Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain dead

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gamer0004
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by gamer0004 »

Don't be a bitch, not all cops are bad, most of them do a good job. And it's a scary job.
Paraphrasing a bit here.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by ZeroPresence »

Correct gamer0004. Although I had a little more emotion and paragraphs. :p

See I like you folks. So I wanted to give some needed insight on one of the more "real world" off topic posts.

Didn't know bringing up a good topic on a low population forum where things can hang on the front page for a while was worthy of a hate post.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

Did I ask you to delete your post?

I did not. In fact I suspect you're the first person in the history of this board who's ever deleted their post just because they were called out on necroposting.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

Yeah I..didn't see anything worthy of deletion. I may have disagreed with the overly emotive tone of it (in places, and even then it's mostly because 'appeal to emotion' arguments always seem a bit cheap) but overall it was a fairly interesting, informative post.

Ho hum.

Oh well. Let's go taze some shit.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by bobby 55 »

gamer0004 wrote: I liked that post :(

Agreed. It wasn't offensive and there have been 24 months plus resurrections left undeleted.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by gamer0004 »

DDL wrote: Oh well. Let's go taze some shit.
Hehe.

Taser is typically my favorite weapon in games, especially if it's not lethal. I like tasering people over and over again.

I would not make a good cop.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by ZeroPresence »

DDL wrote:Yeah I..didn't see anything worthy of deletion. I may have disagreed with the overly emotive tone of it (in places, and even then it's mostly because 'appeal to emotion' arguments always seem a bit cheap) but overall it was a fairly interesting, informative post.

Ho hum.

Oh well. Let's go taze some shit.
I'm defending people against individuals that think they understand a situation and can pass judgement unto others. Whom I happen to be one of; how do you expect me to not be emotive about it?

Basically: "don't be a tool and hate on LEOs just because you see a few bad news stories. Remember that controversy sells and the media is not to be trusted." This has been a public service announcement.

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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

Yeah, but I'm one o' these clinical logical asshats that feels an argument should be winnable purely on factual merit, rather than appeal to emotion.

So bringing up a guy who got killed feels (to me) like it both weakens the argument, and turns a guy's death into a debating weapon, neither of which is really a desirable outcome.

But again, clinical asshat. Also possibly hypocrite, coz I'm fairly sure I've almost never tried to argue something purely on factual merit. ..Mostly I argue on a platform of expletives, actually.


Also, hating on authority figures is not really a new phenomenon, it's as old as...fuck, probably "rudimentary society". Deer probably do it, too. Which now I think about it, means you're probably unlikely to convince anyone on this one by pure factual merit, emotive entreaty, or even a wide platform of swears. Humans are all about the "them and us" partitioning. Even if you don't have anything against cops, they are still unarguably "them", for basically everyone except actual cops (and their families).

And again, that's just one of those things you're no doubt aware of, and were prepared to deal with when you signed up.

Plus it's not like you're entirely innocent of this, either:
don't be a tool and hate on LEOs just because you see a few bad news stories. Remember that controversy sells and the media is not to be trusted.
Don't hate on the media just because they overpublish 'dramatic' news?

But, like I said, clinical asshat. And to be fair to you, yeah: the media ARE mostly all assholes.



Anyway. Mapping. Fucking hell. I hate you. Are you for hire?

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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AgentOrange »

gamer0004 wrote:
DDL wrote: Oh well. Let's go taze some shit.
Hehe.

Taser is typically my favorite weapon in games, especially if it's not lethal. I like tasering people over and over again.

I would not make a good cop.
Remember that we're police. Stick with the Prod!
Last edited by AgentOrange on Tue Jun 12, 2012 5:43 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by ZeroPresence »

*twitch*

... yes. I'm always for hire.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

I'm pretty sure I've already expressed my feelings about the subject.

But honestly, it's still relevant. Given current internet mob culture, the subject of police violence often pops up. It's really hard to square a feeling that acts of certain kinds should be punished, and then the police have to use those very same acts in order to make sure justice is carried out.

