The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
everforward · 6h ago
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
const_cast · 3h ago
> The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
coliveira · 5h ago
The US has a long history of agencies that decide by themselves to do things that are frequently illicit with the excuse that they're protecting the public. From police to 3 letter agencies, they're all operating illegal programs that should be stoped by the public. Whenever someone tries it, they protect their power using the excuse that they're doing this for the "benefit" of democracy or some similar BS.
Uehreka · 5h ago
> This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
guelo · 3h ago
Agree it's never going to happen. The last time people hit the streets for police accountability the political backlash got us a convict in the white house. Democrats are now fully cowed on the topic and Republicans cheer any police overreach.
For the powerful in both government and business there is no rule of law anymore. The "law and order" slogan only means a boot stamping on little people's face forever, the powerful can break the law with impunity.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
slg · 6h ago
Although it is interesting how inconsistently this principle of is applied to other areas. For example, if you come to HN and advocate against encryption or AI because they can amplify the dangers of bad actors, you are going to be met by fierce opposition. So why do these hypothetical bad actors only become valid concerns in certain conversations?
prophesi · 6h ago
When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives. If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal. Regular citizens lose, oppressive governments & criminals win.
slg · 5h ago
>When it comes to encryption, it helps save actual lives.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> Does that not make us all safer?
Is there evidence in that direction?
slg · 1h ago
Thank you, this is a perfect example of the type of inconsistencies I’m talking about when discussing these issues. The prior comment says encryption saves lives and that is accepted without question, but the idea that empowering law enforcement saves lives is met with a request for evidence. Why did you not reply to both claims the same way?
And if you truly believe that finding and arresting criminals does not make us safer, that is an indictment of our entire justice system. It would also make license plate cameras a rather silly place to draw the line.
prophesi · 1h ago
I think it's because you don't have to look too hard to find examples of authoritarian regimes leveraging information technologies for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Or how US government agencies use loopholes to get around the 4th amendment and buy sensitive civilian data from private data brokers. Or how data breaches are becoming larger and more frequent each year.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
Encryption seems highly likely to have saved many people from, say, losing their life savings by having their banking credentials hijacked.
I am less certain about license plate cameras. Hence, the ask. I will leave the questioning of encryption up to someone who actually questions its utility.
slg · 39m ago
Can you genuinely not think of situations in which law enforcement being able to pin a specific vehicle to a time and place might help them catch dangerous criminals or be used as evidence in a trial to help get them convicted?
rented_mule · 5h ago
Something that seems inherently different between GP's comment and encryption is that encryption is an algorithm / tool, not a dataset. Not creating literal tools because they might have bad use cases is clearly a bad idea (e.g., fire, knives, hammers, etc.).
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
slg · 5h ago
What is the distinction you are making between a "dataset" and a "tool"?
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
davrosthedalek · 5h ago
Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
slg · 4h ago
>Isn't an atomic bomb just a scaled up version of a firecracker?
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
davrosthedalek · 4h ago
The point with the firecracker/bomb is this: Not just because it's the same type of tool means that it has the same cost/benefit analysis. The dangers of, say, firecrackers in the had of the general public, scale dramatically faster than the benefit, going from kid-safe firework to bunker busters. The same goes for "a cop with a camera" to "tag readers at every corner".
I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side.
Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys, pretty much for the same reason as they do not see the downsides of data collection: I have nothing to hide. [or the common related variant: Advertisement doesn't affect me]
slg · 3h ago
> I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys
And why are you confident that this doesn’t exist for the license plate dataset? You’re confidentially making two opposing arguments with no justification beyond it getting you to your desired conclusion on that specific issue.
davrosthedalek · 2h ago
That what doesn't exist for the license plate dataset? I am sure there are good reasons for having that dataset. For most data collection, there are good reasons.
My argument is that just because we decided that "police with camera" is a worthy trade-off, you cannot use this as an argument for "license plate scanning is a worthy trade-off". It could be that it is, but it doesn't follow from "it's a scaled up version of police with camera".
slg · 1h ago
I think you are going too deep down individual tangents here. My “cop with a camera” comment was challenging the idea that datasets aren’t tools.
