This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.
A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap.
This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.
I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3 months.
Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice.
Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused.
Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back.
Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.
Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being tried, and without the protections of the criminal system).
On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
If you don’t consent to searches, cops that want to search you will either simply search you illegally anyway, or call out dogs that are trained to alert whenever the cops want them to. There’s a reason that K-9 units are called “probable cause on four legs”.
If they try make sure you assert that you do not consent to searches, and would like to be on your way.. Then when they try to hold you ask them if the detention is inline with `Rodriguez v. United States` which specifically forbids cops from delaying a driver so that they can get dogs to the scene.
This sounds nice until a cop throws you against a car anyways. You're right to give the advice because this is what should happen but that's not the reality because the whole premise is based on what already should not be happening. You'd only need that line against a cop abusing their power. They're almost always going to continue abusing their power
Many cops just try to trick you or are ignorant. Providing this info and asking for a supervisor is the best basis for any potential future legal recourse (especially if recording). Of course none of that matters in the moment, but it can make a big difference in getting that $800 back or not having it seized in the first place.
Well in my experience (given in another comment) this is not the case. With a judge, sure, but a cop no. (Fwiw, I'm white)
It's worth a shot, yes, but it's also unlikely to change the tables. Because again, the only time you would need to utilize such information is when you're encountering a cop who is actively abusing their power. My point is that in such situations, the information has a chance to de-escalate, be neutral, or escalate the situation.
It's hard to tell on the Internet what the intent is because well intended seemingly good advice can also be noise. I'm just trying to convey that the picture isn't black and white. I mean if things happened they way they should, we wouldn't need to call a supervisor or remind a cop of the law, right?
"Because again, the only time you would need to utilize such information is when you're encountering a cop who is actively abusing their power."
Again, this is not true. There are other situations where this info can be beneficial (ignorant cops or deceptive but not corrupt cops).
We are talking about something fairly basic, so if our standards of policing are that it is excusable that a cop does not understand... the 4th amendment... then I'm not sure it is worth distinguishing from abuse. As such level of incompetence would necessitate willfulness.
I fail to understand how you are distinguishing an antagonistic cop who understands you are not breaking the law and is actively trying to trick you into (or trick you into revealing that you are despite no meaningful evidence that a crime is taking place) is different from one that is abusing their authority. I'd go so far as to say that this is a literal act of that.Look, I am happy you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt. We need people to provide such perspectives. In all honesty, I do appreciate your comment and that you are pushing back, but I think you'll need to take a significantly different route if you are to sway me. I think continuing down this train of reasoning will fail to persuade those with similar views. This does not mean there isn't an argument that would, just not this one.
"As such level of incompetence would necessitate willfulness."
It does not. You really should engage in a genuine debate.
Deception and abuse are not the same thing. It's perfectly legal for a cop to say "I'm searching your car, ok?". If you say "ok", you just consented. This is completely different that someone making up probable cause.
"Look, I am happy you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt."
No, I'm not. There are many situations and benefit of the doubt can only be applied to a few. It's simply incorrect from a logical perspective to frame the things you have as always being willful and corrupt. If you've had any experience with the law you will find that incompetence is rampant, but not usually willful. I understand that you may not be open minded, as evidenced in your hardline and unsupported generalized statements, but it's important for others to see these flaws.
In the US, we do have the presumption of innocence. Questioning to search without probably cause is, legal or not, an abuse of power.
I do wish you think deeply about what the "power" is that is being abused. What "authority" mean. Because if your argument is "it's legal" then I do not believe you understand this and I ask you to think a little deeper. Perhaps you're familiar with "malicious compliance?" That's enough of a hint.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stop_and_frisk
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unreasonable
"There is a level of incompetence one can be at their job in which it is clear that they do not seek to do their job well."
And you can't apply that to everyone who is doesn't know every law.
"You should respond to the things I say, not the things you wish me to say."
Check the quotes then. You're making blanket statements without any backup.
'distinguish the difference between "what is right" and "what is legal".'
The question is about what is legal. If you know anything about the law, then you know it is a combative process. In order for the truth to come out it needs to be a fair fight between two sides. There is nothing wrong with asking to search if already engaged (reasonable suspicion). Just as there's nothing wrong with saying "no". There's no basis for that being immoral.
I think the argument for using the line is, there is no reason in the moment not to try everything you can, no matter where you are, and you adjust based on the situation. If you’re in a place that doesn’t respect the rule of law ALL THE TIME, sure, don’t. Is the US(I will assume you’re US-based) that right now? I think your answer to that question == whether you feel the tactic is viable.
But you’re right, we shouldn’t be in this place as a nation, wondering if police are going to be ethical even most of the time.
The main point was that there is a line between being cooperative and being tricked or forced into consent for a search. The best tactic is to appear cooperative but not a pushover. If they are forcing or tricking a search, then you need to show that you are complying but "under protest". And definitely, this is based on how it is now, not where we should be.
My experience aligns with your advice:
Most police officers will bully you within the extent of their authority and try to deceive you into complying beyond their authority, but will not physically break the law.
With those police, being polite but firm is a good strategy.
- - - - -
Example: you’re in the parking lot of a business after hours, sitting there with a backpack; two officers in a cruiser park and get out to find out what you’re doing.
1. Well — legal or not, they’re going to detain you for a moment until they decide how to proceed
2. and they’ll pretend the only way to make that stop is let them search your bag to “prove you didn’t steal anything”
3. but if you politely repeat that you’re not consenting to any searches and would like to leave, they’ll let you go because at best they have probable cause for trespassing.
"My point is that in such situations, the information has a chance to de-escalate, be neutral, or escalate the situation."
Yes, because in intense situations, it matters often much more how you say something, than what exactly you are saying.
Remember that from the point of view of the cops, you might draw a gun at any moment, if they misjudged you. They need to feel they are in control of the situation.
So giving a legal correct counter, but in a snarky or aggressive voice, might not help.
But calmly reminding them of certain laws and maybe even asking them, if they are sure that they could justify their actions in a court, might work better than resisting and demanding things of armed police officers.
This will mostly just come across as patronizing and more likely to 'deal with you in court' while your smarmy ass sits somewhere.
Some real advice: don't tell a cop how to do their job. Answer the damn questions and be assertively "no" if they ask you to consent to anything. That's it. If they go away, great. If they make your life hell. That sucks, but don't do anything to make it worse, like patronizing them. Suck it up and deal with it later.
Well, I do have managed quite well with different police so far, even though not with US police. But I am sure they react to body language and sound as well. And yes, one can also articulate that sentence less escalating, my point was mainly that the way someone is said matters a lot more.
Correction: (..the way something is said)
Count to five in your head before answering any good questions.
They get trained to get you to misspeak, and they ask you questions that if you answer them like a normal human you give up rights...
If the cop wants to throw you against the car that's going to happen and no amount of negotiation or "Am I being detained?" is going to prevent that. It's also not going to help against the sizable percentage of cops who just don't know they can't do something. This isn't for either of them, this is for the lower grade abuses of power where the cop will make you "wait" 2 hours for a K9 (but never call them in the first place) to try to get you to consent to make things go faster. If they know that you're going to be filing complaints and suing them they're much more likely to just send you on your way. YouTube has literally thousands of these videos which induce various levels of rage depending on how egregious the cops act.
Yeah having rights is great but it's not a lot of help when the cops can just beat the shit out of you and arrest you for resisting arrest. Maybe you'll get it overturned in court but what good does that do if you missed work or lost your job over the whole ordeal?
Does it forbid the tactic in a way that results in negative consequences for the perpetrating officers?
Your right has been confirmed in that case. It then has the basis for a civil rights case.
But Rodriguez is way past the qualified immunity deadline. What incentives the cop not to do this?
How so?
In the US if you ask the cops anything you risk getting tased or having a knee on your neck.
