– Have you been seeing bicycle memorials around town? Here’s what that’s about. Also, oof and some hope from that map.
– Shotspotter is a waste of money and time. If we have the money and staff hours to send police on wild goose chases, I assume we won’t hear about shortages any more.
– Someone take away his phone, or his drugs, or his companies.
– Anyway, please wash your hands right now and get vaccinated or boosted if you’re eligible. Book that appointment, and get the flu shot while you’re at it. Easy.
Shit like this was bound to happen now that Stacey Abrams got outed as a grifter.
Braves awarded 2025 MLB All-Star Game after 2021 game moved
Still in place: election reforms in Georgia.
In the previous thread there was some whining that people treat Palestinians as if they are Hamas.
That’s clearly wrong. Only three out of four are Hamas.
Had Joe Schmoe stiffed the IRS the way POS Hunter Biden did, he’d be in prison.
Prison.
The Biden Crime Family is unraveling, fiber by fiber.
The good news for ol’ Joe is that every 2023 video clip of my corrupt, incompetent, senile fossil of a president provides convincing evidence that he is not competent to stand trial along with the other members of his family.
But Jill is. Jim, too.
The problem with Shotspotter from a criminal justice perspective is not so much that it is a huge waste of scarce resources – a tremendous amount of what already goes into public safety budgets is giant waste.
The problem is that it once again assumes a priori that police agencies are comprised of highly professional, highly skilled, highly trained technical experts. There has never really been any evidence to support that assumption. Just a huge media/PR push in the 1960s and beyond to promote the idea using movies, television, and other parts of the culture. It is a comforting thought, especially when it was first being promoted during a demographics, drug war, and lead toxin fueled crime explosion. And cop dramas are fascinating entertainment. If only they contained even a mere shred of truth to them.
But sadly, the awful truth about police and law enforcement in general is that they mostly eschew what little available science exists to direct their methods and activities because it either would increase their personal risk, or because it fails to satisfy their sense of moral hazard. In general police patrol officers drive around in stupefied boredom in between calls to collect statements and reports from crime victims. Police detectives are clerks chained to desks, phones, and computers burdened with tedious administrative tasks of correcting misspellings, and a daily beuraucratic treadmill of fragmented agency, and court records to prepare criminal cases for trial.
Technology like Shotspotter assumes something entirely different about police. And that assumption leads to not just big wastes of resources but also to massive civil legal abuses. Given what we actually know and understand about police, we should expect this. Police despise the 4th Amendment. They always have. It’s uderstandable. Demanding that police do work is burdensome on police. They don’t really want to investigate, record observations of activity, and tie those observations to suspicions grounded in reason. They’d rather fish, play hunches, or loaf.
Shotspotter acts like a semi-automated drug dog for guns. So why don’t police use dogs for guns? Because guns aren’t illegal. Deploying fake-trained dogs into targeted communities as a pretext to intrusive searches doesn’t work. Because it would fail to provide probable cause. Since guns are legal. But as we know cops love to use dogs for drugs, especially as a pretext for intrusive searches during traffic stops. And we also know that the dogs are not really trained to independently “alert” so much as they are trained to respond to their handler.
Shotspotter will work the same way. It will provide a pretextual basis for intrusive search in targeted communities. And as we also know with drug dogs in traffic enforcement, these procedures are both incredibly costly and very ineffecitve. Dogs at least have some PR value. You can’t bring a Shotspotter sensor into a 3rd grade classroom to sell authoritarianism to 8-year-olds. But you can obviously sell it to fearful 60-year-olds.
@ 4
Deploying fake-trained dogs into targeted communities as a pretext to intrusive searches doesn’t work.
Broken-windows policing does. Let’s bring that back.
He can.
However, by doing so SC Weiss will open the door for the defense to demand discovery of all the previously collected evidence, as well as some of the internal deliberations of his own office in negotiating the failed agreement from that other jurisdiction. And the defense may then also be free to interrogate some of that evidence before the other grand jury via motions as well as directly before any potential criminal trial jury.
