I may have worked on those radios - are you in Michigan, I assume?
Colorado. Not that there's anything wrong with Michigan...:-)
It is pretty expensive hardware, but on the other hand the signalling protocols that the radios use are standardized (APCO), so hopefully a market will arise there that will mitigate some of the costs. IMHO the hardware does a lot to justify it's cost, but then I'm a little biased:)
The problem we're having is just that we can't justify these costs to the bosses. Our radios are programmed with our own agency and a half-dozen surrounding ones, and we just have no way of convincing the city that we need new radios that will probably only be all that useful in a very large multi-agency incident (like a school shooting? Not that those could ever happen here on the Front Range...)
I have to be entirely honest. I can see their point. There's only so much money to go around and we have some very expensive equipment issues coming up this year. And even zeroing out the training budget (a favorite cost-cutting measure in the private sector, they tell me. It's equally stupid in the public sector) wouldn't buy the radios.
What the hell, maybe next year.
These radio systems can solve the "tactical teams can't talk to each other" problem too, if they're set up right, by quickly patching groups from various systems together.
Our state is actually trying to transition to a statewide 800MHz digital system, for exactly that reason. Predictably, it's been slow going. That's some expensive equipment we're talking about, and a lot of departments here are having budget crunches that preclude new portables at $1500 a copy and base stations that cost considerably more.
My own department is trying, but it won't be this year that we can afford new radios.
On 9/11 the Emergency Broadcast System here in the USA was not used AT ALL. WHY?? Because the news channels knew what was going on before the government.
Not quite true. The EBS is mainly intended for "All people downstream of the Lake Pueblo dam, move to higher ground immediately. The dam is breached" or "A tornado has been sighted in the southeastern corner of Arapahoe County, moving northeast at about twenty-five miles an hour. All persons in the area of Blah Blah Blah take cover." EBS isn't just a news substitute. Thats what Denver's (lack of) all-news AM stations are for.
All this talk of emergency communication networks is bogus. They just need to feed information to the news outlets like they always do.
Again, negative. They serve two separate purposes. The news is to inform the public. The EBS is to get very-high-priority, extremely time-sensitive stuff to specific parts of the public. Emergency communications are generally not for public consumption at all.
Emergency logistic communications (like the prioritized email, I'm guessing) are for things like "We need at least three additional ambulances at Fourteenth and Clark" or "We need a dozen more cops at the hospital to keep order" or "Can someone have the Red Cross bring soap and blankets for about five hundred people to City Hall?"
As for tactical communications, we need something to say "two-adam-twelve, two-adam-sixteen, back door's open. Can you send a King unit around this way?" Our radio channels are not designed to have eighty or a hundred cops working on them at once, plus explorers and volunteers. Even with one channel used for nothing but wants checks and one specifically planned for special events, we'll swamp our dispatchers very quickly. Email and internet won't do a lot of good there, unless we need to coordinate with another agency and they have to talk to a dispatcher twenty miles away from ours. It doesn't happen very much, but when it happens you NEED that capability.(As an aside: That was a big problem at Columbine High School a few years ago. There were a half-dozen tactical teams that were simply not equipped to talk to each other.)
For instance, during 9/11, we went into shock when the first plane hit, just like everybody else on the planet. When the second plane hit, I was just getting out of the shower and getting ready for bed (graveyard shift) when my cellphone range and I was told to gear up and get my ass back to the office. I don't watch TV, and rarely listen to the radio (except for "Car Talk" on NPR on Saturday mornings) and so the EBS wouldn't have told me anything. An email might have gotten to me, but it turned out that the cellphone was the easiest (for most of us. About half of the department doesn't have email and most of us deliberately avoid television news, as a mental-health measure.)
They do. There are problems with this. I'll talk to my local cop, but most of the cops I know will NOT talk to the KGB, MI6 (or is it MI5?), or any other overseas spi agency knowingly. some will, but most will not. I have relatives in the military who tell me sensitive (unclassified) information that foreign goverments would like to know. I don't go repeating that information to just anyone.
Evidently, one of us is misunderstanding the other.
I didn't suggest that CIA hire Russian cops to tell us what's going on over there. I suggested that CIA hire American cops away from American police departments and send them overseas. Say, have them covered as "Third secretary to the cultural attache" in our embassies.
And then just have them talk to people. We're trained to read minds. We're trained to be able to tell if someone's lying to us, not telling us everything, drunk, drugged, doesn't have a clue about what's going on, or is about to attack us. And we're trained to get people to talk to us. I know that the CIA has their own in-house training for their field operations people. However, it just seems to me that they'll get better people if they recruit folks who've already been doing the same job for a few years.
As for MI5 and MI6, ISTR that they're just called Her Majesties' "Security Service" and "Secret Intelligence Service" now. But I could be wrong.
Social engineering is by far the most cost-effective way to run an intelligence agency. I'll let you spend billions on fancy software and hardware. I'll spend a grand on a hooker to wink at one of your sysadmins - and I've got all the access I want.
A few years ago, Archer-Daniels Midland actually did try to hire a few hookers to get some market information from a competitor. The plan got scrapped when nobody could keep a straight face at the thought of some lady of the evening moaning "f--- me! F--- me! Harder! What's your method for removing impurities from lysine? Oh, god, harder!"
But I agree with paiute. It's people who have information, and getting information means getting it from people. Sending them hookers who then blackmail them is one option-a US Marine assigned to our embassy in Moscow fell for that back in the 80's.
And a lot of people will talk just because. Rajid at the 7-11 (not flamebait-that's really his name), a half-dozen homeless guys, and a handful of "undocumented workers" who are just as happy that the gringo cop speaks Spanish and doesn't know INS' phone number like to talk about what goes on in one particular neighborhood, and that includes talking to cops who want to buy coffee at 3AM (mainly me) and as a result I know pretty much everything that happens within two blocks of that 7-11.
It's all about people, and knowing how to listen to them. If the CIA had the good sense to hire street cops, semi-experienced newspaper reporters, multilingual cabdrivers, and a very few really good clinical psychologists to send overseas, they'd be able to tell us what kind of lube Osama bin Laden uses when he has relations with his goats, whether Jiang Zemin really is a pedophile or if that's just office gossip, if there's another reason why Vladimir Putin is cranky this week, and where the communist guerillas in Colombia buy their cigarettes. The really REALLY good information-gatherers know that they need to talk to people instead of wasting money on techno-toys.
