They are calling for volunteers and need technical folks like us.
Denver made a similar report, but have not made their arrest records public, for some reason...
Show HN: Citizen Police Data Project – Police allegation data made accessible - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374345
Minneapolis is reasonable considering its the epicenter of the current issue and reasonable driving distance from Wisconsin.
One story that comes to mind is the license plate HPPYPPS, a plumber whose company Happy Pipes provided service around SF. He was subject to numerous citations on the order of $1k a month. When his van was towed, he likely did not have the funds to retrieve it, and it was subsequently auctioned. He now does business under the same name, but in Utah. It is interesting to think of how much tax revenue the city actually lost by fining a small business out of existence, which was likely much greater than the total punitive fines levied against him.
In the process of looking up companies that owned vehicles, S1 filings, and high-end cars that seem to accrue tens of thousands of dollars of fines every year, I grew exhausted and demoralized by the project and it has sat on my back burner for a year now. If anyone is interested in taking this up while respecting the privacy of those involved, let me know how to contact you and I'll share my data.
1. https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
It's not clear to me that this is true for all data about an arrest/charge.
Courts have upheld that arrest mugshots and fingerprints taken at jail intake time both can be retained by the law enforcement system even if the arrested person is exonerated (acquitted, charged dropped, etc).
I was falsely arrested under the belief of arson. It happened when I was in my early 20s. The charges were dismissed and my expensive lawyer said it was the best deal to end it all. There wasn't even a fire and a cop that made the arrest had no reason to assume I was trying to start a fire. In any case, I still have to wait a few years to even expunge it.
Well, when going through university I was bullied & ostracized for a period of time and eventually found out someone had googled my name. They could see the arrest on some website and just the type of charge it was.
Why do you think people are protesting or rioting? There are a ton of people who feel like their desire to change "the system" is falling on deaf ears.
Elections and lawsuits are really the only meaningful power the average person has over those in power. Other than that, it's up to people in power to check others in power via "checks and balances".
Surely there is a way to achieve the stated goal of the project without the collateral damage of exposing information that individuals might, for whatever reason, prefer not be published online.
Worst of all, an incomplete attempt to compile statistics that purports to be a comprehensive overview can be just as destructive as doing nothing at all. One notes how often white supremacists, racist, Neo-Nazis, and internet trolls bring up FBI arrest statistics, which rely on local LEO reporting and certainly, at the very least, reflect the known role implicit bias based on race plays in arrest rates.
[1]https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/george-floyd-minneapolis... Semi-related: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gath...
I don't want to trivialize the pain a wrongful arrest ad bullying caused, but I think the solution to the underlying problem is more sunlight, not less. Without being able to see how many wrongful/unfruitful arrests happened at the hands of your arresting officer and DA, power might go unchecked for longer and grow more corrupt.
I might be naive, but I think most populations around the world would have revolted much earlier if they were armed the way americans are.
Cost of doing business yes, but things tend to get a bit tricky when cities wholesale outsource their parking systems to private agencies that are harder to keep accountable than city departments[0]
[0] https://www.governing.com/columns/mgmt-insights/Chicago-Park...
You’re still correct that datasets such as these might need to be globally distributed, instead of hosted with a single commercial provider.
The only relevant guideline I found on parking citation data was that it is unlawful to look someone else up by their license plate. However, it is entirely possible for someone to do so without detection. My primary concerns, however, were ethical concerns - there were many people for whom you could determine their place of residence, place of work, and financial situation by their license plate's inclusion in these data sets.
Edit: or am I thinking of libel?
EDIT I'm not going to do your legal homework for you, but this is South Carolina, for example. As stated above, each of the 50 United States has various laws and regulations with regards to arrest and criminal records. Violate those laws at your own risk, but if a lawyer is not being involved in this project on an ongoing basis, I highly recommend anyone to avoid: https://www.scjustice.org/criminal-records-come-back-haunt-e...
That's just about respecting expungement (30 day notice must takedown). If you improperly record or transcode the data from the scrape and that results in someone being attributed to something that the record never showed, you are subject to full weight of defamation lawsuits. If you unwittingly expose someone's private information that is involved in witness protection, for example, you can be subject to legal and civil penalties: https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...
I have my preconceived notions of what I'd find, but I think it'd be better to let the data speak for itself.
My email address is just philip at mccarty at gmail, and I would be happy to talk to you on phone/skype/zoom so you can see if you feel comfortable with me using the data for that purpose.