If the issue is purely about amplifying the danger of bad actors and therefore forcing us to reevaluate the tradeoffs, encryption and AI do that too.
jrflowers · 3h ago
>advocate against encryption
This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th
mindslight · 5h ago
Encryption is this same exact topic, and the prevailing technical viewpoint is the direct application of the principle of minimizing collected datasets.
marricks · 6h ago
Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
airza · 6h ago
I think the hard counterpoint is
- some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies
- the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.
Gormo · 5h ago
> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
mrguyorama · 3h ago
Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.
Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.
This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.
Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.
mindslight · 5h ago
So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Gormo · 5h ago
> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
mindslight · 4h ago
One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".
carlosjobim · 5h ago
These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
Where "the box decided by the government" means having a mail address?
Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...
carlosjobim · 3h ago
In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.
It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.
_DeadFred_ · 5h ago
This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
Aloisius · 36m ago
The Nazis didn't actually need the pre-occupation data from the civil registry to easily find Jewish people.
In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.
If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.
fooker · 5h ago
Who was this guy?
marricks · 5h ago
I am having a very hard time finding his name, but there was a section on him in the dutch resistance museum.
I highly suggest visiting it! Sorry for the lack of an online source.
bigyabai · 6h ago
What can we even change? It's likely HN will also go to the grave demanding deregulation amidst a maelstrom of consumer protection malfunctions. We're already there in many respects; the DOJ's case against Google and Apple both seem to have stalled-out while the EU, Japan and South Korea all push forward with their investigations.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
davrosthedalek · 5h ago
Go out, tell your non-techie friends how data can be misused.
Geezus_42 · 5h ago
"But I have nothing to hide"
davrosthedalek · 5h ago
And then tell them the story about the Jewish people in the Netherlands....
Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.
mrguyorama · 3h ago
That has never been convincing to them because they are fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the shoe of an "other" like that. Look at all the people who voted for Trump literally to deport all the illegals and cry foul when he arrests their significant other or parent.
This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.
davrosthedalek · 2h ago
True, but there is a large fraction of people who are not like this, but haven't given the dangers of data collection enough thought. You can reach those. Are that enough people? Let's hope so.
I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.
mrguyorama · 3h ago
The simple counterpoint is that lack of data didn't stop the nazis a single fucking bit, and ICE has no problem breaking down random doors and harassing legal establishments.
This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.
Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?
A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.
The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.
Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?
The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.
There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.
davrosthedalek · 2h ago
Not having the data readily available slows it down. Having more random and less well targeted actions hit the supporters, so weakens the support. Is that enough? No. But I still lock my door, even if this will only slow down a determined thief.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
yieldcrv · 6h ago
Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
davrosthedalek · 5h ago
What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
chaps · 6h ago
A lot of that is because of the advent of computer systems built by IBM to maintain records.
IBM also built a calculator for the IRS in the late 1800s. They have been working with the government before nearly anyone still alive.
chaps · 31m ago
Friend, are you really conflating a calculator with a system of records knowingly used to enact the Holocaust? I recognize your point, but the valley between the two things is so large that I'm going to assume you're trolling.
aspenmayer · 18m ago
Not at all. I’m saying that IBM has been getting government contracts for a while, and they worked with Nazis in Germany to tabulate undesirables.
chaps · 2m ago
Okay, but what's your point? The OP question was about what shifted.
aspenmayer · 30s ago
If you believe that IBM carries water for fascists, the history seems to support that.
What’s your point?
macNchz · 5h ago
I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
davrosthedalek · 5h ago
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
yieldcrv · 2h ago
fwiw we do make a lot of jokes about getting rejected from art school
whats_a_quasar · 7h ago
Fair enough, but it is also valid to be angry at your local law enforcement if they are acting against the community's preferences. Especially when local law enforcement is breaking state law in the process.
Dilettante_ · 6h ago
Maybe true, but at a certain point you're just getting angry at the wind for blowing. The system is a scorpion: It cannot, will not go against its nature.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 5h ago
They are a political force, not a force of nature. It is certainly reasonable to get angry at a political force even if their politics are predictable.
standardUser · 3h ago
Politics change, scorpions don't. Throw your hands up in and air and give up if you want, but don't pretend some poor analogy absolves you.
const_cast · 3h ago
I don't think he's throwing his hands up in the air, rather he's implying we need more radical change. If we're going to be waiting around for police to become "good", that's not going to happen. We need to force them to become good.
