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Police Database Lists 'Future Criminals'
Rio writes: "A Local6.com article tells us about a database that contains a list of people who police believe are likely to break the law. It features names, addresses and photographs of potential suspects --many of whom have clean slates. Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods."
If they don't have me listed yet, then their database is no good.
Soon they are going to have tabs on if we wash our hands in the bathroom....
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
We also need to be proactive in preventing terrorist countries with nuclear population control.
how long till the suspected criminals-to-be are arrested "just in case"?
Cthulhu fhtagn!
Statistics show that lower income minority population usually cause more crime then high income majority population.
Why does the author act suprized with his last sentence?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Minority Report?
If you've ever handled a penny the gub'ment already has your DNA. That's why they keep them in circulation.
Might as well send them a cheek swab now so they can clone you...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
>Soon they are going to have tabs on if we wash our hands in the bathroom...
Well, you're supposed to wash them anyway, so why are you afraid? Oh, I see...
Sure it might be legal but that doesn't make it wise. What I'd like to know is where do the people come from who implement these policies? I think Arthur Clarke was right when, in "The Songs of Distant Earth" IIRC, he suggested that anyone who wanted a political office was, by definition, emotionally unsuited to having that office.
I didn't, but then that's just because Tom Cruise is an anti-American loser, and trash talks America.
But this story sure remindsme of that premise.
Unless of course, you don't wash your hands, you filthy bastard.
Soon they are going to have tabs on if we wash our hands in the bathroom....
This is part of a disturbing national trend.
In Ohio, they're keeping a DNA database of CLEARED suspects!
John
The drops of water don't know themselves to be a river; and yet the river flows.
I'd be curious to know if this program was created before or after someone heard about Minority Report ? While I'm opposed to it on ethical grounds, it sounds legal as long as the justification for arrest is not based solely upon appearing on the list. That is, the arresting officer(s) are going to have to charge the "suspect" with some crime other than appearing on a list.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
Maybe they will start deciding at birth what people will do with their lives. I can see it now, they kill the kids whom they think will cause problems in the future, and give everyone else their life's salary when they turn 18. Complete predetermination.
Just get a list of current government officials. You can't get possible criminal list with better odds then that.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
...Politicians on the list? Don't they come from a high crime neighborhood (the Capital Building)? Aren't they likely to commit crimes (soft money, self-imposed pay raises and yes, the ever-evil DMCA)? Until I see some senators and other high ranking government officials on this list, it just won't be believable...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
I hate it when people always use racism as an excuse. I mean sure a database of people likely to commit crimes may not be the best thing in the world. The police would probably look at it every time they didn't have a suspect and check for anyone who is likely. I'm guessing that would lead to more than 1 innocent person being arrested.
However, I absolutely HATE it when people put a racist spin on things. They are saying hey! the police made a list of likely criminals and they chose people in minorities! they are racist! NO. If you read it correctly the police chose people who live in high crime areas. People who live in high crime areas are probably more likely to commit crimes than people in low crime areas. Common sense. high crime area = more people who commit crimes. And it just so happens that in said high crime areas many of the residents are minorities.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
redundant?
Lots of other professions speculate on compilied data. The /. posting here implies that they are guessing completely, but in fact they are really just taking note of people that are hanging in shady areas, loitering, with no real reason to be there.
If the majority of those people end up commiting a crime, and they see a pattern, I see no problem with getting familiar with those faces in case anything ever does happen.
Now, it would be funny to see some CEO's pop up on a fbi list.... this ceo has aurthur anderson consulting as his auditor, a seemingly inflated stock price... hes probably laundering, lets keep an eye on him!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Most crime happens in poor, minority-dominated neighborhoods. It only makes sense to increase the police presence in those areas, through random patrols and targetted surveillance of possible hotspots and hotheads.
The people who live in those neighborhoods have a right to live in safety. If this can effectively retard the development of criminals, isn't it worth it?
This why we have affirmative action programs like "Midnight Basketball". When there is a possibility of someone going down the path of crime, it is much cheaper to stop them when they haven't done anything than it is to incarcerate them later.
I have been pwned because my
how long till the US invades and removes the governments of other countries, "just in case?"
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This is such crap. I can only wish bad things upon the Wilmington, DE LE offices.
Amen, Brother!
Taking pictures of people stopped for loitering. How low tech. These days, more and more DMV's are going with computerized drivers licenses including pictures. Now all they have to do is to use the dl database to compile information based on address (since location is obviously an important criteria for them) and then just pull the pictures. This could be done without anyone (i.e. the public) knowing. Heck, they could be doing it now.
Now true, this would be easy to defeat by providing false info, or getting phoney licenses, both easy enough, but the man would still be able to get a large db up and going quickly and quietly.
is that why they called the movie "Minority Report"?
ChopSuey
A Harvard man and a Yale man are at the urinal. They finish and zip up. The Harvard man proceeds to the sink to wash his hands, while the Yale man immediately makes for the exit.
The Harvard man says, "At Hah-vahd they teach us to wash our hands after we urinate."
The Yale man replies, "At Yale they teach us not to piss on our hands."
State and federal prosecutors say the tactic is legal. The photos are being taken by two Wilmington police squads created to arrest drug dealers.
Many of the people whose photos have been taken were stopped briefly for loitering and let go.
Then after the article, there is this notice:
Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Does this mean that /. is in violation of AP's copyright?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
How did they get my photograph?
Pixels keep you awake!
We could save a whole lot of trouble by having everyone chained up and electronically monitored at birth. We could most likely achieve a zero percent crime rate. We've just got to find someone that everyone trusts to monitor the system and administer electric shocks to those suspected of contemplating bad thoughts. Someone pure of heart. We better get voting, ideally using some of those ultra secure secret electronic voting machines..
air and light and time and space
They can have databases all they want [provided they can justify the expense to the voting public next time around]. Provided they don't violate your civil rights who gives a fuck?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
That's from this article.
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Why is parent post moderated as flame-bait? They bring up an extremely valid point. What if this list starts being used in such a way, like minority report? I see this as being a definite possibility, although maybe not an extremely likely one, but it still could happen.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
``Loitering'' basically means the cop thought you looked out of place. If that's all it takes to be branded as a suspect--and, don't forget, a suspect is somebody who's guilty of some terrible crime but just hasn't been caught yet--then you better not get caught staring at a cop's jackboots.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
These police are amateurs. My money says 90% of those in the database are *actual* criminals, having managed to violate the DMCA one way or another.
Cheers
-b
We recently got in a heap of PR trouble about not caving into federal pressure to harrass persons of arabic descent. Same law.
The cops here are not allowed to keep files on citizens excepting in the course of an active criminal investigation.
There is some sense here in the U.S. It's just hard to find.
Cheers.
I view privacy as my first line of defense against the assault by the State and business on my freedom. Too many people seem willing to disregard their privacy, or not at least not care too much about others delving in to it. Contrary to many Libertarian values, I believe this is a situation where more government regulation is required to strengthen and protect my liberty. The US has shockingly poor privacy laws, and it seems now that Europe is on the brink of weakening their own inadequate ones. In the UK, I view the 1984 Data Protection Act as bare-minumum foundation, yet even there, the current Labour government is making noises about changing the law.
The Worst State(tm)
(if anyone read the cover-page article in The New Republic..)
Delaware now seems not only to be the leading pro-corporate leech-state in America (ever see where all of your credit card bills are mailed from) but also the first to start the "pre-crime" division? (ala Minority Report).
And what right do they have to divulge people's personal information without their consent, when no overriding law would allow them to do so (i.e. the child sexual offender laws, etc).
Is there any legal precedent for this???
IMO, if these people are being treated as criminals without actually committing a crime, they might as well commit crimes. I don't know about you, but if I were singled out as a potential criminal, my first order of business would be to remove all doubt by killing everybody dear to the person that lets this continue.
Stastics also show that people who eat breakfast are in better shape than people who skip breakfast.
That doesn't mean that an unhealthy person will lose weight by suddenly starting to eat breakfast.
There is a significant difference between a causitive relationship and a correlation.
That doesn't mean anything though. You can use stastics to prove anything. 85% of all people know that.
best web host ever
The "future criminals" list, according to the article, is being collected by an anti-drug squad.
Yet another example of how absolutely disgusting the "war on drugs" has become in this country. They're paying a group of policemen to spy on ordinary citizens because they might smoke pot some day, or try a handful of mushrooms.
When can we get these retards back on the street fighting actual crimes? (Actually, do we even need the services of these particular retards anymore?)
Does anyone actually support the war on drugs anymore? If so, what are they smoking?
- A.P.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
George Orwell's "Thought Police" seem to be a step closer. Are we going to be arresting potential hackers because someone is computer literate? How about arresting potential rapists because the person is about to hit their sexual prime?
What are the requirments for entry into this exclusive database? Income level? High incidents of arrest of your immediate family? High intelligence? Low intelligence? Neighborhood you grew up in?
Take this a step further: Just enter EVERYONE into the thing and link it with our upcoming national ID system. Now everyone is a suspicious person until they prove themselves innocent.
This is wrong on SO many levels. IMHO of course.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Now some people are:
Assumed to be soon guilty and searched for until arrested,
Then innocent,
Until proven guilty?
This sig provides no comical value.
Too many people with power are taking all these movies way to seriously. Come on people - they are just movies. It doesn't mean we have to actually implement every insane idea portrayed in a movie. It's called a "story" and I for one would like to keep it that way.
To the rest of the sane population:
If you don't want a nation based on Gataca and Minority Report, you had better start voting these a-holes out of office.
-- Knuckle Blood : Official Lube of Team Rusty Nuts.
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Sadam has already broken the agreement that ended the war with him. So any bombs that drop in his country are his own fault.
This database is insane. Even people with clean records being stopped just so their picture can be added!!! Never mind catching all the criminals they already know are out there!!!
... here
I would best most of those CEO's don't live in high crime areas
[This was a joke to the moderator challenged]
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I bet if they targeted White CEO Execs, everyone would cheer in rejoice. I can't stand special interest groups, tree huggers and minority lovers. Because a bunch of minorities is in the database, it's all wrong. If it were 200 White CEO's I'd bet most people would feel different.
They're just crusing high crime areas (where the probabability is greater that a resident will be involved in criminal activity), then they find someone who's doing anything that's even remotely in violation of the law (loitering for instance), then adding them to the probability list.
And of course, they cite numbers of "successful guesses" but fail to mention how many misses. Its not necessarily meaningful. Very VERY few people are completely 100% in compliance with the law. I wouldn't go so far to say that someone who occasionally speeds is to be considered a criminal, but if you look at the teeth many laws have, especially copyright law, many of us are in violation to the degree that we could spend many thousands of years in prison and be fined billions of dollars, should they bring those cases to court and press the maximums.
6.6 Million americans (about 3%) are currently under supervision of a correctional institution, either in prison, or on parole or probation. And that's RIGHT NOW. That's a significant percentage of the population. To drive around someplace where that percentage is signficantly higher, it wouldn't be terribly unlikely to get a 10% matchup with pure guessing by pointing out random people who will one day end up in trouble with the law. To tout statistical probabilities as indications that this system is any more useful than pursusing criminals after the crime has been commmited is nothing more than a lazy effort to create the impression that something is being done about the "problem".
What is the point of this anyway? So someone's name is on a "future criminals" list. Does that make any difference when a trial comes up? I suppose if there's a murder, and one of the suspects happens to be on the list, that might be something, but if the only critiera for being added to the list was the fact that you once jaywalked 5 years ago, there would be little grounds to take it seriously, and defense lawyers would have a field day if someone was held longer than necessary based only on such inconsequencial evidence.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Stoner Chicks Rule
you're the reason Hep-C is spreading. was your mom a crack head that didn't teach you to wash your hands after wiping your ass?
This sounds like the beginning of a system like the one used in Asimov's "All the Troubles of the World".
So we shouldn't try to get it back if its already gone? Why not?
...what the hell is going on over there? ...soon there will be no political or social
You are loosing it...
examples left in the world witch your politicians
can point to and say "look, the bad guys..."
zugedneb
Something like this could be very self-fulfilling. How much will being considered a potential criminal lead to a person becoming a criminal? Consider things like employers checking such lists before hiring people.
-- jason
- A man who does not wash his hands is obviously a dirty criminal who harbors contempt for all things good and true: cleanliness, laws, George Bush.
- A man who washes his hands is is either nervous about a crime he is about to commit or trying to wash off the evidence of a past crime.
Either way, your honor, we have sufficient cause to believe the defendant is an enemy combatant.That, and isn't this collection of data an unlawful search? Especially when the person in question has no criminal record?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping tabs on people who have previously broken the law, as unfortunately many felons are repeat offenders. However, there's no way you can convince me that keeping a database of people who "may be inclined" to commit a crime is a fair idea.
Besides, let's be honest, we've all though about committing a crime. Who hasn't wanted to beat the snot out of that jerk that just cut you off in traffic?
Using the logic of this, then the next step is that everyone with a driver's license should be tagged in a database as a possible assault perpetrator.
Illustrating absurdity by being absurd:
Most serial killers are middle class white men in their 20's who have trouble with relationships with women. DEAR GOD! SLASHDOT IS FULL OF POSSIBLE SERIAL KILLERS!
And anyone who thinks that's a racist, bigoted comment is ignoring the sad truth of the ghetto. That doesn't mean crimes aren't commited at higher income brakets or whatnot, just that there is a higher chance of those crimes being commited in those lower income brackets including dem darr white folk, which isn't mentioned. And it's true in any country as well, where the minorities here aren't minorities there. South Africa is a prime example. The majority populace (which just happen to be black and poor) suffer from an extreemly high crime rate, therefor statistics say that the majority of citizens in the country are likely to commit a crime. It's not a surprise or even racist as the author vaguely implies, though neither does it apply to everybody, which is what worries me about this system a bit.
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This seems to violate the doctrine of innocent until proven guilty. This database isn't a list of every citizen in an area, it's a list of people likely to commit a crime, thus assigning to them some measure of pre-guilt. I find it highly doubtful the police keep a list of "respected citizens unlikely to commit a crime."
People have been mentioning how this is a disturbing trend. I would say one we've already seen start with the RIAA and intellectual property concerns. ISPs no longer appear to follow due process when they terminate a user account because some copyright holder has sent them a legally sounding notice saying they have "proof" that a user is abusing their intellectual copyright, "proof", which has been shown in articles, to be withheld from the accused users.
More of a slippery slope.
What, you mean there's a correllation between high-crime neighbourhoods and a likelihood of more crime being committed there. This is an outrage. I demand that zero-crime neighbourhoods get equal representation as places likely to have crime in the future.
Yes, it is very unfortunate that minorities in this, and most, countries tend to be in poorer neighbourhoods and that those neighbourhoods are consequently more likely to suffer from crime. However, as far as I'm aware, the list contains those individuals for reasons other than race. Playing the race card simply serves to add an association that wasn't being made before. Haven't we learned yet that the over-the-top-PC brigade do more harm than good?
Wouldn't it be just as reasonable to say that if you live in a high crime area you are more likely to have a crime committed against you? I know that would be true for me.
"High crime area" does not immediately mean there are more people committing crimes. It means that more crimes are being committed. I have a hard time jumping from one (high crime area) to the other (more people commit crimes).
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
These people are NOT having their rights infringed on. I can make a database of any group of people I want...hell, I can go through the phonebook, find out where the person lives and go take a picture of them AND IT'S PERFECTLY LEGAL. All this organization is doing is keeping track of people that have been caught in 'questionable activities' and making a list.
...and to anyone with that "Those who give up a little liberty to get safety..." line in your sig, remember NO LIBERTIES have been sacrificed here
If these peoples' civil rights are infringed upon, please, get up in arms...I'll join right along with you. But if the police are just compiling a database, not performing searches, pulling them over unnecessarily (note: I am not referring to racial profiling) or taking them into jail without cause, I see no problem with this. It could, in fact, be a good way to keep an eye on potential trouble makers. If the cops checked what these individuals were doing on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis, it would keep some innocents from getting harmed.
Remember, these are not random picks from the phone book...there's a reason why these people are in this database. Maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but doubtful...the majority were probably in the process of or about to commit crimes (drugs, vandalism, murder) when they were picked up.
--trb
After the Columbine Shooting the FBI posted a survey that would help profile a potential school shooter. We all remember that list, it was on /. after all. The list with things like:
Locking your door from the rest of the family.
Not labeling Floppy disks,
Being the Social Outcast of the school.
Hell I'd warrant that most of us would have been profiled as a potential threat based of our answers to that list. Odds are that at least some of us would fit that list as well.
What should really chap our collective asses is the blurb I heard on the Jim Gearhart show on 101.5 in New Jersey. That this law is constitutional because they say it is. If this is a true statement and not FUD from what boils down to a Rush Limbaugh-ish show, then we're really going to hell in a handbasket. If they can ignore the constitution based on whim then we're (not to put a fine point on it) fucked.
What is going to happen when this person goes for a job interview and he answers that he has no criminal record and then the employer and sees a "Future Criminal" tag? IF he going to be forced to work fast food and live off of welfare even though his record is clean?
Honestly, It's become a matter of 'when' and not 'if' for the revolution hasn't it?
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
This already happens in the UK, under the mental health act, a person can be detained for up to 28 days to "protect themselves or others" and longer if during those 28 days psychologists determine that the person requires medical help.
./ has already done this. (see poll) Dont think they dont trace post submission IP addr to ISP. Before long it will be commonplace for a business to be able to force an ISP to reveal who their customers are. They will soon be coming for you, you filthy bastard!!
Most crime happens in poor, minority-dominated neighborhoods. It only makes sense to increase the police presence in those areas, through random patrols and targetted surveillance of possible hotspots and hotheads.
The worst part of America winning the Cold War is that whenever insane shit like profiling potential criminals happens we can no longer point to the practice of show me your papers in the Iron Curtain or Soviet states to show why it is against the very principles of democracy the US is based upon. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
I used to live in one of those poor, crime ridden, minority dominated neighborhoods a few years ago and this adverserial us vs. them mentality between the police and members of the community was a major problem which is excarberated by public opinion that encourages treating poor, non-whites as a criminal underclass as default behavior of the police.
Now that the officals in Wilmington are using the steerotypes to decide who is going to become a criminal, they need to expand the number of steerotypes beyond "Criminal Negros". Let's see There is a steerotype of "Pigs" who ready to assault defendants, so they need to add the Wilmington Police Force to thier database. There is a steerotype of "Crooked Politicans", so everyone who ever ran for office in Wilmington needs to be added.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Or just send them your "ass pennies".
Remember, the fact that you were prevented from breaking the law doesn't alter the fact that you were going to break it....
I work for a firm that writes and provides record keeping and dispatching software to police agencies, so I have a more intimate knowledge of how this works than your average beat cop.
Anyone can keep a list of anything they want for their own internal use, police included.
Just like I have the right to make a list of people I think are funny looking.
Fact is, if you've ever given a cop your name for any reason at all, they kept it.
Although, while not good PR, this isn't too far off from a list of suspects an officer might generate when investigating a crime, even though he hasn't yet any evidence against any of them.
This has been so for as long as there's been an america, though we all know some would love to hogtie the police completely
There's no story here, just slashdot trying to raise the level of angst..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As long as this technology is not being used against whites I dont have a problem with it. I know that sounds real racist but there is a very simple fact here: the majority (VAST majority) of crime is being done in neighborhoods just like this by people just like this. Instead of wringing your liberal hands and trying to get this technology outlawed why not try to expend an effort and get the blacks to stop committing so much crime. Then these databases would not even need to exist, right? It doesn't matter if it's not popular to say, it is the TRUTH.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. If you question this then you are the enemy and you will be looked at.
I guess big brother IS watching.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Yes, it's tought but we need those cops out there, keeping the streets safe from this menace. If you have young children, you should support it too.
In fact, just the other day, I saw one of these snarling beasts in my own neighborhood. I ran home, got my shotgun, and put it out of its misery (and mine).
What? Oh sorry, I thought you meant the War on Dogs. No drugs are fine. I just toked up a fatty last night in fact.