And people are being absolute dicks about it. There's not one instance of police action that doesn't automatically get videotaped by some youth, if the youths can help it. The worse part is, some of the people doing the recordings are clearly power tripping; which makes sense. If you're standing up to someone clearly out of your league in terms of capacity and capability for violence, either bodily or otherwise, then you're probably convinced you're acting heroic, and that you're a heck of a guy.

But that just illustrates that we can't use (physical) violence as part of our justice system, except when to protect someone innocent from bodily harm that would happen without immediate interjection.

You know, honestly, we need a way to identify people that's better than what we have right now; the idea that if you just get away from the cops chasing you right now, you'll be safe...that's the main problem with all of this.

If you know you have a very high likelyhood of being held personally accountable nomatter what you do, that's a very different dynamic. If you know that part of your fine will be paying the officers who come and pick your up at your place of residence because you didn't self-report and self-identify as someone who committed an injustice, then suddenly you have the correct incentives in place to use much less physical violence.

In other words, the problem with police is, the current system is bad, because the police do not have the tools they need to do their jobs well. This taser thing is an example of just that. It's very easy to blame the individuals when you should in fact blame the system. Anyway, I'm incredibly happy that the news media _are_ being dramatic about this, because the justice system is currently a cesspool of injustice, and without bringing attention to the issues surrounding it, that won't change. I'm sorry that means individual officers sometimes get thrown under the buss - they don't always deserve it - but societal change has to happen to improve things, and there's no other way of getting there than angry newspaper articles and videos of violent policemen.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

It might be worth stating which justice system you're talking about, since they're far from homogenous. In terms of violence, for instance, about the most violent a generic UK police officer can get is "roughing up" a suspect, since they don't carry guns (and rarely, I believe, carry tazers or alternative non-lethal weapons). In the US they could shoot a man dead.

There's a big difference in application.

Also, in ZP's post that died a terribly premature death, he illustrated that the response to an offender running is often for the ground-pounding officers not to pursue. This does not mean they let the guy get away scot free, since they'll usually have various forms of surveillance data they can analyse to identify him, plus they have other means of pursuit, such as a helicopter.

In other words, instead of
"suspect fleeing!"
**dramatic car chase across downtown san francisco**
**shopping trolly full of cans asplodes as car careens into it, bag lady shakes fist**
**cartload of melons gets atomised by a truck that swerves to avoid the police interceptors**
**more movie cliches here**
"suspect apprehended!"
they can just go
"suspect fleeing!"
...

"hey, helicopter, where's he going? Ok, and can we alert all the guys that are already in that area? We can? Ok, great"

...

"suspect apprehended!"

Which is both less dangerous (to ALL involved), and more cost effective.

The problem isn't the idea that "if you run from the cops, you'll be safe", because even if people believed that, it very rarely actually happens. A lot of suspects are rounded up within the hour, even if they run clean away from the officers. If anything, the problem here is one of probabilities: if you give up immediately, there is zero chance you'll escape. If you run away, there is a chance you'll escape. It might be an incredibly incredibly slim chance (and it often is), but as long as it's non-zero, it's better than capitulating instantly. Unless you can somehow guarantee that you will find and arrest fleeing suspects with absolutely NO failure rate (which is essentially impossible), then this will always be a problem. Adding financial penalties to this will not change things, since those most likely to flee (and to rate their chances of successfully getting away) are those with few financial ties. White collar tax fraud man won't run away because: fucksake, they caught him coz he left a huge papertrail. They know everything, where's he gonna go? Crazy meth junkie #345 WILL run away because he's of no fixed abode, the police only know him as 'crazy meth junkie #345', and because he has nothing whatsoever to lose.

It's basic human risk management failure.


