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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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There’s also option C- we have a very good idea of how to do it such that any retired cop in a diner could tell you how, but for some reason that probably has to do with civil rights or non discrimination society has decided it’s against the rules.

What, exactly, are you alluding to?

The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.

The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."

This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.

The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."

Interesting. Do you know how, say, an English or Australian policeman would handle Bad Leroy Brown, the local drug kingpin?

I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.

I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.

So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.

I'm not alluding to anything in particular, just pointing out that it's entirely possible in the society we have that the solution is both known and politically impossible because it has bad optics or a disproportionate impact or something.

Yeah. I would suspect that "catch and flog/beat petty criminals" might be it, or at least part of it.

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