that alone should be the canary in the coalmine. Things are so completely fucked up because of people like you who trust the police.
The police are just bounty hunters. It’s a position that gives power over others, power that you are trying to expand. Of course we’re going to get the worst of humanity in the police. That’s the kind of person who wants to become a cop (give or take the few rare individuals who actually want to help – I suspect most of them give up pretty quickly). We need to be going in the opposite direction of drastically reducing their powers.
We’ve tried this oversight thing time and time again, for decades, and it hasn’t worked. What makes you think it will be different this time? Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same results every time, and expecting a different result the next time. There’s a word for that. Extreme foolishness.
What most people do not understand is that my principled stance is not just because principle, but because that principle has a reason behind it, that putting power into the hands of people and making them unaccountable will almost always lead to horrible results and atrocities. Do I like having drunk drivers on the road? No. However, I’m way more afraid of the police than I am of drunk drivers. In the US, you should be too, especially if you’re not white.
No, I pretty sure I’m the one who brought up those criteria, so of course I know about it. I was merely correcting your flagrant misinformation concerning what the DMV can and cannot require you to do to get a driver’s license. Their power is not without bounds, and SCOTUS has struck down ridiculous provisions before – again see the result of Bell v Burson above.
Now, I happen to think that under standard recent SCOTUS jurisprudence, the majority decision of Michigan State Police v. Sitz was not outrageously wrongly decided. It had some precedent, such as the earlier case that allowed border checkpoints. I just think that the earlier precedent is outrageously wrong too.
Further, even if you buy the border checkpoints legality, there’s still plenty of reasons to argue against the legality of roadside sobriety checkpoints, like Justice Stevens does at length. Justice Stevens, he’s one of those Republican crazy justices right? Who cares what he says. (/snark)
I know it’s going to be hard for you to understand, but that’s a blatant lie. The thing that we call “police” did not exist before the 1830s. The police as thing were invented in British by Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Peel#Police_reform
In America around the same time, there were sheriffs, constables, night watch, US Marshals, and so on, but none of them had any police power whatsoever – at least none compared to the average citizen. The only kind of arrest was a citizen’s arrest. If a sheriff or marshal made a bad arrest, the victim of that bad arrest could go before the local grand jury, get an indictment for false arrest, and criminally prosecute the sheriff or marshal. If a sheriff or marshal did a bad search, the victim of the bad search could go before the local grand jury, get an indictment for criminal trespass and criminal breaking and entering, and criminally prosecute the sheriff or marshal. It was not uncommon for sheriffs to be in debtors prison unable to pay the punitive damages for a bad arrest or bad search.
There was no such thing as police as we would recognize them. There were the occasional private citizens employed by the government, either by salary or by commission, who performed arrests, but so did many other private citizens who were not in the employ of the government. Anyone could go before a judge to get an arrest warrant, search warrant, seizure warrant, etc. That’s how it was done. For the 50 years following the American independence, it was a libertarian wet dream.
The idea that the militia refers to state security forces like police that are used to enforce laws, enact arrests, etc., is beyond ridiculous to anyone with a passing knowledge of history. It’s pure and utter bullshit with not a single shred of credibility to it.
The second amendment was meant to protect the right of every individual to own a gun, in some large part because there was no police! To go here and say that the second amendment is to grant the states the authority to have police is on the same level as holocaust denial in terms of demonstrable historical inaccuracy.
EL:
What? I thought that one thing that’s wrong with stop and frisk is the strong evidence of racial profiling, which violates the 14th amendment. Like I said:
If sobriety checkpoints are conducted in a way that doesn’t offer equal protection, then of course those are wrong (and the cops responsible need to be fired and charged accordingly, since I don’t need to put any trusting in them to always do anything right). So, for example, they clearly shouldn’t be conducted mostly near bars that serve people who are black/gay/etc. What’s the problem then?
It is sometimes amusing in a not at all funny way to look into these conversations where amendments fly around and constitutional rights are brandished about like holy grail an indisputable goods. It is interesting to see how narrow, limited, US centric view even enlightened US liberals have. Often coupled with black and white, either (constitution! founding fathers!) or (tyrany! police state!) thinking.