AcerbicZero · 3h ago
Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.
fn-mote · 5h ago
At this point it sounds like you have given up believing in checks and balances in politics.
ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.
xyzzy9563 · 5h ago
The greater community, i.e. the United States, may have different preferences than San Francisco.
p_j_w · 3h ago
Local governments are under no obligation to help the federal government enforce federal laws.
FireBeyond · 5h ago
Those officers are employees of the City, County or State, not the United States.
mc32 · 6h ago
But that would put them between federal law vs state law and federal law supersedes state law and state law supersedes local laws.
ceejayoz · 6h ago
There are plenty of things Federal law can't do under the Tenth Amendment.
As an example, the Feds can round up marijuana users in California, if they like. They can't require California's law enforcement to help.
fooker · 5h ago
Doesn't seem like there was 'force' involved.
There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
> There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
The law prohibiting exactly that is linked in the article.
"Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
fooker · 5h ago
Apologies, I was responding to the comment about weed
vector_spaces · 6h ago
Why not be angry at all of them?
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
czhu12 · 4h ago
I'm not sure how to think about this. It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
const_cast · 3h ago
> It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
chickensong · 4h ago
> At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly
Respectfully, I believe you have it backwards.
panic · 6h ago
Also, be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020. If an organization consistently behaves in a way we don't like, we should seek alternatives to that organization, not continuously act surprised when they act out and keep giving them more money.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
stouset · 6h ago
> This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
anigbrowl · 4h ago
Far from it. On one occasion, when the DA in question went after a notorious fence (buyer for stolen goods), he had to rent a u-haul truck because the SFPD would not supply a vehicle to transport the arrestee.
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
stouset · 6h ago
This was the sensationalist media narrative, yes. Chesa got kicked out. Brooke Jenkins took over to much fanfare. Aaaand nothing material really changed, either with enforcement or with prosecution. The media stopped talking about it though.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
I can’t speak credibly to San Francisco. But in New York there was a visible rise and drop in what I’ll call nuisance crime. Petty theft forcing the toothbrushes into cages, homeless people yelling in the middle of the night, subway jumpers, graffiti, et cetera.
dttze · 5h ago
The nypd is better funded than many state’s armed forces. Any funding changes would have been minimal and not caused that increase in crime.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> the cops quiet quitting
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
const_cast · 3h ago
It would discourage LEOs from being useless. As it stands, many police departments are absolutely worthless, on purpose. They believe it's some sort of protest. The police got a few years of bad press and now, like children, they're playing the silent treatment.
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
gamblor956 · 2h ago
To second this: LAPD got fired from providing security for the LA Metro public transportation system, and crime rates fell through the floor in the three months since the LAPD officers were replaced with security guards.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?
dttze · 4h ago
They wouldn't be wasting tax payer money doing nothing.
stouset · 5h ago
And do you think this was a result of a ~3% reduction in police officers, or could it have been something else?
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> do you think this was a result of a ~3% reduction in police officers, or could it have been something else?
It was a combination of the weird post-Covid crime boom. And the various police reform efforts cities experimented with in the wake of George Floyd.
stouset · 3h ago
Be specific. Which police reforms resulted in an increase in nuisance crimes in NYC?
FireBeyond · 5h ago
> nuisance crime ... homeless people yelling in the middle of the night
Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Yes, yelling in a residential neighbourhood in the middle of the night is a disturbance of peace. The fact that it’s caused by unchecked mental health is somewhat separate. (In many cases, I don’t think it was a mental health issue. I think Rob on the corner got drunk.)
myvoiceismypass · 6h ago
Not sure if "recall" was a pun or not... But the recall campaign for DA Boudin started a month after the 2020 election, so he was effectively DA for 10 months at that point, including during the heart of the pandemic. Interestingly, it was also right after he started trying to implement police accountability reforms in response to the Floyd backlash that year. He did de-prioritize drug prosecution right at the time of major fentanyl spikes in SF, so not a good look.
sagarm · 5h ago
SF did not reduce police funding. They quiet quit anyway.
cardiffspaceman · 4h ago
Quiet quitting does not make the position legally vacant, such that the employer knows they need to fill it. The employer has to notice that the employee is not performing, and then replace that employee. Those steps are often harder than you’d think.
loeg · 5h ago
"Defund the police" was never actually tried. (This is not a defense of defunding -- I agree it would have similarly bad outcomes! But you can't just point at changes that weren't defunding the police and say it was tried.)