Hm, time for us non-US-ians to start pining them just by random, just for the fun of it, perheaps? Or will the send death-squads to Europe to kill me then?
Well, people who carry guns on behalf of the US government inside the US are obligated to follow certain niceties, like the Fourth Amendment. Your government (mandrakesoft address...France?) may not have such rules. ISTR that France does allow for secret military tribunals with its own citizens, and has for some time. (A response to Action Directe, unless I miss my guess.)
Why do you say that? I understand that you are referring to the majority and not anybody personally, but I don't agree with your statement. Is that how people out west view New England?
Yes, it often is.
I grew up on a farm in Kansas. If we didn't fix the cars ourselves, they didn't get fixed. Ditto the combine and tractor. Ditto the fences. Ditto pretty much everything else. And now, ditto the computer that my folks are using. And there is no pizza delivery to my folks' farm. And as recently as my 1970's childhood, our main source of heat was a wood-fired stove. Never mind that meant cutting about ten cords of wood every summer-I doubt that's even legal in a lot of places back east now.
Now I live in Colorado, and it's about the same once you get away from Denver. Maybe even more so.
When we look at the East Coast, we see places where never mind fixing cars, relatively few people other than cabbies even drive. Dinner doesn't involve killing and plucking a chicken-it's the speed-dial, twenty bucks, and twenty minutes. And the phone book is full of people who will change your oil, rewire your living room, unclog your toilet, and re-shingle your roof. If you want heat, throw a switch. If it doesn't work, call the power company and yell at them.
How many hunters and fishermen live in the grain belt? How many in Massachusetts? When I was a kid, rabbit and pheasant hunting and muskrat trapping was the way we'd kill time in the fall after school. Three cents worth of.22 bullets made one hell of a fine meal and the pelts WERE our spending money. Likewise, setting out trotlines for catfish in the spring and summer. How many people in NYC/Jersey/Mass/etc do that? How many teenagers back there even know what a trotline is?
Just about everybody eats bacon. How many easterners have butchered the hog? Ditto McDonalds and cattle?
And if the weather gets bad enough, we put chains on our tires and put sandbags in the bed of the truck. When it gets that bad and the buses stop running, what do you do?
I personally like this lifestyle. I like how Hank Junior put it: "We grow old tomatoes and homemade wine. A country boy can survive, because you can't starve us out and you can't make us run."
almost all you guys all have drivers licenses I presume. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are issued by the govenment (DMV department or something).
Yes and no.
The US works on what's called a "divided sovereignty" system. That means that the individual states retain sovereignty over internal public safety and health matters like driver's licenses. In other words, my driver's license was issued by the Colorado Department of Revenue-Department of Motor Vehicles. Not by the Federal government. The Feds have a bitch of a time keeping all fifty states straight. Hell, we're supposed to have a nationwide computer system called NLETS (the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System) which will tell me if any driver's license issued anywhere in the US is valid, suspended, revoked, or completely non-existent. It's famous for not working, though. Each individual state maintains the records, and NLETS just allows Colorado cops to access Missouri's records. The individual state computers generally work just fine, but NLETS will go down completely for no good reason.
And even when NLETS does work, it's text-only. Hell, we're still a few years away from being able to quickly and easily check photos from here in Colorado.
I don't know about America, but most countries I have been to have either an ID document with a photo, or a drivers' license with a photo. Anyone with a passport has their photo on a government database.
When I last renewed mine, I had to get a few photos taken at the Rite-Aid. (Combination of a pharmacy and convenience store, for non-US readers). I turned those in at the post office with my application. Uncle Sam has one hardcopy photo, but I doubt that they've been scanned.
Note: I haven't renewed my passport in about eight years, and this may have changed.
Fingerprints alone are not enough to convict -- EVEN IF they are the only prints present! These has been a case along these lines in the US courts in the late 80s.
That depends. Fingerprints mean only one thing-that you can assume, with reasonable certainty, that a given person was in a particular place or handled an item. What happens next depends on a lot of things, including the person's statement. For example: I got the sheer joy of working a house burglary one morning. I lifted seven fingerprints. Three belonged to occupants of the house (I took cards from them so that our examiner could exclude them) and the other four belonged to the same person. Through other means I identified him, and went to interview him. He said he had been in the neighborhood, but had never been inside that house.
So why were his prints INSIDE the house?
Those prints, by themselves, couldn't prove his guilt by the standard that we use in US courts. However, they did prove that he had lied about ever being in that house.
In another incident, we lifted some prints and one of them was on file for a parolee. It turned out that he was a witness to the crime, but didn't know that a crime had occurred until we interviewed him. We were quickly able to exclude him as a suspect by other means.
I've been printed several times. It's a standard part of passing a police pre-employment background check. But I can understand why some people may not want to be printed. Even if it's not crime-related, it makes people feel like they're being treated like criminals.
Why would you be at the scene of a crime and not want to talk to the police? Surely you'd either want to help them with their enquires, or you're the criminal.
Because some people just "don't want to get involved."
I've been a cop for most of my adult life. I've had any number of incidents (esp. gang-related) go unsolvable because someone didn't want to get involved. Some people fear reprisals, and don't think that we'll be able to run the gang out of the neighborhood. (Yeah, with the amount of help we get from people who complain but can't even be bothered to give us any useful information, they might be right.)
Some people, if I ask them about the car that the shots were fired from, will refuse to answer because we "probably staged a drive-by shooting in order to get the community activist Wilbur Hassan 3X for the half-ounce of weed in his pocket." I actually was on scene for that one! Christ, and people think I'm paranoid!?! (Rule of thumb- we're not going to stage a murder in order to get someone on a $100 mail-in marijunana-possession citation. We have better things to do.)
But the first paragraph is more common. Because of the way police in parts of the US have been stopped from doing their jobs, there are plenty of neighborhoods where we can't protect the public. And that means that people will literally see it as a question of their life or death, whether they should tell the cop that it was a black Toyota 4Runner with Arizona plates and three men in it that fired the shots. And they don't want to talk, because that makes them the next target and we can't protect them.
So, still want to suggest that their fear of reprisals makes them the criminal? These people aren't evil. They're scared of the price for cooperating with police.
sure nukes may dether rogue countries, but religious fanatics take pride in dying.
There aren't THAT many religious fanatics out there, and fewer still in actual positions of leadership.