In EU there are “papers please” and sobriety checks for drivers, exactly because driving is a privilege and also a public good as well as public danger. We also have strict gun control laws and if police shoot someone, it is investigated always as if anyone else did it- i e as manslaugther/murder. We do not have fossilised constitutions and from time to time we change them sligthly when they show to be out of touch with reality as seen in light of new informations available to us now as compared to then (like slow progress to allowing gay marriage and disbanding obsolete laws granting undeserved privilege to religious institutions.
And yet by all objectively measurable factors I am able to find, life in EU is generally better than in US, and we seem to have more actual, real, usable freedoms, even thought people in US might have more theoretical freedoms on paper.
It is not perfect, but not using something because it is not perfect is sure proof way to get paralyzed. EnlightenmentLiberal, there is more to the issue than “fourth ammendmend good, no fourth ammendment bad”. Your view of the problematic is naive and simplistic. If you have not been outside US to other developed countries, try it and look around. If you have been, you probably have not looked around you properly.
I’m curious, what “real, usable freedoms” are available in Europe that are not available in the US? Also, with about 50 countries in Europe, all with different laws, I would think it would be difficult to talk about them as a single entity.
@consciousness razor
Did you even read Justice Stevens dissent?
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@Charly
There’s other reasons in play. The fact is that gun ownership is not well correlated with actual gun violence when you look at country by country stats for countries that actually have significant rates of personal gun ownership. Much bigger indicators are other metrics of societal well-being, socio-economic stuff. The US has so many violent deaths not because of its gun ownership, but because of its history of racial and class warfare and its continuing racial and class warfare.
I should say that roadside sobriety checkpoints are a rather small corner case for what I’m concerned about, and I will admit that roadside sobriety checkpoints are close to the line of reasonableness.
Again, what is not close to the line of reasonableness are: “no knock” warrants of any kind. Lack of access to grand jury indictments and criminal prosecutions for the general public. State crime labs that are controlled by the state prosecutors and police. State crime labs that are paid by the number of matches for the state prosecutors. Any sort of special civil or criminal immunity for cops above the normal citizen for breaking the law, including excessive use of force, brandishing firearms, wrongful arrest, and so on. Ideally, even police power of the police would be rolled back substantially.
I hope none of these things are controversial. Again, we got sidetracked onto a side issue that is really rather far from my core complaints. We could go pretty far with what I want without going the full distance – and even going halfway would still accomplish a lot of good. Again, we can do a lot of what I laid out here and still maintain the use of roadside sobriety checkpoints.
I don’t want to live in a police state, but some of you do. Again, regardless, can we all agree at least that maybe we should roll back a bit the police state in the US? Maybe a lot?
And I still hate this sentiment. It is the sentiment of a slave, of a serf. Driving is not a privilege. My knowledge of the law in other countries is lacking, but I bet in basically all European countries what you said is also flagrantly false. Just like in the US, the European equivalents of the DMV have a shall issue policy w.r.t. driver’s licenses, and if the DMV equivalent denied a driver’s license without a compelling state purpose, then the person could take it to court and win. If the DMV equivalent tried to require you to sign a contract that contained conditions that are not part of a compelling state purpose of driving, then again the person could take that issue to court and win. Just like the US.
Driving is not a privilege. It is a right. It is a licensed right for the safety of others and for the efficiency of all, but it is not granted at the pleasure of the government. It is retained by the people, and can only be denied to a person with a compelling government purpose, such as public safety.
EL –> killfile. Terminal preaching.
But preventing drinks from driving is not a compelling public safety issue? Inconsistent.
“The US has so many violent deaths not because of its gun ownership, but because of its history of racial and class warfare ”
Please, let’s stick to reality. The five states with the highest gun ownership, AK, LA, AL, MS, and WY, have the highest gun death rates in the country. They also have some of the weakest gun laws. The five states with the lowest gun ownership rates, HI, MA, NY, CT, and RI, have the lowest gun death rates in the country. Not coincidentally, they have some of the strongest gun laws. Gun ownership is directly correlated to gun deaths, and to pretend otherwise is simply trying to twist facts to fit pre-conceived notions.
http://www.vpc.org/press/1501gundeath.htm
regardless of the right v privilege debate. Driving is a skill, that the gubmint demands licenses to exercise such skills.