Drug dogs only provide probable cause for drug searches. They arent suppoaed to extend to other crimes. Just as if the dog alerts on private property and a warrant is then needed, it only provides probable cause for a drug search (or related offense).
On another note, in many states the dogs can't be trained on marijuana as it has legal purposes (medicinal or recreational). If coming from a state where it is legal, it still shouldn't provide probable cause as the sniffable residue could be from previous legal use.
So in my view, the drug dog liability is low (biggest threat being planted evidence, but that could happen anyways), and being reined in further. Yes, the made-up probable cause is more likely. That's why I was wondering.
It is still a federal crime to use marijuana, even in states where it is legal under state law. Also, if you are in a car, they just have to suspect you were driving while under the influence of marijuana and it becomes probable cause again. But it is unlikely that residue alone constitutes sufficient evidence of a crime, because they would never bother to investigate someone smoking a joint so severely anyway.
I believe you are also wrong about the limited scope of a search. If additional crimes are uncovered during a legitimate search, they absolutely can charge you with it and use the evidence they found. Think about what you're saying. If they find pools of blood in your trunk while looking for drugs, they will definitely admit that as evidence against you and cause to search all your property.
Only the feds enforce federal crimes, so it's not relevant to most traffic stops.
The residue is enough for the dog to alert.
"If additional crimes are uncovered during a legitimate search, they absolutely can charge you with it and use the evidence they found."
Any examples of that? Usually with warrants they have to specify what they are looking for. Probable cause searches are supposed to do the same.
I said an example. If you're found with a dead body in your trunk for example, that will not be thrown out on a technicality, especially if it was found during an otherwise legal search. I don't have the case law memorized but I've heard lawyers discuss it before. If you do some research you will find exceptions to 4th amendment protections, such as the ones in this article: https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-rights/the-fourth-...
Who are these dorks downvoting me so much? Lol
Algorithmic downvote. Maybe “gag factor”. Just guessing.
Instant downvote.
I meant actual case law examples. If it's a body in plain view during the other search, then that falls under the plain view exception. If it's somehow concealed in a way that they can't tell what it is, then they shouldn't be able to use it. Of course judges would use every avenue possible to side with the police on an issue of murder (assuming it was murder and not just a corpse from some other reason).
Not sure what your point is here. Even the feds aren't enforcing marijuana laws.
Can you take a domestic flight carrying marijuana? I doubt it.
You're unlikely to be arrested by any federal LEO, as there are not many of them. Your local LEO do the arrest and then transfer to the relevant agency.
Law enforcement can, and do, cooperate to arrest individuals.
Imagine if a suspect could get away from being arrested just by crossing into another state.
Unless they are federal police, they have no authority to enforce federal law.
I agree with you in general but police can do a lot of things on suspicion of a crime. They may have to let you go eventually, but don't overestimate your position. You could be tied up for months straightening out issues with false accusations.
Police officers in US can enforce a federal law, local police officers are just not obligated to.
The entire existence of a class of contraband that cops can claim to be searching for at any time is a massive loophole in the fourth amendment, and as such, the drug prohibition wave of the mid-20th century was instrumental in turning the US (and for that matter a majority of developed countries) into police states
That's the thing - it's not considered a search. That's how they get away with it. The sniffing has to happen in public (or with a warrant) and is considered in plain smell (same as an officer smelling alcohol on your breath in a car). Then the dog provides probable cause for the real search.
Well, really everything has become heavily criminalized in the 20th century. Especially as things that aren't outright outlawed are regulated to the extreme. Drugs, alcohol, guns, knives, etc. Some things have gotten more open, but virtually everything has gotten more complicated and easy to get tripped up on technicalities.
The officer "smelling alcohol on your breath" is infamously applied to any situation where the officer lacks probable cause. It cannot be verified in a criminal case or in litigation, the officer is simply presumed to be telling the truth, and if proven to be lying is never, ever imprisoned for perjury.
It may as well be "The officer saw you drinking in a vision"
In an environment where police officers are effectively immune from any consequences of any actions, which appears to be almost true - barring widespread media coverage and consistent pressure from essentially a majority of US adults for multiple months at a time - the actual nature of the pretense used to take the officer's word for things is pretty immaterial
Not true, I have refused a “look over”of my car for two traffic stops, both cops threatened canine cops and I told them go ahead. One radioed in “not available”, The other one went back to his car and wrote me a ticket and told me I was lucky he got another call while he was filling out the ticket. I’m sure they sometimes do “do it anyway” but it isn’t a sure thing.
Canines need to be well trained, if it goes to court the need to prove the dogs won't point if there are no drugs (or whatever the dog looks for) so if there isn't good reason to suspect you they won't bother (depending on how far away a dog is) they are just threatening as if you are guilty you may give up.
There are also rules about how long they can detain you while waiting. See a lawyer (the rules may not be good but you can get off in court if they are 'too long')
No, in practice they do not need to prove that.
The presumption of innocence is mostly a fiction.
They do need to prove it. It's just that they treat it like a radar gun - they take the last certification testing as the proof. It's very rare to get to re-examine them.
It's impossible for a test to prove that a canine ONLY alerts to contraband. It doesn't matter how many controlled tests it has passed, dogs could nevertheless be responding to conscious or unconscious signals from an officer who is already expecting to find drugs.
Ever since Rodriguez v. United States the police cannot make you wait for the K9. It's considered an unlawful detainment if they extend the traffic stop, without reasonable suspicion of another crime, beyond the time it takes to deal with the original reason they pulled you over.
This is generally accepted to be about 20 minutes but that's not a hard and fast rule and multiple things can extend that time.
Basically they need to continue writing your citation for speed or a brake light or whatever, at a reasonable speed. If you ever see dash/body cam footage where this is relevant, cops have had charges dismissed because they fill out the entire citation but don't sign it in about 10 minutes, then spend 45 minutes questioning everyone in the car and trying to get probable cause for a search. This is part of why they'll do a lot of the fishing at the beginning before they start the citation process, as that's seen as more "reasonable" than doing it at the end. This is also why it's so important to only give the info you're required to and not to answer any other questions. It increases the odds you'll get that first ticket but it cuts off their ability to extend the stop.
They can also plant evidence, find something left behind by a passenger, or any myriad of things. You do not consent to the search because if you are arrested I guarantee that's the first thing the lawyer will ask. And will turn a $10k into a $20k if you allowed it. Because even 1 piece of illegally gathered evidence can wreck the whole case.
BTW, I've done jury duty and witnessed the DA's case fall apart as witnesses and evidence was excluded. It's hard to build a strong narrative when whole chapters have to be ripped out. Years of evidence went up in smoke because they weren't handled correctly.
Anyway, the point is you don't make the cops job easier because they certainly don't deserve it.
Interesting, typically all the evidentiary hearings happen without the jury present - because as much as we like to pretend otherwise, once the jury hears something it's going to be considered no matter what.
In my case we had pictures of random people, we assumed "accomplices", with no statement. Dates and timestamps where there was lots of activity, then nothing for 2-3 weeks and then lots of activity. We determined in the jury room the prosecution was hiding evidence from us probably because some of it wasn't legally obtained.
We were 51% certain the guy was guilty but everything else left too much doubt.
I was on jury duty recently that seemed the epitome of "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride," along with a terrible job done by the prosecutors. I explicitly told the defense attorneys on the way out that they didn't win their case, the prosecution lost by doing a terrible job with evidence.
Violation of an order of protection case, charged with violating a 500 foot OOP by 2 feet. Apparently part of the sidewalk at a nearby intersection was 498 feet from the house, but they didn't even pop up a map of the area just threw a bunch of street names at jurors from all over the major metro area.
Another time I was visiting the Golden gate Park. I asked a ranger for directions. He said we smelled like weed. I told him SF smelled like weed. He asked to search, we walked, he grabbed us and my backpack. His evidence to give us a ticket was my still sealed bottle from the dispensary.