... is that Mircosoft Visual Studio .net ad in slashdot ??
Why the hell did they have roads that went straight up apartment buildings and futuristic highways 50 years in the future, but yet Georgetown looked exactly like it does today with Victorian houses and parks abound?
From this Yahoo news article. This is what the mayor of Wilmington thinks of critics of the new database:
"Mayor James Baker called the criticism "asinine and intellectually bankrupt."
"I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional." "
At least the people of that city know who to NOT vote for in the next election.
It's times like this when people like to ask themselves what the founding fathers of our country would be doing about all of this.
The answer is simple: planning the armed overthrow of our corrupt government. England never taxed the colonies as hard, instigated as harsh of a police state, or so blatantly ignored the will of the people to the extent that our currently "elected" government does. The men who wrote our constitution foresaw a time when the government they created would become corrupt and lose touch with its democratic principles. When exactly that happened is open for debate (some would say as long ago as the Civil War, I'd say sometime in the 1960s) and they honestly believed that the only solution to such an eventuality was an armed rebellion.
Posting anonymously to avoid government detection.
Oh wow, Insightful. But the answer is no.
Lawyers are going to compare this list to arrest lists. When they get a hit, they will go down to jail and sign up a new client.
They will then name the list administrators as defendants in a lawsuit. They knew a crime was likely, and did nothing to prevent it.
If I were an administrator of that list, part of the list process would be to offer public assistance to anyone on the list.
When VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws have VPNs.
And what the fuck is this doing on Slashdot, anyway?
I live and work in the area so this is very much how Delware is. States are turning into communist birth places. Starting in Oct you can only smoke in your house or car in delware. You can get fined for smoking in your front yard. I dont smoke but this is another just another thing. Were are the people that used to protect our rights?
"this violates a persons right to be free from warantless searches"
Now we need protection from warrentless SELECTs!
I'm sure many of the things I do today will be illegal tommorrow.
I find it highly doubtful the police keep a list of "respected citizens unlikely to commit a crime."
SELECT * FROM person WHERE race = 'white' AND sex = 'male' AND annual_income > 50000 ORDER by annual_income DESC;
Well, ok there's CREATE VIEW I guess...
Many of the people whose photos have been taken were stopped briefly for loitering and let go.
Considering that African-Americans have long been been pulled over for Driving While Black, is police persecution for Standing While Black much of a surprise? If you are a young black male in America, you automatically "fit the description" for some fugitive from justice. If you want to suggest that profiling such a large group prevents crime, then I ask, where is the database of white male multimillionaires?
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
with the Hells angels. It was deamed illegal, and uncostitutional. Each person was awarded 50,000.
so if you are in delaware, get your picture taken, it will pay off.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First summer I had my license, our local Barney Fife pulled me over. I was feeling pretty safe, because I had just quietly left the parking lot, complete stop at the intersection, no tire noise, and hadn't yet reached the speed limit. I know he would have come up with something, probably the classic "broken headlight" if I'd not surpressed the reaction to burst out laughing, when he gave me a warning because I was "thinking about" speeding.
He was right, though. He'd seen me a couple of times when I was out of reach.
... we had a freakin list of the 9/11 hijackers and did nothing about it as they took flight lessons and planned an attack on the US.
... but hey, we had a list at least.
Then to top it off, even after the attack, our pitiful INS department sent them visas! I don't know what was worse; 1) They were dead 2) they were enemies of the country
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Compile a list of those most likely to seek public office and make sure they never get the chance to run.
Cheers,
Jonathan
If these types of databases became widespread one could imagine a number of scenarios where they could easily be abused. Say a kid enlists in the service and goes for a job requiring a security clearance -- better check his/her standing on the "Suspected of Being a Future Suspect" database.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
So how do you get out?
Is proof required from you that you're not a danger to yourself or others, or is it the doctors' whim?
And can they hospitalize foreigners, too?
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
how many corporate exec's go mugging for fun, or boost their neighbors Acura Integra.
Lord no, they just have some 'fun' with some poor girl or use some 'social' drugs, they wouldn't break any real laws!
Bleh.
The only difference between the rich and the poor is that if some poor guy fucks up he can be arrested and thrown in jail in a second, some rich shit rapes somebody everybody else is too afraid to speak up.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Wow. How were you able to fit so much bullshit into such a tiny space? Kudos to you, my good man.
it ain't America anymore."
I wonder how many of these types will be listed. How are they going to determine who is going to most likely be involved in embezzling or fraud? Is it going to be MBAs who don't take ethics classes? This is just plain WRONG!
i would like to see a 2, 5 and 10 year study verifying if any of these people actually do commit a crime. if they do, would it be enough evidence to actually act on these lists? could statistics be used in law, to trump facts and evidence? interesting, but scary also.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Mayor James Baker called the criticism "asinine and intellectually bankrupt."
"I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
This is one of the problems in this country. "If it's legal, it's OK." No, just because it's legal does not mean that it contributes to a better society. Government officials who turn off their ethics meter just trying to "get the job done" end up doing a lot of damage to this country and the rest of the world.
John Ashcroft complains that people questioning the government's actions with regard to civil liberties as "helping the terrorists." Then the mayor of Wilmington, Delaware says, hey, I'm going to right up to the very edge of constitutionality as I interpret it. But we're not to question that.
Consider This bill...
If passed, this will mandate a year of military training for nearly all "selective service" age males (and any females for volunteer - is it just me or is this an amusing chauvenistic anachronism for a modern law?...).
It's far from being an outright "draft", but it holds a disturbing (and on-topic) implication.
I seem to recall that when someone begins US military service, that they are subjected to a variety of examinations, including, I assume, psychiatric ones. Of course, the military keeps records of the results.
Therefore...this bill is basically a convenient way to ensure that the US Federal Government would from that day forth be able to "profile" effectively every male US citizen as they hit voting age. It'd be a trivial matter, in a technical sense, to automate the "picking out" of any results that are deemed "worrisome" and the reports shared with law enforcement agencies everywhere...
I'm not certain that's the main PURPOSE of the bill, but I don't doubt that aspect of it would appeal to current AND FUTURE executive administrations in the US....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The operative word is IF. there is no reason to believe that someone who is minding his own business on a public street is going to commit a crime. What you have here is RACIAL PROFILING on the highest degree. I am very disturbed that so many people think this is OK. We are not talking about the right to copy a DVD or share music with friends. This is a violation of basic human right. About "Equal protection under the Law"
I do agree with deft that we should get familiar with those faces. Not so we can include them in some photo lineup but so that we can know who they are. And they can know us. And we can help and guide them.
Preventing crime does not come from identifying possible criminals but identifying the potential in all of our youth.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Federal First Post Squad
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As far as I can see the sad state of reality is that if you are a member of minority, and if you are poor, and if you live in a high crime area, there are very few ways for you to make a living other than through crime.
Your schools will certainly be substandard, so you can't get an education and get out of the ghetto. You can't get a job because there are no jobs near where you live and you can't go to where the jobs are because you are poor so you can't own a car and you can't use public transportaion to get to a job because it doesn't go near where you live.
When you look at TV the only people you see who look like you and have money are drug dealers, pimps, and sports stars. The odds of making a living as a sports star are pretty damn thin.
So what do you do? Hang out on the street corner and turn to crime because that at least lets you eat.
I think this situation is the main reason why so many people want gun control in the US. The idea that the next million man march might be a million people carrying two million guns marching on our all white suburbs scares them to death. The thing I don't understand is why that hasn't already happened?
Stonewolf, one sad wolf today.
I think that was meant to be a joke, anonymous fuckhead.
Anyone know where we can find more info on this? The article was rather brief, and the
In related news: Police use brain to apprehend criminals. In what many see as a flagrant abuse of mental powers, police have been observed using the power of their minds in order to catch criminals. By combining past experience with current observations of "suspects" the brain allows police to become suspicious of a crime that may be about to take place. This is seen by many to be in violation of the potential criminals right to privacy. Concerned citizens are also disturbed by the officers ability to see and hear as these tools might also lead to some kind of suspicion. One concerned citizen noted that use of such tools as the human senses is obviously what caused the holocaust as it obviously would have never occurred if the nazis were blind, deaf, and braindead
background: people of ethnic minorities tend to live in areas where crime happens; thus they are statistically more likely to commit crimes
AC: is that why they called the movie "Minority Report"?
Heck no. A minority report is a statement of a dissenting opinion. Say you have a panel of nine judges, and six of them decide one way and three the other. The six write the majority report, and the three write the minority report. Saying anything more would be a spoiler.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It would seem to me that asserting that I have a higher probability of committing a crime in the future might be libel. Would it be possible to get this list (based on an FOIA suit), then organize a class-action libel suit?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Overall, if you survey the general population they are all for this sort of thing, to protect 'us' against bad people.
"It doesnt apply to me im good, so why would they be against it?" is the general attitude.
Not saying i agree, but we are the minority here, preaching to the pulpit..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You are wrong on every count.
Due process grants you not being held without knowing your charges and having a quick and timely judicial process. When/If these people are arrested, they will still be given that right.
No unauthorized searches guarantees no law entity can come into your house (or any kind of domicile) without a warrant which they must show cause in order to get. Being around drug dealers/convicted felons is a reason, as is having previously broken the law (loitering is breaking the law in some places).
Equal protection under the law...you make me laugh. If this person was accused of a crime, he'd have the same rights as every other individual...the right to an attorney, presumed innocent until proven guilty (yes, the state's attorney would STILL have to make a case against him, he's not automatically jailed), the right to a speedy trial, no unlawful search and seizures, the right to free speech, even the right to run for office (assuming he's a citizen and natural born, which most of the people probably are not).
In short, you're making the case that because people are now watching them, they have lost rights. In fact, they have lost nothing, the rest of us have gained some protection.
--trb
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If I were a nsa boss, I would chain all those people to GUID and track their moves. Et voila' 1984.
Not that bad, just don't trade those warez.
being poor alone is by far not enough motivation for commiting crime, ask your local shrink about that. Of course, living in a crime-infested community (Now that was a bad phrase. Sorry.) can lead to thoughts in the range of "Everyone does it" or "If they get away with it, then I can too", but still, no proof.
And, even if some of the people, or even all of them, commit crimes in the future, what good will this list bring? Probably they will just sit down in the flat where they are registered and wait for the police to come, eh? Not.
Could prevention be a reason? Like, "Oh, the police think I might commit a crime someday, so I better be good" ? The article states that most people on this list are from poor neighborhoods. Not exactly the kind of people that read /. on a regular basis, so they will probably never now they are on this list.
All in all, it seems this is yet another attempt to turn the "Land of the Free" (tm) into a well organized prison the size of a continent.
Better mark "Innocent until proven guilty" as KIA.
Karma
Anyone seen anything else on this? I can't find anything about it on the Delaware or national ACLU sites.
After reading this article and the current post, I think we should just disown Delaware.
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the cops know who these guys are and have them in mind anyway. I've had cops point out guys to me and say that person is a drug dealer we are trying to catch. Here, they are just writing down a list.
If "Godwin's Law" is throwing Nazism in a discussion to try to skew a (often off-topic) point, then "Simpson's Law" would apply here.
if(!WHITE) criminals.addElement(person); thats how the database software looks in the USA. vote mario on http://www.gamefaqs.com!
I can't credit for this, but the war on drugs is seeming more and more like the 100 years war.
Jesus...how long are we going to fight this lost cause?
Is the entire LA Police Dept. in this database already?
It is my sincere hope that everyone here on /. realizes that the USA Patriot act (horrible name if there ever was one) already mandates that certain businesses create and maintain a database of people that they FBI thinks might commit a crime. As discouraging as this one small case in Wilmington is, it's peanuts compared to what the feds are requiring. For example, a story on Yahoo News discusses the detailed data that colleges are required to collect and frequently transmit to the INS. Simliarly, business like bookstore and banks, libraries, and the phone company are now required to keep information on their customer "just in case" they commit a crime or are suspected of committing one.
If you were on the list you'd feel alot different.
There was this one episode of "Charles in Charge" where Buddy went on a blind date with a cheerleader, but he had to keep hidden so the date remained "blind." They went up to park on lookout point, but then the girl's dad, a police officer, drove by with the searchlights, and when the light hit his face, which had been dark up to this point, the girl was all, "Buddy? What the...?"
That's the term for data that police collect that has nothing in particular to do with any criminal investigation.
/.'ers and stop with the moronic fear-mongering. I long for the days when this was a news site.
The use it to track gang activity, domestic violence, animal abuses, you name it.
Get a clue.. Hanging with the Bloods or the Cryps can get you on a list. Standing on the streetcorner with your friends blasting 'Gangsta Rap' gets you on a list. Getting drunk and cussing at a cop outside the bar can get you on a list.
There are no limits to what a cop is allowed to see, hear and remember. And there shouldn't be.
Would you like to pass the 'Heads Up Your Ass' bill of 2002, mandating cops take a 'hear no evil', 'see no evil' approach to law enforcement?
Pull your heads out and look around,
If there's a problem, it's that the average cop gets payed about as much as the average full-time McDonalds employee, and likewise the professions draw the same calibur of applicants. Post about that.
times like these i wonder if the terrorists won.
So there's a published list, even if it's only published to cops, saying "This person is likely to commit a crime". Leave aside the obvious civil liberties issues for the moment - this seems like simple libel to me. At least for the Usual Suspects who haven't yet been arrested for things, this doesn't sound like investigation of a crime or other legitimate police function that's protected by laws protecting government officials doing their official jobs. Of course, most of the people on the list probably don't have the resources to fight that kind of libel suit, but it'd be fun to get the ACLU or some other pro bono support for it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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You "doo" wash your hands, right?
Here is positive proof that the police are prejudiced. Just by being black, hispanic or poor, you are a suspect. Institutionalized racism and classism are a lot worse than people suspect.
How ya like dat?
Crime is a relative term. For example, here are some common business practices that can be perceived in different ways depending on how you look at them:
Stock Investments = Prospective Trading = Gambling
Insurance = Protection = Extortion = Mugging
Inaccurate Quarterly Reports = Creative Accounting = Embezzling = Mugging
Depending on where you stand, only one of the terms in each group is legitimate to you. I will use insurance as an example:
In the protection rackets, you "insure" someone that they won't get their place trashed and their legs broken. As the "protector" you feel fully justified that you are providing them with a service: keeping you or your henchmen's violent tendencies at bay. After all, these things just happen from time to time. Right? Either way, in the end it comes down to: "Your money, or your life. It's your choice."
In the insurance industry, there is a bit of legal wrangling, and the roles of the players are somewhat shifted to make it seem more legitimate, but it's a very similar situation: Health care providers (not necessarily doctors mind you... although some of them can be blamed for the unrealistically high insurance rates of today.) have the ability to do something to protect your life in one fashion or another. They are the "protectors". In this case, they don't want to go out and threaten to withhold health care from you. Instead the insurance companies go out and tell you that "without insurance, you could wind up with huge bills that will bury you in debt for life or no health care which can be fatal. It's in your best interest to pay." You wind up in essentially the same position: "Your money, or your life. It's your choice."
So... as you're walking down the street, a "common criminal" comes up to you and puts you in the same exact position by pointing a gun at you: He just comes out and says, "Your money, or your life. It's your choice."
In the end who is more honest about what they do? The "common criminal" because he states in plain view what his intentions are? The protection racketeer, who is somewhat illusory as to his reasoning but still fairly obvious about his intentions? Or... the insurance companies, who use so much obfuscation to cover up the end result? You decide and then look at the end of my reply to see where you fit in.
I would have to say that crime occurs at all levels of society at equal levels. They just call the crimes different things, and in some cases some of the crimes are legalized.
And now for the answers:
If you answered "The Insurance companies are the most honest. Besides , this is America and they have a right to make a profit". Then you are a stinky repugnican.
If you answered "The Protection Racketeer. Hey... accidents happen. Capiche?" Then you are likely a budding mobster who's been playing too much Q3A. BTW... I like your woman.
If you answered "The common criminal because he doesn't hide behind legalese and F.U.D." Then you may actually be a reasonable human being and give hope to others that have given up on the idea that humans are basically intelligent.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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here is a better article about the practice as well as some legal explanations for and against it. It also has quotes from people in the affected neighborhoods.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
"Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods."
:)
umm, maybe this is because that is where most crimes take place. i cordially invite you to visit the hood here in atlanta for a first hand glimpse at what kind of people are involved in a life of crime.
Only if he planned on breaking the law.
Assfuck.
That's a minor point, the big picture is that it is illegal to be poor. This starts with the vagrancy laws, and ends with the fact the constitution does not extend protection from slavery to those who are incarcerated in US prisons.
I don't want to draw conclusion here, but this basically means slavery was never abolished, only the rules where changed to protect us from feeling guilty. These rules only work if you have poor people, ever noticed that health care and medical insurance company overcharge uninsured and minority patients for more than white people with high paying jobs. The poor must stay poor, unless they are willing to switch teams and sell out there side.
Of course America is probably one of about 4 countries that could resolve this problem without a revolution, that is if the American public wants to change this and remembers that it CAN make a difference.
M0571y H@rml355.
I think its good that pot is illegal. If pot were legal, it wouldnt be as cool to smoke and high school students would turn to something else that wasnt legal but quite possibly more dangerous. Pot seems to me an effective red harring against things that are much worse.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Good thing it didn't say "mirrored," eh?
...and you're no precog.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
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most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods
So not only is the premise of the program remarkably similar to "Minority Report", the actual content of these reports features minorities. Scary on several levels. I'm sure the ACLU and other orgs will have a field day with this one...
He won his court case in an American court, so who are you to judge his guilt?
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Its on the doctors whim, if they do not deem you to be a further threat after 28 days, you get released, usually with urther supervision. And yes, they can hospitalize foreigners as well, since they are under UK durestiction.
Note, you are not charged with anything during this time, and you do not have to have commited a crime. Also, if the doctors deem you to need further treatment, you can be hospitalized indefinatly, so you can spend years in a Secure Institution without actually having commited a crime.
You're giving mere examples of the application of Constitutional protections, and then rhetorically eliding them into defining the limits of those protections.
For one thing, the 4th doesn't just apply to police searches of one's home. Hundreds of appeals court rulings can be cited. Likewise down the list of your other claims.
If everyone is dead there won't be any crime. All we need is for someone to press that red button, and it doesn't appear to be very far off...
Really, this country is going down the shit hole fast...this is just one more sick thing these whakos have come up with. It's fucking bent, they need mental help.
NR
Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods.
Hrm, could this be because in that area, people in that group are the most likely to commit crime? Just because a group of suspected criminals includes mostly a certain group of people doesn't mean it's inherently racist. It would be racist if they artificially included or excluded a person or group based solely on race. But if an area is 90% black wouldn't you expect to see that 90% of the people on the list are black?
And even if that is not the case - if the population was 70/30 indian/hispanic, and it turned out that 80% of the crimes were committed by Hispanics, would that be racist, or would it be the truth? If 80% of the crimes are committed by a certain group of people then statistically it would seem to me that if you pick a crime at random and guess "the perp was a _____" then you have an 80% chance of being right. So if the statistics show that 80% of crimes are committed by "minorities" (a term that makes me puke, as soon it will include everyone) then you would expect a list of suspected criminals to consist 80% or more of people from that group. It doesn't necessarily make it racist.
To me it seems almost self-evident that those who commit crimes are most likely to live in poor, high crime neighborhoods. It just so happens that "minorities" tend to live in poor, high crime areas. I don't see how these facts alone are proof of racism.
To me this line of thinking is as disgusting as that which has led the ETS to change the SAT. Black students were not doing as well as white students, so the immediate conclusion was that the test is racist. Why is it inconceivable that certain ethnic groups are better at some things than others, or more prone to certain activities than others? Different breeds of dogs are better suited to different tasks, the same is true of horses and most other domesticated animals, and is probably true of every living organism on this planet. It's the purpose of evolution. For people to think that everyone is equally good at everything denies evolution, as well as all logic.
rooooar
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I think you're wrong. What "process" are the individuals described in the story due? The 5th Amendment guarantees that a person won't be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" These people are being treated rudely and immorally but there is no (apparent) due process issue.