The gubmint is not some monarchical person who demanded that only licensees exercise such skills. The people told the government that the skill was life threatening to bystanders; that only qualified people that have been verified to have the skills necessary to be a safe operator, should be allowed. Only then did a law come into existence, by the demand of the people, that requires licensing and forbids reducing one’s skill through intoxication. Random DUI checks are simply an attempt to keep some from “slipping through the cracks”. Preventing DUI’s is reasonable. IFF [sic] it became mandatory to go through a checkpoint every few miles, every day, you would have a point about checkpoints being evidence of tyranny, but we aint there yet. With you watchin (as we all do), I doubt we ever will get that far down the road.
Definitely, but.. sadly, its also a two edged sword. Our new libertarian visitor would seem to like labs to spend less time testing things, lest the innocent get arrested and jailed. Only… Lets look at rape cases – This is how is it supposed to work:
1. A rape kit is taken.
2. The kit is sent to a lab, along with samples from the person identifies as a the possible perp.
3. The result either confirms, or denies that they had sex with the victim.
4. A determination is made as to whether or not the stories are consistent, or yeah, in this one rare case, maybe it was a false claim.
5. If there is ground to prosecute, a court date is set, and the alleged rapist held in jail, until pending the court case.
This is how it often does work:
1. A rape kit is taken, then shelved.
2. A determination is made, based on who the cops feel is “believable” as to if anything took place.
3. If its determined that something did, which is far too often than it should be, “no”, then they look over the evidence they have.
4. If its not enough to convict, they dust off the kit, and send it to the lab, to be run against the perp. If they think they have enough, it stays, sitting on the shelf, untested.
5. Innocent, or guilty, the alleged perp lands in jail, if the cops decide he is guilty first, before the court (unless of course they actually ran the kit, and either confirmed or denied something happened, and, even then, they might make an excuse for why there was no evidence). Alternatively, even if they are a serial rapist, they go free, because there has a) been a determination that it just didn’t happen, and b) the kit never got tested, so there is no record that this person, even if previously accused, every actually committed any crime in the past, or was, possibly, even brought in on suspicion.
So, in some cases, the innocent end up in jail, and far too often, the guilty never even spend time in jail, never mind go to court. Reesult – serial rapists don’t get caught, until they make a huge mistake, or kill a victim (and, even then, they might get lucky, and some other poor sap will take the fall, because the cops decided that the rape kit was “unnecessary for a conviction”).
And, yes, it does happen – there are whole articles on cases where it has, and testimony from the victims on how many times they have asked, “Did anyone even send my kit to the lab?”, only to get back, “No, we didn’t, because we didn’t think we needed to.”, or worse, “Somehow we lost it, while moving around stuff that was more important.”
The real world isn’t some nice, simple, place where you can draw clean lines between “freedom”, and “safety”. The same thing that would fix misuse of one resource could make is misapplication worse, unless you somehow fix “both” at the same time. And, sorry, but there is no libertarian paradise, in which you get both the right to be 100% free, and also 100% safe. The question isn’t how to get to this bizarre world of imagination and fantasy, but… what is an acceptable trade off? Libertarians seem to think that the trade off is for no trade to happen, and then to blame the victim of this insane view, for when they get raped, robbed, maimed, or murdered. After all, implementing an imperfect solution, never mind understanding why its not working, and fixing it, would be an “imposition” on their precious freedom, which is *always* somehow more important, than constant fear, from all the other people with unlimited freedom, who can, and will, do anything they please, with us in their cross hairs (whether it be the guy with 100% freedom to pick your pocket, as long as they are not caught by the victim, or the drunk driver, who has 100% freedom to not be challenged, until he actually runs over someone, and presumably leaves behind enough evidence to find and arrest them for it.)
