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Google Will Ban Bail-Bond Ads (arstechnica.com)
First Google banned ads from payday lenders in 2016, now it will no longer allow ads from bail-bond companies. Ars Technica reports: In a blog post, the company suggested that such ads constitute a "deceptive or harmful product," citing a 2016 study concluding that minority and low-income communities are typically most affected by such services. "For-profit bail-bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low-income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years," Google wrote. Also in 2016, another study found that "there are 646,000 people locked up in more than 3,000 local jails throughout the U.S.," simply for their inability to pay a bond, which is what drives many people to the services of a bondsman. The change will take effect in July 2018.
...if google used their influence to increase bail bond competition and demand clear and fair terms as a condition of being listed on google. Google could become the go-to place for fair and affordable bail bonds!
The problem isn't the bail bondsmen. The problem are American courts that set excessive bail and keep people in jail for relatively minor crimes (often victimless crimes like drug possession) in the hope that they agree to a plea bargain.
Granted, it might be a symbiotic relationship of corruption in some cases. But we should be going after the courts themselves, not the bondsmen. Google would do well donating to organizations like the ACLU and SPLC, which are starting to sue on Constitutional grounds (prohibition of excessive bail, speedy trial rule) as well as working on legislative reform in some states.
Moves towards bail reform in CA and NJ are a good start, hope this spreads to other states. Same with drug law liberalization.
While I agree with the intent, and even the assessment of Bail Bond providers, Google should not be the entity deciding and enforcing what is correct speech!
That is entirely the purview of government, and once we let private companies start using their judgment we're in for a whole world of hurt.
For example, a legal proceeding (judgment and enforcement by government) usually has well-defined definitions that have been tested in court, refined by previous cases, and there's a clear-cut path for disagreement and appeal.
We're starting to feel the pinch of ambiguous rules and selective enforcement right now, as more people get pissed off because their previously acceptable videos get taken down, stored documents get locked away, accounts get locked and shadow-banned, and E-mails get scanned. (And caused at least one person to snap and go shoot up a bunch of Google employees.)
Instead of suppressing the ads, why doesn't Google suggest and throw its weight behind legislation? They seem to have no problem encouraging legislation in other areas.
There's a lot of smart people at Google. You would think that they could write simple legislation that could be submitted for debate that would make everyone's life better. Such as, for example, legislation about net neutrality.
Instead of forcing everyone into prim and proper behaviour.
They can still Google for a bondsman. They just won't see ads. It is a commodity service, and the only thing that matters is the fee. The ads just run up the costs.
Last time I was in jail there was a list of bail bond companies, in alphabetical order, posted on the wall next to the phone.
I learned a bit about the bail system and I think this is a pretty silly move on Google's part. As for who uses bondsmen - people in jail, that's who.
The choices are:
1. Pay the bail in cash.
2. Use a bondsman.
3. Sit in jail.
People who end up in jail are typically not people who have a couple thousand dollars to spare they've saved up. They're not going to bail themselves out in most cases, though they do have that option.
It's typically family members who feel somewhat obligated to bail someone out of jail. Their choice is pay the bail in cash, which might be about $2,000, or pay 10%, $200, to a bondsman. Since people who end up in jail are typically not the most reliable people, putting up $2,000 cash and hoping to get it back a year later if your drunk brother shows up to all his court appearances doesn't seem like a good idea.
I HAVE $2,000 in savings, I could *afford* to put $2,000 to bail someone out, but I'd rather just pay the bondsman $200 and not have to worry about it. The bondsman will have him call in a few times per week, and try to make sure he doesn't "forget" his court appearance. I don't want to do all that, hoping to eventually get my cash back from court. I'd rather let a professional handle that.
The bondsman isn't making some outrageous profit. If they were, more people would go into that line of business. The bondsman loses money on anyone who doesn't show up to court. If they use a recovery agent (bounty hunter) and successfully recover the fugitive, the bondman only loses a little bit of money. If they don't recover the fugitive, they lose a lot of money.
I can understand reasons people might point to problems with the bail SYSTEM, but bail is much older than bail bondsman. Bondsmen didn't create the bail system. Bondsmen make it possible for people who aren't rich to get out on bail.
The bail system itself has advantages and disadvantages. It allows people freedom while they await trial. That's good. It protects society in general by giving an incentive for professionals to make sure people charged with a crime actually show up to court, including tracking down fugitives who run. On the other hand, like everything else, money doesn't buy happiness, but it does make things easier. We'd like to have a criminal justice system in which nobody has any advantage, but the fact is there are advantages to having resources. Bail isn't perfect. On balance, weighing the positives and negatives, I think the bail system has more advantages than disadvantages.
Yes Google is deciding which companies it will sell its own ad space to.
Didn't many of us call this correctly?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Spot on. Just like payday loans, bail bonds are predatory but they're also the last resort for people who are laughed out of banks and credit unions. If they no longer have access to this type of short term credit, where will those people go? No credit cards, no lines of credit, no valuables to pawn - what's left? Nothing legal.
The rich hypocrites who decides for the poor always bring up those shameful annual interest rates or those people who pay loans for years. What they fail to mention is that payday loans have a lower default rate than mortgages.
But let's not bother with facts, let's just accept the dogma cast upon us from the ivory towers of California. Once again Google acts as a vehicle for the shallow social agenda of political correctness of the Silicon Valley elite, sweeping problems under the rug of "someone else fix it". Fuck those arrogant bastards.
lucm, indeed.