I won't say all cops are bad, but some just want to abuse their power. I won't say cops are good, because the ones that don't abuse do know the ones that do. And you know what they say about "good men" who do nothing...
And people still wonder why I'm critical of authority
It's very much a spectrum but, in my personal experience, many cops are drawn to the job for the wrong reasons, like the power or being able to retire after 20 years with a pension (varies by municipality but very common in the northeast).
It would never happen and I'm not sure it should but I often think about what a community based approach might look like. For example, a requirement that police live in the community they're policing or some sort of conscription model.
I think some of the problems are related to the fact that parts of society don't scale well (though some do). As population grows, so does anonymity. But a powerful tool to fight abuse of authority is by decreasing anonymity, as this creates a social pressure. There are disadvantages to cops being biased towards their communities, but I think this is better than the bias of indifference. We're dealing with humans, and the direction in which we should _error_ should *always* be on the side of compassion.
[0] Perfection does not exist and will not. So we have to be nuanced
Wanting to collect a pension is NOT a wrong reason. It is a very legitimate reason for any government worker. I'd even bet it's inversely correlated with wanting to abuse power.
Moreover, the abuse of power looks to develop over time, learning it from other abusive cops, and going further. It is a cycle of abuse taught from senior to junior. Even if the police represent the community or are conscripted, they still can learn such abusive behavior.
The solution can be for all teams to be new, to not pass bad cultural knowledge from the old team to the new team.
You are misunderstanding the reason to not consent to a search. If the police officer can't justify his search in court, the evidence will be dismissed. By consenting, you are giving the court free evidence.
NEVER consent to a search. However, never obstruct one either.
It's also very very important to explicitly say "I do not consent to any search or seizure." They will tell you to do things you're not legally required to do, e.g. "move over here for me" and if there's no audio recording of you refusing to consent, they can (and will) simply say in court that they took your choosing to get out of the way when you didn't have to as consent. Now you have to argue that you didn't consent, which you wouldn't have to do if it was clear on camera that you were refusing the whole time.
Say it over and over again, any time they ask you to move, any time they ask to search again, any time they say they're going to pat you down, etc. Be a broken record. It's become a meme but this is why you see people asking if they're being detained over and over again because once the cops say yes that changes the rules considerably (in your favor).
I think people have fewer qualms about cops seizing weapons than any other kind of property. Taking cash or a car from someone is not equivalent to taking their guns.
Property is property
Until they start seizing bank branches under suspicion of being used in a crime, this selective scamming won’t stop
Ideological opposition to these laws without a frank understanding of their intent and impact is arguing in bad faith. Property is not all equal and not treated that way, for reasons that should be self evident.
Guns are tools to kill people. Red flag laws exist to identify people who have them and are likely to use them. If a few people get caught up by the net by mistake, the societal impact is that we have fewer guns on the streets while those people are inconvenienced.
Compare that to seizing people's cars. Sure, cars are dangerous, but people need them to travel to/from work/school/etc. The impact of seizing a car from someone by mistake is they could lose their job, their house if they lose income, etc. It's a lot worse than a gun owner not having access to their gun for a little bit.
So no, property is not property.
I'd argue your argument is in bad faith. Guns are tools, that can be used to kill people, just like knives, clubs, or other weapons. Guns are also tools for ensuring equity in a potentially violent world. You don't need to be 6'2 250lbs to defend yourself with a gun from a criminal or violent government. Its also convenient for you to decide that others don't "need" to protect themselves from situations that they've deemed necessary.
What non killing-or-practicing-killing use do handguns have? Zero.
Surely there must be better ways of “ensuring equity” than threat of death.
Also, if you think a handgun is going to protect you “from a … violent government” you should see what happens (or really, doesn’t happen) when a handgun round hits modern tank plate.
"What non killing-or-practicing-killing use do handguns have? Zero."
This argument implies that killing is never justified. Society in general seems to disagree with that. Killing as a last resort to protect yourself is considered reasonable.
Also, there are remote areas where it would be much more likely for the killing to take place against animals than humans. These sorts of scenarios seem to be overlooked quite frequently in these arguments.
Idk I feel like it just increases incidences of "I have a gun and therefore I win this argument".
I'd lean towards saying that there are many times more misuses of a gun than "a good guy with a gun". Wonder if there are stats on lawful shootings vs unlawful.
Yes, there are a number of stats out there on defensive uses of a firearm vs misuse. Every one that I have seen shows a net positive on the side of defensive uses. CDC has some numbers out there that seem to be respectable if you'd like to look at them.
I'm very pro 2nd amendment, but guns are not tools and it's a fallacy to say that.
Guns are used to kill something. In hunting they are used to kill animals, and otherwise they are used to kill other people, or yourself in the case of suicide. You don't do anything with a gun except kill or attempt to kill something.
The overarching point I'm making is that the government seizing $2,000 in cash from you is not the same as seizing a $2,000 gun from you, because the $2,000 in cash isn't a potentially immediate threat to the public. Red flag laws are one of the very few pro-active tools for law enforcement.
I think any argument around guns that focuses on ideological thought experiments like self defense from a "violent government" is not worth exploring. Because then you're talking about how to organize an armed insurrection, not how to reduce mass shootings and domestic partner violence.
And it's convenient for the craziest people in our society to have easy access to weapons and ammunition because of widespread paranoia about defending yourself from those people. Seems like the easy solution is to make access to weapons harder!
Your comparison is not correct. There are security guards, police, and others who rely on guns for their jobs, even more so that the typical person relies on their car to get to work (alternate rides are available, but being armed may be a requirement). Keep in mind that DUI suspects are allowed to drive until their hearing. Also, that there are habitual offenders who have already lost their license and still kill people with their car because their car isn't seized.
The real differentiator here is simply the prejudices the speaker holds against one item or the other. For example, you conveniently leave out all manner of lawful and beneficial uses that the gun owner is inconvenienced with, including potential loss of life or victimization while unarmed.
Reading anecdotes about US police is trully terrifying. How one of the richest countries in the world be so incompetent in this one particular regard. Is there some sort of historic review that highlights how it got this way?
Police unions in some districts are incredibly strong. New York City is famous. That means when you try to charge the police, none of the other officers will want to testify against bad behaviour. Plus, there is bribery-lite with stuff like "Fraternal Order of Police" where you can donate money (no idea what they do with it), get a sticker for your car and you will be statistically much less likely to be pulled over in your car. (Really, I wish I were joking.)
A deeper question: Why don't other highly advanced democracies decay in the same way? For example: Why hasn't the same happened in Japan or Denmark or Portugal?
my cousin's husband is a cop in Philadelphia. my cousin has a "courtesy card", signed by him, declaring that she's family. she shows it along with her license when she gets pulled over for speeding, and they let her off with a warning.
it's a literal get out of jail free card.
Sounds like Russia
Don't assume the best of European countries. If and when they decay, you won't find out about it. The US is different because US people are loud. I submit this discussion as proof.
By the way, Japan is always different. As the saying goes, they are just like us, only more so. So, eventually, they will also decay and when they do, they will decay just like us, only more so.
Both (South) Korea and Taiwan are considered highly developed. They also do not experience this type of "democracy decay" (my term). If anything, they are expereincing the opposite. Personally, I think this is due to both are still relatively young as democracies, so their democratic institutions, when tested with difficult issues, continue to strengthen.
My pet theory is that multi-party, coalition-based systems help a lot.
You have my vote! Multi-party systems really do seem less extreme as an outside observer.
We were supposed to have an aggressive internal affairs department, federal investigations, and federal prosecutors to address the possibility of local/state police corruption, since the prospect of that corruption was raised in the 1970's (or, depending on your perspective, the 1900's to 1930's).