Saddam Hussein isn't. He just mouths the words to keep some of his people happy. Back when his political party affiliation actually meant anything, he was with the Baath party: mostly-secular socialists. Hafez Assad of Syria was in the same category (I think he was actually a Baathist as well). Both coldly pragmatic in terms of their own power.
I don't know much about Iran's Khatami, alas, but ISTR that he's more liberal and West-friendly than Khomeni was.
As for Kim, well, I just don't have a handle on him at all. Redefining communism as a religion (which has been done before, by better minds than mine) is the only thing that explains him but even that doesn't explain too much. I just can't find any logical explanation for him.
But the nation-states that give us problems aren't all that religious. Even if you consider communism to be a religion, Cuba hasn't been that big a problem since the Marielistas, North Korea is barely capable of threatening itself, and China isn't really communist except for when it provides an excuse to murder some more dissidents.
And I sometimes wonder how religious OBL is. It makes for great speeches, but I generally wonder how sincere the "great leaders" are about their claimed ideologies.
Hey, over here in the UK, if you refuse to give a breath sample when you get busted after a road accident, the court is allowed to read into that that you're being dodgy, and you can be done for it appropriately. What does the US law say on that?
Simple. The law, in most if not all states, is that testimony and non-testimonial evidence are to be treated differently. And the DUI example is even more convoluted than that. To give an example from here in Colorado:
You have to take, and assist in the taking of, a chemical test to determine your level of impairment from alcohol or drugs whenever a peace officer demands it, if that officer has probable cause to believe that you're under the influence or that your abilities have been impaired. If you refuse the test or fail to satisfactorily complete it, the judge can instruct the jury that you may have had something to hide by refusing the test. Or in general, juries are allowed to infer that someone had something to hide when that someone refused to hand over non-testimonial evidence in the manner required by law.
Other states may be different. The fifty states still maintain most of their sovereignty over internal public health and safety matters.
Which in turn comes down to who has the most money, which in turn is why your system is terminally screwed up and a worldwide laughing stock.
The next time we give Jack Straw a chance at US public office, I'll keep that in mind.
The thing I never got is how you can possibly find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt (is that the legalese you use, too?)
In criminal cases, that's the standard used. In civil cases, it's either a preponderance of the evidence or (in very rare cases) clear and convincing evidence.
if it takes months at a time for each side to present their evidence.
That's actually extremely rare in criminal trials. I've been a cop for over a decade and have had precisely one trial go more than a week. (It was a fraud case, which tend to be extremely involved, detailed, and generally nitpicky.) The preliminaries can stretch, but those aren't the same thing. Criminal trials in the US are where the jury has to look at factual evidence and think about it and decide: Did he or didn't he? The preliminaries are a lot more varied, and judges have to resolve questions of every stripe, from "Should I reduce the defendant's bond even though he's a foreign national with no ties to the local community?" to "Should I suppress the gun as evidence because it was seized in an illegal search?" or "Should I allow this witness to testify as an expert and give his opinion, when the prosecutor says he's a crank?"
Civil trials are often a different story. I try to stay out of civil court.
Surely, if it takes that long to present evidence, there must be reasonable doubt.
Ever watch an accident reconstructionist work? Get him into a court to explain just how this fatal car crash was caused by driver one's recklessness. He'll have to start at the very beginning, and the very beginning typically involves reminding the jury of basic arithmetic and grade-school algebra before he dares try to explain how he determined that the car was doing 43 miles per hour at the point of impact.
Or take the fraud case I referenced above. We had to go through about a thousand pages of documents in front of the jury to illustrate that a crime had been committed.
Conversely, when you've been found guilty by a court, a higher court, a third high court, and another one after that, how many more appeals do you really need?
That depends on the basis for the appeal. Appeals courts HATE settling questions of fact. There's a lot of precedent here that says that the only trier of fact should be the jury, and they should not be second-guessed. So, instead, the appeals are questions of law: Should the gun have been suppressed? Did the judge give an instruction to the jury that he should not have? And so forth.
And for what it's worth, there are really only two levels of appeals worth considering. The Court of Appeals (state or Federal) and the (Federal or state) Supreme Court. And the US Supreme Court will typically only review cases with major unsettled Constitutional questions. And no Federal appeals court will even touch questions of state law.
It mostly looks like a laughingstock in Europe because of the distortion of viewing it through another culture. Kind of like viewing the France/Yahoo problem, the UK's RIP act, Official Secrets Act, press restrictions, and use of SAS assassins in Ireland, or Germany's suppression of fringe political parties from the US.
The US can't force you to give up your encryption keys - it would be a violation of your 5th amendment rights to keep silent, or at least your 1st amendment rights. Unless it was evidence to be used to convict someone else, then they could subpoena it.
Wrong.
The Fifth Amendment prohibition on compelled self-incrimination applies only to statements to police. It does not apply to non-testimonial evidence.
For example, you get stopped while driving. The officer develops probable cause to believe that you're drunk. He can legally force you to take a chemical test for alcohol/drugs. If you refuse, then the judge will tell the jury that you refused to surrender evidence in your possession, and that they can draw their own conclusions about what it means.
And I'm not sure what the First Amendment has to do with this anyway.
But then, I'm not a programmer.
Usually, I like my job. It has some edge to it, some adrenaline, and the occasional chance to actually do some good. Not to mention the pride in knowing that there are very few people who can do it as well as I do.
There are times that suck. The first time I ever had to tell a woman (at 2AM) that her fifteen-year-old daughter snuck out, got drunk, wrapped the family car around a telephone pole, and would never be coming home...yeah, that blew goats. And the first time I got suspended because of a chief who does nothing but politics and is using us as a stepping stone to the chief's office at a "prestige" department. And I HATED being sued or shot at.And let's not get started on being overseen by a review board with no knowledge of my profession, no experience, staffed by self-appointed "community activists" who are in it mainly to play the politics and be state senators some day.
They warn us in the academy that we're not going to be able to save the world. Maybe so. And it's easy to be cynical-I've gotten pretty good at it. But even if you can't protect the entire world you can still help keep your own corner of it from getting too much worse. I'm satisfied enough with a holding action.
Could have something to do with the fact that vendors often supply "helpful" templates to procurement officers that are often so tightly written that only one vendor's product will meet the requirements, much less that any open source product would.