No, goose. Most bail bonds are arranged by wives or family members of the men who commit most of the crime. That's why you find bail bonds places near jails. It's not because the guy who was arrested can say, "Let me walk across the street and I'll arrange for a bail bond." It's because the wife or girlfriend or family member or friend of the arrested individual can make only one trip.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> > People who end up in jail are typically not people who have a couple thousand dollars to spare they've saved up.
> Then bail is obviously too high.
So you're thinking that because my brother was too irresponsible to save up $20 while he was committing his daily crimes such as shoplifting and domestic abuse, he should be set free and not have to face trial? Or are you thinking that his bond should be $5, because certainly he'll show up to court to get his $5 back?
If he's that irresponsible, he shouldn't get out on bail in the first place.
> it shouldn't take anything close to a year to get your money back because it shouldn't take a year to resolve a criminal dispute.
Are you under the impression that bail bondsmen set the courts' schedules?
In a manner of speaking, they do. More precisely, the existence of bail bondsmen facilitates the slowness of our system of justice.
You see, if the bondsmen didn't exist, then most of those people would be in jails, which means the jails would quickly fill up with people waiting to go to trial, and the flow of people into the system would be limited to no more than the flow of people out of the system. The net effect would be that either the prosecutors would have to exercise some prosecutorial restraint or the city/state/federal government would have to hire enough judges to clear the backlog.
With bail bondsmen, the number of people waiting for trial is essentially unbounded. They could have every man, woman, and child in the country out on bail. So as long as they don't flee or commit some other crime while waiting that causes the judge who set bail to lose an election, the justice system can move as glacially as it wants to.
Where exactly do you find a justice system that is both fast and fair? North Korea's is pretty fast. They don't spend the time needed to be fair. The United States spends a lot of time trying to fair, but doesn't do an amazing job of it.
The inadequate speed of the U.S. justice system is not because it takes too much time to get the decisions right; on average, most trials last less than a week. The problem is that it is massively underfunded, and thus takes months or years before cases even go to trial. This, in turn, is mostly because of a lack of prosecutorial restraint, which in large part is facilitated by the bond system.
There are really only two valid solutions to the problem: either prosecute fewer cases or hire enough judges so that trials aren't delayed ridiculously.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fake news from "anonymous sources"?
Falsehoods, top to bottom.
Holder "stopped" a program that allowed the Federal Government to request civil forfeiture. However, as long as the state/local police requested that the Federal Government bring the charges, everything was fine. Notice that civil forfeiture rates didn't drop during Holder's "stoppage".
He told US attorneys not to overcharge crimes - against black drug dealers only. Non-drug crimes? Hispanics? Throw the book at 'em!
Fast and Furious was NOT started under Bush. This is a constant lie told by his defenders, but it simply is not true. The Bush Administration tried a program called 'Wide Receiver'. In that program, the ATF sold disabled guns with tracking devices to criminals, and cooperated with the Mexican police to track the guns into Mexico to launch raids targeting a specific drug kingpin. Unfortunately, even with planes following the criminals, the criminals kept getting away. So the program was cancelled, with a mere 400 guns sold over two years.
Holder's Fast and Furious did not disable the guns, did not attempt to track them, did not follow the criminals, did not coordinate with Mexican law enforcement, and did not have a target. Instead, from the investigation performed after the ATF's illegal guns were used to kill a US Border Patrol agent, we discovered that Holder wanted to use the program to drum up support for gun control laws in the United States.
Holder is lying racist scum that had no problem giving violent drug cartels working weapons, so that they would murder people with them, so he could use the propaganda to violate US citizen's rights. Beyond the wiretapping journalists and all that, I mean.
OMG - it's almost like the propaganda organs on BOTH sides of the bogus left/right divide pump out fake news all day and all night long. Good thing THAT's not true.
Could it be a bipartisan action? It would be the first sensible one in a long time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
no they didnt. there is NO proof of any of that happening. The russian thing has been a smoke screan to go after trumps people for other things. no one has been locked up for collusion
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
ATF agents playing Keystone Kops and entrapping mentally-disabled people. And arresting people with rock-solid alibis (like being in federal prison at the time of their supposed offense). The IG issued a pretty scathing report: https://oig.justice.gov/report...
The report concluded that all the ATF’s storefront operations were characterized by “poor management, insufficient training and guidance to agents in the field, and a lax organizational culture that failed to place sufficient emphasis on risk management in these inherently sensitive operations.”
Agents lost track of a fully automatic assault rifle and lost $35,000 worth of store “merchandise” in a burglary. The ATF paid such high prices for guns that potential victims of the sting legally bought guns from gun stores and sold them to friendly Fearless Distributing. One entrepreneur stole three ATF guns from the store. The next day he returned and sold one of them back. One of the men agents charged with selling them drugs had an airtight alibi. He was already in prison. ATF agents said Jones sold them six grams of marijuana on March 7. Problem was, Jones reported to a federal prison in Pennsylvania to start a sentence on March 1, according to Chris Burke, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons - on an ATF case. "He was definitely in our custody," Burke said. "He never left."
Pinedo did his thing prior to 2014, so no trump involvment. there https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/16...
Flynn lied about a discussion with the russians AFTER trump was already elected (but before sworn in)
and Ukraine isnt russia
so once again. there is no proof of collusion, there is no proof of conspiracy, and this entire thing is a witch hunt
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same