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> "Defund the police" was never actually tried
Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
loeg · 1h ago
> Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
No, this is a "this didn't actually happen."
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close).
Crime did not rose, crime has been in a downward trajectory for decades, this is likely one of the reasons the crackdown on illegal immigrants is so bad, prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow and needs a new population to imprison.
loeg · 5h ago
Crime rose significantly in the US over ~2020-2022 or 2023. It was on a downward trend before 2020 and is on a downward trend since 2022/2023. But you can't ignore that period.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
Did anything else happen around 2020 that might be a confounding variable?
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
mlinhares · 5h ago
It is almost as if something world shattering had happened in between those years.
loeg · 1h ago
I don't know what point you're trying to make. Yes, obviously it's covid-related. So what? It can't be ignored.
ceejayoz · 1h ago
But you can largely ignore it. It was a relatively short term small blip in a decades long trend in the right direction, with a clearly rare and unusual cause.
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
AnimalMuppet · 6h ago
In addition to what JumpCrisscross said, illegal immigrants are not going to be long-term prison population; they're going to be deported. (At least, that's the campaign promise.) So I don't see how that benefits prison owners.
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
Oh yeah, they benefit. What I’m calling nonsense is the idea that Geo Group is the reason Stephen Miller is in charge. There are more fundamental roots to the anti-immigrant agenda than a convenient corporate bogeyman.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
I'm onboard with that.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
mlinhares · 5h ago
The administration is already talking about indentured labor and slavery, these will soon be work camps where the prison owners will rent the labor to farm and industries.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> Crime did not rose
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
panic · 6h ago
Where was it tried? My understanding is that even Minneapolis didn't follow through with it.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> Where was it tried?
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
ribosometronome · 6h ago
>>> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
> New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes.
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
It was part of the police reform initiative. I supported it. But it massively increased the street population of recidivist bastards in a way I didn’t expect.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI. At least where I was it was considered kind of a given the recidivist bastards would get out on bail and that the bondsman getting paid really doesn't affect outcomes.
JumpCrisscross · 5h ago
> It was never about the recidivist bastards and always about the normal guy with a job he doesn't want to lose not losing that job when he can't come up with bail for a DUI
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
jahewson · 6h ago
Bail bonds exist.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
And yet, there are plenty of people who can't rustle up a couple hundred bucks for them, and wind up in jail for months/years awaiting trial.
ceejayoz · 6h ago
Conflating "police reform" and "defund the police" is disingenuous.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> Conflating "police reform" and "defund the police" is disingenuous
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
ceejayoz · 6h ago
> In New York they were one and the same.
As a NY resident: lol.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> That doesn't make them the same policy
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
sapphicsnail · 5h ago
A leftist conference? I don't think actual leftists have much say on policy.
supplied_demand · 3h ago
==That fuck in Chicago.==
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
It was not tried, and saying that it was is a fundamentally false claim that is actively pushing public opposition to the idea supported by lies. It’s as reasonable as saying don’t vote for democrats because they have a pedophile office under a pizza store. Are there a bunch of people who were convinced by this lie? Yes. Does that make it anything other than a manipulative lie to say? No.
rightbyte · 5h ago
> It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
JumpCrisscross · 5h ago
No, the entire police reform agenda and I’d argue progressive wing of the Democratic Party as a whole. “Defund the police” was a monumental fuckup.
stouset · 5h ago
It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup. The idea that we want types of response units other than armed gunmen available to respond to certain types of emergencies isn’t exactly radical.
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
ceejayoz · 5h ago
> It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup.