The process this descirbes is considerably less straight forward than any normal federal prosecutor arguing before a grand jury. As gullible, dumbfucks undoubtedly do not understand, in a normal grand jury process an individual citizen targeted for possible indictment by that grand jury is entitled to appear before that grand jury. The reason this often does not happen is that in many typical criminal cases such a presentation by the defense would give away details about defense strategy and evidence to the prosecution. And any testimony a defendant gives to a grand jury can later be used in evidence at trial.
But here that is much less so. Hunter Biden and his attorneys spent five years in negotiations with DOJ and Weiss to reach an agreement to plead guilty prior to Weiss sabotaging that agreement in June. Those negotiations involved a tremendous degree of cooperation from Biden as well as numerous proffer sessions in which Hunter Biden was made to answer direct questions under oath. Thanks to this Weiss already knows much more than most prosecutors ever would about Hunter Biden’s potential defesne at trial. And he already has his testimony. So there is ittle of the same disincentive for him to appear before the grand jury.
But it also means that Abbe Lowell, armed with discovery from the Delaware case and the Special Counsel negotiations can move to challenge and exclude a lot of the potential testimony and other evidence from that other jurisdiction, especially if he can show that the case was tainted by political influence at any stage. And what gullible Dumbfucks probably also have overlooked is that Abbe Lowell has sought subpoenas for Trump and Barr.
Any AUSA handling a criminal case involving this alleged conduct who allowed it to become this complex, overwrought, and costly to pursue would be fired. That’s why Weiss sought Special Counsel status when he did. He knows how badly he fucked this thing up.
Malcom Nance on the Stephanie Miller show raised an interesting point. What does it say about the people who are outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Gaza Strip Palestinians, calling it genocide, but were silent about, for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Darfuris, Nuer and other ethnic groups in Sudan, Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic. Why are they silent about those conflicts but vocal when it involves Jews. Makes you think.
@1 How to tell us you are still enraged by black women who accomplish liberal things without just saying “I am enraged by black women who accomplish liberal things.”
Yer funny.
Bicycle memorials? The article indicates the majority of those memorials are to pedestrians, not bicyclists, killed by cars.
The article also says the worst spots for “traffic deaths” (I assume this means vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-bicyclist deaths) are SoDo and Aurora (Avenue).
I can’t speak of SoDo, but I’ve witnessed near-death experiences on Aurora, i.e., people running across several lanes of high-speed traffic, jumping over a centerline jersey barrier, and then trying to make it alive across several more lanes of high-speed traffic. This sometimes doesn’t end well for the jaywalker. These people don’t necessarily have a death wish, but they’re gambling with fate.
“Someone take away his phone, or his drugs, or his companies.”
No. Absolutely not. The more he talks the sooner we’ll be rid of “X” and someone else will run his other companies.
Think of Elon as a spouting volcano emptying its magma chamber. All the pressure has to blow out into the atmosphere for the ground to stop shaking. Eventually the eruption dies away, and life goes on.
@1 “Still in place: election reforms in Georgia.”
In other words, you still go to jail if you hand a water bottle to your spouse standing in a 6-hour-long voting line in a black precinct.
@ 6
Hunter Biden and his attorneys spent five years in negotiations with DOJ and Weiss to
reach an agreement to plead guilty prior to Weiss sabotaging that agreement in Juneallow sufficient time to elapse that POS Hunter’s most serious offenses against the US government and its citizens were outside the statute of limitations.I’m sure it was all very, very intensive negotiation.
@2 Another dodgy poll from your usual fringe sources? Nobody seems to know who AWRAD is. If you Google this poll, you get Israeli sources, and nothing else. If you go to AWRAD’s website, you’ll find another poll that says in June 84% of Gazans and 74% of West Bank Palestinians were “optimistic about the future.” I see a credibility problem there.
@3 The good news for ol’ Joe Schmoe is that Republicans are trying to gut IRS enforcement, so we all can get away with tax fraud. The bad news is they might not pull it off, depending on how badly they want to keep feeding American taxpayer dollars into the Israeli war machine.