So there's that.
It's really hard to square a feeling that acts of certain kinds should be punished, and then the police have to use those very same acts in order to make sure justice is carried out.
This is a very difficult line to draw. Imprisoning someone in your own home is, for instance, illegal. Imprisoning people in a giant government-owned facility, however, is the cornerstone of our justice system. Stealing money is illegal. Levying taxes is a cornerstone of societal structure. Speeding is illegal, yet police pursuit cannot really function without it. Carrying a weapon is illegal in many places...unless you are a police officer.

There are tons of examples of police powers that are in every sense illegal when used by a member of the public. This is not a new phenomenon. The concept of 'the threat of officially-sanctioned violence' is incredibly incredibly old.

And it's because it really fucking works.

At least under the current system you can ensure that the people authorised to potentially deploy violence are highly-trained in the application of said violence. Random meth-head with a gun is BAD, because random meth-head has no formal training and does not have to fill out a fuckton of forms every time he fires wildly at imaginary phantoms. Random police dude with a gun may not be ideal, but it is BETTER, because he's had an extensive training program in correct use of firearms, and is aware that he will have to justify each and every damn bullet that comes out of that gun, on paper, probably in triplicate.


In essence, your attitude seems idealistic (never a bad thing, mind), but unrealistic (at least over any measurable timescale). It also makes a few sweeping unsupported logical jumps ("And people are being absolute dicks about it, etc etc.....But that just illustrates that we can't use (physical) violence as part of our justice system"), and assumes that police powers are getting more severe, rather than progressively weaker. There's a constant, progressive shift from violent to non-violent methods, and it's still happening. So don't worry.

And finally remember that "man confronted by police, gives up immediately, job done, nothing exciting occurs" is not terribly newsworthy, so even though it happens ALL THE DAMN time (and exciting shootouts happen incredibly rarely), the impression you're often left with (from reading the papers) is that whenever the police get involved, they're batoning, tazing and shooting people left-right and centre.

The current system isn't bad, essentially. It could be better, certainly, but it's far from 'bad'.

(and by current system I'm mostly referring to the police/justice system in the UK and -to a slightly less extent- the US)
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

@ DDL
Guns are a whole other thing. Those things are expressly designed to put killing at the fingertips of a person, and are given to police expressly to give them this capability. Most policework, I actually think is fine. I think it should always be recorded whenever there is any kind of altercation, but in general, most policework isn't an issue.

I don't really make a distinction as to which justice system, because I believe all the relevant ones have problems. For instance, both the canadian, the UK, the american and the danish justice systems have shot innocent civilians during riots in the past 20 years, even though there was no immediate danger. There is absolutely no reason a civilized nation should ever have that happen.

I'm primarily concerned with police behaviour during riots, because riots are situations where violence often occurs, and where there _is_ incentive to immediately apprehend people, even though it very likely will make things violent.

Active crimes are obviously also a concern - that's what this thread was spawned over - but honestly a lot of the same things apply in both situations, and a lot of the same tools can solve them (particularly, I think it's significantly less common than you seem to think for people to be apprehended even as they're witnessed comitting a crime).

But you might be right; it might be impossible to get people to not try to escape unless apprehension is 100% certain.

Here's the thing: I have no problem what so ever with keeping a database with bloodsample data covering every individual of the entire nation. If the data is encrypted using a one-way hashing system such that noone with access to the database can say "well, these exact markers are present within this specific persons DNA", then such a database would have only one use: If you find someones blood, you can then match that blood with a name.

If you do this, then you just need to arm law enforcement officers with dartguns...they might hurt like a bitch to be shot with, they'd be no bigger than tazers, and it would ensure the eventual apprehension of a fleeing suspect.

This is the type of thing that I want. I want to equip law enforcement officers to handle things like rioters. See someone comitting a crime? Ask them to come with you (arrest them verbally), and they don't listen? plop them in the belly with a blood sample gun and be on your merry way. Next morning at 5am, 4 police officers apprehend the person at their place of residence. Or maybe you just send 'em fines till they come in themselves.