Or we could find a way to anonymize the data, as the personally identifying information isn't necessary for my analysis at all.
1. This group believes that police officer names should be redacted from all police documents. They also think that Court case IDs should be redacted because it might be PII.
2. The owner of the group is accepting police officers into their ranks, and suggestions of inviting FBI agents and police commanders have been taken seriously. When I tried to point out that this was a bad idea, I was told I was "gaslighting" the group.
3. They have no legal representation. The closest they have (as of yesterday) is a legal researcher. This researcher is very green.
4. The creator of the group is a marketing expert who is a co-owner of a marketing company named frac.tl that specializes in making things go viral using emotional issues. While that in itself might not be a bad thing, it should make trusting this movement a bit more difficult.
5. The blog post that 'started' this had three different author names, and was recently changed two weeks ago. The 'current author' has told me that this is because the website editor was changed twice. Again, not something bad in itself, but combine it with everything..
6. The blog post that started this all is on lawsuit.org, which is owned by frac.tl. Instead of representing themselves as owners of frac.tl, the creators of this group represent themselves as lawsuit.org.
7. The owner of the group has given admin permissions to the group to people that she's never met. They have full rights to do whatever they want, including kick/ban/view email addresses.
FWIW, in the past 6mo, I've been heavily involved in police accountability work. Still new to it, but the folks that I've talked to who do this work more than I agree that this is a suspicious group.
If you want to support projects like this, please donate to your local police accountability groups instead!
Will post links in a bit.
What’s the gold standard here?
Someone told you, not on paper of course but it's not a stretch to believe.
Whats easy to believe is the insane underlining racism that exists in the US. Leader of the world ? I think my Grandfather who was a lil racist (innocently enough in my upbringing. Wouldn't shop at a chinese store etc, never would act on it. Never. I imagine he'd turn his grave at the US.
The US is probably up there with the most racist country on the planet. That's insane. Might be a close cut though with Russia.
All that said, let it sink in, you've a leader who just turned the military on US citizens.
The America of the land of the free and brave.. Kinda doesn't apply anymore.
Well done America. You destroyed the ideal of what you sold everyone (that works better elsewhere).
Been nice knowing you. Enjoy.
I have been trying to think of ways to help. Some thoughts:
1. Publicly track the FOIA status of video evidence at a given agency
2. Verify the authenticity of videos floating around on the internet
3. Create a way for citizens to verify the identities of officers in an area who use our technology
4. Put out a public portal on the capabilities of body cameras by agency: what exactly they record, how and when officers can disable them, and more
The 2A's only role in US society is to allow some people to buy some small arms some of the time and otherwise doesn't have any place in America until the country falls (at which point all of the laws/amendments are not relevant). It's not like you can use your weapon on a government official and claim under the 2A you were protecting yourself against the government. You still get prosecuted for murder; only jury nullification would save you at that point.
> if they were armed the way americans are
You forget that our military is the largest in the world with lots of recent experience in {counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and psychological operations}. They also have some of the best tools for identifying where most people are and are capable of shutting off most mass communications within the US if they needed to.
In the end, the political polarization is such that those who own lots of guns tend to be the same demographics who revere police/military/order and are currently in the camp that overlooks / detests the protesters, saying their complaints are overblown. I'm pretty sure that's largely due to a sustained PR effort by the post-WW2 Defense Department including sponsorships of sporting events that are more likely to attract those same demographics.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...
``` 1) There's been no decision on redactions. We're still standing up proj mgmt tools after 1000 members in 4 days, much less "this will be in it, this will be in it"
2) Someone else, not the owner, was largely advocating for police inclusion b/c of the impact of the data. Again, no decision made here about "no cops/yes cops"
3) Law professor is the legal lead, with about a team of 5+ researchers (mix of law students, etc.)
4) True. Marketing = bad, is that the point?
5) True. The author explained it to the T, there wasn't much there there.
6) Creator of the group is with frac.tl, the rest of the 'leadership team' has zero to do with it.
7) So what's the deal.... too centralized around the creator's professional group, or too dispersed management to people away from people that aren't in her group. ```
5: It's still an SEO tactic that should raise flags. Here are the names of the past posters if anyone wants to dig:
Matt Meadows: https://web.archive.org/web/20191118214540/https://lawsuit.o...
Kristen: https://web.archive.org/web/20200527213804/https://lawsuit.o...