And frankly, the folks who turned "liberal" into a dirty word can make any branding into a branding fuckup. That's what they have Fox News for.
soupbowl · 4h ago
Modern liberals made "liberal" a bad word.
actionfromafar · 4h ago
Maybe... but something doesn't sit right with that assertion.
Anyone against concentration camps now gets the "liberal" slur thrown at them. Why is that?
stouset · 3h ago
As someone who grew up with a dad who listened to conservative talk radio, "liberal" has been used as an epithet for at least thirty years. I was genuinely stunned in high school when I met people who would willingly refer to themselves as liberals.
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
rightbyte · 5h ago
Yes but I don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
gamblor956 · 2h ago
In Los Angeles, crime on the Metro public transportation system has fallen by almost 70% in the three months since the LAPD was booted off the job and replaced by...security guards.
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
Ar-Curunir · 6h ago
Don't speak bullshit. There was more media outrage hullabaloo around the idea of reducing cop funding than there was any actual reduction. Especially because the cops went on strike to ensure that no cuts would happen.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
mlinhares · 6h ago
These people were mostly defeated in elections and the ones promising to shovel even more money got elected, just look at Eric Adams in NYC.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
jahewson · 5h ago
I guess this depends on how one defines the public interest. Shielding data from federal authorities surely has both upsides and downsides.
Geezus_42 · 5h ago
They aren't even required to protect you according to the supreme court. The only point of cops is to protect private property, not people, and to harass people that conservatives don't like.
davrosthedalek · 6h ago
If you defund police, what do you think will be cut first? The control organs and oversight, or the thing they should oversee?
ceejayoz · 6h ago
> If you defund police, what do you think will be cut first?
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
Ar-Curunir · 6h ago
So you are saying that the police force is a extra-governmental organization that has full control over how they allocate funds?
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
Geezus_42 · 5h ago
Sounds like theft, fraud, and abuse to me! Where's the DOGE team digging into police and military budgets?
dimitrios1 · 6h ago
"Defund the police" was and remains wildly unpopular with almost everyone, especially minorities (as a reminder to any of those out touch reading this: there are large racial disparities in who is affected by crime, particularly violent crime) . It was quintessential "progressives are out of touch" ammunition, not only used by republicans (obviously), but also establishment democrats in competitive districts.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
LazyMans · 6h ago
To be fair, systems like Flocksafety really help departments being squeezed for funding. It's one of the ways the system is sold. It's an effective tool.
FireBeyond · 3h ago
I worked for Flock. I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
stouset · 6h ago
This same argument is true for every bit of authority we give to law enforcement agencies (and really, the government in general). We expect they'll use those powers responsibly and within the limitations that we've ascribed, but it's always a risk that they're used irresponsibly and in situations we don't approve of.
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
TechDebtDevin · 6h ago
There are mobile survalience cameras systems at my very family friendly park. Everyone has asked the city to tow them away but they refuse. There was no vote on this.
spauldo · 6h ago
A tire and some gasoline seems to work for the Brits.
orthecreedence · 5h ago
Spraypaint?
TechDebtDevin · 1h ago
Yeah, this is for kids who can't go to prison :P
bjornsing · 7h ago
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
georgeecollins · 7h ago
If you are a district attorney in a city, you depend on the help and cooperation of the police in your daily work. If you became unpopular with the police they can make your work very difficult and you could also become politically very unpopular. I think district attorneys and police want to do what they think is right but its very understandable to me why a DA does not want to prosecute police.
roughly · 6h ago
This is evidenced in Oakland, where the recall campaign for Pamela Price began before she took office.
DebtDeflation · 6h ago
Click through to the law in question. It's the Civil Code not Criminal Code, and states, "an individual who has been harmed by a violation of this title, including, but not limited to, unauthorized access or use of ALPR information or a breach of security of an ALPR system, may bring a civil action in any court of competent jurisdiction against a person who knowingly caused the harm."
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
bjornsing · 5h ago
Yes. So yet another pretty law with no consequences for transgressions.