I don't think this is idealistic at all. The idea that you don't have to apprehend with violence is absolute key.
And look, I'm not saying that police should never be able to stop a crime in progress. Clearly certain crimes warrant a stronger response. A bank robbery, for instance, you want a strong and immediate response to that.

But it has to be a very specific goal you accomplish when you use violence, and it has to be important enough that it's worth doing something terrible before you do that, and I really think our current system often commits way worse crimes than the ones it purports to stop.

Consider, for instance, the violent beating protestors are subject to in Canada right now; Denmark is no better, as we had officers beating up 15 year old kids sitting nonviolently, if loudly, on the asphalt just 5 years ago. They were demonstrating illegally, and refusing orders to disperse. I would have had each of those kids identified if possible, and each of them fined to the tune of 100 quid for that offense, but I would not have a single baton hit any one of them...because ultimately, dispersing a crowd of nonviolent kids with violence is a way worse crime than demonstrating illegally.

Same thing in the USA where people were getting peppersprayed half to death for protesting. It's just not worth it, and there has to be a better way.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

Holy shit. Ok, yeah: I revise "idealistic" to.."totalitarian clusterfuck dystopia".

Keeping a giant blood database of everyone? **shudders**

Ok, let's break it down.

Technically, this is a problem in terms of manpower, storage and reliability. Most commonly used DNA comparison techniques use PCR amplification of a select few chosen regions of the genome that are subject to high individual-to-individual variation (the theory being that while 20% of the population might have marker 1, and 20% of the population might have marker 2, only 4% would be expected to have both markers, and so on)..but this is only so accurate. Even with 20 or so markers, where you might statistically expect to be able to uniquely identify everyone on several earth's worth of people, you find you can't: sometimes the reactions don't work, sometimes a particular combination of allelles is really prevalent amongst a whole ethnic group, a given individual has a huge family, etc etc.

So it's not 100% accurate.

Also, currently we mostly use it to say "we have sample from the crimescene, and we have suspects X and Y, do either of the suspects match the sample?". This is because that way we only need to do three sets of DNA fingerprinting (it's time consuming and not wholly inexpensive). If we wanted to ask "does the sample match any individual in the entire country?", we'd have to do fingerprinting for every single person. Even just doing it for every newborn would be incredibly expensive in time, money and manpower, and it'd take fifteen years to start paying off. Doing it for everyone currently alive would be an insane amount of work. Given that an average PCR takes about half an hour to set up, and takes three hours to run, and maybe one and half hours to analyze, we're looking at 350,000,000 man hours for the population of the UK alone.

Again, it's also not 100% reliable, so if we give it a false positive (via user error, sample contamination, or just plain 'science being an arse') rate of 0.0001%, or 1 in a hundred thousand (which is being hugely generous), you'd be looking at 700 possible hits for a single search. It's designed for "does sample A match subject B", not "who out of these millions does sample A match?"

If you HAVE a subject B, and it's a match you can say that the chances of it being coincidence are vanishingly small. When your dataset is overwhelmingly huge, "vanishingly small" becomes "a realistic chance".

Then there's storage. Firstly in terms of data: you'd have to keep detailed records of every step of the profiling process, because you can be as sure as shit the lawyers would pounce on that.

"Here's his DNA profile"
"And do you have photos of the actual gels?"
"No"
"Then how, members of the jury, are we able to say this is indeed the defendant's profile?"

So you'd need to keep all that. Let's keep it reasonable, and say that maybe 250megs of data would do the job. So that's a terabyte for every 4000 peeps, so for a pop. of 70 million that's 17.5 petabytes of storage needed. You'd prolly need a backup or two, and the whole thing would need to be searchable, or at least accessible with relative ease (those lawyers again).

And it'd need to be secure as fuck, obviously.

Also, you'd probably want to keep the actual original blood samples just in case, so that's a fuckton of freezer space.

So that's expensive. And it's a massive up-front expense, too, and one which pays off gradually, over time. This is absolutely the worst thing from a government spending perspective, because the current govt takes all the flak for the ludicrous expenditure, but subsequent govts get to take all the credit.