Anything is possible. Here in Colorado, we have a statute prohibiting such designation of suppliers. However, that statute is so damn vague that it might as well not exist. It prohibits a supply officer from telling a contractor to "buy the carburators from my cousin's shop over in Littleton." It MIGHT prohibit a municipality from signing on to the HUD-Smith and Wesson deal of a few years ago. It doesn't prohibit our supply officer from requiring W2K because "that's the only option that most of us have any clue how to use."
We wrote our own specs for our IT system at my employer. Not a vendor. Unfortunately, there basically was no suitable non-Windows software available. And we're not going to use VMware or wine and add another unnecessary level of complexity: ten years ago, we had oficers threaten to quit over having to use computers to write reports, and that was on relatively-idiot-proof DOS systems. Now we use primarily W2K machines, and have people who can barely function. Switching to something even as easy as Mandrake Linux would probably kill us.
Believe me, I tried. But the records-tracking system is an Access front-end, and we MUST be able to import the old records. And MUST be usable for GIS purposes. And MUST be off-the-shelf with vendor support available. And we don't have the budget to commission someone to write something new and to retrain everyone.
And if there's a computer-aided dispatch system for *n?x, I've never seen it.
There was talk for a while that the junk fax law, 47 USC 227, prohibited spam. However, that requires twisting some of the definitions beyond where a court would be likely to go.
Some states have prohibited some classes of UBE, but the laws are mainly written to give the so-called "legitimate" spammers a way to keep oing while eliminating certain of their competition. And FWIW, no statute uses or defines the term "spam," so it's still just a slang term.
Infringing on another person's rights is illegal as well. In this case, they are preventing someone from exercising their rights.
You mean the rights outlined in the First Amendment, I assume: "CONGRESS shall make no law..."
It was 1868 before that was even binding on state governments. Almost ninety years as a nation. As of yet, NOBODY has seriously suggested that the Bill of Rights is binding on private parties. Or, in high school, did you tell your mom to get a warrant before searching your room for smokes? (I actually tried that. She wasn't thrilled.)
You can't simply sign away your first amendment right. (These would be different from Miranda Rights.)
The next time you need to sign for a security clearance, an NDA, or a contract in a place with a "little" Hatch act," keep that in mind.
I'm curious: what makes the First Amendment different from the ones outlined in the Miranda advisement?
And if you can't waive a Constitutional right, then you have no right to plead guilty in court. You have no right to bench trials. You MUST have an attorney: there will be no pro se representation. You can never consent to being searched. And you'll go either to hell or to jail if you leave the house without a gun.
(There are rights that cannot be waived, but damn few and they're named by statute. Death penalty defendants, in my state, cannot waive jury trials here. If there's a statute concerning waiver of free speech, I'd like to see a citation.)
"Sir, help me understand this a little better. You met "Charmscalper" at the Dragon and Orc tavern. You each drank two flagons of mead. He then shot you with a "magic missile," carved up your body, and stole your Cloak of Radiance and five hundred dollars. And he's about 75 pixels tall. Male? Female? Human? Hobgoblin? Any scars, marks, tattoos, anything like that? What was he wearing? What color eyes? Hair? Could you describe his voice? Anything special about his voice, accent, anything like that? We'll keep an eye out for him."
(Aside to my partner: 'What caliber are magic missiles? Will they go through our vests?")
I wouldn't hang up on him. Oh, no. I'd take the report and add it to the briefing book. I'd make sure this story NEVER died!
It's even better than the guy who called us last year to complain: "I just bought an ounce that this guy said was kind shit, but it's pure skunk! I was ripped off!"
Again, I'm no lawyer, but aren't you allowed to exit a lease if you can find someone to take it over?
Not necessarily. At least in the two states in which I've rented (Oklahoma and Colorado), if you sign a lease you're stuck with it. If the lease doesn't have an escape clause, then you can't get out unless the lessor fails in some statutory duty-failing to keep the property in reasonably good repair, failing to keep the water running, etc.
RMS is a church for decentralized social pricing (which is to say that nothing is 'free', but that the cost/worth of software simply gets entwined with social values under his system, s goods and services were before the 16th and 17th century.. in which people only make, distribute, fix, document software for the sole purpose of bettering their society or community).
Funny. I thought that, even before the 16th century, people made stuff because they wanted to sell it for money or trade it for things they wanted or things they could have sold for money.
Maybe programmers are idealistic, or don't care about money, but my line of work is a tiny it different, and there's not much chance that I'd spend 40+ hours per week at it if I weren't getting the pictures of dead presidents. Anything that takes that much of my time had better either pay my mortgage or be a boatload of fun.
Everyone seems to forget that using a gun in a plane is a very bad idea.
Tasers. Mace. Glubombs.
Useless. Useless. Useless.
Remember Rodney King? Specifically, do you remember the couple of minutes of video that the TV news 'forgot' to air? It features King being shot several times with a taser, and getting up to attack the officers after each one.
And I've had plenty of failures with defense sprays like Mace and pepper. If the subject has any meaningful amount of alcohol in his system, the sprays are about fifty-fifty.
And batons have their failings. I'm about 6'2", 220 pounds, mostly muscle. There was one fine night where I got called to deal with a scrawny 15-year-old girl who had been mixing meth, PCP, and alcohol at once. As the contact evolved, I ended up hitting her on a nerve cluster on her leg, hoping to shut down that nerve temporarily so I could settle her down without having to shoot her. Nope. One strike will work, in theory. In practice, the fourth one broke a metal expandible baton. How we got control of her, I'll never quite understand.
In other words, I would never trust my own life to OC or taser. And I'm not comfortable trusting it to a baton either, not on an airplane. I do, however, have a great deal of faith in overpriced German handguns. And where the mission is to keep an airliner from becoming a missle, I'm not exactly willing to take unnecessary chances.
Sometimes I've been thinking, it's actually a pity that I'm too old to apply for the air marshal's program.
It's really too bad Linux didn't try this last year.
Slowing down and sticking to bugfixes for a month would have done the 2.4 kernels a world of good.
But that leads to an interesting question: What would hot dogs taste like, boiled in beer?
About like hotdogs otherwise. I tried it after noticing that a friend was briefly boiling bratwurst in beer before grilling, but after tasting it I didn't quite see why.
Don't boil them. Simmer them. Poppy seed bun. Mustard. Relish. Tomatoes. Onions. Peppers. Pickles. Celery salt. And for god's sake, NO KETCHUP!