Ryan: https://web.archive.org/web/20200518181855/https://lawsuit.o...
So to the extent that "you've a leader who just turned the military on US citizens" is true, it's also been true for many decades.
I am sympathetic to minimizing collateral damage of the innocent, or even those without a chronic history of abuse (we should never be judged by the single worst day of our lives), but also believe in the vigorous application of sunlight on the nefarious.
I'm not so sure about that, due to the nature of his business (plumbing).
There will be two broad categories of taxes that will be lost when a business moves away from San Francisco.
1. Taxes that are paid by the business itself, and
2. Taxes paid by individual employees of that business, such as income taxes and sales taxes, if those employees move with the business.
I'm not too familiar with San Francisco business taxes, but a brief bit of searching suggests that the bulk of it is a gross receipts tax and business personal property tax.
A plumbing business leaving San Francisco doesn't change the amount of plumbing that needs to be done in San Francisco, so presumably money that would have went to his gross receipts had he stayed just ends up in the gross receipts of some other plumber. I don't know if the gross receipts tax is flat or progressive, but if it is then the city might actually collect more on gross receipts with him gone.
The city will lose out on business personal property tax because presumably much of that goes with the business when it moves to Utah. Whatever plumbers in San Francisco get the work that would have went to him might need to increase their business personal property some, but it probably won't be enough to offset what is lost. A smaller number of bigger plumbers are going to be more efficient in this regards than a larger number of smaller plumbers, so any consolidation should lower the total amount of business personal property.
For the individual taxes, there are two groups to consider. First, employees who leave rather than move with the business. These probably have little impact. They still pay sales and income taxes--they just get the money for that from their new employers.
Second, there are the employees who move with the business. Their income tax and sale tax is lost.
If the city was hitting them with $1k/month in fines, that's $12k/year. Googling tells me the city income tax is a flat 1.5%, and the sales tax is 0.25%.
Let's assume that these employees spend half their taxable income on things subject to sales tax. Then they need to be making about $740k aggregate taxable income for their income plus sale taxes to be more than the parking fines. By "taxable income" I mean whatever it is that San Francisco charges 1.5% on.
---------------
- Eliminate civil forfeiture, an archaic part of the policing process
- Remove the sentencing discrepancies between crack and powdered cocaine, which needlessly exacerbate the racial welfare gap (Biden erote this law btw)
- Ensure all cops wear bodycams at all time so that their integrity can never be called into question without evidence.
- Implement a UBI so that impoverished minorities can claw themselves out of a dead end system.
Things we did do!
-----------------------
- Burned Target
It's the Occupy Wall Street idiocy all over again. If you're going to protest, you need to have S.M.A.R.T. goals in mind and make sure you don't lose public goodwill to fringe radical followers (looters).
I'm steeped deep in gun culture in Texas, most of my friends online are in gun culture. We are all universally outraged by what happened to George Floyd and to others. The majority of us do not support looting and pillaging, but we do support the message of the protests. In fact, the gun community has been advocating for something to be done about police militarization and the negative side effects of the War on Drugs for decades.
It is this weird thing how political divisions work, because so many people on the Left in this country assume "gun owner" == "racist white man, thin blue line, thank you for your service".
The reality is a sizable proportion of gun owners in America are lumped into a generic "conservative" bucket because of some specific issue viewpoints, which have nothing to do with actual worldview. By and large, gun owners tend to be more Libertarian than conservative, and as such view the government and the police with distrust. They view people breaking the law with even more distrust, which is why they may often support the police, but they do not support police brutality and they have deep concerns about policing in America.
It was the Libertarian think-tank The Cato Institute that spent years collating every single failed no-knock raid in America and mapping them. It's Libertarian writers like Radley Balko who've published multiple books on police misconduct. These groups and people who are opposed to police misconduct on the grounds of preserving liberty are part of gun culture.
It's really weird to me being in the tech industry as I see it's shift Leftward politically and being inundated with utterly ridiculous caricatures of people who hold similar viewpoints to me. Gun owners aren't a homogenous group, and by and large your caricature of a racist Elmer Fudd is grossly inaccurate. I have most of my teeth, am educated, work in a knowledge field, am politically active in causes which matter to me, most of which align with the positions of the Left somewhat ironically, and yes I own guns.