The problem is that since the rise of the 1980's white conservative 'crime and punishment' voter we don't have executive-branch leaders who are willing to regard police overreach as a form of police corruption; In the bootlicker's mind, everything is an honest mistake as long as the police are hurting the right people.
I think the part you are missing is the sheer scale of our public services in the US. Sure it's like that in some parts of the country but in other parts it's completely different. A quick Google says that the US has ~18,000 police departments (by comparison, Germany has 16 and Japan as 1,250), I'm sure some of them are fantastic and others are corrupt hellholes, all depends on where you are.
In some cases, larger donations get you different stickers showing your level of 'support'.
The purpose of police and their training matters a lot. That is not to say that police in other countries are saints, they just have a much different role in societies in western Europe compared to US.
The police in the U.S. can be awful, but let's not get smug about it either. Police in MANY places worldwide and also in many European countries are just as bad or worse (if sometimes less overtly aggressive) and often you don't even have the basic protections of the law that you can use to your advantage in court later.
Which European countries? Other than maybe France I cannot think of any which have big issues with police violence.
The US police are terrifying but there is the possibility of redress unlike the UK where the justice system does not exist.
They originated in large part from slave patrols. Enforcing a certain social order is in their DNA.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Police are largely there to reinforce social and economic hierarchies, which the people at the top of those hierarchies naturally benefit from.
This comment is good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285843
Why such needless arrogance from cops in a developed country like US? They for sure couldn't be following some written law, right?
I mean that's not even pretending to 'protect and serve', unless we change subject from 'citizens' to 'ourselves'. I would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of Africa, not champion of free world.
There’s a lot of sordid history around the police being used to keep certain ethnic groups in line (heavily but not just black people - one of the more interesting shifts was how Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to comprising large fractions of many forces), but then the war on drugs really hardened things into a relationship more like an occupying military force. That coincided with many cops joining white flight to the suburbs, meaning that they didn’t feel part of the cities where they served as had been the case a generation earlier, and the lurid tales of how violent & well-armed drug gangs were along with how dangerous “super predators” were lead to a lot of quasi-military weaponry and tactics becoming routine with quaint things like warrants being severely undermined. I say quasi-military because I’ve known multiple combat vets to express disbelief at the poor discipline shown by cops compared to the rules they had in places like Fallujah.
The other big driver was the concept of qualified immunity and civil forfeiture. The modern form of the latter was invented during the drug war and formally embraced by the Reagan administration as a way to make elevated police presence self-funding, and that opened up a lot of room for abuse since it created huge conflicts of interest and the growth of qualified immunity removed the potential counterbalance of personal accountability.
Can you tell how this came to be?
There are a couple of different things coming together but the big one is that while they were first considered degenerates, criminal, drunks, etc. they weren’t denied all of the legal status whiteness offered. As states removed the property requirements, allowing all white men to vote, the large groups of Irish immigrants voted cohesively enough to become very influential in a lot of cities – helpfully around the same time that booming cities needed professional police & fire departments, creating a ton of civil servant jobs which did not require formal certifications or uncommon skills. Once a few people from a tightly-knit community get in more will follow, and the Irish tended to be more insular as Catholics in a Protestant country.
The persecution of the Irish was a leftover of the British's attempted cultural eradication of celtic and Catholic identities. British media often portrayed the Irish as violent and backwards, and the living conditions the British enforced often made the stereotypes seem true. After the Eiri Amach of 1798 and Irish Potato Famine of 1845 there were two waves of large immigration of Irish farmers, fisherman, and sailors to Boston and New York. These former farmers, fisherman, and sailors were extremely unfamiliar with many of the job types available in the heavily industrialized cities and struggled to find employment they couldn't form for themselves. As a result high levels of unemployment and street crime were part of American Irish life in cities in the 1850s and 1860s, leading to them being seen as troublemakers and being heavily targeted by city patrolmen.
By the 1870s a large portion had left through Pennsylvania to settle in the Appalachian Mountains, and many more were pushing further west to work on the rail lines. As they were often paired up with the Chinese and German migrant workers they were distrusted and weren't easily integrated into heavily English, French, and Italian descended communities that settled along the developing railroads, continuing the reputation of the Irish being supposed troublemakers.
However back in the major east coast cities the Irish who stayed were successfully carving out their own districts thanks to the enforced isolation from other ethnic groups, allowing them to form almost vertical control of the political process from individual home to district level. To ensure this control wasn't ceded as the cities grew and to prevent the return of the abuse of the 1850s, rising political institutions like Tammany Hall heavily encouraged first and second generation Irish immigrants to perform enforcement instead, leading to Irish descendants taking positions as everything from police officers to prosecutors. By the 1910s this push meant that as many as one in five police officers in New York and Boston was either an Irishman, the child of an Irishman, or the grandchild of an Irishman.
It's always Reagan. The poison seed of a human being that rotted America.
Cops in the USA are social tech support. They exist to protect the social and economic status quo, and to close out trouble tickets that come in over the phone. Protecting and serving aren’t in the job description, practically or even legally.
Your head not being on a pike/your continued breathing is also part of that 'economic and social status quo'. I think we can agree then that 'economic and political status quo' is thus a uselessly vague term.
Ive had a bunch of run ins with cops and, to me, they just seem like guys who have a job thats annoying. I didn't get a big "classist conspiracy" vibe.
Protect and serve hasn’t been a thing for a long time. Police have been trained that no one or anything is worth dying for.
That’s why cops go and hide during mass shootings at schools.
Its never been the thing they want you to think it is. It was coined by an extremely racist LAPD officer
Do you have a source showing that Joseph Dorobek was extremely racist? I can't seem to find anything about him being racist. I saw one article which said that according to Dorobek's granddaughter it was coined by her mother who was 17 at the time, and he submitted her idea as part of a contest to find a motto
They mostly are not, but with 300 million people and free press you hear about the exceptions. If you think your country doesn't have simialar problems you are not paying attention.
I'm sure this is what you mean, but not everyone is going to understand what that phrase means.
It happens enough (20 years ago, at least) that a short-term visitor like myself actually saw (but happily didn't experience) multiple examples of cops abusing people (beatings, mostly). The completely oblivious reaction of the crowds around these incidents spoke volumes more; it was clear that nobody wanted to attract any attention.
I recommend not believing everything you read on the Internet. In a country with 330 million people, a one-in-a-million event happens often enough to be a regular fixture in the news. And it gets clicks every time, reliably.
It should be up to the legislators and justice to limit cops power, and punish them when appropriate.
California and the Federal gov’t has a requirement that if you’re ever accused of domestic violence, you’re not allowed to be near any firearms unless the accusations have been withdrawn or found without basis. (Notably, it is a very low bar for them to be found as having a basis. The standard is literally ‘could have possibly happened/occurred’, not did or beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.)
Practically in California, you’re required to turn them all in for storage or sell them within 24 hrs of being served - either selling them to a dealer or turning them in to the cops or to a very hard to find, expensive, and specialized type of gun dealer who doesn’t advertise.
Keep in mind - accused - not a finding of or anything - and the court is happy to issue these orders ex-parte based off accusations which the impacted party has no chance to rebut or is necessarily even aware of at the time the order is issued. And the bar to issue it is very, very low. The accusations don’t even need to make sense or be supported by any police calls or the like.
In theory? Fine. In practice, a very common abuse and harassment tactic. Or actually necessary.
If you can’t find the specialized type of dealer and get him everything within 24 hrs, and can’t sell everything for penny’s on the dollar to a standard gun dealer in time, then you have to turn them into the cops. Or be committing a felony.
Oh and the court will demand proof when you go to reply to/contest the emergency order that you did everything within the requisite amount of time, and did indeed turn everything in.
In Santa Clara county - among others - apparently the cops will also never actually return the guns to you either. Because ‘it would look bad if you then used them in a crime’. Yes, this is clearly against the law. They DGAF.