GOODBYE TO COMMON SENSE Practically all law-enforcement professionals believe in the need for racial profiling.
Crap and nonsense. In ten years as a cop, I've met about three people who "believe in the need for racial profiling."
All were above the rank of lieutenant. That makes them command staff - PHB's. "Lieutenant" is how you address a cop with an IQ under 73.
In an article on the topic for The New York Times Magazine in June 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Bernard Parks, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
There's the mistake. Bernard Parks is a pitiful excuse for a command officer. Parks is why LAPD is having a miserable time getting even enough recruits to bother having academy classes. The man gets sexually aroused by firing his officers. And I doubt he's actually worked anything but a desk since Parker was chief. How often do you meet someone who's been a manager for two decades plus, who's an expert on anything but management?
My agency has had to deal with this issue. We spend a fair bit of effort on highway drug interdiction, and on aggressive street crime prevention. And we've learned that minorities make up maybe 25% or 30% of our population. By focusing on them, we've managed to ignore and/or miss 75% or 80% of the drugs and the crime out there. Maybe even a little more: Illegal aliens (primarily from Mexico) are amazingly good at having the simple common sense to not do things that'll get them arrested or get us to call La Migracion.
But I'm just a dumbass cop, so obviously I don't know anything about the subject.
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Colorado. Not that there's anything wrong with Michigan...:-)
It is pretty expensive hardware, but on the other hand the signalling protocols that the radios use are standardized (APCO), so hopefully a market will arise there that will mitigate some of the costs. IMHO the hardware does a lot to justify it's cost, but then I'm a little biased :)
The problem we're having is just that we can't justify these costs to the bosses. Our radios are programmed with our own agency and a half-dozen surrounding ones, and we just have no way of convincing the city that we need new radios that will probably only be all that useful in a very large multi-agency incident (like a school shooting? Not that those could ever happen here on the Front Range...)
I have to be entirely honest. I can see their point. There's only so much money to go around and we have some very expensive equipment issues coming up this year. And even zeroing out the training budget (a favorite cost-cutting measure in the private sector, they tell me. It's equally stupid in the public sector) wouldn't buy the radios. What the hell, maybe next year.
Our state is actually trying to transition to a statewide 800MHz digital system, for exactly that reason. Predictably, it's been slow going. That's some expensive equipment we're talking about, and a lot of departments here are having budget crunches that preclude new portables at $1500 a copy and base stations that cost considerably more.
My own department is trying, but it won't be this year that we can afford new radios.
Not quite true. The EBS is mainly intended for "All people downstream of the Lake Pueblo dam, move to higher ground immediately. The dam is breached" or "A tornado has been sighted in the southeastern corner of Arapahoe County, moving northeast at about twenty-five miles an hour. All persons in the area of Blah Blah Blah take cover." EBS isn't just a news substitute. Thats what Denver's (lack of) all-news AM stations are for.
All this talk of emergency communication networks is bogus. They just need to feed information to the news outlets like they always do.
Again, negative. They serve two separate purposes. The news is to inform the public. The EBS is to get very-high-priority, extremely time-sensitive stuff to specific parts of the public. Emergency communications are generally not for public consumption at all.
Emergency logistic communications (like the prioritized email, I'm guessing) are for things like "We need at least three additional ambulances at Fourteenth and Clark" or "We need a dozen more cops at the hospital to keep order" or "Can someone have the Red Cross bring soap and blankets for about five hundred people to City Hall?"
As for tactical communications, we need something to say "two-adam-twelve, two-adam-sixteen, back door's open. Can you send a King unit around this way?" Our radio channels are not designed to have eighty or a hundred cops working on them at once, plus explorers and volunteers. Even with one channel used for nothing but wants checks and one specifically planned for special events, we'll swamp our dispatchers very quickly. Email and internet won't do a lot of good there, unless we need to coordinate with another agency and they have to talk to a dispatcher twenty miles away from ours. It doesn't happen very much, but when it happens you NEED that capability.(As an aside: That was a big problem at Columbine High School a few years ago. There were a half-dozen tactical teams that were simply not equipped to talk to each other.)
For instance, during 9/11, we went into shock when the first plane hit, just like everybody else on the planet. When the second plane hit, I was just getting out of the shower and getting ready for bed (graveyard shift) when my cellphone range and I was told to gear up and get my ass back to the office. I don't watch TV, and rarely listen to the radio (except for "Car Talk" on NPR on Saturday mornings) and so the EBS wouldn't have told me anything. An email might have gotten to me, but it turned out that the cellphone was the easiest (for most of us. About half of the department doesn't have email and most of us deliberately avoid television news, as a mental-health measure.)
Evidently, one of us is misunderstanding the other.
I didn't suggest that CIA hire Russian cops to tell us what's going on over there. I suggested that CIA hire American cops away from American police departments and send them overseas. Say, have them covered as "Third secretary to the cultural attache" in our embassies.
And then just have them talk to people. We're trained to read minds. We're trained to be able to tell if someone's lying to us, not telling us everything, drunk, drugged, doesn't have a clue about what's going on, or is about to attack us. And we're trained to get people to talk to us. I know that the CIA has their own in-house training for their field operations people. However, it just seems to me that they'll get better people if they recruit folks who've already been doing the same job for a few years.
As for MI5 and MI6, ISTR that they're just called Her Majesties' "Security Service" and "Secret Intelligence Service" now. But I could be wrong.
A few years ago, Archer-Daniels Midland actually did try to hire a few hookers to get some market information from a competitor. The plan got scrapped when nobody could keep a straight face at the thought of some lady of the evening moaning "f--- me! F--- me! Harder! What's your method for removing impurities from lysine? Oh, god, harder!"
But I agree with paiute. It's people who have information, and getting information means getting it from people. Sending them hookers who then blackmail them is one option-a US Marine assigned to our embassy in Moscow fell for that back in the 80's.
And a lot of people will talk just because. Rajid at the 7-11 (not flamebait-that's really his name), a half-dozen homeless guys, and a handful of "undocumented workers" who are just as happy that the gringo cop speaks Spanish and doesn't know INS' phone number like to talk about what goes on in one particular neighborhood, and that includes talking to cops who want to buy coffee at 3AM (mainly me) and as a result I know pretty much everything that happens within two blocks of that 7-11.
