zlacker

I’d love to see stats on what % of search warrants are NOT signed off by a judge (I’d bet hardly any), and how many search warrants later found to be inaccurate, end up with disciplinary action towards the police (I’d bet almost none).

The 4th amendment isn’t worth anything if judges will sign off on everything that crosses their desk.

>>efitz+(OP)
Here's a taste - the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (often referred to as the FISA court) authorizes security agencies to spy on US citizens. The court proceedings are secret, and the party being surveilled is unable to participate and is not aware of any of the proceedings. In terms of warrants issued:

> From 1979 through 2012, the court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has rejected only 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance applications by the government

> "The FISA system is broken. At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of U.S. citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review," Mr. Rotenberg said.

Story by the Wall Street Journal https://archive.ph/lafXz

>>efitz+(OP)
I've tried looking into this in Chicago. Fax records that would show how often a fax is made to the specific fax number aren't accessible because Chicago PD uses a third party service to send faxes, and they don't keep logs. They do it by having the third party company host a physical host at CPD's office, which the agency says they don't have access to.

When I tried to get records showing how often search warrants happen and what their details are, they give inconsistent amounts of records for identical time windows. First FOIA request gave 9k records, second was 11k, third was 18k. And colleagues were able to find more with requests for emails.

When I appealed to the IL AG office, they sided with CPD saying that a sufficient search was done, despite our proof showing that a marginally expanded search resulted in more records.

All made worse by the Judicial branch being un-FOIAable.

It's all pretty fucked.

>>efitz+(OP)
Well good.

If there was a statistically relevant problem, we wouldn’t hear about this sort of malfeasance in the news.

The fact that there is almost always one or another incident making the news only indicates that rare events occur frequently at sufficiently large scale.

The overwhelming majority of search and arrest warrants are authorised because they should be, and, well, like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt.

Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action, and we do see that occasionally as it makes the news.

There’s definitely an argument to be made that maybe some police are too prone to abuse their powers, but the answer isn’t perfect law enforcement, the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none, and the only thing worse than corruption is perfect law enforcement.

>>TheSpi+K9
> like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt.

The judiciary and law enforcement absolutely must be held to a higher standard which does not accept mistakes. They are not 'any job role' -- these people have the authority to take away your livelihood, if not your life. The standard they must be held to should be perfection and nothing less. Any deviation from such should be treated as harshly as the worst criminals are.

> Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action

_Any_ wrongdoing by law enforcement is serious.

> the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none

Just because we won't ever end up at 'none' doesn't mean we need to be accepting of anything less. Zero malfeasance, zero corruption. Anything but those should be burned out as a cancer, even if that burning out needs to be literal.