The right to be secure in one's person and home against warrantless searches (that's Amendment 4 for those of you keeping score at home) has been steadilly eroded. But even before that you had no general right not to have your picture taken in public.
The equal protection clause requires equal treatment under the laws, not petty police harassments. And if the courts didn't find the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters in Florida to be an equal protection issue, this won't even make the radar screen.
Very uinlikely. They may stop doing it but it will not be "struck down" by a court. It's easilly within current constitutional confines.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Q: So what did _you_ do in the war, daddy?
A: I myself did nothing, but Saddam made me drop bombs.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Err, so what's new? Where I live (Finland) there's been such registry for decades. I'm on it, I know 20 of my friends who's names are on it. All you need to do it knew someone that has committed crime. If you did commit crime yourself it'll be cleared from all registries within 5-10 years after convict, but suspects are never removed. I was member of BBS back in late 80's and board was busted for distribution of pirate software. Case dried up as our copyright laws didn't cover computer software back then and no one was convicted. Everyone who'se name were found from that boards userlist, access to pirate area or not, has his name on polices 'potential criminal' list. Having your name on this list also means no high ranks in army and no high security jobs on goverment organizations nor public sector. Oh, and they won't tell you if you got your name on the list or not. Found out that me and my friends are on it thru relative who works for police and she ran check for my name couple years ago.
Sure most of you won't belive post like this from AC, but would you put your name below such facts? Won't exactly help getting new job!
The poster completely missed the point of the article and you guys mod him up to a 3???
wtf? Or has he been saving mod points since Clinton was elected and blew them all on this one post?
Putting cops in a high crime neighborhood is sane. Suggesting that someone should be watched closely for criminal activity because he lives in one is not.
So now it's not politically correct for the police to keep databases on possible criminal activity they're investigating? That's ridiculous. It's not like they're arresting these people. They're just keeping an eye on suspected drug dealers. How the hell are police supposed to do they're job if they're not allowed to keep investigative records. It's not like the records are public.
Vote for Pedro
Tinfoil hat check, boys and girls!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
This is exactly the case. There is no way that a system like this will work in the way that it is intended to. If you ask me the only reason they are doing this is because they want set a precedent to create dbs that they can use to make it easier to silence dissent.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Last Sat Nite Live had a commentary by Tracy Morgan, said that he was OK with racial profiles.
If cops see someone black, just shake 'em down.
If cops see a guy with a ZZTop beard, shake em down.
If cops see someone with a turban, shake em down.
If cops see someone in the "wrong neighborhood", shake em down.
If cops see someone that "looks funny", just shake em down.
When they came for the poor, I said nothing, as I wasn't poor.
When they came for the unemployed, I said nothing, as I wasn't unemployed.
When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, as I wasn't Jewish.
When they came for the Arabs, I said nothing, as I wasn't Arab.
When they came for the Catholics, I said nothing, as I wasn't Catholic.
When they came for me, nobody said anything, as I was the last poor son of a bitch left.
Land of the free? Home of the Brave?
This is a Bunch of Shit! Stand up to them and don't let them take what America really stands for. Freedom!
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
Two words: Ted Kennedy. One more word: Chappaquiddick. Two letters: OJ. If you are loaded in America you can literally get away with murder.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
This is utter hogwash. You'd better check your facts. Try looking through some of the statistics and reports at The Bureau of Justice Statistics. The opposite of your statement is demonstrated again and again.
Furthermore, many argue that not only economic minorities but, also racial minorities (so often the same) are unjustly labeled as the largest source of criminals. Again the statistics say otherwise.
The fact is that economic and racial minorities produce a disproportionately high volume of criminals. Additionally, and interestingly to me, the minorities are statistically the largest group of victims of crime. That means that most criminal activity is perpetrated by minorities against other minorities. This has been case throughout history and is still true today.
Everyone seems to see a link between this and minority report, now me personally i haven't seen it simply because it didn't appeal to me, and the idea itself seems very much stolen from alfred bester's book "the demolished man" (which btw was a great book, and so are all his other works). So yeah, my point's that the idea of future crimes prevention has been around for quite some time (the demolished man was written in 1957 if i'm not mistaken)
Writers imply. Readers infer.
X = (PU + CB) / (T + BL)
Where:
PU = Pints of feces they're wallowing in
CB = Number of cinder blocks under the wheels of the car in the front yard.
T = Number of teeth
BL = Years of book learnin'
If X > 5, add to the list.
And what percentage of crimes are white collar?
if you hold any document more sacred than your nutsac
What about if you don't hold your nutsac? Sacred or otherwise?
I AM CORNHOLIO! I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!
this is what happens when you hire astrologers in police service. now, if they had only done this prior to 9/11!
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Drive in any direction for 20 minutes and you're in a different state.
The other good thing is that its residents are too dumb to know how to do this.
(I was stationed in that God forsaken hell hole)
One key thing to bear in mind which is definitely true of the UK Mental Health Act, and is almost certainly true of the Baker Act too, is that psychiatrists have to sign the final order to have someone sectioned in this way. IIRC, Britain requires that two psychiatrists, in addition to the person who recommends the sectioning (usually the patient's psychiatrist), sign off on this, and as I understand it, usually they'll interview the individual before making their recommendation.
So it's not quite as open to abuse as it might at first appear.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
My home page is set to the AP Wire. I can't find anything on this story and it was supposedly released within the last few hours? Also, the article says The American Civil Liberties Union is "Up in arms." Why then isn't there any mention of it on their homepage or in their news section?
Remember the source of this 'unconstitutional' and 'freedom oppressing' news comes from the US Media, a source oft criticized as bloating, manipulating and sensationalizing otherwise mundane things. As an earlier comment noted, the article is a grand total of 5 sentences in length, resembling routine police activities if the word 'database' is removed. There is no mention of the situation or relationships of the subjects in question. Not ever drug dealer out there gets caught by the police, and more than enough of them manage to retain 'clean slates'. Perhaps this was just a way of tracking suspected associates that become a bit munged once the press started sniffing at it.
Or perhaps it is true. If so then yes, I do have strong opinions against such things. First off, how many street level police enforcers realize how the penal system works? As yet another earlier post stated, it doesn't, and the prison population is growing larger and larger each day because it continues to not work. Yet police still arrest people (minorities) based on societal bias, shove them away then let them out a few years later - for some reason. At most, it ensures that they will become repeat offenders, or if they're lucky, will scare them shitless out of fear of being digested by the system again. I am not an anthropologist, nor a judical figure, but this sounds like a badly flawed system.
My point is this: how is categorizing and (potentially) arresting more people going to help society? It won't, if the process is flawed and this action speeds up the process.
How is more power, with full legal support mind you, going to weed out the supposedly corrupt? If anything, more power will turn the enforcers into the corrupted and the US into a divided zone of criminals and sheep.
And post with your full name, address and social security number.
Thank you!
weownu@whitehouse.com
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I agree, we should just kill them instead of making them do productive work to offset the high costs of their incarceration.
health care and medical insurance company overcharge uninsured and minority patients for more than white people with high paying jobs
I call BULLSHIT!!! The medical empire overcharges those with the means to pay for the healthcare so it can write-off the bills of the poor people who *sob* can't pay their medical bills. You seem to have gotten this backwards, bud.
Of course America is probably one of about 4 countries that could resolve this problem without a revolution, that is if the American public wants to change this and remembers that it CAN make a difference.
The only way this will ever change if if the American public realizes that NOTHING is free, not even jailtime or basic healthcare.
Murphy was an optimist.
This is useless:
Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods
Now how many NIGGAZ on the list commited the crimes? That's important
This sounds like something straight out of "Minority Report"..... freaky.
Our current law enforcement system that is supposed to arrest people for crimes that have already happened is flawed. Now take that same law enforcement and judicial system and have them start investigating people for crimes they haven't committed.
Seriously, can we expect our cops to be mind readers? Can we expect this to turn into anything other than a racially biased system. It's not enough that we are arresting millions of blacks because they sell white people their drugs. Now we want to make it easier to arrest these citizens. It's not supposed to be easy to arrest people in the US. That's what freedom is. It's being able to say and do what you want without the government spying on you - among other things. If someone does a crime, you arrest them. It's that simple. We are ALL innocent until proven guilty, not just the ones we like. How hard is that to understand.
I don't understand how or when some people got the idea that they could decide who deserves equal protection under the law and who the Constitution and Bill of Rights applies to. We are going to ask the police to watch these "suspected criminals" so they don't commit any crimes or doing anything to harm the rest of the "good" population - those that are protected by the Constitution and Bill of Rights - the ones that the judicial system works for. There's the little thing called probable cause, and being poor and black is not probable cause.
I think that the upper class folks in the US need to be careful. Poor people will only be pushed so far, before they start to push back. Poor people in this country get kicked around a lot less in this country than in other countries, but they also have higher expectations. There will always be poor people in a capatalist society, but they deserve a chance to succeed and freedom. Many of the greatest Americans have come from poverty and achieved. Give poor people a chance, and protect their freedom too. You never know, it might feel good doing the right thing.
LoRider
I'm surprised that this hasn't come under major scrutiny from the legal field. I can't possibly see an argument that would consider that list as constitutional.
We have the best government money can buy. Witness the extensions to copyright, the DMCA, etc.
No law gets passed, or stays passed, without some big money "campaign contribution".
So who is campaigning for tougher drug laws? Ask yourself who benefits from these inasne laws? Certainly not the public, who is in the line of fire when the drug gangs shoot at each other.
That's right, the folks who sell and import the illegal drugs are teh ONLY beneficiaries of these laws. Legalize the drugs and the insane profit is gone, and these billionaires have lost their means of easy cash.
So when you see a politician screaming for ever more draconian drug laws, you know whose pocket he is in.
Looks like the cops misunderstood the movie "Minority" report.
"likely to break the law" = "minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods." DUHHH all these idiots need is to watch is the "COPS" show on FOX to make such a stupid guess!!!!
:)
properties at these neighborhoods are cheap, perfect for new schools, highschools and universities to give REAL oportunities to those that desperatelly need it the most
Is there any report, press release, news, documentary, observation or anything realting academic population in regard to the regions that they move to?
Dude, grow the fuck up. Wisconsin != the real world
This is similar to what Guliani did in NYC
with his quality of life initiative.
For minor crimes (jumping subway turnstile etc..),
individuals were taken to the police station and finger printed. The rational given was when
individuals move onto bigger crimes, they
are easier to catch.
NYC did not publish this list as a list
of criminals for the future, but they
just increased their database.
In the US, privacy of a individual is NOT a fundamental right and the state will continue
to collect as much information as they can of their citizens.
I think that this is a good idea, but the database should be more balanced by inlcuding local business school year book photos in the database.
DC Police Officer: "Hey, you! Show me your papers!"
Loiterer: "Ahh, Ahh, I've got them here somewhere, sir"
DC Police Officer: "Well, come on! Show me your papers!. You do have papers, don't you?"
Loiterer: "I seem to have misplaced them, sir."
DC Police Officer: "A likely story. You're coming with me, bub."
I can just see it now; Sidnew Greenstreet as the crook who supplies fake ID, Peter Lorre as the Loiterer, Humphrey Bogart as the bystander who becomes enraged and fights on the side of the Resistance, Claude Rains as the DC cop with a heart, and Ingrid Bergman as the love interest.
What a movie that would make.
If the vast majority of certain crimes are committed by certain groups of people, is it reasonable to focus your interest on those groups of people? You apparently claim not. Me, I think that focussing equally on the 90% group and the 10% group is massively discriminatory against the 10% group, not to mention being downright stupid.
If you get to the point where someone is actually assumed to be guilty because they are in the 90% group, that's an entirely different issue, and clearly it's wrong to do so. But to focus most of your detection and prevention efforts where most of the problems lie isn't discriminatory, or racist, or abusive, it's smart and in everyone's interest (including, incidentally, the vast majority of the 90% group who presumably aren't guilty of anything).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Insurance companies profile us. And then the State comes along and _forces_ us to buy insurance, subject to our profile. I was a young male, once, and had to pay a high rate, not because _I_ was a bad driver, but I was in the same group as bad drivers, and I couldn't do a thing about it. Is that fair? What am I missing here?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but rights aren't given. They exist, and it's up to us to defend them from all encroachers (especially from the State). The founders knew this, and it's why they believed a well-armed populace was the best deterrent to an opressive state. Not that it seems to be working...
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
John Ashcroft was Missouri's Senator. The last election, his opponent died a month before the election, and Senator Ashcroft lost his Senate incumbancy to a dead man.
In a landslide.
He now has an even more powerful position as US Attorney General, and the rest of the nation is getting a glimpse of why he was hated so much by his constituents.
What good does it do to vote them out of office when their political cronies will appoint them right back in, often to an even more powerful post, as with Herr Ashcroft?
-steve
springfield fragfest
Why don't you just stop speeding? You're not the only one on the road you know. You put other people's lives in danger when you fool around like that. I'm not trying to be a jerk but can't you find some other way to have fun?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I read an article in a local Canadian newspaper last year about the same thing. Can't remember if it's federal or provincial, but in Canada as well, yes, you can be detained just on the word of someone else.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
"how long till the suspected criminals-to-be are arrested "just in case"?"
THAT is just a shockingly short step from this... Liberty and security...
You know, as a moral conservative (who is a social libertarian), I WANT to like the police. I really do. They have a job I would not want. They deal with people I do not want to deal with.
But with this sort of thing, and incidents like the Houston PD stormtrooperaid on kids at a K-Mart http://66.70.240.173/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1598 (discussed on my site, several news articles linked to there), I don't trust them...
I'm beginning to believe that there is little difference between the police AND the criminals anymore. And that is scary, when you consider how much more militarized the police become each year...
Here's some advice for the law enforcement establishement on how to deal with crime (since they seem to have forgotten how)
1. The best way to PREVENT crime is to be visible in places where crime is a possibility. This means VISIBLE patrols, not unmarked cars cowering in a blind curve on the highway that goes downhill looking for speeders.
2. Though you'd think otherwise by where you see the most cops, MOST CRIME DOES NOT HAPPEN ON HIGHWAYS! They happen down in the city.
3. Though it's preferable to deter crime (see visible patrols), when crime happens it's law enforcement's job to CATCH them. Not beforehand, but AFTER a crime has been comitted.
You also might not know it, but the crime RATES in this country have been dropping for some time. Yes, there was a slight rise recently, due to economic hard times, but violent crime today is FAR lower than it was 20 years ago, and we have more people and worse economic times.
With that said, how come there are more cops than 20 years ago? How come cities like mine, which has lost half it's population in 30 years has just as many, if not more cops? Why do cops now dress in body armor and carry weapons Rambo would have envied?
I saw this written someplace, which puts it best:
"When the cops talk about the war on crime and the war on drugs, everyone needs to understand that they view us, the civilians, as the enemy."
Clearly there needs to be limits on what information that the government (remember ALWAYS that the police are an arm of the government) can collect and keep, and for how long, on someone not convicted or charged.
Corporatism != Free Market
as if your vote is going to be counted...
Those who cast the vote decide nothing
Those who count the vote decid everything
- Stalin
According to the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water, yet White House Lawyers think otherwise, claiming that the president has the right to launch military strikes on Iraq without the approval of Congress.
When you loose something, you let it go ON PURPOSE. E.g., "I loosed the prisoners".
When you lose something, it is generally an accident, as in "You lose the game, loser".
In fact, the loose use of the word "loose" is the single thing I don't like about Mandrake. But as they're French, you have to cut them some slack in misuse of the English language.
For you native English speakers there is no excuse. Calling someone a "looser" or saying "you may loose data" makes you look like an illiterate.
141 words, counting the posting date. Can we all just be a little cautious before we all rush to judgment over this?
Doesn't sound good in 4th amendment terms, but there's so little detail here that I'm hesitant to offer any analysis.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I'm not as elliquint as I'd like to be, and to lazy to shit Shift-F7 (thesauras) in Word sometimes, but the above states more clearly my thoughts on the matter.
And as for your comment "a place for reflection and thought" did I not post my thought? Or is it only a place for reflection and thought that YOU agree with?
I would point out that conscription (forced military service) is still practised in many first world nations. France practised conscription up untill 2001, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland still do, among others.
Not saying I support it, just saying something like this isn't totally out of left field, it's been done for a long time and is still done in some countries.
Surprisingly, the mayor of Wilmington seems to be the leader pushing this business. He is himself black. Of course statistically it's inner city residents who are crime victims. Also the last administration was notably corrupt and the new mayor evidently wants to reduce various crimes.
The worst criminals are those who have learned not to be noticed. "We never knew John Doe would do something like that. He was such a quiet, well-mannered boy." Also, considering the number of cases in which lawyers use abuse of the perp when he was a child, shouldn't anyone suspecting of having been abused be added to the list? (Oooh, that'll rile the victims rights activists.) What about the insanity pleas? Perhaps we should have mandatory screenings to determine who is not completely sane -- and keep files on all of them as potential criminals. The possibility of misuse is too great.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most of these rights were the main casualties in the War on Drugs. See US: This Is Your Bill of Rights, On Drugs for some other egregious examples of the police getting out of hand. You do not have to tell the police your name, address or let them photograph you. Since this is America the police have the right to ask you anything that they want; and you have the right to ignore them. These rights are laid out in the ACLU 's web site. I think that the best place to read about what the police can and cannot do when they approach you is a study by the New York Attorney General's Office entitled The New York City Police Department's "Stop & Frisk" Practices. This article goes on to site case law supporting things like "civilians are not required to answer or to provide proof of identity":
See De Bour, 40 N.Y.2d at 219, 386 N.Y.S.2d at 382 n.1; see also People v. Powell, 246 A.D.2d 366, 667 N.Y.S.2d 725 (1st Dep't 1998)
Some of this information is specific to the state of New York but much of it is applicable for people in every state. This report goes on to explain things like Federal law provides a floor for state standards. This means that states may enact tougher restrictions on their police departments but that they cannot give the police more lattitude to do things like question citizens.
The practice mentioned in the article will stand until someone sues to have it stopped. Here we are back with the ACLU again. They seem to be about the only organization that has deep enough pockets to pursue things like this. And the worst that is going to happen is they are told to stop. In reality the state and federal prosecutors are probably right when they say that the collecting of this information is legal. This is because the people that got into this file didn't walk away from the police in the manner that is outlined in the Supreme Court's decision in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent case law. For the police to detain you - meaning that you cannot just ignore them and walk away - they must first reasonably concluded that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity. The article in question says that the people were detained for loitering so the police have found what they say is a criminal activity. Make them prove it! Make them file a detailed report of the stop. File your complaints with the entities I listed above and make them justify their stop to their superiors. Make their superiors justify the stop to the local paper and the federal authorities. If everyone that was annoyed would push just a little then it would work more than one or two people pressing really hard.
Unfortunately the police are rarely required to justify their actions much less defend them in an official inquiry. Police enjoy something called qualified indemnity that protects them from the consequences of their actions in all but the most severe of circumstances. And even then they get off with a slap on the wrist instead of the punishment that they deserve. Case in point:
I used to live Colorado where they have a law similiar to that in many other states called capital murder. It states that if someone dies while in the commission of a felony that all people committing that felony can be charged with first degree murder. Perjury is a felony; that is what swearing out a false affidavit is. So when an officer lies while asking a judge for a search warrant they have committed a felony. When an innocent person dies in the execution of that search warrant it should be capital murder. If the person that lies is a police officer then it works out differently. They can even get their job back and the opportunity to lie again. This was not his first mistake. The FBI has even been critized for that very same offense.
We MUST stand up for our rights or we will loose them.
Regards, Tres.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
"No sir, I do not want you to search my car"
Wearing black,red (*color) clothes
Visting pawn shops (*resale store)
Registering to vote other than major parties
Working for politically incorrect industry
Outdoors after some unstated cerfew
Joining a protest march
T-Shirt with logo not for approved activity
Signing a pettition
Websites...