I have yet to find a libertarian with a coherent explanation on how you get this fantasy of 100% freedom (which can only logically exist if you are totally alone in the universe, and no other thinking beings can take advantage of you), while also being protected against all those other entities, who have drastically different ideas about what they should be free to do, which might even include taking everything you own, or just not giving a damn if you are in their way, or just plain dead, and thus no longer *in* that way. All you get from them is delusions of paradise, and an almost religious apologists for how its “possible” to get both, if you just did… “stuff”, which work, instead of the “stuff” that doesn’t. But, “stuff”, like “prayer” or “gods grace” is an undefinable set of objects, which are merely presumed to exist, if we but abandoned the “false world” we live in and “seek enlightenment”. lol
@Nerd
And nothing of value was lost. You couldn’t read your way out of a wet paper bag, as demonstrated on numerous occasions.
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@Rowan
I did admit that it’s a legitimate government interest. I also said that there’s other reasons to object to it, and I gave the example of Justice Stevens’s dissent. You also need to work on your reading skills.
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@Kagehi
I am no libertarian. I regularly advocate wealth redistribution programs for the purpose of wealth redistribution, including heavy progressive income taxation, and incredibly heavy death taxes, plus programs to spread the wealth, such as welfare, free public health care, free public education, public works programs, FDA, etc. I’m talking like 90% or even 99% income tax rates on the top 0.1% percentage of people by income.
The reason is that money is power, and I am afraid of the massive power wielded by the filthy rich, and that needs to be restrained, just like I am afraid of the massive power of a massive modern police force that is currently answerable to no one – give or take our disfunctional election system.
Sounds great. I am assuming that reasonable bail is offered. That’s another thing which is totally fucked up today, AFAIK more or less every amount of bail set is unreasonably high.
That’s correct.
In this particular case, that’s how the wrong side views the question, because they see no danger that will stem from giving government agents more policing power. And on that issue I must politely but strongly disagree with seeming everyone in this thread.
I do no such thing. Again, I want government funded police and prosecutors. I just strongly believe that the police do not need superior police powers nor immunities to do their job, and I strongly believe that the police and state prosecutors do not monopoly access to the grand jury and criminal prosecutions to do their job, and I think the system would work much better if private citizens could also press criminal charges against the police when they fuck up without asking the state prosecutor for permission first.
I recognize that my way does lead to more criminal cases that will not be solved compared to living in a police state. I am also very willing to suffer those small number of additional unsolved criminal cases to be free of the corruption and abuse of the police and government that invariably exists in a police state. It’s not a mere question of freedom vs safety. It’s also a question of safety from common criminals vs safety from the police.
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@slithey tove
So, at least there is a line for you. I’m actually rather partial to Justice Stevens’s reasoning in his dissent, which is that a permanent checkpoint that I have to go through every day is in many ways less obnoxious and less prone to police abuse than roadside sobriety checkpoints. The roadside sobriety checks are placed randomly and with surprise, and because they are at night, and due to their nature, it allows a very wide degree of police discretion, which then invites a very wide amount of police misconduct.
I am seriously concerned for life and limb when I have to go through a roadside sobriety checkpoint. Note that I never drink. I am alone, at night, with a bunch of power-hungry cops, who can detain me further at the slightest provocation, and if they don’t like me, then get a trained so-called “drug dog” who is trained to signal when needed, so they can search me and my car, and as necessary the police can invent the story that I ate the drugs or drugs are up my ass, and then the police can force strip searches and medically invasive ass searches for these non-existence drugs. This regularly happens, and you as the citizen has no recourse, and the police never get punished. For the cherry on top, the police will then bill you for the anal cavity search.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/22/1264609/-Are-drug-sniffing-and-bomb-sniffing-dogs-just-props
http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/innocent-man-given-anal-cavity-search-colonoscopy-after-rolling-through-a-stop-sign/
I note that the case was settled, but standing jurisprudence is that the cops themselves would not probably be found civilly or criminally liable.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/us/georgia-toddler-stun-grenade-no-indictment/
This is the country that we’re living in. The cops themselves face little incentive to change their ways because they can often commit literal murder and get away with it, plus the plethora of lesser abuses that happen daily across the country.
Whereas, with a permanent checkpoint like those in airport terminals, due to the much more standardized procedure, and to the oversight of others present, I know the likelihood of abuse is much smaller.
@tomh
The statistics are all across the board on this issue. I’ve looked into the matter numerous times, and I never came away satisfied.