_DeadFred_ · 4h ago
The American judicial system is pure theater. You used to be able to appeal forever. Then the government decided that was too expensive, so they changed it to like 7 days. Then that was too extreme of a limit from 'forever' so they compromised on 14 days. Your right to appeal expires in 14 days in the US. Also during those 14 days you are most likely in a detention center, or being transferred across the nation to a prison, so good luck researching/writing an appeal in those 14 days.
water-data-dude · 7h ago
*no consequences for transgressions by anyone in law enforcement. Qualified immunity has snowballed into some serious bullshit.
delusional · 7h ago
> somehow the western world
Excuse me. While a minority of rabid Anarchists might agree with you, the vast majority of people in Denmark happen to really like our police force.
This is largely an American problem. Don't blame it on "the western world".
bjornsing · 5h ago
I’m Swedish. We have plenty of toothless laws that no one follows. Plenty.
autoexec · 3h ago
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
rayiner · 6h ago
> The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
CalChris · 6h ago
In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law? Which laws, exactly which laws, was the OPD enforcing?
leoqa · 4h ago
The use was audited and is now being investigated. The claims were for various local and federal investigations. ICE also contains HSI, the second largest federal law enforcement agency, which prior to their recent mandate has been tasked to solve sex trafficking, import fraud etc. SF has multiple large inter-agency task forces that run multi-year long investigations into all types of crimes. HSI is part of those investigations. Querying flock to establish a suspect’s presence during the commission of a crime seems like it’s within the bounds of reasonable use.
CalChris · 4h ago
Querying which flock to establish which suspect’s presence during the commission of which crime seems like it’s within the bounds of what reasonable use? I think you've replaced the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave with Round up the usual suspects.
rayiner · 2h ago
> In sharing the license plate data, how was the OPD enforcing the law?
... the immigration laws? Folks should read the immigration laws. They're actually quite draconian against not only illegal immigration, but anyone who aids and abets illegal immigration. We've just had decades of non-enforcement.
CalChris · 2h ago
No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982. That wasn't draconian either. You should read these laws.
Trumpian enforcement? Now that's draconian. It's also economically stupid. And I'm sure you understand the concept of clean hands. So further discussion of Melania and Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship will be unnecessary.
But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
rayiner · 42m ago
> No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
They really are. For example, there's expensive crimes relating to "encouraging/inducing" illegal immigration that could put a lot of people in prison if they were aggressively enforced: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Encouraging/Inducing -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) makes it an offense for any person who -- encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.")
Similarly, criminal penalties for knowingly continuing to employ an alien one knows is unauthorized: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Subsection 1324a(2) makes it unlawful for any person or entity, after hiring an alien for employment, to continue to employ the alien in the United States knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.").
> The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
That one-time amnesty was a compromise in return for aggressive enforcement going forward. The pro-immigration folks reneged on that compromise, so now it's mass deportations.
> But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
No, it's vindicating a fundamental collective right to decide who gets to be in this country and who doesn't. It's an effort to undo the effects of decades of broken promises around immigration enforcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
ceejayoz · 6h ago
> It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
> HHS rescinded its 1998 interpretation of the term (63 FR 41658) and expanded the agency’s interpretation of “Federal public benefit” to include programs, including Head Start and numerous community health-related programs.
Yeah, I'm not inclined to view clear and open violations of a law the same as "the Feds said it was fine for 27 years, including Trump's first term".
You'll need stronger whataboutism than that.
rayiner · 41m ago
There's lots of programs being funded that aren't covered by that HHS guidance.
mrguyorama · 3h ago
Rayiner, you are supposedly adept with constitutional law.
The state is not allowed to pursue every physically possible means of achieving their justice aims. They are not allowed to overstep their authority period. When they do overstep their authority, it often harms the State's case against the accused, entirely to make it less desirable for a cop to overstep their authority and protect our rights as people in these lands.
For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after. They must either get a warrant or consent from that 3d party, following specific and WELL UNDERSTOOD rules.
You cannot possibly pretend to not know this, so why are you being so disingenuous in your argument?
rayiner · 3h ago
> For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after.