----
Now if you try to get a job which requires a background check...
Everytime a crime in a certain area is comitted they will be instant suspects. The cops will first go to them, and ask where they were, what they were doing, establish alibi's, etc. This is a removal of due process.
Wouldn't shady people in the area of a crime be suspects anyway? Or at least worth questioning? That's not removal of due process; no one's being convicted of anything.
Second, you are protected against searches of your "person and effects". A complete description, demographics, photo, vital statistics and possibly a blood/urine/DNA sample inconjunction with fingerprinting are your "effects".
You couldn't be more wrong. "Person and effects" refers to bodily searches and searches of your property. What your name is and what you look like aren't in any way private data. Your legal existance in this country requires that you make at least your name public, and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy of your visage, given that it's regularly displayed in public.
FWIW, I'm no big fan of this "plan", but you're getting a big hyperbolic.
The main reason that this is bullshit is that, clearly, once you're on this list, you're more likely to be suspected of a future crime, and, with a little thought, I think it's clear that this makes you more likely to be convicted of a crime you didn't commit. And, of course, the way you get on this list is that you "look suspicious" to an officer.
I think therein lies a big problem with this kind (drug and violent crime) of law enforcement. A big factor in whether or not you are suspected and/or arrested for a crime, in these cases, is what a given policeman's impression is of you. Now, don't get me wrong... I think there are a lot of honest and well-meaning policemen out there. But some of them are not, and, more importantly, it's easy for well-meaning guys to still have a wrong impression. This is a major reason that minorities have such a bad record with the police. Study after study has shown that race makes a suspect look more or less likely to the police.
Long story short, one of the things this does is point out to people how "suspects" get on the police's shitlist... sometimes only by their race, and usually over nothing big. In the end, this may actually do good. Look, this database is, at the very least, a very accurate map of what police in Wilmington think a criminal "should look like". At the very least we can see what's going on. Furthermore, if the cops' prejudices are explicitly written down somewhere, perhaps that's better than being secret.
Come on, give it up, that's
I suppose the only valid reasons to be anywhere in Amerikkka are working, shopping, commuting, or taking your daily dose of TV - Cult of the Corporation - indoctrination.
I will obey. I will obey. I will obey.
Your "email joke" argument fails because, in its own words, those crimes were committed by "muslim male extremists aged 17-40." Henceforth, airlines must search all muslim male extremists aged 17-40, not all muslim males, nor all muslims, nor all Arabs, Aryans, Lebanese, Indians, Sikhs, blacks, and hispanics who happen to compose the majority of every inspection line in the airports I've been in post-9/11, which inludes LAX, Memphis, Dallas/Fort-Worth, and Jackson, MS, and I have reason to believe most airlines in America.
Imagine yourself going through a bad neighborhood and you notice couple of guys acting rather unruly, wouldn't you make a note of those guys and stay away from them in the future? Is that prejudice?
This database can very well looked at as a collective memory of the cops who have such mental notes
I've read that people are vandalizing traffic cameras in Britain -- by the hundreds -- and no one is admitting to it or turning in their fellow citizens who are destroying the cameras. So far, no arrests, no suspects.
I hope it's a revolt against the panopticon!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Too bad. Such and important topic and a bunch of children are the ones who squander the opportunity. Hope the excrement jokes are still funny when they come for you.
Actually this is jsut a Urban Myth. There was a spate of people painting traffic cameras bright colors, and the police knew exactly who it was, and jsut told them to not do it, and the "attacks" stopped.
Occasionally there is a report of a camera being destroyed, but it usually turns out to be teenagers, and not a organised conspiracy.
Maybe the IRS could keep records of DNA and photos of those who might commit tax evasion.
I agree with mandatory military / federal service. I think that every individual should contribute at least one year to serving the country in some fashion. Would save alot of aggrevation on the soldiers parts when pop culture feels a war is not politically correct.
And for the use of data gained while in the military, I doubt that any single organization would have the manpower to sort through every single file profiling individuals. About the only profiling that would occur would be the type of discharge recieved, and you have to try to screw up to screw up the type of discharge you recieve.
--WooooHoooo--
I'd like to say that James Baker is a corrupt ass and it'd take an act of god for him to get re-elected this coming election. Everyone wants him out. Just look at the number of cases winding their ways through the courts because of his (a) reverse-discriminatory policies, (b) flagarant nepotism, and (c) complete incompetence.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Thank God I'm not the only who's noticed that President Bush has attempted to usurp an explicit power reserved to Congress. I wonder if history is going to record the 9/11 attacks as the American version of the Reichstag fire...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
eno2001, i appreciate your answer. I think its well thought out, and I totally see your point of view. As a matter of fact, i downright agree with some of the things you said. I agree that the insurace companies are for the most part unfair to a small percentage of the population. As in example, my own father and my wife. Both are type I diabetics. There is so much red tape getting them insulin pumps that there is no will to even try. I understand that there is a small percentage of people that these insurance companies deny, whom have coverage. I think they should cover those people under most circumstances. I think that all business are just there to make a profit. But you know what. I dont wanna take away their rights. plain and simple, I want them treated the same way that I am. And if I do somethign wrong, then drag me away and put me in jail. If they do something wrong, dont let them hide behind their lawyers, PUT THEM IN JAIL. NO ONE IN AMERICA CAN HAVE MORE RIGHTS THAN ME! Only the same amount of rights. If someone does something wrong put them in jail. But I think even the poor shouldent have more rights than me. Just the same. I dont receive a welfare check, I dont receive free health care. I know i could, and thats why the programs should be there. But to a limit. But now i'm deverting. I am the kind of person to belive in the good of people, and i think that the majority of people in business america probaldy are good people. But in today media, you dont hear about the good people. Guipo Brains have consequenses.
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
if they are using neural nets and time series data - then I would feel better about this.
but considering I didn't even click on the link, I guess I can only hope that is what they are doing.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Hehehe ok, if you would rather be held up at gunpoint than have to pay insurance - to each their own I suppose...
In all seriousness, I (of course) dont have all the answers to the whole Health Care situation... A socialist-umbrella type program? Take less taxes but demand that people take responsibility for themselves? Some mix of the two? Its a complicated question... hence, the political fallout on both sides. Its even further complicated by the extraordinary costs of hospital care... I dont think open-heart or brain-related surgeries will ever become "cheap" in the short term, which leads me to think that some sort of insurance/umbrella system is necessary. However, in the end I get far more in return from my medical insurance (despite our flawed system) than I would from some thug at gunpoint... Try again.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Everyone who has replied to this story is now on a list of potential hackers. Please report to your local police for processing.
So how much do they charge per use?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This bill is rather interesting. It basically says all men must complete 1 year of military training after they graduate high school.
First off, it says that eligible persons will go to be trained either by the Army, Navy, Marines, Airforce, or Coast Guard. It doesn't say how it is determined where the eligible persons will go. It is not clear if those who are undergoing training under this act will have a chance to see active combat duty during the training period.
As far as anyone knows, those eligble who are sons of politicians or rich campaign contributors might find themselves in the Coast Guard, while the average person will find themselves in a branch of the military where they could see active duty overseas.
Secondly, it says that those who have religious reasons to oppose combat must still be trained, minus the combat training. This would still enable the Federal Government to "profile" these people.
I'm actually surprised that they didn't include all women into this category.
Third, it makes exceptions for those who are still in High School, but not those who wish to pursue higher education. It could be possible that if this Bill were to be passed, that everyone would have to wait one year to go to college because of military training. The only exception, of course, is if you are accepted into a military academy.
On the upside, everyone who completed this training would be eligible for educational assistance.
Personally, I don't like the bill out of principle.
I think that if this is passed, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for a future bill to expand upon the training period, include required "regular" armed forces service, or so forth.
On the other hand, a lot of other countries have seemingly worse "involuntary conscription" periods for young men.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I'm from northern DE. From what you say, it sounds like you were stationed at Dover airforce base. If that's true, I'm sorry -- you have my sypathy. Delaware is basically two different worlds -- the canal cuts delaware into the north (where all the normal people are) and "slower-lower" delaware. Go to the southermost part of DE, and you have, as one of my friends put it -- "Welcome to Seaford, where there are only 2 things to do. Farm and fuck"
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This probably exists in one form or another in most cities... perhaps not in a database named pre_criminals.
This is a clear exemple of violating civil rights and institutional repression. Wow you guys are good, maybe others countries governmental bodies could learn from you, I wonder, what's next in social policies, secrete camps?
vast majority of the prizon[sic] population are non-violent drug offenders
Care to support this with numbers? and sources... yes, those are needed to prove a point.
Furthermore, by non-violent offender, you are implying that this is a person who was simply sitting at home, not harming anyone else. Suddenly, the police bust in, and he is in jail for life, just for smoking pot.
More usually, people who break the law, break many laws.
New York City found this to be true with their quality of life crime enforcements. They found the same people that jump fares at subways are the same people that commit other crimes. Catching them for jumping fares, they found the people often were wanted for another crime, or were breaking parole rules. Doing this prevented them from causing other crimes.
I would wager this, that "the vast majority" of the prison population is locked up for crimes including drug offenses. The fact that these people are also serving time for "non-violent" drug offenses makes people include them in their statistics about "the vast majority" being locked up.
In other words... say 75 percent of the prison population has a drug charge against them (most drug charges being non-violent). Now, some subset, lets say 35 percent of the prison population is in for assault.
Groups with an agenda, come a long and say... look at this! "The vast majority (75%) of our prisoners are in for non-violent drug offenses"
This does not mean, although they want it to, that the 75 percent is in only because of non-violent drug charges.
See the difference?
moving on....
Another disturbing trend is the rise of prizon[sic] labor. Prizoners [sic] manufacturing goods for nearly no pay will be the new form of slavery
It is called a debt to society. Would you rather they sit around, doing nothing, wasting their life? Or do something, repay society, and maybe even get some skills?
Furthermore, slavery implies that they were forced into their situation. Breaking the law is something you choose to do... becoming a slave isn't. There is a huge difference, so don't muddy the waters by using such an emotionally laden word.
That is why America incarcerates 4.4 million of its citizens, more than any other country.
Are you seriously implying that we have laws with the hopes that people will break them so we can use them for cheap labor? Or perhaps that is why laws are so tough? I hope you realize this is complete tripe.
The reason the laws are tough is because of democracy. No politician wants to be seen as "soft on crime". Prison labor is merely making due with available resources, not the cause of them.
More even then China
More.... ummm... Percentage wise? or in terms of raw numbers? Also, keep in mind that there are massive cultural differences between the two countries that account for the crime difference more than anything else.
In all actuality, I am against "the war on drugs", and I do realize that a lot of people (not "a vast majority") are in jail for non-violent drug offenses. The thing that angers me more though, are people who toss off statements like this. It makes the whole movement seem like a product of pot smoking youths who can't justify their position and are therefore sidelined.
---Lane
how long? it's been happening for almost a year now... look up.
One sobering statistic is the fact that, at the end of last year, one out of every 32 adults in the United States was behind bars or on probation or parole. This is ridiculous, and a far greater incarceration rate than most any other first world country. I find it difficult to understand how so many Americans can still subscribe to the rhetoric that their country is the freest.
I disagree, I think the only fair database of precriminals you can have is all inclusive. Anyone can be a criminal, and if they are looking for a 6'1", 205lb, 20 something bearded white male who lives in a certain suburban neighborhood, I should be a result in their search query. This is not saying that additional intelligence could not be included. You could include information on known gang association, suspicion of previous crimes... Then, for instance if the police had reason to believe that there was gang involvement that could narrow the search.
I am not saying that I am in favor of police tactics like this, I am not... But if they must be used, I insist that they do not limit their searches in such a way.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It would be completely pointless to destroy cameras. The current generation is easily seen, but if vandalism, in the form of open rebellion or just teenage angst, becomes a problem, the cameras will be made less noticable. Look at the size of X10 cameras, and the prices they go for. The government could afford to spend far more, and get far smaller cameras. If covert surveilance was really the issue, they could use a single strand of optical fiber connected to a ccd and lens hidden a few meters away.
The UK is lost; once the cameras come in, they never leave. Remember, government never relinquishes power and never lowers a tax.
It would be no more legal for minors than cigarettes. In other words, kids would still smoke it (like the do normal cigarettes) because it was "off limits". I doubt MJ will ever become legal, but even if it was, it'd still restricted to ages 18 and above.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
We've done that before. We'll do it again.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
The fact that it is "designed" to be effective is absolutely no indicator that it is effective. The fact that it is not "designed" to be illegally discriminatory is absolutely no indicator that it is, in fact, not discriminatory. In a pluralist society, profiling quite rightly raises hackles and -- if it is to be used at all -- must be constructed very carefully and narrowly.
Personally, I find the idea repugnant and prone to abuse, so I vote for "not at all".
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Holy shit. That only happened a week ago...why wasn't it covered on mainstream TV? That's a big story, and a legitimate news item as well. I'd have expected media outlets nationwide to cover that, if only in expectation of the police chief going to prison over it. I'm not sure what pisses me off more...that it happened in the first place, or that it wasn't covered at all.
Canada: It's like a loft apartment over a really great party, isn't it?
Not really. More like a really great party over a prison cell.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
"Holy shit. That only happened a week ago...why wasn't it covered on mainstream TV? That's a big story, and a legitimate news item as well. I'd have expected media outlets nationwide to cover that, if only in expectation of the police chief going to prison over it. I'm not sure what pisses me off more...that it happened in the first place, or that it wasn't covered at all."
Want to know why this hasn't received media attention? Racism. The media doesn't have a problem with people being jacked around by cops unless they are non whites.
The local media in Houston have been pretty active on it. A friend of mine sent me the links, and I've been OUTRAGED... Enough of that shit, and it's open season time on cops in Houston....WITH JUSTIFICATION!
It's like I said... I WANT to be on the cops side. After all, their job is to protect US. But I see them slipping more and more over to the dark side. Stuff like this is inexcusable. The cops who are using this database should be imprisoned for abuse of civil rights. They should also be sued civilly for libel and/or slander.
Corporatism != Free Market
...did they?
/.
The database is of people who were stopped for loitering and other issues in an area where drug dealing occurs. The police are merely gathering intelligence is all. No one has been arrested, no one has been detained.
But of course, that doesn't matter to
My guess is that they saw that Spielberg movie, thought it was a great idea but couldn't afford the Psychic Hotline @$2.95 a minute. So they bought MSSQL and a digital camera. . .
Okay, you're still wrong. "Less process", as you put it, has nothing to do with due process. They have not been charged with anything, have not been detained, have not been held against their will.
Your personal effects, as another poster wrote, are NOT your face or description or name. You are a citizen of the United States, you pay taxes, these things are on file. It's not an invasion of privacy or a search for people to look through them. "Person and effects" means that a cop can not legally search you walking down the street without your permission. When a cop pulls you over, if he pats you down and finds a bulge in your pocket that he knows isn't a weapon, he can't remove it from your pocket or tell you to. He can ask, and you can tell him "No". You could have a bag of and it doesn't matter, you can't be searched without a warrant.
--trb
Crash units here in LA have been taking photos of teens, mostly under 18, that have "Gang affiliations". Anything from baggy jeans to tattoos or just being around known members. They take the poloroids and keep them for mugshots and other future use. So if the crash system works, what is the harm in making it digital? And if there are other signs that are known as "Crime affiliations" what's the harm in profiling those also? In the worst case scenario, if they started profiling people with white shoes for instance, everyone who disagreed with the profile would go out of their way to wear white shoes, thus negating the profile.
Sure this has dangerous implications, but what law these days doesn't?
-Tom
I think your missing the point. It's profitable to have people in jail for companies, even though we are paying the bill, we don't see the profit, we are subsidizing slavery for companies that can are enjoying a cheaper alternative to thrid world sweatshops.
The only way this will ever change if if the American public realizes that NOTHING is free, not even jailtime or basic healthcare.
You bet it's not free, if it was then I wouldn't have pay $40K in taxes last year. The American public needs to realize that US corporations are getting what belongs to the public, FOR FREE (well OK they spent a few million paying some party's campain fund, normally paying both the lead parties evenly).
Why do companies have the same rights as people? IS that what America is about? Can't put a corporation in jail, just the people who work there.....
M0571y H@rml355.
Mayor James M. Baker: "I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
From this article: So, the loitering law says, "no blocking public passages if asked to move." Did the cops jumped out of an unmarked van and say "Please move"? No. They frisked everyone, and started snapping pictures of people doing nothing more than standing around. Does that sound lawful and constitutional to you?
Even if it does, does it sit well with you to know that the mayor has the attitude that he can do whatever the hell he wants until a court of law specifically tells him not to?
"Someone's gotta have some damn perspective around here!" -- Commander Susan Ivonova, Babylon 5
Perhaps you need to re-read the article. "Many of the people whose photos have been taken were stopped briefly for loitering and let go" (emphasis added). Not all. And the concerns this action raises [for example, posting a list of "suspects" (another quote from the article) rather than convicts] are valid regardless.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
its called the Fortune 500 list.... Many of them seem to be accurate so far so I think I am going to take my list public and make millions.
Actually, there is a huge flaw in your Insurance = Protection Racketeer analogy.
In insurance, you are paying into a third party money pool to be there when you need it. (Granted said third party is getting rich off of this money.) When something happens, you put in a claim to pay a second party. In the "Protection" scheme, you are paying off the second party directly.
Insurance's says: "Your money, or your life. It's your choice." to use your fear of the unknown to market to you.
Protectors say: "Your money, or your life. It's your choice." as a direct threat.
The first is distasteful, the second is a crime.
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
brilliant! thank you, Scott Baio!!
cpeterso
America has always been the country symbolized by "$". The immigrants who choose the US do so because they want to make as much money as possible, maybe even get rich. Even with all our ridiculous laws, it seems to still be the easiest country in which to make money. My town is full of Brazilians. They came here because in Brazil they made like $400 a month if they were lucky and now some of them are making like $3000 a month, although that may include working two full time jobs. France and England are both great countries to live in but try making alot of money there. The only country I know of as focused on money as the US is Japan. Most people seem to immigrate for economic reasons and the US has a worldwide reputation as the "richest" country in the world. There are still some people however who don't want to live in America because they've heard so many negative things about Americans, many of which are actually true.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I was just discussing forming the PFD "Pre-Emptive Fire Department" yesterday with some friends.
We would show up to buidings and put out fires pre-emptively by spraying the whole site down with water - to ensure that no fires were going to happen. Then demand payment from the owner for preventing disaster.
Looks better on paper I guess....
I just saw my first Microsoft ad (visual studio.net) on slashdot attached to this article. They may have been here for a while but this is the first one I saw. Wow, how things have changed.
Speak truth to power.
Who else is getting a deja-vu from this?
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Yes. Interview. But how frequently do they second guess? Does the second know in advance the verdict of first?
In the US it is (or used to be) quite difficult to get out of the mental hospital. I think that they cut the funding, though, so that even really crazy people can't get committed. So they end up in jail, instead. The prison industries can find a use for them. At $.12/hour. (I wonder how quickly the prisons will empty when robots get cheaper? [But could they get *that* cheap?])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
White upper class males who's records are so clean they should be cannonized?
I'll bet that Plato was merely echoing the wisdom of the stone-age cheiftan selection procedures. Lucky for him he lived in an age with writing.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
It's People....
It's People....
Soylent Green is People.....
this is available in the US as well...it is called a 5150 Health and Safety code. You're detained and taken to a hospital to be determined if you are a danger to yourself or others. A doctor has 48 hours to make a judgement based on his experience, but NO specific criteria have been established for the detaining officer. Welcome to the 'J' Ward :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Haha, that country is just exploding with good ideas :) :>
The funniest thing is that it's a role model for the civilized world
GO! GO! GO!
Obviously they are trying to get potential dealers and users, however I think they ought to make a database of all the SUV's that drive through these neighborhoods buying drugs, to be fair--since possession itself is a crime, why not track all the people with money who drive in from the suburbs?
Hoooo boy! You thought YOU liked it....