Let me note one error that you are making in your argument: Focusing only on gun deaths. Rather, the appropriate measure to look at is murder numbers in general (and separately suicide numbers in general). One should expect that with less access to guns, some amount of would-be murderers would turn to other methods.
Regarding murder rates, I just looped up some numbers for murder rates by US state outside the context of the gun discussion, and so hopefully reliable, and I looked up some plausible numbers for gun ownership rates by US state. My random-ass sources:
Using year 2013.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state
Using numbers from the picture:
http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-ownership-by-state-2015-7
I did a standard linear regression, and I got a number of about 0.15 for the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, and thus a r^2 value of about 0.022. Apologies for any mistakes in my math (specifically, apologies for any errors in my use of google docs or inputing failures). That’s really small. I am not a trained statistician – just a few courses in college and a math major – but I think it’s fair to say that the evidence indicates that gun ownership rates are not something we should be focusing on if we want to reduce murder rates and violent crime. Rather there are much bigger indicators and causes that would make a huge difference in murder rates and violent crime rates, such as poverty levels and education, which I want to solve via wealth redistribution programs and government funding of welfare and public education paid by progressive taxation and incredibly heavy progressive death taxes. That might actually do something.
Regarding gun control in particular: In the United States, it’s a politically dead issue. So-called assault weapon bans are a joke made by people with no knowledge of reality. Magazine capacity limits do almost nothing for mass shooters, which constitute IIRC like 1% or less of all gun deaths, and magazine capacity limits do basically nothing for the rest of gun deaths which constitute 99% of all gun deaths.
The only policy that I can see making a difference in potentia is the simple banning of all semi-auto firearms and all revolvers. Anything short of that would not make a material difference in a vast number of actual scenarios involving gun deaths. However, good luck getting that US constitutional amendment passed. Again, I think it’s a much better use of our political capital to do things that will have much higher impact on this problem and many others, specifically wealth redistribution programs for fun welfare, public health care, public education, and other public works.
Oh, sorry for the spam. One other thing. I think that there is a constitutional way forward that would significantly impact the number of gun deaths, and it shouldn’t even piss off most of the reasonable gun nuts.
First, close all the loopholes on background checks. I’m still annoyed that this hasn’t been done yet.
Second, require a course to obtain a license to own a firearm. This is not a license per-firearm – that would really piss off the gun nuts and perhaps run into constitutional concerns. It’s like a driver’s license in that it covers all cars, err legal guns. Then, make the class actually difficult, a day or two at least, and include in it all of the scare-stats about how guns make you less safe, give sources, teach proper handling rules, teach the current laws about self defense, and so forth.
As a slightly more extreme thing we can do, which IMHO is entirely constitutional, is require that anyone who wants a gun license must pass the equivalent of military boot camp. The legislative history is quite clear that the states and the congress can require members of the militia (e.g. every adult male) to show up for yearly combat training. I’m sure no one will complain if we make that service voluntary, but if you do not show up for service, then no gun owner license for you. Of course, for the final delicious irony, make this boot camp publicly funded. 1- To ensure that there are no constitutional issues regarding it (see “poll taxes”). 2- Because it would be really funny for gun owners who tend to be anti-government and anti public funded programs to be required to attend a government funded program to get their gun owner license.
I’m sure my boot camp proposal would ruffle a lot of feathers, but it does have the added benefit of being on quite solid constitutional grounds IMHO. And frankly, fuck the people whose feathers it would ruffle. Ever since I had this idea, I’ve been a really big fan of it. For the people who want to own a gun, sure, but we’re going to train you first, in its use, in the law, and in the stats on the danger of its possession, before we let you get one. Plus weed out those insufficiently mentally incompetent of owning a gun, and weeding out former criminals too.
PS: Note: To remain on rock-solid constitutional ground, the military service would need to be restricted to merely showing up for training once or twice a year. Any further obligations might run afoul of constitutional arguments.
Now, I go ahead and dare anyone to call me a libertarian.
@ #169
“I’ve looked into the matter numerous times, and I never came away satisfied.”