The real reason gun owners aren't starting an insurrection is because we have too much to lose and very little to gain. The reason CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US, and why most gun owners own many guns (which are expensive, by the way) is because as a cohort we are people who uphold order, make prudent financial and life decisions, and take our responsibilities seriously (because of course, we regularly handle deadly weapons). Insurrection has a nearly incalculable cost in human lives, has no guarantee of the end result being a better system, and essentially ends every positive thing that currently exists in your life in the blink of an eye. As you said, the 2A isn't an affirmative defense in court if you go around shooting government employees, so only people who are so thoroughly radicalized that they've effectively already distanced themselves out of society and thrown their lives away are willing to be the one to fire the first shot.
It has basically nothing to do with political affiliations and everything to do with common sense and basic prudence.
I agree with almost everything you said. Just one small point - I suspect the reason why CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US is because it’s the only demographic that actively screens for past crimes before allowing you to be a member.
I've seen it happening in a country that has actually, super explicit structural racist policies and laws against a minority group, and the minority just does not do anything because they're "kinda okay". They don't riot, or have any large-scale protests. They barely do protests, and even then it's rare.
I also grew up in a another country that crumbled under an authoritarian government. The government meddled with elections, caused election violence, was instigating for youth-brigade members to cause violence, seized private property, the economy exploded with thousand digit inflation, people went for weeks with barely intermittent water or electricity, etc. And still, the best people could muster was to either "leave" whilst those that stayed did their utmost best to help each-other out to make life barely not miserable.
1. End the war on drugs 2. Fire bad cops 3. End Qualified Immunity 4. End Civil Asset Forfeiture 5. Collect stats on every-time police force is used
Or are you going after mayors (or whatever) more set on reform?
(Anonymizing citizens that were arrested/cited makes sense, of course)
Personally, I’m amazed that we don’t keep publicly accessible logs of every time a police patrol car turns its lights and/or sirens on.
Firing bad cops should be swift and purposeful. I think any police officer who leaves their reflective vest on the dashboard of a private car or otherwise signals that the car belongs to a police officer, should be fired immediately with no pension. I don’t think we can do that today because the police unions are just too powerful.
I don't have a solution, but making all police communications public in real-time only puts innocent people at risk.
Former HIPAA security officer here; to be abundandly clear, there _are_ very specific guidelines for which information must be anonymized.
I don't think you were saying the alternative, just sounded a little like "anything goes" which is definitely not the case.
As for your point about guidelines, that's entirely true - last time I read the section about encryption, it just specified "state of the art encryption" which is... a poor way to specify that.
In other words, the old way is being deprecated, and you cops need to upgrade to v2 or game over.
Need some intelligent leadership to pull this off, but it seems we lack this. We have sincere people that are providing emotional leadership, but I’m seeing very little in the realm of pragmatic and competent leadership.
No draft bills, or even a consensus list of demands by leading figures with forward thinking initiatives yet. Not good, we’re on the cusp of letting another actionable moment blow past us again.
I'm also from small town TX and I consider myself more of a libertarian-lite than a "lefty" or a "righty" in the US political spectrum, so we have some things in common. I realize I tend to look down on "those who own lots of guns" (I'm not talking about just 1-2 per family) because I consider them to be my outgroup.
I decided not to post a lot of response-per-quote after a few drafts, but I'll just say: thanks for this.
Some context: I'm not from an upperclass family and me just paying for the lawyer to get the case dismissed really hurt financially. As well with the strain on my parents.
At the time of the event, lawyers told me it's very hard to make anything worth the effort & cost and unless clear video evidence exists of what happened. It would have been my testimony against the police officer. Police have good lawyers when they're being sued as well.
I was unsure about suing a website for libel. I did research the laws around it and services do exist to attempt at removing similar material online of what happened against me. I thought after finding out why I was bullied that it wasn't guaranteed and changing my name would likely be sufficient. At this point in my life I'm still not financially well off to care enough anymore. I work in academia and I moved outside of the USA after graduating.
I did learn a lot from what happened. It can really hurt to not be financially well off, the system really harms people even if they're innocent and not everyone has a happy story of lawyers lining up to take on injustice.
Police officers, therefore, are generally complicit, and actively rather than merely passively so, in perpetuating and advancing the culture of unaccountability that fosters abuse and enables those officers who are direct abusers.
Most officers may not be direct abusers but that's not the only way to actively participate in promoting abuse.
Got a source? I've worked with/dated/am related to quite a few LEOs in various parts of the country. This has never been true in my experiences. That's hardly a "rule".