I think your missing the point. It's profitable to have people in jail for companies, even though we are paying the bill, we don't see the profit, we are subsidizing slavery for companies that can are enjoying a cheaper alternative to thrid world sweatshops
BULL SHIT ON A STICK. Find me some number which show that corporations are getting rich off prison labor. Last I knew, all prisoners were good for was stamping license plates and doing road work (chain gangs are illegal now, cruel and unusual punishment). And it's not like we're locking these prisoners in dank musty cells. Don't tell me you think cable TV, a wieght room/exercise program, no taxes and no bills is a cheap bill on US tax dollars.
You want my opinion on criminals, if your guilty (espesialy of high crimes like murder, arson etc) you have given up all your rights as s US citizen. You knew what the consequences were of getting involved and getting caught, yet you did it anyways, so pay up.
Yeah, it is a crime to be poor, espsialy if you try to solve that problem by robbing people and stores. If you're poor, get off your ass and start finding something to do. Hell, there are plenty of religious groups which provide jobs to the poor and there are plenty of openings at McDonalds. Or you could do what the guys in NYC do, collect cans and bottles. It's not much, but it's better than sitting on your ass collecting welfare. "but" you say, "what about Mrs. So and So with her 8 kids to support." Hey, you know what, if she was so damn poor, she shouldn't have been getting it on so often. Yes I do realize there are so circumstances where it is nessesary for someone to have government assistance, but that's to be decided on a case by case basis.
You bet it's not free, if it was then I wouldn't have pay $40K in taxes last year. The American public needs to realize that US corporations are getting what belongs to the public, FOR FREE (well OK they spent a few million paying some party's campain fund, normally paying both the lead parties evenly).
If you're paying 40k in taxes you must be making a pretty hefty pay check. And if you're so concerned about the prisoners and the poor people, why aren't you taking that money and sending it to NPOs and charities to support those people????? YOu get to write that off on your taxes you know.
And what that belongs to the public (and therefore is free) are the companies getting for free?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Frankly, I don't see this bill getting much serious attention. As a rule, the military in this country prefers volunteer forces over a conscripted force. At this point, they want people who want to serve, rather than those who have been forced to. They have enough discipline troubles with volunteers, how bad would it be with those who have been forced to serve?
Also, if every male 18 to 22 has to serve one year, what will the financial cost be? What would these people do? How much of the military's time will be spent mothering a huge population of men, many of whom do not wish to serve? This sounds like a "nice" idea, but not one which will get serious attention.
Sure, it sucks if someone fucks up my stock fund, but it's not nearly as bad as if someone shoots me in the head. Violent crime is what the police should be focusing most of their energies on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"ohh, why didnt you say it was just searching the database?".
Yes, but this is legal. The fourth amendment is to protect your person and your property from unreasonable searches. What you are suggesting is that looking up someone in a phone book could constitute an illegal search.
Care to elaborate on your comment?
The GPL makes software more like your mom. Free and open to all.
is going to start using this to beat felons before they commit a crime?
Capitalism: unequal distribution of wealth
Socialism: equal distribution of poverty
Do we really need to spy on ourselves?
The US already has 3% of the population in jail, many for the "war on drugs". (One out of every 27 people)
I know that we're not a small bunch of colonies anymore but how about treating people as human beings with basic needs instead of insects who are always up to no good?
obviously time to create a database of
police officers (with pictures) and informants.
and *OF COURSE* those suspected of becoming
police officers or informants.
"...most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods."
As a White Collar Worker, this does not trouble me. Since most of the statistical criminals are in fact minorities, from poor, high-crime neighborhoods why would I be concerned? If I am walking down the street at 2 a.m. in a poor high-crime neighborhood, and there are a group of young men of African descent dressed a certain way, I am going to highly discriminate. I will either have my hand close to my 357 Magnum, or I will leave real quick. On thing is for certain, I intend on surviving.
As a Constitutionalist (or at least, I like to think I am), I am very concerned. Are gun owners next on that list? Or how about Catholic Priests? Maybe you, because genetically speaking, you are highly likely to be involved in a crime someday. The Government should not be in the business of using my tax dollars, which they steal from me at gunpoint, to find PROSPECTIVE criminials.
It is a tough issue, and I for one am not smart enough to provide the answers. Take my prosepective for what it is worth, use what you wish, and move on.
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
That is, until the police state comes for them.
"It's been discovered that the police have been hacking into the Slashdot website, which contains a list of people who police believe are likely to break the law. By cross checking postings with IP addresses and ISP accounts, they have recorded names, addresses and photographs of potential hackers --many of whom have clean slates. Since the program was introduced in June, most of the 200,000 people included in the file have been highly opinionated from independent, high-tech communities."
Hey, I think you overlooked something, "Minority Report" is already here. FBI is already arresting people "just in case" becouse they belive they might carry out future terrorist attacks, based on their, race, heritage, religion and whatever place in the world they came from.
Minority Report is already here! So much for that freedom!
I've held the view that police officers are useless for quite some time now. I've never seen a cop deter a crime, I've never heard of one actually managing to do anything useful that a group of citizens could not have done equally as well. All cops really do is harass speeders and stalk teenagers around the mall in their off hours. They clean up the mess that's made after some punk splatters your brains all over the sidewalk for 17$, but that doesn't help you. We should liquidate the police force and dump the money into education in the inner cities, revitalization of the inner cities, and REAL urban renewal, not the "bulldoze the affordable housing and put up 1500$/month apartments" urban renewal.
Maybe complete liquidation of the police force is too much.... Just remove the entire War on Drugs section, that should probably do it... Then you can legalize drugs and regulate and tax them... A ton more income right there...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
...it becomes easier to understand if you can grasp one point. That is, "the police" are not there for your protection. the police are armed mercenaries of the corrupt machine. they exist SOLELY to enforce edicts and orders of the ruling "class" on their subjects. the government itself-people in it-are the major drug smugglers. People in government and their drinking buddies at their clubs run the banks. The banks launder the money. The "war on drugs" is setup as a top to bottom profit scheme, PLUS, it allows them to put huge numbers of people into their criminal justice "system". This is a part of the populations command and control aspect, most common in dictatorships. they know 100% full well that "prohibition" doesn't work, but keeping it illegal is immensely profitable. So, they run a scam war. the streetcops are low level expendable foot soldiers, nothing more, for the bulk of their "duties". Look at DUI laws. Totally legal to go drive someplace and drink, then totally ILLEGAL to drive home. If they were seriopus about drinking and driving, we would have a "one drink, that's it" law on the books, but that doesn't exist anyplace, does it? Nope, the law is a revenue stream, and again, more command and control function over the serfs.
The "war on terrrosim" is another variation of this scam. First, these government "leaders" prop up and support some dictator someplace. A good example is saddam, george seniors business partner, and someone we supplied with intel, weaponry, and also chem and biological warfare "samples" and equipment. We even gave saddam the go ahead to invade kuwait, via our ambassador over there, when the kuwaitis were slant drilling under the border and stealing his oil. Iraq complained about it for THREE YEARS in public and at the UN. Eventually, he invade, whoops, now we have to go "fight the invader". Then when they want to double cross him or rip him off, all of a sudden that dictator and regime becomes "the bad guy". Many very large fatcats make hundreds of zillions, and much political hay made. Age old scam kings pull off.
Soon they will be doing this with saudi arabia, all the signs are there. Just watch it happen.
The po-leece are just their domestic lackeys, nothing more, all they do is sieg heil and follow orders. Nothing new there. The military are their foreign mercenaries, nothing new there, either. Right now they are merging those two supposed to be separate entities, exactly like they do in other dictatorships. Nothing new there as well. Right on schedule actually. Steps, A,B,C,D, etc. this is just normal history, been repeated many times in humans life, all over the planet. Absolutely zero strangeness to it, nor debate, it just is the normal progression of very large and powerful governments to gradually go corrupt and bullyish. there isn't one government that hasn't eventually done this, so having it start to hit hard in the US is just natural, bound to happen sooner or later, and it's happening now, way too many examples can be cited to dispute it, IMO.
You have no "rights", that concept is long, long gone. Go down the list of your "born with rights" in the constitution. Every one of them has a "permit" attached to it now. Yes, there are still some variations, but go back ten years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. What is the overall trend and pattern you see? If you need a "permit" for something, it's not a "right".
You are "with" the dictators and their policies, or you are an "untermenschen", or nowadays they will say "terrorist", and you will be treated accordingly. Their shock troops will act as shock troops always have, and there's always a certain element in populations who dig that sort of scene, to be on the 'force" side of the equation, to en-"force" whatever their bosses tell them to, with no questions asked. It's a part of some human's nature.
Once you can go beyond just intellectualising about it, and really 'get it", that that's the way things are, then it isn't as strange, and you can go on with how you live much better. You have to beat back that cognitive dissonance you get when it finally bingoes with you what's going on. some folks never manage to beat it, the ones that do can usually cope better, no matter how heinous the rtegime gets, and by the looks of it and with the technology they are bringing to bear, this regime looks to become the worst one in the planet's history. We will have travelled from the biggest hope the planet ever had, to the most dark and heinous police and government terror state ever created. They do it with the "unpopularts" first, those druggies, or those "protestors" or whatever buzzword fits. In years past it was dirty injuns, or lazy ni***rs, or..well, you get it. In europe it was filthy gypsies or thieving jews. so many examples. Demonizing particular populations is the easiest way for governments to distract attention from their own crimes, they go "see, it's those other people, let's kill them!"
The police will be there to help out, count on it. some will get hip and quit, refuse to take part. Most will stay in and take part, as long as they can, because of all people, police know it sucks to be the victim, so they will stay on the side where that is the least likely to happen, on the bully side. Governments recognize no neutrals, you are either open for rape and exploitation, or you will be made an example of, a victim, that's the only two choices dictatorships ever offer.
Good luck and better skill to you, you sound like you "get it".
You also might not know it, but the crime RATES in this country have been dropping for some time.
Effect.
With that said, how come there are more cops than 20 years ago
Cause.
Obviously, it's not a 1:1 relationship, but it is a contributing factor.
Now, if they could weed out the (very few) bad apples that manage to get into policing, maybe people would start trusting them again.
More trust of police -> more co-operation with police -> more bad guys caught -> less crime. Or something like that.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Unless things have changed a lot in 18 years... They do not do psychological testing on recruits. The exams we were subjected to (Air Force) were aptitude tests and medical examinations. And then there were the drug tests, and the interviews where they ask you things like "Have you ever committed any crimes?", "Used drugs?", etc. I was clean on those, but the recruiter would have coached me on how to get by (if the military really refused enlistment to former "drug users", then almost nobody could get in...)
Damned Cops! Don't they know that such is the FBI's territory and has been for decades?
Table-ized A.I.
Here's an expanded article from the Wilmington News Journal.
So, if you put tens of thousands of innocent people into a database and match DNA from random crimes against it, you will fish out innocent people. That's why you should only compare DNA of people who are already suspects on other grounds against crime DNA.
> Interesting how you explicitely give a description of the law that allows this then proceed to declare it illegal.
Not quite. It's legal to arrest someone and hold them for 24 hours without charging them, at which time they must be charged or released. However, as his example illustrates, the violation of intent stems from the reason for arrest. These people were purportedly arrested for loitering, but were processed and entered into this database. It does not take a large leap of logic to arrive at the conclusion that they were arrested as an excuse to gather information. If it can be proven that they were targetted for arrest based on police desire to put them in the database (admittedly hard, but not impossible), then the police are guilty of false arrest, which is indeed both reprehensible and illegal.
Virg
Idiocy should be. If it was, I wouldn't have to see another rush limbaugh post like yours again.
And yesterdat, Minority Report seemed far fetched....
Just patent the *concept* of a criminal database, and then charge too much royalty fees for it to ever be implemented.
Patent any SQL that says, "Select * from suspicious_people where....". Overture did just that kind of thing with their "rank by ad fee" algorithm patent.
Fight stupidity with stupidity
Table-ized A.I.
--beg to differ. Violent crime is much more prevalent and extensive at the high income and political levels. At that strata, it's called 'foreign policy". Hmm, some recent examples, monica lewinsky stiory breaks on drudge, within hours the cruise missiles are flying. The generals and admirals "just follow orders" and waste-kill-foreigners because they are told to do so, no "declaration of war" needed anymore.
Go back in time a little, 'government" gives out a report that 'torpedo boats initiated an unprovoked attack on US ships" in the gulf of tonkin. Result, a decade of war, millions killed, years later it was revealed as a lie. Oh well.....
Go back further in time. US businessmen are bankrolling germany and japan, some ford's, bush's, dupont's, kennedy's, etc, serious fatcats. whoops, need a 'war" now. japanese naval codes broken, FDR knows they are approaching pearl harbor, let's the attack proceed. Took decades for that truth to come out, didn't it? Oh well.... it can't be a crime because only 'street crime" exists? really?
Nope, the biggest and most violent criminals are always the ones with the biggest and most weapons, and who stand the most to gain from violence. There's no difference other than scale and rank and title. Leader of the medellin cartel, the "e-vile drug lord", or CEO, honored solid citizen and community leader of ****bank, where the drug cash gets scrubbed. See?
There's thousands of examples of this. It doesn't make street crime any less "bad", but let's not forget the really LARGE criminals and criminal acts, either. Let's agree to actually learn from history and to not ignore reality. And then let's start to recognize the large crimes as they are happening, and not wait decades to find out they were,in fact, *crimes*.
I like how if you express an unpopular opinion, you are a troll. All I was saying is that the police in the U.S. are there to keep the poor in line and out of the lives of the rich. This is just an obvious extension of their foreign policy, turned inwards.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. Show me how the quality of life for an average U.S. citizen has been improving for the last 30 years. Because it hasn't. And don't blame a world economy that has slavishly followed the advice of American economic "experts".
Of COURSE people who want to make a lot of money move to the U.S. What better place to unleash your mercenary fervour? That's what the American Dream *is* after all: having more than the guy next to you. (After all, if everyone had about the same amount of stuff, how would you know who the winner was? And Yanks love winners. Exclusively.)
I mean, considering their attitude, I always thought "E Pluribus Unem" meant "Looking Out For Number One".
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
"Now, if they could weed out the (very few) bad apples that manage to get into policing, maybe people would start trusting them again.
More trust of police -> more co-operation with police -> more bad guys caught -> less crime. Or something like that."
I do believe the majority of cops are good people. But that the bad ones are a SIGNIFICANT minority, and that the majority are JUST AS GUILTY by their silence...
Fact is, there IS no one to "police the police". And in the last quarter century, police powers in this country have increased DRASTICALLY. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops have near absolute power in some respects. THEY get to finger "the suspect". Or not.
Another major problem with our justice system is that juries are largely made up of a NONREPRESENTITIVE sample... There aren't nearly as many younger people, or working people, as there are older retirees. Why? Because everyone ELSE seeks to avoid jury duty. Not that it matters, as both prosecution and defenst counsel quickly seek to eliminate anyone in the pool with any cognition between the ears.
Remember, we are a country of TOO MANY LAWS... Many such laws that are actually illegal, especially on the federal level, as the feds are supposed to not have ANY POWER not SPECIFICALLY ENUMERATED in the Constitution. More laws are passed each year. EVERY new law creates a new crime. There are literally thousands and thousands of laws that apply to anyone in any given place.
AND, there are very few of us not guilty of breaking SOME arcane law, though mostly tiny.
Including the police. Police officers are typically the worst at disobeying traffic laws. It's rare to see them under the speed limit, or not driving what they would consider recklessly in a way they would pull over someone else. Everyone sees it. It's one thing that creates disrespect for them. Especially when speed limits are usually too low, sometimes DELIBERATELY too low, for revenue generation.
Same thing with crime. Most police crime is never known about. Only when it is captured on camera. Recently, in my area, city police officers beat a suspect to death, while he was IN CUFFS, and in the JAIL of all places...
Not much in the way of press on that, except locally. 6 months later I've not heard of ONE cop being dismissed, much less tried for murder.
And my town is one where there is very little crime!
Corporatism != Free Market
Oh bloody hell. One of the tactics of at least the DC police is to ask the person being questioned whether they have any history of mental health or are on any meds (non-specific the way they ask, but suggestive of mental health pharmaceuticals, given the question tends to follow the mental health history question).
Great. Let me guess. If you get pissed off enough to actually try to escape, they hold the fact that you tried to escape as a crime, and compound the escape with the mental health inquiry, to further hold you.
(For those in the US, like me, this is one reason I'm against the "3 strikes" rule. People have been detained, found guilty, put in the prison system, that, of their original crime, found innocent. But because they commit crimes in jail (principally fights or escapes), they are given life terms for being "habitual criminals.")
The FBI has been doing this in at least two kinds of situations:
1- At any "hacker" gathering. MANY undercover FBI are there taking mental notes. Mainly at defcon. but... some were even there at places like quake con. [I know of two FBI field agents that got the go-ahead to go to both events undercover; with partial expensed paid by the govt./taxpayers]
2- People that may be/ have a tendancy to become/ are/ were/ affiliated with what may be/ become/ was a terrorist organization.
I'm sure that more than a few CEO's of listed corporations would qualify. Someone once said about their approach to solving crimes was to follow the money. These guys tend to be close to the feeding trough and certainly have an interest in overpromoting their companies to shareholders.
Tongue and cheek that may be said.
Politicians don't have to follow, or are affected by the laws they pass. What politician is going to pass a law that allows someone to spy on him/her?
Is the DMCA going to personally affect your representative? Were's the pain for a politician who makes a bad law?
Oh looky, we're going to fire you. Hmmfff! They retire with the money they pocketed during their terms, and collect a GREAT pension (better than most of us get). And most of them were rich to start with.
Looks like one of the founding fathers was right.
Political office should never be considered a career.
You obviously are not an American. Maybe that's how the bobbies and the judges work in the United Kingdom or Australia or Germany or wherever, but here in the states the cops and judges are friends. To both of them the citizen is the enemy and obviously always always guilty if the cop says so. The cop is not on trial, you are. If you want the judge to question what the cop says, you'd better have iron-clad, indisputable evidence to back it up. The judge probably won't laugh at you, but his view of the alleged events will be *exactly* the same as the cops. Rather than call you a liar, he will merely rule against you. Next case!
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
This story has a little more detail uncluding a declaration from the mayor of Wilmington that "...If I say it's constitutional then it is constitutional".
/me points gun at your head/
What -- as long as it doesent go off, why should you care?
This is a system that makes it very easy for my rights to be violated (if it doesen't already) Given the nature of people and governments, systems like this will violate someones rights just like pointing guns at people's heads will (probably) result in someone being shot
Hardly. Institutionalized racism and classism is definitely known. The reality, though, is not as you describe, but closer to the following. Folks that know it exists are usually not in the position to do anything. Those that know it exists and are in a position to do something don't because such a counter position generally hurts them (due to the economics of public perception).
I should point out that there is a lot of non-institutionalized spite from what you called the poor or (underrepresented) minorities back at the white and upper-middle to upper classes as well. Both are wrong, suck, and one is not a greater or lesser evil than the other, and neither is justifiable.
As to police being prejudiced....duh. You don't have to watch CNN to see that. Go drive into a metropolitan area, find downtown, ask where the "bad section" of the city is, head in that direction, stop halfway there, and simply observe how the pissing match goes both ways.
The article is too short to really explain this list, but this sounds pretty obvious. All this means is that the department has a collective memory of loiterers/potential troublemakers. No different from an officer noticing some young guys who start hanging out in front of a 7-11 and linking it up with a broken window nearby a few days later.
Of course actions that seem harmless on the small scale, like a shopkeeper remembering your name and preferences, can become threatening on a large scale. But if this makes you anxious, you should consider that policeman have been keeping an eye on suspicious characters since police departments were first created.
aclu has a good list of things to do during an encounter with a police officer
You don't have to answer a police officer's questions, but you must show your driver's license and registration when stopped in a car. In other situations, you can't legally be arrested for refusing to identify yourself to a police officer.
but they also go on to say that you should obey an order, even if it is illegal--there is nothing you can do but bring a charge against the officer in court after the fact. but by then you're already screwed
I agree, except for one thing. I should point out that most studies tracking crime rates show a rather close correlation with economic times.