It's all about people, and knowing how to listen to them. If the CIA had the good sense to hire street cops, semi-experienced newspaper reporters, multilingual cabdrivers, and a very few really good clinical psychologists to send overseas, they'd be able to tell us what kind of lube Osama bin Laden uses when he has relations with his goats, whether Jiang Zemin really is a pedophile or if that's just office gossip, if there's another reason why Vladimir Putin is cranky this week, and where the communist guerillas in Colombia buy their cigarettes. The really REALLY good information-gatherers know that they need to talk to people instead of wasting money on techno-toys.
Well, people who carry guns on behalf of the US government inside the US are obligated to follow certain niceties, like the Fourth Amendment. Your government (mandrakesoft address...France?) may not have such rules. ISTR that France does allow for secret military tribunals with its own citizens, and has for some time. (A response to Action Directe, unless I miss my guess.)
Yes, it often is.
I grew up on a farm in Kansas. If we didn't fix the cars ourselves, they didn't get fixed. Ditto the combine and tractor. Ditto the fences. Ditto pretty much everything else. And now, ditto the computer that my folks are using. And there is no pizza delivery to my folks' farm. And as recently as my 1970's childhood, our main source of heat was a wood-fired stove. Never mind that meant cutting about ten cords of wood every summer-I doubt that's even legal in a lot of places back east now.
Now I live in Colorado, and it's about the same once you get away from Denver. Maybe even more so.
When we look at the East Coast, we see places where never mind fixing cars, relatively few people other than cabbies even drive. Dinner doesn't involve killing and plucking a chicken-it's the speed-dial, twenty bucks, and twenty minutes. And the phone book is full of people who will change your oil, rewire your living room, unclog your toilet, and re-shingle your roof. If you want heat, throw a switch. If it doesn't work, call the power company and yell at them.
How many hunters and fishermen live in the grain belt? How many in Massachusetts? When I was a kid, rabbit and pheasant hunting and muskrat trapping was the way we'd kill time in the fall after school. Three cents worth of .22 bullets made one hell of a fine meal and the pelts WERE our spending money. Likewise, setting out trotlines for catfish in the spring and summer. How many people in NYC/Jersey/Mass/etc do that? How many teenagers back there even know what a trotline is?
Just about everybody eats bacon. How many easterners have butchered the hog? Ditto McDonalds and cattle?
And if the weather gets bad enough, we put chains on our tires and put sandbags in the bed of the truck. When it gets that bad and the buses stop running, what do you do?
I personally like this lifestyle. I like how Hank Junior put it: "We grow old tomatoes and homemade wine. A country boy can survive, because you can't starve us out and you can't make us run."
Yes and no.
The US works on what's called a "divided sovereignty" system. That means that the individual states retain sovereignty over internal public safety and health matters like driver's licenses. In other words, my driver's license was issued by the Colorado Department of Revenue-Department of Motor Vehicles. Not by the Federal government. The Feds have a bitch of a time keeping all fifty states straight. Hell, we're supposed to have a nationwide computer system called NLETS (the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System) which will tell me if any driver's license issued anywhere in the US is valid, suspended, revoked, or completely non-existent. It's famous for not working, though. Each individual state maintains the records, and NLETS just allows Colorado cops to access Missouri's records. The individual state computers generally work just fine, but NLETS will go down completely for no good reason.
And even when NLETS does work, it's text-only. Hell, we're still a few years away from being able to quickly and easily check photos from here in Colorado.
When I last renewed mine, I had to get a few photos taken at the Rite-Aid. (Combination of a pharmacy and convenience store, for non-US readers). I turned those in at the post office with my application. Uncle Sam has one hardcopy photo, but I doubt that they've been scanned.
Note: I haven't renewed my passport in about eight years, and this may have changed.
Fingerprints alone are not enough to convict -- EVEN IF they are the only prints present! These has been a case along these lines in the US courts in the late 80s.
That depends. Fingerprints mean only one thing-that you can assume, with reasonable certainty, that a given person was in a particular place or handled an item. What happens next depends on a lot of things, including the person's statement. For example: I got the sheer joy of working a house burglary one morning. I lifted seven fingerprints. Three belonged to occupants of the house (I took cards from them so that our examiner could exclude them) and the other four belonged to the same person. Through other means I identified him, and went to interview him. He said he had been in the neighborhood, but had never been inside that house.
So why were his prints INSIDE the house?
Those prints, by themselves, couldn't prove his guilt by the standard that we use in US courts. However, they did prove that he had lied about ever being in that house.
In another incident, we lifted some prints and one of them was on file for a parolee. It turned out that he was a witness to the crime, but didn't know that a crime had occurred until we interviewed him. We were quickly able to exclude him as a suspect by other means.
I've been printed several times. It's a standard part of passing a police pre-employment background check. But I can understand why some people may not want to be printed. Even if it's not crime-related, it makes people feel like they're being treated like criminals.
Because some people just "don't want to get involved."
I've been a cop for most of my adult life. I've had any number of incidents (esp. gang-related) go unsolvable because someone didn't want to get involved. Some people fear reprisals, and don't think that we'll be able to run the gang out of the neighborhood. (Yeah, with the amount of help we get from people who complain but can't even be bothered to give us any useful information, they might be right.)
Some people, if I ask them about the car that the shots were fired from, will refuse to answer because we "probably staged a drive-by shooting in order to get the community activist Wilbur Hassan 3X for the half-ounce of weed in his pocket." I actually was on scene for that one! Christ, and people think I'm paranoid!?! (Rule of thumb- we're not going to stage a murder in order to get someone on a $100 mail-in marijunana-possession citation. We have better things to do.)
But the first paragraph is more common. Because of the way police in parts of the US have been stopped from doing their jobs, there are plenty of neighborhoods where we can't protect the public. And that means that people will literally see it as a question of their life or death, whether they should tell the cop that it was a black Toyota 4Runner with Arizona plates and three men in it that fired the shots. And they don't want to talk, because that makes them the next target and we can't protect them.
So, still want to suggest that their fear of reprisals makes them the criminal? These people aren't evil. They're scared of the price for cooperating with police.
sure nukes may dether rogue countries, but religious fanatics take pride in dying.
There aren't THAT many religious fanatics out there, and fewer still in actual positions of leadership.