Except we're talking about the state's own license plate data, not stealing someone else's data. Since it is California's data, California can complain that Oakland police shared it impermissibly. (Good luck with that!) But that doesn't create a constitutional issue.
standardUser · 3h ago
>If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
belorn · 4h ago
A lot of people raised similar objections to dna databases, and later when those same databases was used by law enforcement. It did not take very long until law makers and law enforcement made i praxis that such data bases are up to grab for trawling through. Any objection is meet with the handful of cold cases that was closed because that trawling of data.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
roughly · 6h ago
Yeah, I think both things can be true: one is that it is absolutely utterly unacceptable to be in the year 2025 advocating for new data collection programs in the name of "fighting crime" - it should be absolutely abundantly clear to even the most naive of us now that A) the cops have absolutely zero interest in pursuing the kinds of crime we're actually interested in - the closure rate on shoplifting, car and package theft, and other property crime is basically zero, and that's not because the cops don't have enough resources, and B) any of these systems will be abused immediately to target whoever it is the feds have decided are the bad guy this week, be it palestine protestors, trans people, immigrants, ex-girlfriends, or whoever else we've decided is outside the circle of protection today.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
For the powerful in both government and business there is no rule of law anymore. The "law and order" slogan only means a boot stamping on little people's face forever, the powerful can break the law with impunity.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
Is there evidence in that direction?
And if you truly believe that finding and arresting criminals does not make us safer, that is an indictment of our entire justice system. It would also make license plate cameras a rather silly place to draw the line.
I am less certain about license plate cameras. Hence, the ask. I will leave the questioning of encryption up to someone who actually questions its utility.
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
I think with encryption, the underestimate is on the other side. Everyone understand that bad guys using encryption is bad. But people do not see the upsides of encryption for the good guys, pretty much for the same reason as they do not see the downsides of data collection: I have nothing to hide. [or the common related variant: Advertisement doesn't affect me]
And why are you confident that this doesn’t exist for the license plate dataset? You’re confidentially making two opposing arguments with no justification beyond it getting you to your desired conclusion on that specific issue.
My argument is that just because we decided that "police with camera" is a worthy trade-off, you cannot use this as an argument for "license plate scanning is a worthy trade-off". It could be that it is, but it doesn't follow from "it's a scaled up version of police with camera".
If the issue is purely about amplifying the danger of bad actors and therefore forcing us to reevaluate the tradeoffs, encryption and AI do that too.
This is a good point. If people are willing to push back against giving law enforcement everybody’s data why would they also oppose giving law enforcement everybody’s data? It is inconsistent because if you think about it “giving law enforcement everybody’s data” and “not giving law enforcement everybody’s data” are basically the same th
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.
This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.
Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".
Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...
It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
In January of 1941, the Nazis ordered all Jews in the Netherlands to register themselves and virtually all of them, some 160,000, provided their name, address and information on any Jewish grandparents to the government.
If the lesson one learns from the Holocaust is that one shouldn't collect data just in case some genocidal group comes to power, then I fear one has learned the wrong lesson.
I highly suggest visiting it! Sorry for the lack of an online source.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.
This phenomenon is well documented, from "the only moral abortion is my abortion" to suddenly accepting gay people when your child comes out to a huge quantity of Americans only being accepting of gay marriage rights after watching a damn sitcom, to "deregulate everything" types suddenly screaming for the government to do something after they get scammed/screwed/used as expected like most of the crypto community.
I really fear for our older generations and those who are less tech-affine. What chance do they have to not be scammed by AI generated videos, fed by exfiltrated private data of them and their family. Grandparent scam on steroids.
This absurd idea that all we have to do is "defang" the government and we can safely ignore it, as if the problems that these data sets are built to work towards fixing would magically go away, or magically mean that people who experience those problems wouldn't still try to get something done about them, except now outside of a legal framework of any sort.
Do you actually think people with broken governments are more free in their world of arbitrary penalties and non-existent solutions?
A blinded government isn't less dangerous when it gets hostile. It just makes it more random and less well targeted. But that won't STOP it.
The holocaust would have happened just the same even if we never made counting machines. The main difference with IBM helping the Nazis is that we have good data about who died in the camps and good documentation. Funny that doesn't seem to matter to morons who think it's a hoax though.
Or do you honestly believe Jews faced no oppression and extermination in the areas without good data on them?
The actual answer is, as always, the hard one: Suck it up and pay attention to your government, participate in democracy, advocate for good politicians, understand how our system is somewhat broken and non-representative, and vote for people who will make it more representative.