There are multiple outstanding lawsuits against them for this, last I checked, but the courts keep putting them on the back burner as after the Judge Persky recall no one wants to be involved in anything like this in the current political climate.
They’d much rather drag it out for years or even decades over procedural matters.
Even if it’s really clear what the legal thing to do is.
One or two guns, not a lot of money. But folks with collections? Better not piss off anyone you’re living with.
Well, maybe people should not own guns. At all. Any gun, let alone "a collection".
Why allow anyone to own anything?
In this case, while it may (temporarily) remove (if the party is willing to follow the law!) one method of domestic violence, it’s not like it’s hard to come up with alternatives. In many parts of the world, the preferred method of domestic violence is throwing acid on someone’s face.
The concern here is abuse of due process, and that it’s so trivial to take away someones rights and property using falsehoods and BS bureacracy, while also not actually solving any of the underlying problems.
Since, for instance, if that emergency order was for someone who actually was a problem, they still have a full day to go after whoever while still legally owning everything, and if they go on the run, it’s not like they care about another felony!
I'm not defending the police, or forfeiture laws; I'm just surprised one would use guns as an example, because it's still so surprising to me, as a European, that people would have guns in their homes like it's the most natural thing in the world.
Guns are dangerous -- in fact they don't have any other purpose beyond inflicting harm (unlike other dangerous things such as cars or drugs, etc.) I'm aware of the 2nd amendment, but firearms don't look like a good rhetorical argument in a discussion about property.
Your legal system that considers you a serf is not to be emulated.
serfdom disappeared from western europe in the 1400's... several hundred years before slavery in the united states. what are you talking about?
As a casual gun owner, my main requirement for entertaining any sort of gun prohibition is simple - disarm the police first. The police operate within domestic society, where the power of the government is supposed to flow from the rights of the citizenry. Police are also involved in the sheer majority of violent confrontations across society, and thus preemptive de-escalation would be quite significant at changing the overall societal dynamic. And disarming the police wouldn't even involve any kind of constitutional amendment, since we're essentially talking about employment regulations. It would also address the worry that police will find some way to except themselves from any new regulations prohibiting firearms, as they have traditionally done with existing regulations on guns and many other judicially-banned armaments. So if you're advocating for gun prohibition, put your best foot forward and get to work on the police.
I would agree we should disarm the police. For some reason most people get upset when you say this, not just in the US but everywhere I've tried. In France at the last presidential election there was only one candidate (out of 12) who defended the idea, and he scored 0.77% of the vote, so there's a long way to go...
In the US it is, clearly.
And statistically, very very very few guns kill people. The US has well over 300 million, and it is far from the top cause of death or serious injury.
If anything, a collection of them is even less likely to be dangerous, no? Since if someone is collecting something, they tend to be familiar with it and are putting effort into keeping it safe and in good condition.
Even Germany allows gun collections, albeit with a mind blowing amount of paperwork.
And they are worth money. And prone to people trying to grab/forfeit/confiscate.
What about Finland or Switzerland? Both have very high personal gun ownership rates, but incredibly low gun violence. How do you explain that?
Speaking only for Finland: most of the guns are for hunting: rifles, shotguns and the like. A statistic from 2016 has 1.5 million guns, 220 000 of which are handguns.
Second, the legislation is very strict. You need to have a reason for owning a gun; hunting and shooting sports are valid, personal protection isn't. You need to belong to a relevant association (such as hunting clubs or shooting clubs). You need proper locked storage in your apartment. Carrying a gun in public without a reason (such as going to a shooting range) is forbidden, and even then should be minimized.
Should you violate any of these conditions, you're liable to lose your gun license and all guns will be seized. Also the police may revoke the license on suspicion of violent behaviour.
So, if you want to get a gun, you have to live squeaky-clean. Illegal guns are of course another matter.
Those things you list as "very strict" are incredibly easy. And they do not make any difference to the US regarding domestic violence.
True; the intent isn't to make owning guns impossible, but it takes some dedication to get into guns, and once you get one, next ones are easier to obtain.
The end result is a small minority having multiple guns per person, the majority not having any, so citing Finland as a country with high gun ownership is misleading.
I am not replying to dispute your comment. I didn't consider your idea about concentration of ownership. It is a good point!
About gun ownership in Finland, Wiki tells me:
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_FinlandIt doesn’t even have to be someone you’re living with unfortunately.
They took my camera and then when I tried to get it back they claimed that nothing like that was in evidence. So I filed a police report because the police stole my camera, but I never heard back about it.
Glad you eventually got your money.
Sounds like a good reason for expensive devices (cameras, laptops, etc.) to do nasty things (like slowly release compressed onion mist or fart spray into the air) if they detect that they have been stolen or otherwise away from the owner's presence for more than 24 hours.
There would be clear warnings to the effect of "Do not steal or else X" pasted on the device.
As absolutely ridiculous (and illegal) as this advice is, if you find a way for inanimate objects to "detect that they have been stolen" I'd imagine you'll become wealthy enough that you won't need to worry about it.
I don't see anything illegal. It would be a device intended for my use, not the police's use, and I'm happy with the way it is constructed, therefore I purchase it and own it. If you steal it, you assume all liabilities thereof.
See similar: https://skunklock.com/
Booby traps are incredibly illegal, even if they're "non-injurious" by your personal definition.
This also applies to the classic tale where someone is stealing food from a communal fridge so an enterprising idiot puts laxatives in a sandwich. Congratulations! You've just committed a felony by poisoning someone.
I'm not saying you're wrong on the facts. But altering my lunch and getting in trouble when someone steals it is insanity.
- Fart spray isn't a booby trap and doesn't injure anyone, it will just make the police office stink like ass
- It isn't a trap if it is in my possession all of the time. Anyone who takes it out of my possession forcefully, it's their fault
Heh USA biggest police state, in EU there is only one state with same level of policing. Germany. Cops there will make you strip search even before concert, because of "drugs" lol.
Do they have the right? I was stopped by German police many times and they asked me to search my car every time, which I complied. However one time I was stopped, one policeman was speaking to me while I was in my car, and his colleague started opening the passenger door and searched without asking. That's when I told them to stop and questioned their authority to do so. German citizen did not seem to question the authority, because when I asked around, they didn't know if it was legal or not.
https://www.mvcr.cz/mvcren/article/checks-and-selected-proce...
You can thank Ronald Reagan for that.
You believe that police abuses originated in the late 1980's?
It’s maddening to hear such a story. It should have ended with the invoice.
Utterly ridiculous. I'm sorry that happened to you, how infuriating.
This is hilariously Kafka-esque, what a shitshow
That is clear abuse. I think there should be very clear law and the same that the police should be extremely diligent applying laws, abuse should be punished the same way. But for this, rules need to be crystal clear.
If that happened to me I would put up posters with the face and name of the thief (police officer) that did that in his neighborhood. I would want everyone to know what kind of an asshole he is.
Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point.
My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
this intent/implementation duality was codified by the chevron precedent that was just overturned by the supreme court.
the legislature was responsible for establishing intent, and the executive was responsible for implementation, and the judiciary branch was responsible for resolving disputes.
but the supreme court ruled that the legislative intent has been too vague, and the executive has been too whimsical with implementation. so the legislature must be more specific, or leave it to the judiciary to establish details.
That is false. Please don't spread misinformation. Chevron had nothing to do with how legislatures write laws.
The prevalence of extreme propaganda on this site is getting really tiresome.
It is an objective, inarguable fact that neither Chevron nor Loper had anything at all to do with the ability of Congress or state legislatures to distinguish between intent and implementation.
can you provide a correct interpretation of the ruling?
The ruling stands on its own. Have you read it?