Saddam Hussein isn't. He just mouths the words to keep some of his people happy. Back when his political party affiliation actually meant anything, he was with the Baath party: mostly-secular socialists. Hafez Assad of Syria was in the same category (I think he was actually a Baathist as well). Both coldly pragmatic in terms of their own power.
I don't know much about Iran's Khatami, alas, but ISTR that he's more liberal and West-friendly than Khomeni was.
As for Kim, well, I just don't have a handle on him at all. Redefining communism as a religion (which has been done before, by better minds than mine) is the only thing that explains him but even that doesn't explain too much. I just can't find any logical explanation for him.
But the nation-states that give us problems aren't all that religious. Even if you consider communism to be a religion, Cuba hasn't been that big a problem since the Marielistas, North Korea is barely capable of threatening itself, and China isn't really communist except for when it provides an excuse to murder some more dissidents.
And I sometimes wonder how religious OBL is. It makes for great speeches, but I generally wonder how sincere the "great leaders" are about their claimed ideologies.
Simple. The law, in most if not all states, is that testimony and non-testimonial evidence are to be treated differently. And the DUI example is even more convoluted than that. To give an example from here in Colorado:
You have to take, and assist in the taking of, a chemical test to determine your level of impairment from alcohol or drugs whenever a peace officer demands it, if that officer has probable cause to believe that you're under the influence or that your abilities have been impaired. If you refuse the test or fail to satisfactorily complete it, the judge can instruct the jury that you may have had something to hide by refusing the test. Or in general, juries are allowed to infer that someone had something to hide when that someone refused to hand over non-testimonial evidence in the manner required by law.
Other states may be different. The fifty states still maintain most of their sovereignty over internal public health and safety matters.
Which in turn comes down to who has the most money, which in turn is why your system is terminally screwed up and a worldwide laughing stock.
The next time we give Jack Straw a chance at US public office, I'll keep that in mind.
The thing I never got is how you can possibly find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt (is that the legalese you use, too?)
In criminal cases, that's the standard used. In civil cases, it's either a preponderance of the evidence or (in very rare cases) clear and convincing evidence.
if it takes months at a time for each side to present their evidence.
That's actually extremely rare in criminal trials. I've been a cop for over a decade and have had precisely one trial go more than a week. (It was a fraud case, which tend to be extremely involved, detailed, and generally nitpicky.) The preliminaries can stretch, but those aren't the same thing. Criminal trials in the US are where the jury has to look at factual evidence and think about it and decide: Did he or didn't he? The preliminaries are a lot more varied, and judges have to resolve questions of every stripe, from "Should I reduce the defendant's bond even though he's a foreign national with no ties to the local community?" to "Should I suppress the gun as evidence because it was seized in an illegal search?" or "Should I allow this witness to testify as an expert and give his opinion, when the prosecutor says he's a crank?"
Civil trials are often a different story. I try to stay out of civil court.
Surely, if it takes that long to present evidence, there must be reasonable doubt.
Ever watch an accident reconstructionist work? Get him into a court to explain just how this fatal car crash was caused by driver one's recklessness. He'll have to start at the very beginning, and the very beginning typically involves reminding the jury of basic arithmetic and grade-school algebra before he dares try to explain how he determined that the car was doing 43 miles per hour at the point of impact.
Or take the fraud case I referenced above. We had to go through about a thousand pages of documents in front of the jury to illustrate that a crime had been committed.
Conversely, when you've been found guilty by a court, a higher court, a third high court, and another one after that, how many more appeals do you really need?
That depends on the basis for the appeal. Appeals courts HATE settling questions of fact. There's a lot of precedent here that says that the only trier of fact should be the jury, and they should not be second-guessed. So, instead, the appeals are questions of law: Should the gun have been suppressed? Did the judge give an instruction to the jury that he should not have? And so forth.
And for what it's worth, there are really only two levels of appeals worth considering. The Court of Appeals (state or Federal) and the (Federal or state) Supreme Court. And the US Supreme Court will typically only review cases with major unsettled Constitutional questions. And no Federal appeals court will even touch questions of state law.
It mostly looks like a laughingstock in Europe because of the distortion of viewing it through another culture. Kind of like viewing the France/Yahoo problem, the UK's RIP act, Official Secrets Act, press restrictions, and use of SAS assassins in Ireland, or Germany's suppression of fringe political parties from the US.
Wrong.
The Fifth Amendment prohibition on compelled self-incrimination applies only to statements to police. It does not apply to non-testimonial evidence.
For example, you get stopped while driving. The officer develops probable cause to believe that you're drunk. He can legally force you to take a chemical test for alcohol/drugs. If you refuse, then the judge will tell the jury that you refused to surrender evidence in your possession, and that they can draw their own conclusions about what it means.
And I'm not sure what the First Amendment has to do with this anyway.
There are times that suck. The first time I ever had to tell a woman (at 2AM) that her fifteen-year-old daughter snuck out, got drunk, wrapped the family car around a telephone pole, and would never be coming home...yeah, that blew goats. And the first time I got suspended because of a chief who does nothing but politics and is using us as a stepping stone to the chief's office at a "prestige" department. And I HATED being sued or shot at.And let's not get started on being overseen by a review board with no knowledge of my profession, no experience, staffed by self-appointed "community activists" who are in it mainly to play the politics and be state senators some day.
They warn us in the academy that we're not going to be able to save the world. Maybe so. And it's easy to be cynical-I've gotten pretty good at it. But even if you can't protect the entire world you can still help keep your own corner of it from getting too much worse. I'm satisfied enough with a holding action.
Anything is possible. Here in Colorado, we have a statute prohibiting such designation of suppliers. However, that statute is so damn vague that it might as well not exist. It prohibits a supply officer from telling a contractor to "buy the carburators from my cousin's shop over in Littleton." It MIGHT prohibit a municipality from signing on to the HUD-Smith and Wesson deal of a few years ago. It doesn't prohibit our supply officer from requiring W2K because "that's the only option that most of us have any clue how to use."
We wrote our own specs for our IT system at my employer. Not a vendor. Unfortunately, there basically was no suitable non-Windows software available. And we're not going to use VMware or wine and add another unnecessary level of complexity: ten years ago, we had oficers threaten to quit over having to use computers to write reports, and that was on relatively-idiot-proof DOS systems. Now we use primarily W2K machines, and have people who can barely function. Switching to something even as easy as Mandrake Linux would probably kill us.