@4 On the subject of officer safety, according to this source, the U.S. had 708K full-time police officers in 2022, up from 660K in 2021, and according to this source, 249 officers died in line of duty in 2022, 83 of these deaths attributable to Covid-19, 30 to other medical reasons, 41 in non-pursuit vehicle accidents, and 61 to non-accidental gunfire and another 14 to vehicular assault, for what appears to be a total of 75 criminally-inflicted officer deaths. That’s one KIA per 9,440 active-duty officers.
According to this source, there were 20,138 gun deaths in 2022, which out of a total population of roughly 330 million, works out to roughly one KIA per 16,400 civilians.
This is a very offhand way of attempting to measure the dangers of police work, but even if they’re considered extremely rough, they don’t portray police work as wildly dangerous. More dangerous than flying, to be sure; but so is walking down the street.
Includes a remarkable number of self-inflicted wounds.
🥳🎉🍾🎊🥂
@4 “Shotspotter will work the same way. It will provide a pretextual basis for intrusive search in targeted communities.”
In other words, like Loren Culp’s police dog. When Culp was the one-man police department in Republic, Ted Nugent gave him a German Shepherd to use as a police dog. I have no idea who trained this dog for police work, or if anyone did, but the dog alerted for drugs 100% of the time, regardless of whether there were any drugs, which got Republic sued by at least one arrested and impounded motorist.
I won’t go into what else Culp was sued for as a result of his incompetent police work; what’s relevant to this discussion is his incompetent police dog. Of course, it wasn’t the dog’s fault; the problem lay with what the handler did with faulty information.
Not to be overlooked, sometimes the information relied on by police is intentionally made faulty, in order to provide pretexts for illegal searches and violating citizens’ rights; and some cops aren’t above that.
In Culp’s case, though, the violations almost certainly were due to the handler’s incompetence and stupidity, a contributing factor to why he isn’t a police chief anymore. Now he’s an incompetent Republican political candidate.
Shotspotter has nothing to do with “officer safety”.
It’s only real purpose is to provide pretextual support for non-permissive intrusive searches of targeted low income communities and individuals in order to deprive them of their rights, including their right to possess firearms.
@5 “Let’s bring that back.”
Let’s start by frisking you every time you leave your property.
@3 So if you can’t pin any misbehavior on the incumbent president, you’re going to go after his wife and brother? How very Republican.
@12 Isn’t it a prosecutor’s job to keep criminals from escaping accountability by such means? And isn’t it a defense attorney’s job to get his client off the hook by any lawful means he can? You need to read up on how roles work in the criminal justice system.
@16 It seems you’re right. I didn’t catch that nuance. For some reason, not explained, that LE source doesn’t break out officer suicides. Maybe they don’t count those as line of duty, but if so, they don’t say so that I can find.
Apparently reliable data is lacking. This source says the FBI had data of 32 officer suicides in 2022, collected from 22 (presumably large) police agencies; that seems incomplete.
A USA Today article (here) said in 2020, 116 officers died by suicide versus 113 in line of duty; if this trend is extrapolated to the 2022 data I linked @15 above, and roughly half of those 61 gun killings are attributed to suicide (which lines up with the FBI data above), then cops are victims of gun homicides at a lower rate than ordinary citizens are.
21,
The more salient information:
Hunter’s most serious alleged offenses against the US government and its citizens lacked sufficient evidence to result in any indictment without the defendant’s willing cooperation, which was freely given.
While complaining incessantly about the pretense of “double standards” Republicans simultaneously demand double standards whenever it suits their political aims. Simple tax cheats who fully cooperate by freely turning over all of their own financial records and by making full restitution typically don’t go jail.
Republicans demand an exception be made in order to serve their fat orange cult figure. Trump’s very own hand-picked prosecutor has agreed to meet their demand if he can. But the problem for Weiss is that he has already so badly compromised his own prosecution case that he may just be going through the motions for theatrical purposes.
@18 My impression is Shotspotter and similar technologies aren’t for officer safety, but for the purpose of apprehending shooters by quickly getting police to a scene where shots have been fired.