And in any case it is completely off-topic from this thread.
i've skimmed it, that's what i got out of it, but i'm no lawyer. if you aren't going to clearly express your intent here i must continue to rely on my interpretation
Not parent, but Chevron was about deference to agencies, not about whether courts should adhere to legislative intent. The original Chevron ruling was written by a well-known originalist, who usually didn't abide by legislative intent.
sure, but agency interpretation is only possible within the vagaries of the legislation. that's 100% synonymous with intention/implementation.
Here you go: https://www.justice.gov/d9/osg/briefs/1983/01/01/sg830081.tx...
You can read all 7,000 words, then you will better understand the "correct interpretation".
The intent / implementation duality isn't related to Chevron or Loper Bright. That is entirely about how to interpret the implementation: to what degree, when considering alternate interpretations, do we weight the agency's own interpretation?
The intent / implementation discussion comes up when considering statutes like this:
In order to maintain our beautiful forests and meadows, the city of Little Island hereby declares these acts governing the pollution of water: ...<enumeration of acts>...
Now many years pass and all the forests are cut down and the meadows are gravel lots, buildings, &c. Is the statute no longer operative? Generally, the way laws are interpreted, the courts would say it is still operative. The alternative would make the interpretation of law quite inconsistent, because it means we are asking courts to judge many things that are not really matters of law.
It is much more difficult to establish standards of intent interpretation than it is to establish standards of statutory interpretation. One could imagine a law written as follows:
In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins, the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments. The minimum temperature shall not be greater than -18C.
There are some gaps that a court needs to fill in order to apply this statute:
- The health department and the area of effect are not specified but these can be assumed to be the health department and area connected to whatever legislature passed the statute. If there is no health department that is the obvious one -- if, for example, it was passed by a city legislature and the city has no health department -- this could introduce some difficulty.
- The use of "minimum" and "shall not be greater" together in this statute are confused and confusing but since it pertains to freezers, the court can infer that freezers must be set to temperatures of -18C or below (-19C, &c).
However, sorting out the true intent presents insoluble problems that would lead to inconsistent interpretation of the law. Perhaps an establishment only has frozen fish. Does this law apply to them? Generally, the rule is that clear intent clauses -- "In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins..." -- are ignored in statutory interpretation. The operative part of the statute is that "...the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments." and that the temperature established by the health department must be -18C or below.
No standard ways of interpretation will make up for a poorly-written statute - and, with all due respect, that's what your hypothetical example is. In liberal democracies, we expect our representatives to pass only laws that have low ambiguity, and sometimes require third-party review to ensure this.
Why would any legislature pass a law delegating responsibility to a non-existent agency? How could this legislature pass a law with clearly contradictory stipulations regarding temperature? Then, finally, for what reason would intent clauses be written if they were then be entirely ignored?
In conclusion, I think that your hypothetical system of government has greater problems than any inherent difficulty in expressing legal intent that may exist.
Do we really?
UK law is full considerations like what would a ‘reasonable’ person do.
Also full of terms that are ambiguous - loitering for example.
Jeez, no kidding. Think about criminal sentencing guidelines. Not all circumstances are the same.
If the facts change, I change my mind; but I don't think you're being realistic, here. Judges sometimes have to interpret poorly-written statutes. Legal drafting has improved a lot over the last hundred and fifty years or so; but that has been a gradual process.
Some countries have what are effectively brand new political and legal systems; but countries with comparatively long histories of stable governance generally have comparatively old laws that must be interpreted.
You ask three questions in the foregoing:
- Why would any legislature pass a law delegating responsibility to a non-existent agency?
If the city does not have a health department, it may be that the county does, or the state does, and they meant to delegate to them.
- How could this legislature pass a law with clearly contradictory stipulations regarding temperature?
The stipulations make use of a common, unfortunate misphrasing; that doesn't mean they are actually contradictory.
- Then, finally, for what reason would intent clauses be written if they were then be entirely ignored?
Intent clauses are generally considered non-binding, in legal systems all over the world. Another commenter has pointed out that this is the case not only in the Anglo-American system but also in the EU system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41284984
That doesn't mean intent clauses serve no purpose. It just means they don't serve the purpose of providing a specific, actionable rule.
Laws already attempt to encode intent through technical word choices, scoped definitions, and careful construction. Judges and lawyers attempt to discern the intent by careful reading and logical deconstruction.
When the lawmakers and judicial interpreters are good at their jobs this works great. Good lawmakers draft good laws that are clear in their intent. Good courts make good decisions by applying reasonable interpretations of the law.
Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.
How does encapsulating the "intent" into its own section of the law fix the problem? Bad lawmakers will still write vague intent sections as well as poorly defined implementations. Bad lawyers will abuse the vague intent sections to argue for exceptions and novel interpretations of the implementation section. Bad judges will let this fly and warp the system further through bad precedent.
You kinda do get a separate intent section. It begins with a string of "whereas".
As with code, adding more words rarely makes it clearer. In fact it usually introduces more discrepancies.
Interestingly some places give legal effect to those preambles it seems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble#Legal_effect
I'll point out that bad judging can always move the goalposts of what 'well-written intent' is.
"Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly."
Good lawyers and good judges allow bad laws to be taken advantage of. If the law says it, it should be allowed (for leniency to the accused) or the law should be invalidated due to a lack of strict construction.
That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those.
Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
Normally during the legislative process a record is kept about deliberations leading up to the proposals for texts, and amendments etc..
In a 'normal' European democracy judges and lawyers use these deliberations to argue what the intent of the legislative branch was, when it created the law. And to interpret it in that light.
I'd be surprised if there was no equivalent in the USA. I suppose therein lies the root of the Scalia doctrine though, which is too strictly 'originalist' for my taste. But in this instance I'd wager the rules of seizure were given a lot of legislative attention, similar as Habeas Corpus, because illegal seizure is an obvious tool of tyrants. It was often used by Roman Emperors and medieval Kings.
Civil Law systems will prioritize being clear and precise in the language of the laws. Where a law allows interpretation, it will likely literally state that.
There are clear limits to how to interpret laws and most of the case law comes from which provision is applicable to a particular case. There's often no need to resort to "deliberations" part to interpret the law for a judge, just find the law that most precisely applies in a particular situation and there's no law that is in conflict.
Basically in a Civil Law system if the law states that you're not allowed to drive while drunk, that doesn't extend to being high. Unlike Common Law systems, where a judge could accept that drunk and stoned are close enough for both to be banned. (this is a hyperbolized example, not exactly how it would work)
Even in a Civil Law system, there still exist fundamental principles (like the one from the GP that would disallow US-style property seizing), badly written, and conflicting laws that judges have plenty of space to interpret.
Seems to me that a vague law is simply an invalid law. The rule of law requires the clear knowledge of what exactly is illegal, if that isn't clear then its simply a prospective law that doesn't meet the basic requires to be law.
This is classic HN. "Apply API-style thinking to the Real World."
What is reasonable cause for police officer to search someone? Mind you: This single point alone has hundreds of interpretations around the world, across all cultures. Within a single country / culture, there could be many interpretations.
There is no such thing as a law that isn't vague to a degree, because laws are expressed in words and concepts, and those are vague by their nature. Laws can, of course, be vague to a lesser or greater degree. We definitely don't want poetry-level vague laws, but we also don't want to (or can't) have laws expressed in code or as mathematical proofs, because this level of clarity is just computationally intractable wrt. anything relating to real world and real people. At this point, the practical optimum seems to be laws that mostly obvious in vast majority of scenarios, and leaving it to judges to opine on corner cases on an individual basis.
That is how European Union directives and regulations are written, as it happens. The 'recitals' outline the general aims of the legislation, acting as a sort of preamble.
From https://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/p/how-to-read-eu-legislat...
The recitals are non-binding, but nathan_compton's proposal is that the intent portion would be binding.
It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in the rulebook.
This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
Old laws are among the most likely to have deviated from their intended functionality. In my imaginary system, though, someone would have to raise the case to the courts, so it wouldn't be just happening all the time.