Crime is on the low because we've generally had a swing up in the economy in the last 20 years (esp. when you compare it with the previous 20 years, that being 21-40). I disagree with your characterization that recent economic times are far worse. Hardly. The economic downturns we've recently have are no where even close as bad as the shit the 70s had.
As to the police, yeah. Interestingly, the crime rate in my area has risen (I've learned here since I was a kid). Yet you hardly see the cops around. In the nearby city, the south side has rampant crime (and I'm talking about rather conclusive crimes, e.g. murders). Meanwhile, despite almost no city population growth, the police force size has increased 50%. While there has been no population growth, there has been a population change--more minorities moved in. Many consider this "understandable"--more minorities, more crime. I always point out that more minorities mean ditto; any area will go to hell if you have a (larger too) police force that will not get off their asses and clean up areas with obvious crime problems.
It will take some time though. As we've slowly lost our so called freedoms or "rights" over the past 100 years, the process will continue unabated for the next 100 years until we have a real Stalin as president with the same power and the same hunger for killing. I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime without some major medical breakthroughs on stopping the aging process, so I'm not too worried. The government will continue to grow and what citizens are "permitted" to do will continue to shrink. But it will happen so gradually, bit by bit, that you almost won't notice. It will all seem perfectly normal. And it will be. As you say, it's a perfectly natural process. It's just what governments do, what they are.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
10 ounces of pot: $1000
1 blotter sheet of acid: $500
Planting them on your favorite brain-dead supporter of the War on Drugs and watching him try to explain his innocence to the police: priceless.
There are some things, like civil liberties, that money can't buy. For everything else, there's a good lawyer*.
*Until drug dealers are prohibited by law from enjoying the right to an attorney, that is.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
And guess what, African Americans are not the victims of the white bigots. African Americans are victims of their own culture, and until you realize that, you will never progress in society as a culture.
How is it that Black culture put up the walls which keep so many of them in poverty?
When a Black family moves into your neighborhood does your property value decline? Yes, sadly it still does in the year 2002. Why is that? Because of racist stereotypes.
I grew up in a white subdivision, yet all the while knew life outside that subdivision. I also grew up with my surrounding neighbors telling me that they wouldn't mind if Blacks moved in as long as they were "clean" or they were "good", as if it was a given that they wouldn't be. Many times this came from people who I wouldn't trust my worst enemies with.
Again, this year a man I know was denied a job he was qualified for because he wouldn't "fit-in". This was at a major Catholic college which you would suspect wouldn't judge one by their race only. Now, you could also think that it wasn't him who would have a problem, but his co-workers. But if this was the case, why should their hateful views be put ahead of a job well done? Because racism still exists. Will it always? Yes, but to ignore it almost puts you in the boat with those racists.
It is the job of everyone to elevate the conditions of your fellow man. If you believe life is lived on an island, you don't belong. No living thing doesn't live within a group, flock, herd, or etc.
The catalyst which started what you call "African-American Culture" is racism. In fact, the term "African-American Culture" starts with slavery. But later on, even after the struggle for freedom and then the fight for civil rights Blacks in this country never got that equal treatment - they were herded into unwanted areas, only allowed the bad jobs, and making it to the top was made impossible.
Since then many have "made it out". Many can get out of areas which have been abandoned by the people who got elected on the hopes they would help. But there is a lowered feeling of worth when you are born into an area and system which is cold and doesn't care. Some may think it's a harsh world, some say "it's a cold world everywhere", but when nothing you seem to do helps, at one point you give up.
Look at areas which you claim are bad because of the people who live there. Then look at the fact that they are the first to turn to drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and violent crime. Why? Because they don't expect to "make it", or even live.
I know this because I'm someone who has a mental illness. When it started to take over and my *planned* life was taken from me I turned to drugs and drinking. It's because at one point you realize there isn't anything you can do.
Can that attitude change? It's changed in me. But going around and blaming Blacks' problems which started with their oppression on their "culture" isn't going to help.
Your use of the word culture isn't correct. What Blacks do in spite of their oppression is culture, but using the term correctly would force me to say that you should use "cultured" as in a Petri dish.
Since you brought up Tupac:
"How about a war on poverty, instead of a war on drugs so the police can bother me"
Simply: Don't waste money fighting consensual crimes when you could fight death, disease and illiteracy.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Well, let's see who commit more crimes - the middle class whites, or the people living in poor neighborhoods (who tend to be black and hispanic). Oh, yeah, that's right.
Firstly, these places are NOT prisons - they are secure hospitals - while this does mean that you are not free to go, equally if you are deemed medically fit you may be let out even though in a conventional prison you might have barely served any sentence at all.
Secondly, the 'whim' of a doctor is a bit of a pointed term. Remember that these are professionals who have been practising for usually many years before they can commit someone for the longer stays - and this is constantly reviewed by consultants working with the patients every day. There are many different orders ('Sections' of our mental health act) which range from 6 hour detention (can be ordered by a qualified nurse) to 24h ( which I could do on my own, as I am fully registered (i.e. out of med school for over 1 year), to 48h, a week or two, a month or two, six months, a year, and indefinitely (I cannot remember all the exact times). For anything longer than 24h two docs must agree, or e.g. a court official. These people are very answerable for this decision; I would try to avoid sectioning a patient as I am no expert unless I thought I really had to - they would have to be pretty barking for this to happen. Of course, as a hospital doc, I could usually get them assessed by the on-call psychiatrist and pass the buck.
Both docs will have access to medical records, but each has to interview the patient and assess them. Patients can appeal against these decisions in which case a third 'impartial' doc is brought in -any number of times. Obviously they'll be an inpatient at the time though.
All in all it's a pretty good system - not infallible, but the benefit of doubt is always with the patient. No doc I know would risk their career with a blatantly wrong assessment, but not all are competent. The vast majority are though.
In practice you have to be pretty doo-lally to get commited. And you get out soon when better. OTOH, if you are a real head-casem you might be there for a while.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
This sounds more like a step into the world of the movie Gattaca... People are seperated by the DNA in them because it "pre-disposes" them to certain things, (smoking, drinking, violence...)
I would enjoy it so much, as I am so smart, and would control others lives more easily... Jejejejee... Those puny minorities and there scummy DNA.... (insert sinister laugh here)
But seriously... If the gov has the DNA of all armed forces personel... couldn't they "Statistically" have templates from which they can find people who were more likely to fit the mold for one job over another?
Wouldn't that be a better way to use this statistical info on people, rather than... focus on something cynical? Hmm... Joe Blow's DNA says he can be a powerful athlete, but he will not have the temperament to work as a team, and yet he has good eyesight, and doesn't talk much... is a loner... Ok, he's going to sniper training. While Jack is a sexual miscreant, and grabs everybody's ass, and he likes teamwork... lets put him in a sub...
You know... it could work. Except those guys in the sub would'nt get much work done...
ok forget the idea, it just plain sucks! Likewise the Minorities would probably have no desire to get out of there rut if society has tagged them as evil-doers...
We don't want society telling ANYone there destiny is to be a bad guy! Would you tell your kids if you happen to live in an area where folks are considered suspicious and bad?
PLEAaaaaaaseee
"the biggest contributing factor with regard to crime is poverty"
If that were true, crime would've been higher during the depression, but that isn't the case. Most of these "poor" aren't poor in that they don't have enough food, or they're homeless. They have a playstation, cable tv, and expensive clothes. The crime in these neighborhoods is NOT people stealing food to feed their children. The crime comes from (IMO, of course) the war on drugs creating a black market, coupled with a high sense of entitlement that pervades US society. But even then, violent crime nationwide is at a 30 or 40 year low, from what I read.
I went to high school (we won't discuss how long ago this was) with an exchange student from near Bombay, India. He laughed at what we called poor, saying we had no idea what poverty was. It really put things in perspective for me. In the US we've rigged the debate by automatically calling the lower x% of the income bracket "poor." Anyway, I'm veering off-topic. Sorry. Your comment just made me think.
Cuz, you know, that would make it all okay.
You really think keeping a photo of you should be protected? I don't know about you but I have no desire to ask every person in my vacation photo if they mind ....
.... I believe that if used properly it could be a useful tool. If I'm hanging out with someone that deals drugs or is in a gang, I'm putting myself in harms way. If i'm hanging out in a place illegal things happen then yeah, the cops should be remembering my face. I don't like the idea of the cops keeping tabs on me ... so I avoid the situation.
As for keeping records
Oh and FYI the cops keep logs of this type of stuff already the difference is no they have gone tech to catalog it.
I did some searching myself, thinking along the same lines - aclu.org has nothing I can find. However, several people here have posted links to delawareonline's article, (Inlcuding many slashdotters who are posting links to it with no other information, as if they were the first to mention it - c'mon folks - read the posts at least a little before you go "adding" to the discussion with a web link listed over and over above you. Or add a thought or opinion of your own so at least you're worth reading!
The city's website has a link explaining their position.
The other link (which is more independant, and critical of the program) I've seen listed numerous times in the discussion so I won't repost it here.
IMO - This looks very much like a perfectly legal manauver being misrepresented because) 1) the police are using it in a manner other than the situations they depict, which seem legal, or 2) the public doesn't like it and is spinning the story in the worst light.
Let me highlight the following points, with the caveat that I understand it's possible police are misusing this tool. (And as such, are breaking the law - but if you don't like that "reasonable suspicion" is too ambigous to trust the police with, then find another place to live - our entire legal system is based on interpreting ambigous statements, right down to the constitution.
"The corner deployment units have the authority under the law, if there is 'reasonable suspicion', to detain, search, request information of, and photograph those individuals who are detained during one of these stops "
"Once detained under the law, police have the right to take a photograph of the person being detained."
To illustrate - if the police can already detain a suspect based on "reasonable suspicion", and are already allowed to photograph any detainee (just like they have the right to record your name, and anything else they discover about you during that process), then there's no justification that the police can't do this.
Yes Folks,
INet Vegas where everybody is a suspect, and you can bet on it!
50 to 1 - Tyson rapes another girl within 6 months
20 to 1 - Bush pussy foots around Iraq invasion at least 5 times within the next 48 hours
30 to 1 - Chaney has another stroke within 8 months
15 to 1 - Whitney smokes crack within the next 5 minutes
80 to 1 - Larry buy's off FAA officials to buzz the control towers in his learjet again
Yes folks, why bet on the NFL, or B-Ball when you can bet someone will be an idiot and win cash prizes!
Brought to you by the makers of the Wilmington Del-aware high crimes police database! If the police can trust us, so can you!
...We're talking about profiling likely criminals in general, not just on race grounds. And if the biggest factor is poverty, then it's not hard to work out who the poor people most likely to commit crime are, and direct efforts to help them, stop them committing crime, or catch them afterwards. Furthermore, such work is not discriminatory, in the usual sense of the word; discrimination normally implies an unfair identification, where in this case there is a legitimate difference.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In psychiatric institutions, anything you do to resist them is treated as evidence of mental illness. Your attempt to escape is not a crime, it simply "proves" that you are insane after all.
Nice reply. You actually argued! And you disregarded my smart-assed tone! Wow!
Maybe there is hope for America after all. Well, no, I really don't believe that. Just wishful thinking. The second that Noam Chomsky gets major air time on a U.S. network, I will reconsider.
BTW: I'm Canadian. Born to hate America the way the twisted twin brother locked in the attic hates his All-star double. Kinda. But at least the view from up here extends beyond my navel.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Is a reality it seems. And people thought Minority Report was SciFi instead of a documentary.
Why do cops wear body armor now? You're joking right? Have you SEEN the hardware that the police catch people with on the streets? Be happy the police just wear body armor and aren't driving tanks.
Soldaten sind Mörder Kurt Tucholsky
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
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Uh. Did you read what you just wrote?
You also might not know it, but the crime RATES in this country have been dropping for some time. Yes, there was a slight rise recently, due to economic hard times, but violent crime today is FAR lower than it was 20 years ago, and we have more people and worse economic times.
With that said, how come there are more cops than 20 years ago?
Reverse the order of those two statements and you have, "there are more cops than 20 years ago", and, "violent crime is FAR lower than it was 20 years ago". Did it occur to you that more cops CAUSES less crime?
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I've never seen a cop deter a crime
That's because you don't hear about events that didn't happen.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
1. The best way to PREVENT crime is to be visible in places where crime is a possibility. This means VISIBLE patrols, not unmarked cars cowering in a blind curve on the highway that goes downhill looking for speeders.
A problem is that "sucess" for policing appears to have become judged in terms of arresting people, issuing tickets. As opposed to detering and preventing crime. It is also important to ensure that police officers are themselves never considered above the law. Otherwise it's too easy for a crook hide their crimes by becoming a police officer.
This is nothing new. Where I grew up, and this was during the mid 80's, police routinely took pictures and names of potential criminals, and kept a file on them. Whenever they stopped a group of young people (potential gang members) they would take pictures of all of us (speaking from personal experience) and take our names. After that, each time we were harassed, another tick was made in the file and you slowly became a very well known person to all the police, without ever having committed a crime. I've seen the cops break out a huge binder with all kinds of info on people who were never criminals, they just hung out in "bad" neighborhoods and with "possible" gang members. I was on that list for years and probably still am. The cops knew my name, my parents names, tattoos I had, my nickname, had my photo, knew my friends names, where I hung out, and on and on...
Freedom is great, isn't it?
Fact is, there IS no one to "police the police".
How can this be done effectivly
And in the last quarter century, police powers in this country have increased DRASTICALLY. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cops have near absolute power in some respects.
Not only that power attracts the corrupt and easily corruptable
More laws are passed each year. EVERY new law creates a new crime.
Including in cases where the new law is redundant
Just as policing appears to be measured by numbers of arrests and tickets issued. Passing laws appears to be seen as some kind of metric of legislature performance. With crime prevention and review of existing legislation taking more of a back seat.
Same thing with crime. Most police crime is never known about. Only when it is captured on camera. Recently, in my area, city police officers beat a suspect to death, while he was IN CUFFS, and in the JAIL of all places...
Not much in the way of press on that, except locally. 6 months later I've not heard of ONE cop being dismissed, much less tried for murder.
You can have not only the situation where a police officer commiting a crime is treated less seriously (which IMHO should be considered a "high crime" attract a higher sentence and not be subject to any statute of limitations) but a crime is treated more seriously if a police officer is a victim. e.g. if someone being killed through being knocked down by a car is described as "murder" then odds on the dead person is a cop.
I wouldn't exactly call myself "naive" ... young maybe not naive. I haven't given up my right to assemble I just know when I see people on the corner where drugs are sold I assume that either they don't care or are in involved with whatever is happening. I know when I'm around illegal doings I'm no saint.
You make it seem like peaceful gathering in the park are going to be spyed on by the cops.
Maybe I don't have a problem because my photo is on the internet. If they want a picture of me I've given it away already.
You have missed my point. In the US, the mental hospitals are now so short of funding, that you don't get admitted just because you need to be admitted. You need to be an active danger to other people. And probably to have health insurance that covers it, too. They gutted the funding. The jails that the people end up in are called prisons, not mental hospitals. It's quite possible that Britain has a more humane system. I wouldn't know, as I haven't talked to anyone with direct experience. (It's hard to imagine that it could be worse.)
That said, some of the mental hospitals were no great shakes when they had funding, either. Some doctors really *believed* in electro-shock therapy. Maybe that's sometimes necessary, but not in those numbers! That's probably worse than Bedlam was. I don't know about insulin shock. I never knew anyone who was coerced into it. But I also haven't heard anything good about it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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how long till the US invades and removes the governments of other countries, "just in case?"
Depends what the "just in case" covers. If it's "just in case corporate profits are at risk" then the answer is "19th century".
"most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods."
While I am vehemently against any sort of database of, as far as the government is concerned, innocent people, I have no problem believing that poor people from high-crime 'hoods are more likely to break laws than the same age bracket of people in a golf course community. Even if it isn't politically correct, let's be real and not pretend this is shocking. Many of these people have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It's the most simple social science.
Reminds me of an old SNL skit where they were doing one of their fake advertisements. It was for an alarm system that would "stop a burglar before he left his own house". Then they would show this with some burglar (was it Eddie Murphy?) trying to leave his own house but an alarm siren and flashing lights would go off and the police would arrive and arrest him. This seems to predate Minority Report by something like 15 years or so. Prior art? NBC or the scriptwriter for that show should have patented that idea so that they could sue these cops for "using their patented idea". Does anyone know what episode that was or know any more details of that skit. It seems particularly relevant now. Maybe the comedy channel will run it again sometime. I think it might have been back when Joe Piscopo was still on the show but I can't remember.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I can see that something like this could be abused but like everything you have to police its use. Solve the problem not the symptom. You don't trust this to be used correctly.
Everything they have is public knowledge. And don't get me started with the picture bit. If your out in public you are now part of the land scape, does it make a difference who takes the picture?
As long as we have money in our pocket and a beer in our had, they (goverment) will continue to tramp on our rights and we won't do anything about it.
There's no nefarious intent here. The cops know that they themselves and criminals are pretty much cut from the same cloth -- both otherwise useless people who like to earn their living by bullying others.
This file of potential criminals is therefore just a recruiting database.
Depends. Poorer people might be more likely to shoplift or something to that effect, whereas things like assault, date rape and the like would probably be a lot more common in middle classes.
And the top echelons commit fraud and embezzlement as the crimes of choice.
Each class has problems crimes, is just that people are prejudiced against poorer people. Look at the figures sometime.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
<RANT>
The "War on Drugs" is a sham -- it's been going on for years and years and there's no end in sight. There isn't even *progress* in sight, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Saying "Look at the big pile of drugs we've confiscated" while standing in front of X-gazillion dollars worth of white powder about to be incinerated does not actually indicate progress in this "war" -- to measure progress, you would have to determine that the availability of drugs on the street has decreased, and to my knowledge (and I'm no expert) this has not happened. No one has yet claimed that there are now "NO DRUGS AVAILABLE ON THE STREETS OF CHICAGO!" or anywhere else.
You mention legalizing and regulating (and taxing) drugs as a possible solution -- and I agree. The only way to win this "war" is to get the criminal element to give up. And the only way that'll ever happen is if we take the money out of it. And the only way *that* will ever happen is if we make drugs *cheaper* to the point that the cost of importing the stuff the way the crooks do ends up exceeding the cost of growing the stuff here on our own territory, refining it in Winston-Salem's plants and distributing it to state-licensed stores just like we do with liquor.
Will that ever happen? I don't know. I'm not optimistic, though, because this approach is not only opposed by lots of upstanding citizens who can't get past their upbringing, but it's also opposed by the *very* wealthy crooks and their lawyers and etc.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find that *HUGE* contributions are being made to the campaigns of those politicians who are most rabidly anti-legalization by front people and/or organizations for the crooks who stand to lose the most money if we were ever to actually decide to win the "War on Drugs."
</RANT>
Sorry. Sore subject for me.
TyZone
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But with this sort of thing, and incidents like the Houston PD stormtrooperaid on kids at a K-Mart http://66.70.240.173/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1598 (discussed on my site, several news articles linked to there), I don't trust them...
Aw, fer Pete's sake. They really did that, didn't they? Aw jeez.
Okay, kids, let's all remember, now -- and repeat it often where others can here you -- "The Police Are Not On Your Side!"
Let's don't make 'em out to always be the enemy, but keep in mind that they have an awful job to do, they deal with the dregs of society, and you should *NOT* assume that they are on your side in a given situation. They're interests are not yours and we all need to keep that in mind during any encounter with the xxPD.
While we're at it, everybody go to the ACLU's website and download the Bust Card, print it and keep one in your wallet.
Hell, print two and give one to a friend.
TyZone
This has absolutely nothing to do with what you were talking about earlier... in fact you have completely changed the subject.
To Summarize: Our argument is as follows..
Me: Crime X is punished more than Y because that is what the majority think should be punished and policed for
You: Oh yeah, well "To me..." the two crimes are equivalent because both ruin people's lives
Me: True, they both do, but since we live in a democracy, it isn't what matters "to you", but what the majority thinks.