That doesn’t stop you from declaring, “The fact is that gun ownership is not well correlated with actual gun violence.” That sounds pretty sure for someone who is not satisfied. In fact, nothing could be more strongly correlated. Every year, hundreds of children are killed accidentally, and thousands more wounded, because of the simple fact that their parents own guns. It has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with gun ownership.
Hey! Before you folks move entirely from sobriety checkpoints to gun control (which is at least in the right vicinity for the OP), I’m still kinda mad that EL has to answer everyone when no one acknowledges points in agreement with EL that they don’t seem take into consideration.
For one, did you not see that I wrote above that National Highway Traffic Administration studies show a sobriety checkpoint to be LESS EFFECTIVE than active roving patrols? Almost 3:1 LESS EFFECTIVE?
Rowan vet tech, if you want to be safe on the roads, if you want this “compelling public safety issue” to be handled, why argue for one of the most individually invasive yet least effective methods?
Since the 1990 ruling, the police know they’re not going to arrest many drunk drivers at a checkpoint. They have to publicize them. They can’t stop citizen groups standing farther out to inform motorists of the checkpoint. Although police still seem to like checkpoints as a deterrent, there are drunk drivers giggling their way down the road one block over. Whether drunks are avoiding because the site was officially publicized or they were informed by word of mouth, they’re on a detour that puts them on the road for more miles than if they’d driven the direct route. A saturation patrol area, on the other hand, while also publicized, doesn’t give a drunk driver a single location on a single roadway to avoid.
And Nerd, you switched to talking about frickin’ paperwork without acknowledging the inefficiency of sobriety checkpoints against the immediate safety issue of impaired driving. Why do you want people arrested/cited over paperwork? My brother once accidentally threw away his current rather than expired insurance card when he cleaned out his glove compartment. My son had a medication-related seizure. If I hadn’t retired just months before, he would have had the choice of losing his job or driving illegally during the six months suspension. My neighbor to the east lost his license because he lost his job and fell behind on child support. He drove illegally because — guess what — he needed to get to his new workplace if he was going to catch up. A former coworker returned from the supermarket to find her house engulfed in flames. She totally forgot: one burned piece of paper in the ruins was a reminder to renew her driver’s license. My dad had just finished the surgery, radiation, and chemo for lung cancer, and we breathed a sigh of relief. He suddenly collapsed, and we found that his cancer had metastasized to his brain. He died the day before his scheduled transfer to hospice. Over the course of that time, I forgot to renew my car’s registration. I called mom when I realized it. Turns out, she’d forgotten the same thing. However, all of us, if ticketed at a checkpoint, would have had to go to the courthouse. While many judges do waive court costs for the forgetful, none are obligated to do so. I wonder about costs waived in places like Ferguson. Hmmm.
On top of that, the LEO at the checkpoint has the arbitrary power to wave one uninsured driver on with a stern “You take care of that” while deciding to direct the next to a parking area for the citation and further perusal for possible intoxication.
So screw sobriety checkpoints. I won’t roll my window down far enough for a flashlight with a passive alcohol detector to be thrust inside. I won’t converse beyond an initial loud and distinct “Hello, officer” so that someone can subjectively decide my words are slurred. And I’m loud so I won’t be asked to roll my window down more at the outset or have the claim that I became loud (agitated) as things progressed. If there are questions, I recite “I’m going to remain silent.” I won’t make eye contact so that someone can subjectively decide my eyes are bloodshot or glassy. I refuse a subjectively evaluated field sobriety test. And since they can say you’re voluntarily remaining in contact with them unless you indicate otherwise, I broken record repeat “Am I detained, or am I free to go?” Don’t let them train you to behave as if asserting your rights is something only the guilty try to do.
Cop gaslight people all the damn time. They are permitted…no, they’re TRAINED to lie to you. They deflect to things like “Are you a lawyer?” if you assert your rights. They pretend to be shocked with questions like “You’re not going to talk to me? You’re not going to stop filming me?” They’ll tell you it will go better for you in court if you confess to them.