I love this and think about the same. Similarly, in a work setting, I used to decree that any subsequent decrees (eg: tooling, commit/lint rules, languages) must come with the intent, the desired results, and the expected costs. This made it much less political to suggest changes to our process while simultaneously eliminating some of the low effort "let's use <framework-of-the-week>" statements. I also want to believe it made it so ideas could come from anyone, not just people with titles or social capital, although I don't have any hard proof of that.
As the article reports, the ruling actually states that the amount of time must be reasonable. Any gross or blatant violation would be picked up by any lawyer or judge.
Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without getting into specifics. This means the language can reclaim memory whenever it deems a violation has occurred. How well do you think would that work for the program? Not very well.
As much as programmers like to draw analogies between law and code, they don't really work the same way at all.
There are times that parts of a law should be vague to allow those evolved to make intelligent decisions. They should be specific enough to come to a resolution quickly if needed.
This opens the door to routine injustices whereby those who can afford expensive attorneys get a sweet deal, and everyone else gets stabbed in the name of justice.
that sounds like what we have right now.
Courts tend to follow precident, indeed precident is nearly the same as law. It's not really the case that an expensive attorney can argue his way around the well-established interpretations of the meaning of the constitution and other laws. Maybe, in the case of something novel, or for a question that has never come up before. It's not at all routine.
Why not? It would seem that you're just used to a state of exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice. Sometimes it helps to see things from an outsider's perspective.
I'm not commenting on the way things should be, I'm commenting on the way things are.
And if you're saying that this ruling is bad because it doesn't work well in an idealized model of the law as you think it should be... that's an interesting observation, but you can hardly fault the judge for crafting a ruling that works in the context of the actual legal system.
Because laws are executed by people, not computers.
Why yes?
Yes, the constitution itself only prohibits "unreasonable" searches and seizures, and only states that "probable cause" is required for a warrant. These terms are undefined, and left to the courts to interpret.
The definitions are well defined in theory. How they get applied to specific cases and how they have been perverted over time is the real problem.
Take warrants and probable cause. It's supposed to be that by a preponderance of the evidence that the crime has been committed. The quality of many warrants today seem to completely miss this to the point that many of the descriptions fail to even claim that the elements of the offense have been satisfied. Then we have such a lazy system that warrants foe summary offenses don't even have to be for the correct crime - all that needs to be claimed is that any crime has been committed. That's how it goes when the system is too lazy to give each issue the correct level of attention to protect your basic rights.
Isn't that what garbage collection essentially is?
Garbage collection doesn't impose a subjective reasonable vs unreasonable time limit for holding memory. It checks if the memory is still in use or not. Garbage collection is never subjective; it is entirely objective and without ambiguity or bias with regard to the guarantees it offers.
This claim is false for a lot of modern language runtimes which use tracing garbage collection, like the CLR (C#/VB), JVM (Java/Kotlin/Scala/etc), Go, BEAM (Erlang/Elixer), etc.
There are no hard promises about when or even whether GC will reclaim a particular piece of garbage, precisely to enable optimizations and necessary compromises. Application availability is often more important than immediately collecting every possible piece of garbage. The use of tagging, generations, arenas, etc. all allow the GC to use heuristics and apply different collection regimes to different pieces of garbage.
Apologies, but I meant it terms of the guarantees that a GC offers. Yes, the GC can delay, but it will never over-eagerly reclaim beyond its advertised guarantee. It will always err on the side of not reclaiming.
So exactly the same as saying that you will get your money back at some undefined point in the future whenever the police agency you’re dealing it will find it convenient?
No, rather that your money (memory) will never be taken away from you (your application) by the police/system (runtime/OS) without an objective rule.
So police is the VM/programming language and you’re the program? Person writing the program? Or is it the other way around?
It seems like the analogy just didn’t work.
I'm not sure of your definition of objective here. If you mean a specific implementation and exact version of a specific language does one objective thing that might be true.
But, different implementations of the same language and different versions of those implementations can all do different things. GC rarely says exactly when something will be collected. Only that it will eventually.
Example: https://jsfiddle.net/8cej4tpk/2/
Firefox GCs after about 8 seconds, Safari GCs immmediately, Chrome never (probably not until there's pressure). And, you'll find different behavior if you go check different versions of those browsers.
Apologies, but the point was that a GC will never unjustly take your memory from you without a well-defined rule. It may delay in taking it away, but if it does, it will be very clear why it did.
Earlier you wrote "Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without getting into specifics."
This is essentially what Python-the-language does. It does not require reference counting, or mark-sweep, or any garbage collection at all. The language specification says at https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects-v... :
"Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether — it is a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still reachable."
That subjective language specification is quite different than its objective implementation in a Python implementation, which appear to be what you refer to now.
Presumably much better than a language which would free all memory after 46 minutes in all cases regardless if that makes sense in the given context.
Also not sure why people like coming with analogies so much, they very rarely are useful or make anything clearer.
I dunno, I think it's generally quite useful to identify relations between similar concepts. Not always easy to find one that fits perfectly but usually it just needs a bit of a tweak.
Like in this case, the situation you describe is exactly what a garbage collected language does, the key is that they let you mark what memory is still in use with a reference. Similarly in this case, there should be an explicitly defined time with a rule that if police want to hold something longer, they need to actively justify why and what the expected timeline is for the return without the owner needing to take them to court over it. Not perfect, but neither is garbage collection, and to me sounds much improved from what we've got.
I’m still not sure if GC is the police (i.e. returning the money/memory at an arbitrary undefined point in the future) or me trying to take it back.
The topic at hand is pretty straightforward and easy to understand, not sure what’s the point of trying to explain it using significantly more complex concepts besides making it more confusing and harder to understand for no reason.. (I mean I find it hard to believe that any person who understands how GC works would find the analogy in anyway useful).
On a very superficial level sure. But then that mechanism starts coming apart at the seems if you start talking about the details.
I know you think you're being facetious, but you've just described how modern operating systems work.
They give programs a reasonable amount of memory, without getting into specifics about the limits. And they reclaim memory as necessary based on the demands of the OS and other programs. See, for example, browser memory usage vs video game usage.
It turns out that in practice "reasonable" works quite well as long as you are reasonable about it.
IANAL, but I don’t think they are supposed to. They decide the case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but that’s not authoritative.
We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.
I seem to remember something about "justice delayed".
Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
More like "this is how you creep in justice". You set a date and politicians will spend months determining what's too long/too short. Or in this case, the judges may not get a unanimous ruling as easily. The article mentions that this is a DC appeals court that establishes this, and several other circuits have rules otherwise.
The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court case to set precedent on what is "too long" and use that as a reference for future court cases. Or in this case, it may in fact go to the supreme court who will be able to determine a more concrete time (or just throw it all away and doom us all).
Given the prior majority of appeals courts deciding the other way, it seems like something of a waste of time to figure out a time period.
Better to say "you can't hold it for an unreasonable period, and 14 months was unreasonable"
It will have to be resolved at the Supreme Court level anyway, given the US Court of Appeals split.
I hope that you aren't expecting a court with a rampant Clarence Thomas to care about anything pertaining to your rights vis-a-vis the police.
1 / 9
We're stuck with the courts because congress doesn't do their job, but leaving this to the courts to decide on a case by case basis could mean that only people who can afford to pay the lawyers and court fees and take the time off for a lengthy court battle against the police can expect to have their rights respected. Ideally, we'd have claws with specific limits that would then be used to set department policy. That way it'd be clear to everyone what the expectation is and when a violation occurred.
A functioning congress could make laws regulating this.
But as things are, we have wait for some random court case to bubble up.
Congress has no reason to care. They certainly aren't subjected to any of the shady tactics. Most of their constituents aren't either. Just the edge cases, but nobody cares unless they find themselves in it.