The next major issue is the horrendous human rights issues: this is every bit the "guilty until proven innocent" policy. "We shall assume everyone is potentially guilty until they prove us wrong by eventually dying without us needing to arrest them, and thus we'll keep everyone's DNA on file". Human rights advocates would go apeshit over this. You can argue all you like about proper usage of the data and so on, but the fact remains it'd be a significant step toward totalitarian oppression. First your blood, then hell, let's tag everyone so we can monitor them constantly. Then tags are too expensive, let's tattoo everyone. And then godwin turns up.
At best, the government would take a year before they think "hey, we spent all that money on this database. What else can we use it for?"


And finally (though there are probably numerous other holes I could poke in this), it would create a market for blood. Police out with the blood guns? Stab a nearby person and then you're covered in mixed bloodsamples. You could go to a riot equipped with a bloodpack ready to smash over yourself. Hell, you could make bodyarmour composed of bloodpouches. You could coat your skin in DNAse enzymes, so that any projectile puncturing your skin captures blood that rapidly becomes cleared of DNA. Hell, if it's a needle gun, you could literally just wear ludicrously padded clothing.


So..conceptually, the blood thing is unworkable. Even as a thought experiment, however, the whole thing is horrific. I mean, really: if you can compile a blood database for the pure purpose of fighting crime, why NOT just chip everyone and monitor them 24/7? It'd probably be marginally cheaper than the DNA tests, even. And hell, so what if the government can watch you go to the toilet, or whatever: as long as you're innocent you have nothing to fear, right?

O SHIT YO, THE CHIP JUST CAUGHT YOU JAYWALKING! YOU GOIN' DOOOWN.


It would be awful, is essentially my point here.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

hold on, hold on.

The database is a 1-way hash database. What this means is, you take the bloodsample, you run your magnificent analysis on it and classify every individual in the country according to a number of uniquely identifying markers, and then you computer a 512bit hash based on those markers, and then you throw everything out. No blood, no report, no nothing.

Just a 512bit string and a personally identifying number/name.

This is what you do for every person in the UK.

When someone commits a crime, and you get a bloodsample but no name, you do the analysis again, you get the uniquely identifying markers, and then you hash it. If the hashed result is a match with any bitstring in the database, you have a person.

You ask this person to provide a new sample of his blood, because he was flagged by the database. You then do a dna comparison of the sample collected at the scene of the crime, and the sample taken from the flagged individual.

If it's a match, the person is fined for the DNA analysis, as well as for his transgression. If it isn't, the government pays for the analysis, and throws the evidence and bloodwork out. This is not the same as having a chip implanted in your body. This is not the same as having a database the government can actually use for something.

It can only be used to identifying potential suspects based upon DNA material.

This is also not an invasion of privacy. If I talk to the police, the police officers in question see my face, my age, my body type, my skin colour and any visually identifying marks I might have. It is now part of a secure database - the officers won't be able to accurately share this data because it's in their brains - but they've registered it, and they know it.

If someone matching my description has comitted a crime, and they see me, they will take me in for questioning. This is the very same principle; the reason we allow this is because there's no way we couldn't. The reason it's ok and a database listing a picture of me is not ok is because such a database could be abused for persecution, whereas what a few individual officers know cannot. This is the distinction.

The database I suggest has build in security in that you cannot reverse engineer the hash. It won't even have to be kept safe particularly safe because it has very little general utility, and there's no need for chain of custody. It would also be less than a terabyte, since every person can be fit inthere at a kilobyte a pop, and even with 200 million kilobytes, you're still only at 200 gigabytes.

It also doesn't assume you're guilty untill proven innocent any more than any civilized nation assumes you're not a citizen unless you're present in their database. Considering the shit you'd be in if you weren't a citizen, this is the same basic setup: You're guilty of not being a citizen untill we're able to prove otherwise by looking up your information.
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