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?
``` 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...
(Anonymizing citizens that were arrested/cited makes sense, of course)