You:
- Yeah but the Bill of Rights protects me from the majority.
- Just because the majority thinks something is right, doesn't mean it is
- I'm reminded of a quote that has nothing to do with our argument (as we weren't discussing liberty, we were discussing differing severity for crimes)
My replies to your points, which really have nothing to do with the orriginal discussion---Lane
"You can have not only the situation where a police officer commiting a crime is treated less seriously (which IMHO should be considered a "high crime" attract a higher sentence and not be subject to any statute of limitations) but a crime is treated more seriously if a police officer is a victim. e.g. if someone being killed through being knocked down by a car is described as "murder" then odds on the dead person is a cop."
It's even worse than that... If you kill a police *DOG* it's tried as a homicide most places! They are considered police "officers".
You are likely to get more time for killing the police dog that is ripping apart your wife than you would if you killed your wife because you found her in bed with another man...
Or more time than someone who abandons and kills a baby... I could go on and on...
I totally agree. YES, someone who kills a peace officer, fireman, etc who are LAWFULLY doing their jobs *SHOULD* be more greatly punished. Those people in LAWFUL execution of duty should be sacrosanct.
But so too, their crimes should be considered GREATER crimes, because they aren't common citizens. Cops have it both ways, their OWN crimes are LESS LIKELY to be punished, yet slugging an off duty cop who said something rude to you in a bar is a major felony.
Frankly, I wonder WHAT system could be designed that would be better though... We give law enforcement so much power today, and too little oversight, that the job (which sucks, BTW, other THAN their little power trips, which is why I think so many eventually are corrupted) almost requires a SAINT...
They have too much power and too little restraint.
The best solution, IMO, is to strike laws. If we ended the already lost "Drug War" right there would be half or more of the need for cops and prisons. Which would mean PLENTY of manpower to crack down on violent crime.
Dirty little secret: Despite how it's most often portrayed, drug "crimes" are NOT violent. MOST people arrested are low level street "pushers" and users. The "big guys" (ie, the ones who produce and distribute in bulk) seldom are touched. Why, someone might get hurt (or not get paid) that way!
Decriminalizing drugs will get rid of what crime problem DOES exist with drug distrobution as magically as the bootleg alchohol profit fueled Capone gangs were vanquished by the striking of Prohibition...
Indeed, the GREATEST , most illustrative example of how lawmakers and law enforcement's respect for the law (Constitution) is the difference between how Prohibition and the "Drug War" were enacted...
Prohibition became Federal Law by CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT... Drugs were made illegal post-World War II by what amounted to Federal "fiat".
Corporatism != Free Market
And about prisons:
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I'm presuming you live in the USA; it's not entirely clear from your user profile.
If you want draconian no-nonsense drug laws, I would suggest you move to Singapore. They shoot drug dealers on the spot there. Course, they don't have these pesky things called constitutional rights over there, but it's quite clear from your tone and attitude that you don't care about such things.
Since you in typical fashion ignored the entire point of my post, let me put it to you more directly: suppose someone framed you for drug possession. How would you like to be treated by the US police and criminal justice system?
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
how? the people listed in the database aren't being charged with anything, so it's not as if they have to appear in court.
nb: their identity and "person" are already a matter of public record; they're in public.
the police department in question would probably suggest the opposite: they are trying to ensure equal protection; hence the database.
Look, it's SOP for a women's health clinic to photograph those who appear on the sidewalk protesting abortions, and to maintain a fairly comprehensive description of actions and behavior not only at that particular clinic, but indeed any other clinic where that particular individual may appear. You might even call a collection of such descriptions a database.
These clinics started the process over 20 years ago as a way of protecting themselves from those unknown extremists who decide to act outside the bounds of law (i.e., criminals). The descriptions and photographs are used to defend the clinics and their patients against unwarranted attack, as well as chronicling the behavioral development of those that may one day commit crimes, instead of just loitering on the sidewalk, as it were.
The practices undertaken by this specific department are tried and tested, and from my NSH perspective, valid.
Do us all a favor, and ponder before you rant.
Randomly generate IDs.
I think we should help out by setting up our own website with information on police officers and politicians who we believe are likely to become corrupt. It could feature names, addresses and photographs of potential corruptees --many of whom have clean slates.
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immigants... takin' resources away from real American's. American's like george dubya and his under-age drinkin' daughters and his pill-poppin niece...
I'm Canadian From oakville, ontario (halton region).
It's damn near impossible to get admitted here.
I've had friends admit themselves before, and they had to argue with the nurse to be let in.
The main problem here, is that the provencial government has started to cut funding, and the directors of the hospitals don't want to give up their $500K + salaries, and helicopters and company vipers... Ah, but i digress..
Anyway, the nurses that handle admissions are not overly receptive to new patients here. And for all but the most serious cases, they only keep you long enough to do an evaluation. You have to be pretty messed up to get any sort of treatment past a week.
That was my sort of disjointed, drunk, demirant. Actually, i refuse to take credit for that. It's probably of shameful quality.
What? Me? Worry?
With that said, how come there are more cops than 20 years ago?
Perhaps it is partly due to the greater number of officers that the crime rate has decreased?
In addition to the current rash of justice, lets' extend this action beyond the normal "drug screening" that many employers subscribe to. Let's have every employee submit to "chip implantation" so employers can monitor each and every employee's whereabouts. Let's mandate video/audio monitoring of employee's homes and vehicles ( I believe the video/audio monitoring should also extend to any other place an employee frequents for any arbitrary amount of time, i.e. restaurants, movie theatres, parent's home, friend's home, etc. ) I believe, in exchange to payment for service rendered, an employee should waive ALL rights to personal privacy. Those unemployed, or self-employed must also waive all rights of personal privacy in order to accept any form of government aid, aid from any registered non-profit organization, etc.
Gee, maybe THEN we can finally put these no-gooders where they belong!
Guyote
Guyote was here.....
My mother was in the legal profession, the father of one of my best friends growing up was a Lieutenant in the police force. I've been around lawyers, judges and cops a lot. And I never EVER heard any of them say anything about preventing or deterring crime. It was never their motivation or their intent. They always talked about punishing the offenders... Which doesn't really help the victims any does it?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Police use lists of potential threats to help their investigations whenever there is a crime in the suspect's city that they think may be perpetrated by him or her. The larger the list they have, the easier it is for them to conduct their investigation.
An example of this is in my hometown, Edmonton, Canada. A woman was recently sexually assaulted at knife-point in her home by a man who broke in through a window. Her child was in the house at the time as well. Both were then forced at knife-point to enter a van and eventually escaped. The police are going over their list of possible sex offenders derived from people previously charged with similar offences, to see if they can find any leads. If this happened to someone you knew, wouldn't you feel safer knowing they had as many possible suspects as possible to track down and prevent such an assault from happening again? I would.
Besides, the police have better things to do than spy on law-abiding citizens. There's a whole world full of evil sons-of-bitches that need stopping, plenty to keep your local police busy. I think privacy advocates sometimes get out of hand in their attempts to protect their(our) rights.
Any word from the NAACP? Sounds like a 200 member harrassment law suit.
I'd reply, but I fail to see what your post has to do with mine...
I merely discussed the reasons for stiffer penalties againt violent street crime than white collar crime.
You went on a typical slashdot reduction ad absurdum against drug screening. I'm not seeing the connection.
---Lane
Black* people have everything going for them.
To sum it all up, there's nothing difficult. 1) Stand out, by being trim. 2) Do well in school. 3) Apply for black student scholarships. 4) Attend a top school that some white people only dream about. 5) Get any job you want 6) Profit
SCENARIO1: If your pants start at your knees, your clothes are torn and drooping, you have gold chains everywhere, and you have a leather jacket / football jersey on, you WILL be treated like a WHITE person. A white-TRASH person, more specifically...
SCENARIO2: But if you respect yourself, wear CLEAN ironed shirts and pants, clean nails, and nice shoes (not sneakers), you WILL get MORE respect than any white-trash gets.
But most importantly, you will get MORE respect than ANY OTHER RACE gets. Yes even more respect than trim WHITE people get. That's because people are used to seeing 95% of black people not take care of themselves. Therefore, the black "trim" person will stand out.
Take this "trim" black person, do good in school and get any of the millions of BLACK ONLY scholarships.
Next are colleges. Without RACIAL PROFILING, a "trim" black, active, good student can easily get into a top school, COMPETING DIRECTLY with students of ALL races. But because of RACIAL PROFILING, this black trim student is at an advantage--quotas. Colleges will have spots for black students and would rather fill them with trim black students.
Jobs are the SAME exact thing as colleges.
I SWEAR to you it's as simple as that.
*Black is used here to mean African American because Blacks would rather be called Blacks, regular Americans and not singled out.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
WCMI92 wrote:
...
"I'm beginning to believe that there is little difference between the police AND the criminals any more"
That thesis has been around for a long time.
It is one of the case studies in the 1950's pop psychology classic "The Games People Play".
The notion is that the fuzz and the crims are largely a closed group playing games that probably started in teh school yard - it was certainly the case that if you tracked the toughs from my school yard they went in one of two directions - into the police, or into jail.
It was unpredictable which ones went where
Since when did white Slashdot users become experts in being black in the inner-city. Many of you can spout all of the uniformed rhetoric you want but unless you are black you will never understand what it means to be black.
I've heard everything from "If I see two guys of African descent on the street, I will [to paraphrase] run and hide like a little baby." or "Different breeds are better suited to do different things (as if humans were dogs)."
Everytime a Slashdot reader posts an article about Microsoft doing something that discriminates against Linux. I see the slashdot rapid freedom response team. When I see an article about social ills such as police misconduct against minorities, many in the slashdot community say blacks deserve what they get, or there no such thing as racism.
The biggest problem I see with most of the posts on this thread is that whenever people talk about blacks they slap them all together like a herd of cows. It becomes a them versus me argument instead of a we argument.
Primer:
Africa is not a country it is a continent with over 50 countries of people speaking over 400 languages with > 4000 years of history.
African are genetically deversity from skin tone to facial features.
Sure african-americans (whatever that title means) may perform lower on average on academics, but that does not mean there are no african-americans that score above average on tests. Whites and Asians like to comfort themselves by saying their races as a whole do better in academics, but then when I ask many of them how they did in college they usually change the issue.
Not all blacks listen to rap music, and not all whites listen to rock music. There are blacks who listen to rock music as well as play in bands.
Not all blacks dress up as thugs, do drugs, carry guns, etc.
Not all blacks are good at sports.
Not all black neighborhoods are run down. Not all houses in black communities have low realistate value. This is why the term gentrification exists.
Not all blacks are southern christian, 1/2 Africans in Africa are muslim. Ethiopia has a significant Jewish population.
I could go on and on, but I hope you get the point. Just remember, you like to look at yourself as an individual not as a class of people, treat others with the same respect.
"Want to know why this hasn't received media attention? Racism. The media doesn't have a problem with people being jacked around by cops unless they are non whites."
Huh? Well over 50% of the kids I saw in the pictures in the news about this incident were white.
What the hell is your problem? You retards are just as much of a problem as redneck racists.
Oh yeah, its clearly media bias; they only show the white kids getting arrested. But that woulnd't explain the other 50% they chose to show.
It's always bothered me how law enforcement is such a bandaid solution. They just lay in wait until you do something wrong - then whammo they can use whatever means necessary to bring you in.
This case is an obvious example... now why aren't they trying to make changes so these people will be less likely to commit a crime? Perhaps the police themselves should be living in a poor, crime-ridden neighbourhood for a long time and see how their behaviours change... how their lack of options maybe drives them to more violent behaviour. You take those people out of that environment and they're changed people - I'd almost guarantee it.
This has everything to do with what we were talking about.
You brought up the issue of the majority being more afraid of one particular kind of crime, which results in profiling of citizens to decypher if they are likely to commit that particular type of crime. Your rights to privacy and a speedy and fair trial, along with the assumption of innocense until proven guilty, ARE protected by the Bill of Rights.
I thought we were talking about cops snapping photos of innocent people and putting them in a database of 'future' criminals.
Me: Crime X is punished more than Y because that is what the majority think should be punished and policed for
You: Oh yeah, well "To me..." the two crimes are equivalent because both ruin people's lives
You are completely missing my point.
I never said they should be treated equally. I was objecting to the notion that white collar crime was somehow less serious. By bringing up the point of a victim, I was pointing out that both crimes hurt other people. Smoking pot in your apartment hurts nobody, and should not be considered a serious crime when compared to a crime where someone else is hurt. Yet there are thousands of non-violent offenders in prison on posession charges, in overcrowded prisons, while 'Kenny boy' Lay can rest safely in any of his 18 homes.
I'm reminded of a quote that has nothing to do with our argument (as we weren't discussing liberty, we were discussing differing severity for crimes)
This was merely my attempt to bring this debate back on it's original track, which was the obliteration of civil liberties to provide peace of mind to a select few, which is directly relevant to the quote.
As to your last two points, the first is well taken as it was my point to begin with, the second was the very reason I wrote in the first place. You claim classism has nothing to do with the profiling. I disagree.
In any case... I'm catching an early flight tomorrow morning, and I won't be near a terminal for a few days, so this will be the last post from me on this matter.
-- This sig for rent.
I've always held the following opinion, give the police all the power they want, if they abuse it. Kill them, kill their families, down to the last child, salt their land, deliver the most obscene tortures, the worst penalties, the most horrific acts upon them. Let a cop abuse the public trust, just let him, imho it's worse than murder. Same thing with a politician. Too the nth degree let those who betray the public as a whole suffer, slavery, torture, who cares, but let it be the ultimate deterant. Hell, punish the whole department with something like castration/mutilation so they turn on each other. There's something fundamentally wrong with anyone who wants to tell people what they do wrong all day anyway. But the good people, the people who went into it for the right reasons, let them be fairly compensated for it. Just my $.02.
Though last I heard, it's still cheaper to send 'em to a reasonable college for a year, including food, books, and dorm, than a year in prison. Obviously by the time they get to prison, it's too late, but getting teenagers into college would be a better investment for the country.
But people like expensive and inefficient, i.e. corrective action, rather than inexpensive and efficient, i.e. proactive. Look at the "Anti-virus" industry as an example of the former and OpenBSD or SELinux as and example of the latter. Guess which method gets more press.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I think what they are doing is not quite so much wrong as it has the potential for abuse. Potential is not a problem so long as their is equal accountability. Ruining a person's life is worth a life, or several lives. So let the police suffer the fate of those they would falsely accuse, only X3. I'd also like to see police fall under the military code of uniform justice in regards to civilian crimes. IE adultery carries a BIG fucking penalty. It's not like they can catch more than 20% of the criminals anyway. I mean shit, a police office (like they do where I live), fucking tells a woman, fuck me an I'll let you out of a ticket, that bastard deserves to be tortured, mutilated, horribly punished in such ways that anyone would think twice about it. And then his family, his friends, and his department suffer the same exact fate. Only then will I trust the police. When all of them are held ultimately accountable for their mistakes by the lives of the whole.
He wants (so thinks Ashcroft, Dubya & cronies) to build nukes. So he should be punished. What a frikkin unbelievable world!
Our governments have to put everybody into the prison and also all newly born babies will remain there!
That's the only way how to ensure, that good citizens (that people outside of prison) wont be endangered by criminals, suspect-criminals and will-be-criminals ever.
</sarcasm>
hany
The dealers, very often, don't get actually convicted or anything. Oftentimes their wives do, their associates do, and random users do - but actual dealers tend to wind up back on the streets very quickly, because that's what keeps the War on Drugs in business.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Look, please, explain to my just wtf is with the whole 'African American' thing. Are you African, or are you American.
I can't help but think that the constant classification (as though all people with dark skin were the same race, had the same ideals, values, social structures, desires, etc) does nothing but increase the barriers between black and white.
Technically all Americans are African Americans - if you go back far enough. I believe the current theories on the origin of man track all white people to a single exodus from Africa.
Since the various human races in Africa are far more genetically divergent than all the rest put together, classing together all 'African Americans' is actually counter-intuitive. The only reason for such a classification can be on skin colour.
I'm also distressed by the pre-occupation on origin in America. This applies equally to the Irish in America, African Americans, the Jews, the Italians, any of the ethnic groups. You're all American. It's because people don't think of themselves that way that you remain divided, that you retain those ethnic groups.
If you're that keen to be identified with Africa, just go back. If you're that fond of Ireland, go live there. If you are really truly committed to living in America, being American, then call yourself an American. I'm not suggesting you forget the culture - I love the influences other cultures can have on a society, it prevents things becoming stale, it sustains and improves things. But stop making people think of your origins when they consider you. Force them to approach you as an equal, as a stakeholder in their future, and that of their country.
I accept that you've acknowledged that the black population of America could do considerably more to help themselves. I'm just expressing confusion at the use of a phrase that seems to perpetuate misunderstanding and xenophobia.
~Cederic
ps: I live in the UK. I love the fact that the majority of UK society is accepting of those who are different, and acknowledge that there are many areas where we could also improve.
I can't speak directly about the US system, but it shows what is largely a problem with the US healthcare model (ours is by no means perfect, but when it is free at the point of delivery it seems to be a better idea). The funding is a problem here as well - there are certainly a good many people who are in regular jails who would be better served under psychiatric supervision. Politicians aren't generally interested in mental health - too much stereotype and stigma; the funding is directed towards political goals - breast care, cancer, heart disease; even when the evidence base is not really there (breast cancer screening, IIRC, has no objective evidence supporting it as a screening tool - there are a good deal of people who may have had their lives saved by it though, who I'm sure will disagree, but the point is, on a population scale, the same amount of money could have saved more people with some other disease - but an emotional subject for many and therefore a lot of investment).
Anyway, back to the point - you are right in that many people end up in the wrong place, although often it depends on the presentation - if you are seen to be dangerous to others, that doesn't neessarily mean you'll ever see a psychiatrist, in which case you'll never have a chance of seeing the inside of a mental hospital. Remember there are a lot of people without mental illness who are a danger to others as well - it has to be drawn to someone's attention, and it isn't always obvious.
The bottom line is money. Especially in the US, if you had to shell out $250 000 or more to go through med school (average debt at the moment here is about £12 000 ($18 000?) but we don't pay university fees or it would be much higher) then would you want to work for the government getting shit pay or get a million a year prescribing ritalin to kids whose parents couldn't cope with the fact that kids, as a rule, jump around and are generally unmanagable. (I have a lot of issues with the US system, and the mass prescribing of drugs to children who don't need them (only a very few of them do), often under the age that the drugs are licensed for, to keep the parents happy rather than to ofer any benefit to the kids, is nothing short of obscene. But that's what private healthcare does - "If you don't give me it, someone else will, and they will get my money instead")
Off the point again - a lot of the mentally ill here do not get into institutions; I can only imagine it would be worse in the US because it's a private system and as a general rule, the mentally ill are less likely to have cash (lower socioeconomic background, more difficult to hold down a job...). The people responsible, ultimately, are the politicians who allocate the funding, but until the mentally ill are viewed with more sympathy then this is unlikely to happen.
Incidentally, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is very effective for some people - like any treatment, it doesn't benefit everyone, and a few years ago they thought it was great so they did overprescribe it a bit (OK, a lot). I do see a lot of idiots being very vocal about it, however ('barbaric', 'painful', 'assault') who are clearly talking with compensation in mind. A minority of them have a point - it was not always administered properly. But most are just after a quick buck from a class action lawsuit.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Leftist, huh? Well, lets look at our poly wanna dollar polititions on _both_ sides of the aisle. I don't have a link to the stats handy at the moment, but last I checked, not many where hurting for money. Oh, but it's legal for them to take bri...err...donations.
Just because I point out something you find unpleasent does not make me a troll.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I was thinking about that film...
Imagine you had a system where you did arrest ppl before they did a crime, and did get false positives, but got less than you do currently (people can still get sentanced when innocent unfortunately these days - its not perfect)
Surely this would be a better system?