If you think people are endangered by a lack of sobriety checkpoints, show it. Twelve states don’t allow them. Set up a spreadsheet, get the numbers, determine the rates and percentages. Folks round here are disgustedly perplexed when polls show the ridiculously high percentage of people who believe in creationism. Are you shocked to hear that the majority of Americans rate impaired driving as an important social issue ahead of healthcare, poverty/hunger, racism, and education? Or, hey, do you care about domestic violence? Maybe if cops on the job were to hear on a more regular basis that people have the right to refuse them, maybe the percentage of DV among law enforcement would not be a minimum of twice the national average. Only 1% of officers with positive drug tests are on the job a year later. How weird that 28% with a DV report are still employed.
I perfectly understand and agree with “I want fewer drunk drivers on the road.” But I don’t understand arguing for inefficient, rights-infringing methods to reach that goal. I don’t want to end up living any place like Miami Gardens.
Easy, in my area up to 25% of the drivers don’t have licenses/insurance. Think about that for all of twenty seconds. Both are required by the state. What is YOUR problem with those items being checked?
@athyco
Thanks. Maybe they’ll listen to you. Hell if I know why people always seem to never read what I actually write, and it only happens in Pharygnula.
That’s nice.jpg
As I said, I don’t care about the artificial measure of “gun deaths”. I care about the measures of “accidental deaths from all sources”, “intentional homicides from all sources”, and the like. Gun deaths is not my pet issue. Making the world into a better place is my issue. And in the political climate that is the US, and the facts on the ground about the apparent relatively miniscule correlation between gun ownership rates and homicide rates, spending time on gun control is one of the worst ways you can waste your time if you want to make the world into a better place.
Which is a simple falsehood, and a pernicious one at that. If you want to make the world a better place, if you want to reduce gun deaths and murders of all kinds, then the number one thing you can do to help is to improve people’s economic security. Short of a ban on all semi-auto firearms and revolves, restrictions by kind of gun gun in this country will do squat. That is a fact. Don’t like the gun control lobby lie to you about magazine limits, assault weapons bans, and the like. (And again, I favor universal background checks, and requiring full-on once a year military training and training in the relevant law to obtain a gun owner license.)
An aside: About 50 years ago, perhaps the number one thing you can do to decrease gun deaths is to remove lead from gasoline, which is thankfully already done. There’s some rather interesting and perhaps compelling evidence now that the removal of leaded gasoline might be responsible for a 50% drop in violent crime. Again, that’s perhaps one half of violent crime gone because we stopped putting significant amounts of the neurotoxin lead into the environment and into the bodies of babies and young adults, which really really messes with brain development in exactly the ways that you would expect lead to higher rates of violent crimes. Some of the recent statistics look really good on this one AFAICT.
Think for all of twenty seconds? All right. Let’s do that.
The first problem that came to me was the same problem I have with the sobriety checkpoint. The publicized, temporary, and stationary roadblock is the LEAST effective way to solve the damn problem. Wow. I wonder if you’d thought for twenty seconds that I might come up with that.
Let’s now think about this from younger to older. Many states have limited licenses, so active roving patrols could look out for violations in that vein as well as for the erratic driver who may be impaired. In my state, 16- and 17-year-olds can’t drive between midnight and six a.m. They can’t have more than one passenger. Are officers in your state trained to look out for such behavior? Are there social media programs to make driving limitations clear? In my state, students must sign an agreement for random drug testing if they want to participate in extra-curricular activities. What if that agreement also required no record of unlicensed/uninsured driving?
My neighbor’s (yep, same one) son was ticketed for driving his dad’s truck down a dirt road shortly after his 13th birthday. (Dumb kid. He knew the LEO shooting range for the entire county –largest county in the state — was down that dirt road.) He used what was left of his birthday money, scrounged payment for odd jobs around the neighborhood, came up with the $75 he needed for the money order, and mailed it off. Never came clean to his dad until the record came up when the kid applied for his learner’s permit at 15. The sheriff that ticketed him let him drive home. He knew the family; he thought for sure the boy would tell his dad.
What if he’d not been allowed to apply for the learner’s permit until…say…three months after his 15th birthday? What if a “vehicle has been operated by an underage driver” notation had been added to the registration and that information mailed to his dad? What if dad had to pay an extra ten or twenty bucks for his next tag sticker because of that notation? I’m sure the son wouldn’t have continued driving his dad’s truck for almost two years after that ticket.