In saying this, I’m not endorsing the technology, or saying it’s effective. I’m merely describing what I think we’ve been told its purpose is.
Maybe they don’t count those as line of duty,
They do if the officer suicide can be connected to a documented workplace injury, including emotional injury.
And as we now know, police are probably the most emotionally fragile public employees there are.
There seems to be a growing and concerted, if not coordinated, effort by Israeli propagandists, Jewish philanthropists, and others to label any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic” in order to silence criticism.
There also appears to be a parallel effort to label any support of Palestinians, however innocuous, as “pro-Hamas” in order to silence any discussion of Palestinian grievances however legitimate.
I think we need to watch out for this.
“Israel will allow a daily shipment of fuel to cross over from Egypt into southern Gaza, … appearing to bend to U.S. pressure to help besieged Palestinians in the coastal strip.”
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4314809-israel-to-allow-some-fuel-into-gaza-bending-to-us-pressure/
This is exactly the role that the U.S. and its western allies should be playing in the conflict. The Israelis can’t really be blamed for zealously prosecuting their war against Hamas; a conscience for the fate of Gaza noncombatant civilians needs to come from elsewhere.
Free speech necessarily includes obnoxious speech, otherwise you’d have somebody censoring speech according to their own subjective definition of obnoxious; and free speech being vital to a democracy and information economy, we don’t need a president who wants to restrict the First Amendment and impose censorship.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4314462-haley-social-media-reform-viral-bin-laden-letter/
Meanwhile, this looks like an ACLU lawsuit waiting to happen.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4315364-arizona-state-cancels-pro-palestinian-event-featuring-tlaib/
@28 continued — I think is just more flailing by a candidate who lacks intellectual and policy heft, and is testing waters trying to find something that will resonate with voters. Censoring the internet probably isn’t that issue. She also wants to distract voters from her abortion views.
There seems to be a growing and concerted, if not coordinated, effort by Israeli propagandists, Jewish philanthropists, and others to label any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic” in order to silence criticism.
There also appears to be a parallel effort to label any support of Palestinians, however innocuous, as “pro-Hamas” in order to silence any discussion of Palestinian grievances however legitimate.
HA trolls (teh babblin’ butthole was a huge offender) have done this here for nearly 20 years now.. It’s why I call Israel “the country that can do no wrong”.. Like trade over 1000 Palestinian “murderers” (Israeli terminology) for 1 captured IDF soldier, Galid Shalit..
“no wrong”.. heh..
@31 I’m trying to be an objective observer, neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestinian, in order to better understand what’s actually going on, so as to figure out what might actually work to end the cycle of violence and bring a just peace to the region.
Today I listened to this podcast w/ Lina Kahn:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media
And she is freaking brilliant… Suing Amazon and their anti-competitive practices…
The always wrong wing will do their best to derail her efforts even though some of them agree in part that big tech has overreached
cuz????
mmmm.. Amazon’s munee.. brown skin.. whatevss….
.. But dang, she is smart.. highly recommended..
MAGA Mike is releasing 44,000 hours of Capitol riot footage, but with faces blurred to protect the guilty.
https://www.aol.com/news/speaker-johnson-says-hell-44-211926847.html
I calculated that if you spend 40 hours a week watching those videos, you’ll be able to watch all of them in a little over 21 years. If you don’t want to invest that much time in the endeavor, you can view a summary here:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/A97yAqzRQn8/maxresdefault.jpg
Democrats support increasing social security benefits, increasing taxes on billionaires, and fighting big drug companies to lower prescription drug costs.
@2
After 30 days of indiscriminate bombing, zero electricity, dwindling food supplies and the death of over 4,000 children in a place roughly a quarter the size of Rhode Island the random NOT dead people still living there overwhelmingly support their fellow Palestinians over the Heavily Armed Force doing the killing of their children.
Weird.
@36 Shhh, you can’t talk about that, or you’ll be banned from college campuses, schools, public libraries, and the internet. Also, you need to change your name.