In the next study they should focus on affluent areas and predict the next white collar criminals... or is that only a crime when you cause damages in excess of one million dollars and the local TV news does a report on it.. which is of course nothing compared to those bastards that ripped my CD player out of my car....they got a whole 300 dollars
I've yet to read it, but it looks to be very good. The one question I have for you is, where is this guy teaching children? If you mean 18-22 year old college students then I really must object to them being called children. One of the biggest problems I see in this country is how the age at which people are expected, no DEMANDED, to be mature has been creeping ever higher for who knows how long. It makes me sick how college students and 20-somethings are still living in a kind of prolonged adolescence. What kind of culture are we living in that childish behavior and dependency is still accepted from someone who is halfway to 40?
I work at a university and I can count several occassions in the past year when a writer for the school newspaper referred to themself as a "kid" or to his/her peers as "kids." This is wrong. Sadly it is also encouraged. So many parents don't raise children to be adults, they raise them to be children. The fact that most of them actually do manage to grow up anyway is a tribute to just how much the process of maturity is self directed.
Anyway I didn't mean to jump all over you, its just that the idea of college students as children is a sore spot for me. Where I come from childhood ends when you start growing hair in new places, not when you're 25.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
How come so few of them are getting shot or otherwise removed from the gene pool? Where I come from if someone was acting like that he'd be killed by the very community he was mistreating.
But then again I don't come from a ghetto where any sense of community died a long time ago. I can see how it would be easy for the police to behave that way when there was no solidarity on the part of their victims. Divide and conquer is the name of the game, although in this case the division is a pre-existing condition.
If the police are a problem in some communities then I suggest the people of those communities band together, arm themselves, and when push comes to shove give the police a reason to think twice about terrorizing people. An armed society is a polite society, and I can think of no place more in need of an etiquette lesson than the ghetto. Just imagine how quickly the violent crime rate would fall... How much crime would there be if all of the non-criminals were packing heat? I dare say that the streets of such a community would be some of the safest in the country. Not only would the police mind their manners but the thugs would either be dead or scared shitless of their would-be victims. The only purpose the police would serve would be their usual role as armed historians, writing reports about stuff that happend before they ever got there. The difference is that with the public being armed most of those reports would end with the thugs being arrested or shot dead rather than their victims being killed, raped, robbed, etc.
The only problem with this plan of course is that criminals are opportunists. These thugs would not just sit around in the ghetto. Instead they would move their activities to other places where people were less likely to be armed. Then of course we'd start hearing news stories about thugs attacking middle class (mostly white) neighborhoods. Then of couse the gun control morons would start in blaming the guns the thugs were using. This in turn would fool the weak minded into wanting to take guns away from everyone living in the ghetto. So in the end honest citizens living in the ghetto would be stripped of their ability to protect themselves, leading to a "homecoming" for the thugs, including those carrying badges.
America, don't you just love it?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You know, I'd like to believe that our esteemed medical professionals are so skilled that they don't need any safeguards like habeus corpus or the right to a fair trial.
But the fact of the matter is that there are doctors out there who will make bad calls, who are zealots about particular issues, or who want to comply with authority. And those are the ones who are going to get called.
Perhaps you've never seen a friend pulled off into legal indefinite detention becuaue his political views strike a shrink as diseased. When it happens to you, you may change your mind.
Try saying, "The right to commit suicide is a basic human right," in front of a medical professional. Then, from inside the nuthouse gates, try to believe that the first amendment still exists.
We have a legal system, courts, constitutional guarantees about "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," all because we don't want to have to trust those in authority with unlimited power. That includes nice people like doctors, too.
I firmly believe that when the first amendment is finally destroyed in this country, it will be unaccountable doctors and indefinite detention laws that do it. Nobody will call dissidents "criminals." They will call them "mentally ill", "confused," "a danger to themselves and others," or as you put it, "pretty doo-lally." After all, criminals have rights.
--G
Written by what appears to be a true pinko!
The only time you become this so-called "enemy" is when you're committing a crime.
The reason that your city has as many if not more Law Enforcement is that most of the smart people have moved from what appears to be - by your own description a crime-ridden hell-hole.
The reaons that Law Enforcement Officers now wear body-armor is because the criminal now has accesss to high-powered weaponry that is the equal to or better than what the Law Enforcement Officers are using.
I read the URL you posted, concerning the arrest of "kids" who were in violation of tresspass at a KMart - serves them right to get arrested, since there apparently WAS a previous problem there - why else would the Houston Police Department arrest people if there wasn't a complaint made and evidence found to support the complaint??
GET REAL!
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
-Matt
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Cops are useless eh? So what would happen if they were not there? What if they went on strike?
This is not a rhetorical question: it happened in Melbourne in 1923. The result was rather predictable: riots and looting in the street. Melbourne Police Strike
I am not a lawyer but my sister is, so don't mess with me
Well, since the president technically has control over the military (only one able to authorise use of nuclear weapons, etc...) and the definition of a facist country is one where the leader of the military is the leader of the country...
I think both my Senators should be on this list.
cursethedarkness
I invite them to do so... It just means I'll not hesitate to shoot the fucker that tries to mug me, since I won't have to worry about being arrested for self defense.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
It's political correctness that has led to the a very, very foolish mentality amongst airport security screeners. They don't want to be accused of singling out Arabs for extra scrutiny for 'racial' reasons. For this reason, they will single out anyone -but- Arabs. Grandmothers in wheelchairs. Mothers with bottled breast milk. Even the pilots themselves.
I read about the bottled breast milk incident, and that was truly stupid.
However, the suggestion that Middle-Eastern people can freely stroll through the airports while everyone else is repeatedly stopped at spot-checks tells me that you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I'm guessing that you don't have many friends of Middle-Eastern ancestry who travel much. I recently went on a business trip with a colleague who must look like an "Arab". I was asked a few questions but passed through the checkpoints without much delay. He was stopped at each and every one, and once was escorted to a private room and was asked to remove his suit and trousers as part of a "routine security check".
People of Mid-Eastern descent are the first to be singled out at the airports.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
It's ironic that you'd mention that. The corporation I work for has state prisoners assemble wiring harnesses. We pay the prisoners, and the state gets a good chunk of it to offset the cost of their incarceration. The thing is, we are actually spending more money doing that than we would just having a local company build the harnesses for us. The only thing the program is doing for us is giving us good PR, it really is a case of doing something for the community- we are offsetting jail costs. And if you really think it is slavery, please tell me why competition is so fierce among the inmates to get a job building those wire harnessess? They have the option of setting in their cells, but they want to work and make SOME money for when they get out. We had an excess of applicants for those positions...
Murphy was an optimist.
I'm not proposing lighter treatment on anyone. I'm proposing that this country actually take the Bill of Rights and civil liberties seriously. You're the one that wants to take away constitutional rights of drug dealers to help the War on Drugs, and I say that that's too high of a price to pay. When anyone's rights are taken away, all of us lose, because those that want power and control will try to take it away from the lowest first (i.e. drug dealers), and they can count on people like you mindlessly cheering them on, while they make plans to expand their rights-grabbing.
Do you think that drug dealers would break into your home if drugs were legal? How many liquor store owners get caught breaking into homes? How many people each year are killed over cigarette turf wars? Your home being broken into is a direct consequence of the War on Drugs, the very thing you support!
I don't see the users as victims at all. Certainly some get addicted to the various addictive drugs, and get locked into a vicious cycle, but the War on Drugs isn't helping them; in fact a lot of work that could be done to help them is actually made illegal by the War on Drugs.
The cost of dealing drugs has been made high already-- the result is that drug prices went up, and the rewards for dealing went up as well. This is simple supply and demand. As the financial rewards for drug dealing go up, the drug dealers have more money to play the legal system with. Thus they can afford better lawyers and are more likely to escape legal consequences. It's the people around them that get screwed-- they get sucked into the legal system as well, except they don't have the drug profits to defend themselves with, so they get packed off to jail, since they can't even turn someone else in for a lighter sentence.
So the short version is: drug laws are already as tough as they can be w/o taking away constitutional rights-- and in fact rights are being infringed already. Drugs are as prevalent as they ever have been. 60 percent of the prison inmates are there because of drug-related crimes, as opposed to 2.5 percent violent crimes. The War on Drugs has been fought and lost; it's time to admit that and choose another path.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In Ohio, they're keeping a DNA database [enquirer.com] of CLEARED suspects!
Do you really think those fingerprints taken from you as a kid suddenly vanish when you become an adult?
You've already been filed.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You must smoke ALOT .... paranoid?
And yes believing that all the cops are out to get you is paranoia. I have friends that are cops and you know what they don't have a master plan to screw people over, they are in the line of duty to help people. So to listen to someone like you bash on them is rediculous.
If they start using this DB to trump up charges how will it hold up in court? No judge is going to let a case stand up just because you hangout in certain areas. We still have a justice system.
The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust the computer in all things
and remember -- in all liklihood, the computer wants you dead
(for this, my signature is especially appropriate).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The job of the police is law enforcement, not crime prevention. The concept of crime prevention assumes that someone is guilty. This goes directly against the idea of "innocent until proven guilty". You are right, law enforcement does little for the victim, but "guilty unless proven otherwise" is a path I do not want to tread.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
Listen, if I could be sure that I wouldn't get punished in any way, shape or form, I would happily run a public http server with ripped Hollywood movies on it. Deterrence works on me (although I don't agree with the law, but that's irrelevant) - I don't know about you.
(Off to the gulag with greenrd for comitting a thoughtcrime! *ahem*)
I agree with you to an extent about lack of prevention. But one of the most important steps that can be taken to reduce crime is reduce poverty and social exclusion and hopelessness, and that goes beyond a police officer's mandate just slightly...
Female Prison Rape in NY
Another brilliant short story in a similar vein and from the same era as 'Minority Report' is Isaac Asmiov's 'All The Troubles In The World', which is in the compilation 'Nine Tomorrows'.
And if you really want to incarcerate someone, how hard would it be to get two doctors to sign off on him? Say: Two doctors who are known for prescribing extra narcotics to their patients turning a blind eye to multiple other prescriptions -- or a pediophile child psychologist?
-----
A number of years ago, there was a Lawyer in Vancouver by the name of Jack Cram. He was most famous for taking on the government for conspiracies (and winning in court).
One day he took on a case that was to undo him: It was a young lawyer (Renata Andreas-Auger) who claimed that she was being harrassed by the Law Society of BC (who control the lawyers).
It seemed like a reasonably straight-forward case to Cram, but after taking on her case, it seemed that the Law Society -- and even some of the judges of the Supreme court of BC (The SCBC handles primary trials for civil cases and serious criminal offences with appeals going to the court of appeal).
After suffering for a while at the hands of the Law Society and the Courts, Cram finally ended up in a legal fight with the court system itself (oops). In the middle of the trial (and a whole boatload of other shenanigans), He was suddenly declared, by two doctors, to be a mental health threat. They whisked him off to a mental hostpital where he was held for evaluation and 'treatment' for a week.
The doctors at the mental facility where he was held eventually gave him a clean bill of health, but he spent a good period of time heavily drugged, etc.
Even though he was declared mentally fit, he came out of the hospital essentially a broken man. He handed his case over to another lawyer, meekly accepted a suspension of his bar priveledges, and has since (from what I've heard) refused to talk about the cases.
I interviewed him on video, in the middle of the trial (just before he was comitted). He explained to me his case, the case of Renata Andreas-Auger and the case/comspiracy that was beneath the whole mess.
The case -- Delgamuukw was famous in it's own right. It was a landmark Native rights case. The trial Judge incensed the Canadien people by declaring that the native people of BC were, among other things "Savages whose lives were brutish and short". It eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where rights of the natives to unceeded lands were given at least some acknowledgement before ordering the case back to be retried under a new judge.
Renata had been an articling student doing research for the Delgamuukq legal team, and had found a basic block of constitutional law that would (should) have cemented the case for the natives. She felt that the lawyers had ignored her research, and effectively thrown the case.
When she finally convinced Jack to look at the Delgamuukw case (some time after he'd started to take flack for her persecution case), Jack concluded that -- yes the lawyers had sabotaged their case at law, and had proceded instead with a very weak argument -- But that shouldn't have been a big shock, because their biggest clients were essentially the people who would have been most hurt by a successful prosecution.
The affected parties? The Government and the resource industries. The conspiracy, according to Cram, was a consipircy of silence over native rights. Constitutional documents acknowledge native claim to the lands of North America until, and unless they sign those lands over in a public treaty. For over 95% of BC that's never been done and, for decades, it was actually illegal for natives to hire a lawyer over land claims.
According to Cram, the native claims are real, and laws on Fiduciary duty would call for penalties against the Canadien & BC governments in the range of 3 times the current value of any resources taken out of BC in the last century. Read: bankrupt the country.
Besides Cram and Auger, I've seen Two other lawyers willing to take on native claims using those constitutional laws. One had his license to practice revoked. The other was 'warned off' with a veiled threat that he took quite seriously.
No black copters, No trenchcoats. Just a bunch of paper and people in $1,200 suits. And it scares me to the bone.
(damn. I thought I had some stuff about the Cram case on my website.... Oh well.)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Written like a true foaming-at-the-mouth right-winger.
The reaons that Law Enforcement Officers now wear body-armor is because the criminal now has accesss to high-powered weaponry that is the equal to or better than what the Law Enforcement Officers are using.
Strangely enough, here in the UK we don't have this escalation problem, for the most part. I wonder why? Could it be due to our lack of a gun culture?
why else would the Houston Police Department arrest people if there wasn't a complaint made and evidence found to support the complaint??
Because the office in charge is a nut. Even other police officers say he is a nut.
Yes, this story isn't particularly interesting, because it's just evidence of one over-promoted nut, not evidence of anything institution-wide.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The article gives no information about the criteria police use to collect their data, or about the data collection process at all, or about just how these data will be used, yet hundreds of people comment liberally. Obvious, redundant references to "Minority Report" get modded up throughout the thread. "News for nerds"? I think I'm hanging with the wrong nerds.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
What is the reaction if certain Law Enforcement Staff are vedio tapped breaking traffic laws are placed on this 'Future' list?
Excrement is always funny! Mmmmm... Excrement.
Yes,
I am well aware of the fact that I did not back up my statement with numbers. This is because I was merely giving an example of how someone could think that drug arrests account for "a vast amount" of our countries prison population, while in all actuality, it isn't.
"Extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence"
---Carl Sagan
The requirement for proof falls on the one making the claim, not the one refuting it:
Person 1: Bigfoot exists, I just know it is true, look I even have a picture
Person 2: Are you kidding me, that picture is just an out of focus picture of a guy in a gorrilla costume.
Person 1: What are you a photo expert? You have to prove this photo is fake, otherwise we should all believe in bigfoot.
Do you see, how it is not up to Person 2 to prove the negative, but to Person 1 to prove the positive.
This is something a lot of people don't understand, that is why they ignore a lot of common sense and go on thinking whatever they want. (Like that bigfoot/UFO/Nessie exists)
Yes, I realize that I could have made a much more cogent argument by researching the numbers, but it was not a requirement for me to prove my point, and doesn't make it any less valid
---Lane
The Cato Institute did an analysis of drug legalization back in 1989. Their conclusion was, among other things, that if currently-illegal drugs were legalized, fewer people would die from drugs each year-- counting tobacco and alcohol as drugs-- because heroin and cocaine have lower death rates than alcohol and tobacco, and if they were legalized, people would likely give up alcohol and tobacco in favor of them. Oh, and the death rate from marijuana is so low as to be statistically zero.
Don't take my word for it-- read it for yourself.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
If anyone had bothered to actually CALL the mayor's office, they would have explained exactly what's going on and how it is NOT like anything in Minority Report, how they are NOT trying to catch 'future criminals' or anything like that. Even Amy Goodman of Democracy now made that terrible 'journalistic' mistake this morning and did not verify the facts before an interview.
Always check your facts.
They are patrolling street corners where crimes are regularly commited. When a sweep is made, all individuals there are photographed and IDed. The info is put into the case file database for future reference. That way if you always seem to find the same guy who 'is just passing through, never been here before,' you know that he's lying. The ACLU is involved due to concerns that it's not constitutional. Either way, it's not what was reported.
Doesn't sound fun, but it's about as invasive as the hundreds of cameras recording you on the highways of major cities.
Bottom line is most people aren't smart enough to...
I guess that's where we differ. I'd rather trust individuals to make decisions about their own lives, you'd rather trust the government to make laws to tell us what we can do.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
My "take" on this bill is similar to yours - the "up front" implications aren't really all that bad (It just requires one year of "military training", basically ensures the equivalent of a GED and so on). Also, if I remember from the text, the inductee actually gets to choose which branch they go to, if they qualify (this is from memory, though - I haven't gone back to re-read the bill).
This would hardly have even registered in my mind at all, if it weren't for the current US hysteria over the "need" to "profile" and "monitor" people who may be "suspicious", and certainly, a year of tightly-controlled government service enables the building of such records. (Thanks, though, to the person who mentioned the lack of psychological evaluation in the Air Force [and presumably other branches] at the moment - I had assumed such a thing was normal practice in evaluating a new recruit. Guess I was wrong...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Drugs should be regulated in proportion to their tendency to harm society. Tobacco smoke can be inhaled by non-smokers, so its use should be regulated. Alcohol impairs judgement, so its use should be regulated. Marijuana has some features of both, so its use should be regulated.
The idea that conventional "secondhand smoke" (for example, sitting in a bar with smokers) is a significant health risk is mythical. There is no credible study that supports this, just a weak collection of epidemiological studies. There is more evidence that power lines cause brain cancer. It just happens that this is a very convienient wedge issue for the anti-smoking crowd that wants to ban tobacco in the USA.
For the record, I am a nonsmoker and I fully realize the risks to ACTUAL cigarette smokers and the risks to the fetus carried by a pregnat smoker. That is not what I'm talking about.
By the same token, PCP makes people into violent supermen, so its use should be forbidden.
This is another myth. PCP increases resistance to pain dramatically (Suprise! It's a pain killer!), large doses can also induce psychotic episodes (not necessarily violent or destructive). In 99% of cases it does not turen people into violent supermen.
Would save alot of aggrevation on the soldiers parts when pop culture feels a war is not politically correct
Yes of course, because having a population that thinks for itself is a really stupid idea. Things would be so much more straightforward if everyone just belived what they were supposed to.
I doubt that any single organization would have the manpower to sort through every single file profiling individuals
I hear the military may have access to top secret amazing calculating machines they call "computers". Of course, that may be just a conspiracy theory...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
the war on the drugs is the most expensive war in u.s. history. are the cops winning yet?
you missed the point completly. the people on THIS list have not comitted any crime, but are on a list because someone thought they MIGHT do so in the future. Put Republicans in control, and look what happens. Funny how Republicans always want to reduce regulations and restrictions on businesses (who are not american citizens) but want to increase government controll of you and me (restrict all abortions, no same sex marriage, DMCA, closed energy meetings by Dick Cheney, increased and non judicial reviewed wiretapping by John Ashcroft, strike breaking by Reagan...) The list goes on and on, but you understand.
You don't have to increase the risk/punishment to further the war on crime... this would be 'an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff'... You *could* put a 'fence at the top' - and remove the =reward= of dealing drugs. If you make it illegal to trade in drugs - if you allow people to use them, and grow them, make them or supply them, but BAN outright the trade/economy of drugs... then the whole nasty element of the drug culture goes away.
I'll go slowly - it would be ok for your mother to give you a kilo of coke for christmas - but if you gave her a cent for 'lab equipment' or anything else, then you both go to gaol.
The value of drugs would fall so dramatically that it just wouldn't be worth trying to sell them (which would be illegal).
A gardener could grow hemp instead of roses, and as long as he didn't charge for anything, he could share his spoils with whomever he wanted to...
Nobody needs to break into anybody's house then, well, not to get drugs at any rate.
And you could even be surer about the quality of the drugs - being able to get them from a respectable supplier - universities (not that they'll be able to receive funding or donations as a result), hospitals, chemists, etc.
Now that's freedom.
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*