Of course, his dad had bragged about teaching the boy to drive at 12.They both saw it as an honorable rite of passage. Heck, lots and lots of people in the area did. Who could really be surprised that this young man has had his license suspended three times? Every time was a slap-on-the-wrist fine and extended suspension. He’d count each trip as a win until his next stop. If a ticket cost him $150 and he’d been driving around as he pleased for 150 days? That was only a dollar a day! Pffft.
Now, my good ol’ boy neighbor who really did want to pay child support to his first wife was also an example to his son of “honorably” driving without a license. But if my state had a limited license for him, too, he could be on the road legally to go to and from his work! He’d be insured if you had an accident with him on your morning commute. Sounds like a much better scenario to me.
Does your state often impound the vehicle for unlicensed/uninsured driving? Mine rarely does. The beginning of Sandra Bland’s arrest video shows that troopers in Texas don’t. They can even give warnings instead of citations. Forget about impounding, right? (Steamed me that they included him being kindly stern to the summer session college student for a few seconds before asking her about her courses. What reason did they have to include that? I have my suspicions.)
Well, why don’t they impound more often? Maybe they’d determine that impound is optional for the first or second offense, but not any others. If the unlicensed/uninsured driver is the owner, he might need to lose that vehicle. If he can afford to get it out of impound, slap a keypad door lock or keypad ignition on it before you let him tow it away. He gets the code when he gets licensed/insured at the end of his suspension. If the owner is not the uninsured driver, put a notation on the registration that’ll come up when the tag is run: “Impound this vehicle if driven by X.” The owner would then be required to have the keypad installed. He’d get the code right away, but if X is pulled over a third time in that car? The owner loses a vehicle.
We need to think clearly about making unlicensed/uninsured driving unrewarding but not unworkable. I’d fight tooth and nail against my own ideas for impounding in states in which sobriety and paperwork checkpoints are allowed. Speeding over a certain limit or in usual pedestrian areas? Yes — impound. Reckless driving? Of course — impound. Equipment issues like tag light out? No, don’t be ridiculous, but maybe make that registration note. Mail the notification if the driver is not the owner.
Sam DuBose didn’t deserve to be shot in the head for putting his car in gear, but the unworkable became unbearable for him. He knew he wouldn’t be getting a citation for that stop. You don’t have to unbuckle your seat belt for a citation. The officer doesn’t try to open your door for a citation. (Something Tensing may have developed a habit of doing.) I’ve seen people jeering that those upset about Sam DuBose’s death are ignoring his long list of citations and arrests. Yeah, but not one of them was for violence. Twenty-five of them were for the damned paperwork — license, insurance, tag.
I find that enough for me to consider it a problem. If I think about it for more than twenty seconds, I may be able to come up with more.
athyco@147:
How about something like Operation Red Nose? It’s well known in Quebec, and has since spread across the country. They do a good-cop routine to the government’s bad-cop routine: The Nez Rouge ads are funny and upbeat whereas the government keeps reminding us that if you drink and drive you’re going to kill someone.
Strangely, their website doesn’t have any studies about the effect on drunk-driving rates or effects. Seems likely to have reduced them, but it’d be nice to see the data.
(It’s also not well translated, and even in French, not really well laid out.)
On topic this article mentions:
So what changes depending on whether he’s acting as a cop or private citizen is just precisely which lines are relevant in the books that are thrown at him. Important in terms of the technicalities of laying charges that stick, not so important in the grander scheme of things.
His being a cop means he’s got the fraternity trying to prevent books being thrown at all, of course. But even then, it seems a bit hard to argue for someone who was shooting at fleeing kids.
Let me link to a recent blog post by Mano Singham.
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2015/08/03/suggestion-to-reduce-police-abuse-raise-income-taxes/
Read it. It’s horrifying.
He quotes Jack Hitt at Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines
In many places in the US, the police are not here to protect you. That’s a myth. In many places in the US, the police’s major function in practice is to extract as much money as possible from the poor and to repress and oppress minority populations.
It’s all about economics, racism, and class warfare on the poor.