There's no option to disregard politics and stay safe. If enough people in your country want you dead, no government can protect you of that if you stay disengaged. Ask the native americans how safe they ended up without a comprehensive database of their existence. We nearly exterminated the buffalo to solve that "problem". Because it was popular. No IBM needed.
Additionally, data collected by the government can also be misused by others. So it's still better to not collect unnecessary.
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
What’s your point?
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.
As an example, the Feds can round up marijuana users in California, if they like. They can't require California's law enforcement to help.
There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
The law prohibiting exactly that is linked in the article.
"Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
Respectfully, I believe you have it backwards.
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/the-case-for-recalling-da-c...
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?
It was a combination of the weird post-Covid crime boom. And the various police reform efforts cities experimented with in the wake of George Floyd.
Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Yes, yelling in a residential neighbourhood in the middle of the night is a disturbance of peace. The fact that it’s caused by unchecked mental health is somewhat separate. (In many cases, I don’t think it was a mental health issue. I think Rob on the corner got drunk.)
Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
No, this is a "this didn't actually happen."
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
What year did that occur on their budget chart?
https://x.com/chrisarvinsf/status/1399863666938310663
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
>Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin is not a police budget, that's a completely unserious nonsequitor. SF's police budget rose throughout the defund the police movement, just not as high as initially allocated. https://abc7news.com/post/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-depa...
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
As a NY resident: lol.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cash-bail-illinois-one-...
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
And frankly, the folks who turned "liberal" into a dirty word can make any branding into a branding fuckup. That's what they have Fox News for.
Anyone against concentration camps now gets the "liberal" slur thrown at them. Why is that?
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
Excuse me. While a minority of rabid Anarchists might agree with you, the vast majority of people in Denmark happen to really like our police force.
This is largely an American problem. Don't blame it on "the western world".
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
... the immigration laws? Folks should read the immigration laws. They're actually quite draconian against not only illegal immigration, but anyone who aids and abets illegal immigration. We've just had decades of non-enforcement.
Trumpian enforcement? Now that's draconian. It's also economically stupid. And I'm sure you understand the concept of clean hands. So further discussion of Melania and Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship will be unnecessary.
But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
They really are. For example, there's expensive crimes relating to "encouraging/inducing" illegal immigration that could put a lot of people in prison if they were aggressively enforced: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Encouraging/Inducing -- Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) makes it an offense for any person who -- encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.")
Similarly, criminal penalties for knowingly continuing to employ an alien one knows is unauthorized: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... ("Subsection 1324a(2) makes it unlawful for any person or entity, after hiring an alien for employment, to continue to employ the alien in the United States knowing the alien is or has become an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.").
> The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982.
That one-time amnesty was a compromise in return for aggressive enforcement going forward. The pro-immigration folks reneged on that compromise, so now it's mass deportations.
> But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
No, it's vindicating a fundamental collective right to decide who gets to be in this country and who doesn't. It's an effort to undo the effects of decades of broken promises around immigration enforcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
https://www.feldesman.com/hhs-announces-major-changes-to-its...
> HHS rescinded its 1998 interpretation of the term (63 FR 41658) and expanded the agency’s interpretation of “Federal public benefit” to include programs, including Head Start and numerous community health-related programs.
Yeah, I'm not inclined to view clear and open violations of a law the same as "the Feds said it was fine for 27 years, including Trump's first term".
You'll need stronger whataboutism than that.
The state is not allowed to pursue every physically possible means of achieving their justice aims. They are not allowed to overstep their authority period. When they do overstep their authority, it often harms the State's case against the accused, entirely to make it less desirable for a cop to overstep their authority and protect our rights as people in these lands.
For example, a cop cannot just steal a 3rd party's database to get the evidence they are after. They must either get a warrant or consent from that 3d party, following specific and WELL UNDERSTOOD rules.
You cannot possibly pretend to not know this, so why are you being so disingenuous in your argument?
Except we're talking about the state's own license plate data, not stealing someone else's data. Since it is California's data, California can complain that Oakland police shared it impermissibly. (Good luck with that!) But that doesn't create a constitutional issue.
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.