It's not useless because indefinite means never. At least this will require police departments to define the time and therefore make it less likely the stuff walks off, which will encourage keeping it for shorter periods of time.
How about thirty years (but only if the person is still alive)? It's not indefinite, and it complies with the ruling.
How about 300 years? anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling.
Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing and as a layman that feels like a feature not a bug.
That means they have to be able to hold onto the property for 300 years and be able to verifiably return it to the estate beneficiaries. That costs a lot of money, better to just hold onto things for a short period of time while they are relevant and not steal them or throw them away.
If the definition of the word “reasonable” was left in the other half then sure.
It’s the job that of the court to define what is “reasonable” on a case by case basis and establish a precedent. They can’t start coming up with laws themselves that clearly establish universal and specific limits.
I wouldn't be so sure. Cops have implicit prosecutorial attorneys too that have a lot more experience with such cases than do defense attorneys.
There is no substitute for clarity in law. All else opens the door to exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice.
It would not comply the with ruling unless they could provide “reasonable” grounds for holding it that long, and any precisely specified length of time would probably run afoul of the ruling, since that would by definition be specifying the length of time the police could hold it without reason (they could well give it back because they have no continued use for it, but they choose to withhold it arbitrarily because they can, since the deadline for return hasn’t arrived)
Indefinite does not mean never; that's what infinite means. An indefinite amount of time means not a definitive amount of time; i.e. "we don't know how long".
It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires another court to decide what "reasonable" means in each case, with the time and cost associated with boing to court.
A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).
A court can't set hard limits. It's up to a legislative body to enact clearly defined laws.
A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
But what happens when the property is something that cant be reasonably returned in 30 or 60 days? Maybe it's a cruise ship that got seized and needs to be be made sea worthy before being transported? Hard numbers don't allow for edge cases, the vagueness is a feature not a bug.
Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken your stuff, not on the person who's stuff has been taken.
A feature for who? Where's the evedence that law enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge that in this specific case there's a good reason not to do so.
The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug for the individual. Real life doesn't not have time caps. How many days can a person go without food, without a livelihood, without his property that supports his existence? There are time caps for each of these things.
Imagine if prison sentences didn't define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep extending the duration beyond a defined limit.
What standard does a court use to set a more relaxed upper bound? What's it relaxed in comparison to, if there was no previous more-rigid bound to begin with? And if the court did set some very permissive high bound, it could be so porous as to be worthless. And what's worse, the legislature might have little incentive to bother improving it. Plus, arbitrary rulings can get arbitrarily overturned.
That's what happened with Roe v Wade. Instead of the legislature enacting a rule, the court did. Then Congress became complacent and failed to "harden" the Supreme Court's ruling. Then when the winds of justice changed, Dobbs came into effect. But had the legislature passed a law codifying a Roe-equivalent standard, the chances of there ever being enough of a majority in both Houses to overturn it plus a president willing to sign a new bill into law would've been minuscule.
In short, the less our lives are governed by some random court imposing national standards upon us that were pulled out of the court's honorable ass, the better off we are in the long run.
I once heard of a behavioral economics paper that said you can reliably predict a judge's ruling on a legal or ethics matter based on what is best for the legal profession.
This is why judicial records are so secret that you can't even subpoena exculpatory evidence from them. They want to protect the image of the judicial system. So old fashioned. In today's world, you build trust with transparency... assuming your organization isn't rotten...
I challenge this kind of thinking. Why haven't other highly developed democracies decayed in the same way? Wouldn't all judges, everywhere, behave in the same way?
What actions do you have in mind? Where are those actions happening or not? How do you think the decay of democracy is tied to judicial secrecy/immunity?
I wouldn't call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on when property can be held:
...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay:
The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.
This is easily bypassed and/or worked around. What is to prevent an indefinite investigation? The FBI D.B Cooper case was open for decades, for example.
They same thing that would prevent anything else they do, being taken to court. It’s the only thing they fear.
Well if db cooper wants to come claim his property…
It would not be up to the police to define but a court.
And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.
Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.
That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual.
Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the current status of indefinite asset seizure being essentially the law of the land everywhere.
Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc.
You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional.
It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary.
This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.
https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-servin...
"James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with an additional 3,318 years"
The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US
I suspect that this pattern for sentencing is so that even if some charges/convictions are reversed the remaining sentence makes that reversal not really significant in real-world terms.
I don't think it's remotely practical to have a hard limit because what's entirely reasonable in some cases is entirely unreasonable in others.
Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break that limit they automatically become liable for replacement with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.
They'd be paying for it with our money. Standard economic drives don't affect organizations that are funded with someone else's money.
How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That’s why a reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.
Exemptions for edge cases would benefit only the government. Moreover, the exemptions would take away the individual's rights even more, which is exactly what the citizenry need to guard against.
This is a good point.
I've always thought a constitutional amendment to make every law in the books auto sunset, unless explicitly voted in by congress
I would think this would have made the PATRIOT ACT obsolete some time ago, among other things
The Patriot act was reauthorized (in part) several times, but expired in 2020.
Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap.
For many serious crimes, they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment
This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it back after 14 days.
It however does provide the very useful definition of why it can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for retaining it.
One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation, as you mention; but judges don't write legislation. There is a way the rules develop as "common law" -- via judicial decisions -- but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up through several cases that cover different situations. For example:
- There would be cases where a person's medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days.
- There would be cases where a person's groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks.
- And so on.
It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.
It is very common to naively think laws should be rewritten to be clearer but experience quickly shows why that doesn’t work. Basically laws can only work when they are interpreted by reasonable jurists because the real world is full of grey areas and human language is not clear enough to fully divide the space of “everything that can happen in the world” into clear legal and illegal categories.
In programming terms, an appeal’s court deciding an exact number of days police can confiscate property is like hard coding in a global constant that then can never be changed, deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that, which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of the file that people see and can have input into.
The best part is the insulting pretense that it’s all very rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it’s convenient.
If you watch kids often enough you’ll occasionally observe the kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding fair play, etc. These bully’s become lawyers instead of cops.
The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that it’s easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting impacts. It’s all so fragile.
Maybe civil law is objectively superior to common law.
It's not useless at all. It provides the framework for lawyers all across the nation to contest property detentions on a case by case basis, some will find sympathetic judgments, and the facts behind the case law results will be cited and reused in further rulings.
It's not perfect, but forcing police to define the time that something will be taken does go a long way to shining a light into their intentions and make it easier to prove that they're being unreasonable. "Local police department claims right to hold things for 30 years without a warrant" is a much better headline that would draw a lot more scrutiny from local voters and councils than just "the police won't tell me when I'll get my stuff back".
How does a judge get rich?
Judges are rich?
With qualified immunity on the books, if the police reach into your car and steal something important then you're out of luck. I'm not optimistic that better definitions around this particular method of theft would have any effect at all on the fruits of that power imbalance.
Not always correct as a principle.
To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more.
For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case'.
Anyway to the point how much would people think is 'reasonable'?
10 years - no way 5 years - no way (unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial) 1 year - probably not 1 month - might be to short
... and so on.
I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the 'last minute' with timing and so on.
There is a cap implied. The only reasonable reason to hold the property is for evidence. Once the statue of limitation runs out, or the appeals process is exhausted, there is no reasonable reason to hold the property anymore.
I am no lawyer or something like that. I think the full topic must be much more complex than that.
However, I agree there should be a lot of simplification and there is a lot of overregulation and contradictions.
Baby steps though, progress not perfection. None of your points are invalid
I think a lot of your complaint is a result of too many laws. Why don't we establish principles instead of trying to nail down every edge case. It's the edge cases that enrich the legal profession and leave the law open to abuse.
All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to punish a certain individual or company (tiktok).
It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the intent.
I immediately thought of the same thing. They'll stop retaining seized property indefinitely and start retaining it for 7 decades instead.