Believe me, I tried. But the records-tracking system is an Access front-end, and we MUST be able to import the old records. And MUST be usable for GIS purposes. And MUST be off-the-shelf with vendor support available. And we don't have the budget to commission someone to write something new and to retrain everyone.
And if there's a computer-aided dispatch system for *n?x, I've never seen it.
In the US, at the Federal level, no.
There was talk for a while that the junk fax law, 47 USC 227, prohibited spam. However, that requires twisting some of the definitions beyond where a court would be likely to go.
Some states have prohibited some classes of UBE, but the laws are mainly written to give the so-called "legitimate" spammers a way to keep oing while eliminating certain of their competition. And FWIW, no statute uses or defines the term "spam," so it's still just a slang term.
You mean the rights outlined in the First Amendment, I assume: "CONGRESS shall make no law..."
It was 1868 before that was even binding on state governments. Almost ninety years as a nation. As of yet, NOBODY has seriously suggested that the Bill of Rights is binding on private parties. Or, in high school, did you tell your mom to get a warrant before searching your room for smokes? (I actually tried that. She wasn't thrilled.)
You can't simply sign away your first amendment right. (These would be different from Miranda Rights.)
The next time you need to sign for a security clearance, an NDA, or a contract in a place with a "little" Hatch act," keep that in mind.
I'm curious: what makes the First Amendment different from the ones outlined in the Miranda advisement? And if you can't waive a Constitutional right, then you have no right to plead guilty in court. You have no right to bench trials. You MUST have an attorney: there will be no pro se representation. You can never consent to being searched. And you'll go either to hell or to jail if you leave the house without a gun.
(There are rights that cannot be waived, but damn few and they're named by statute. Death penalty defendants, in my state, cannot waive jury trials here. If there's a statute concerning waiver of free speech, I'd like to see a citation.)
I'd love to take that report.
"Sir, help me understand this a little better. You met "Charmscalper" at the Dragon and Orc tavern. You each drank two flagons of mead. He then shot you with a "magic missile," carved up your body, and stole your Cloak of Radiance and five hundred dollars. And he's about 75 pixels tall. Male? Female? Human? Hobgoblin? Any scars, marks, tattoos, anything like that? What was he wearing? What color eyes? Hair? Could you describe his voice? Anything special about his voice, accent, anything like that? We'll keep an eye out for him." (Aside to my partner: 'What caliber are magic missiles? Will they go through our vests?")
I wouldn't hang up on him. Oh, no. I'd take the report and add it to the briefing book. I'd make sure this story NEVER died!
It's even better than the guy who called us last year to complain: "I just bought an ounce that this guy said was kind shit, but it's pure skunk! I was ripped off!"
Not necessarily. At least in the two states in which I've rented (Oklahoma and Colorado), if you sign a lease you're stuck with it. If the lease doesn't have an escape clause, then you can't get out unless the lessor fails in some statutory duty-failing to keep the property in reasonably good repair, failing to keep the water running, etc.
Funny. I thought that, even before the 16th century, people made stuff because they wanted to sell it for money or trade it for things they wanted or things they could have sold for money.
Maybe programmers are idealistic, or don't care about money, but my line of work is a tiny it different, and there's not much chance that I'd spend 40+ hours per week at it if I weren't getting the pictures of dead presidents. Anything that takes that much of my time had better either pay my mortgage or be a boatload of fun.
Heh. I've got a Dell Inspiron I'm willing to sacrifice for a good cause.
Or break out the airplane food. Just be sure that the hijackers don't get any eggs in their mouths if you want to take them alive.
Tasers. Mace. Glubombs.
Useless. Useless. Useless.
Remember Rodney King? Specifically, do you remember the couple of minutes of video that the TV news 'forgot' to air? It features King being shot several times with a taser, and getting up to attack the officers after each one.
And I've had plenty of failures with defense sprays like Mace and pepper. If the subject has any meaningful amount of alcohol in his system, the sprays are about fifty-fifty.
And batons have their failings. I'm about 6'2", 220 pounds, mostly muscle. There was one fine night where I got called to deal with a scrawny 15-year-old girl who had been mixing meth, PCP, and alcohol at once. As the contact evolved, I ended up hitting her on a nerve cluster on her leg, hoping to shut down that nerve temporarily so I could settle her down without having to shoot her. Nope. One strike will work, in theory. In practice, the fourth one broke a metal expandible baton. How we got control of her, I'll never quite understand.
In other words, I would never trust my own life to OC or taser. And I'm not comfortable trusting it to a baton either, not on an airplane. I do, however, have a great deal of faith in overpriced German handguns. And where the mission is to keep an airliner from becoming a missle, I'm not exactly willing to take unnecessary chances.
Sometimes I've been thinking, it's actually a pity that I'm too old to apply for the air marshal's program.
It's really too bad Linux didn't try this last year. Slowing down and sticking to bugfixes for a month would have done the 2.4 kernels a world of good.
About like hotdogs otherwise. I tried it after noticing that a friend was briefly boiling bratwurst in beer before grilling, but after tasting it I didn't quite see why.
Don't boil them. Simmer them. Poppy seed bun. Mustard. Relish. Tomatoes. Onions. Peppers. Pickles. Celery salt. And for god's sake, NO KETCHUP!
Crap and nonsense. In ten years as a cop, I've met about three people who "believe in the need for racial profiling."
All were above the rank of lieutenant. That makes them command staff - PHB's. "Lieutenant" is how you address a cop with an IQ under 73.
In an article on the topic for The New York Times Magazine in June 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Bernard Parks, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
There's the mistake. Bernard Parks is a pitiful excuse for a command officer. Parks is why LAPD is having a miserable time getting even enough recruits to bother having academy classes. The man gets sexually aroused by firing his officers. And I doubt he's actually worked anything but a desk since Parker was chief. How often do you meet someone who's been a manager for two decades plus, who's an expert on anything but management?
My agency has had to deal with this issue. We spend a fair bit of effort on highway drug interdiction, and on aggressive street crime prevention. And we've learned that minorities make up maybe 25% or 30% of our population. By focusing on them, we've managed to ignore and/or miss 75% or 80% of the drugs and the crime out there. Maybe even a little more: Illegal aliens (primarily from Mexico) are amazingly good at having the simple common sense to not do things that'll get them arrested or get us to call La Migracion.
But I'm just a dumbass cop, so obviously I don't know anything about the subject.