If the cops can demand, rather than request, the video, that's not really a check or a balance on the surveillance state. All it functionally means is that collecting footage is not automated, and there is some small back flow of information about what is being looked at.

Even better when the public surveils the state.

Yeah, the thing I've heard from a cop is to always say "oh, that looks like me, but that's not me". Apparently it's very difficult to prove a person in a video (particularly a grainy surveillance cam video) is a specific person. They apparently tend to rely on the person admitting it's them, and if they refuse, it's a real uphill battle and the footage is borderline useless. Dunno how accurate that is, just what I have heard from a police officer.

You need a Samsung phone - they’ll add the detail you want.

A mountain is a little bigger than letters on a business card.

By now, it's well-known that HST was based on spy satellite designs via the mirror-making technology, as you say.

See under "size and mass" at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

According to that page, NASA moved the primary mirror diameter from 3.0m to 2.4m to match the already-developed mirror-making technology.

I actually asked this question multiple times on HN and other places, asking "what if we take hubble and point it at earth? Now that you have that thought, dont you think there are many objects that are "micro hubbles" that are already pointed at earth? MIC bots downed me to heck.

Lets just imagine, in a sci-fi/Black-Mirror sense, that all the constellation class of satts (starlink, the EU one, the chinese/russian one) have additional sensors for 'ocular-patt-downs-from-sattelites' -- Lets get our hands on some of these units and inspect?

Is Starlink a classified object?

With due respect, everybody's got a story. Stamp "Classified" on something and you can bet your ass the tall tales are going to flow.

From orbit, no it wasn't and still isn't for that matter. It's beyond the diffraction limit of any real or made up lens or mirror we have ever put in space to do this. As far as I am aware, synthetic aperture optical techniques aren't there yet either.

Source: Physics

DEAR GOD I hope you have some images which you can share?

IMINT satellites are never GEO (if only because GEO is so far), so they don't "sit above" some area but fly over it at high speed, so it can get a 45° or 30° picture and the only issue is the target is a bit further than when you're straight above it.

I'd imagine spy satellites don't always look directly down on their targets. Especially if they want to look at something not directly under its ground track, the satellite would need the ability to look at things off to the side. So that'd enable reading something vertical. Still would need to look at it from the _correct_ angle though.

It could be that he meant that you could read something 'license plate sized' from space.

The earth is round my dude.

There is no license plate reading from space. It is physically impossible to achieve such resolutions from LEO with atmosphere in the way. It gets worse with off axis viewing through a longer column of air.

With government, unless it's an organization mature enough to do something deliberately covert, it's more likely theres so much bureaucracy to deal with that everybody knows who they are working for.

It wasn't their building, it was clearly a building they rented a suite in. And, at a guess, the tech was let in because the landlord called and asked them to let the tech in.

More likely the person telling the story isn't the person who authorised their access, and just happened to witness it / have a conversation about it.

The parent comment did not claim to have let the person into the building themselves.

What are you talking about? Small cities are just as rife with corruption. The nationwide "cash for kids" scandal occurred in a small city in Philadelphia. Pasco County, whose largest city is less than 20,000 in populace, literally collected lists of children's names and families for extra surveillance under the assumption they would be future criminals regardless of actual criminal history. Sundown Towns, a notion where hate crimes are effectively legal after dark, were enforced by local law enforcement (i.e. the law enforcement were lynching black people).

There's no reason not to believe that law enforcement everywhere can and does turn dangerous to the local population without stringent education, repercussions for bad behavior, and transparency.

Most? Corrupt county sheriffs are a tale as old as time. I don't know why people try to give a pass to non-big city policing with a brush off like this.

Small town police departments are worse. They just don't get all the press.

Police in the rest of the country behaves in worse ways, it just that they don't usually get put under a microscope unless they kill a sufficiently photogenic person.

The system of checks and balances between police and the people they are supposed to be accountable to is completely broken.

(Even if by some miracle, you do manage to hold a small-town cop accountable for something he did, he can make it his life's goal to personally make yours a living hell. At least in a big city, you're not going to be driving past any particular cop, every day, on your way to work.)

Did you miss the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina? Might want to review that the murderer's family was in charge of basically the entire justice system in a wide swath of that state. For the last 100 years.

Where is your evidence for that?

This sort of thinking is, I think, pretty important. It is good if people feel responsible for following their oaths and professional obligations. This obviously depends on a personal interpretation of those obligations, so it will have to be performed by all us laymen. I don’t think, as some of the other comments here have pointed out, that the lack of legal training is a huge problem.

But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free!

This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department.

In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.

>> If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you have an obligation to not enforce it.

This is so funny because police overwhelmingly do not seek any form of higher education & are given guns to kill people in weeks-months of training they’re essentially babied & coddled through.

Not a singular new police officer on the force in my small Ohio hometown took a singular advanced class in high school, and most of them legitimately got D’s and shit in basic US history class. These were my peers, some my friends. I know the level of their education and intellectual pursuits fairly well.

If we live in a nation where people have a developed world 6th-8th grade level education at best enforcing what they think is unconstitutional, we’re utterly unbelievably fucked.

Yeah right. Where does the US constitution gives police officers the right to decide whether a court order is "unconstitutional"?

I thought deciding what laws are constitutional or not falls upon the Supreme Court?

Wait, police get to choose which parts of the Constitution they want to enforce and which they don't? Right, police state it is.

As a police officer you also typically have a high school education, and your idea of whether or not something is constitutional carries little to no weight.

> As a police officer, you swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution.

We'll, they routinely violate the Constitution too, so at least they're consistent.

That would have been relevant if they were at least consistent about it. But, somehow, stuff like asset forfeiture or stop and frisk is never "unconstitutional" as far as cops are concerned, while stuff like publishing reports on their activities or removing qualified immunity suddenly is.

I've got no problem with that so long as there's also a standing policy that if you refuse to follow the law you're fired.

> by employees who live outside of the city

I think that's addressed in Cop Land (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118887/). Excellent movie.

Can NYPD police officers even reasonably afford living in NYC?

"Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What exactly would be the revanche here?

"Revanchist"? What territory did they ever posses and lose? What would be the revanche?

This was an amazing read. Thank you for sharing. Oh my gosh ,how did people not go to jail?

> They voted for an NYPD Captain as mayor so it would seem if they do care, then it's supportive, desiring more NYPD power over government not less. Which seems insane to me...

It's actually very difficult to argue that peope wanted more NYPD power over government rather than less if you look at the full story of the 2021 elections in NYC.

Eric Adams only barely squeaked through the primary, and even that was after literally four other forerunners either dropped out of the race or became embroiled in their own personal scandals.

As further evidence that the mayoral race was somewhat of a fluke, the same ballot also included many other citywide and local races, and more progressive candidates swept those races citywide, many of whom ran on platforms that explicitly promised to take on the NYPD. That's a trend that was pretty consistent in districts across the city, as opposed to looking at one single race that had a particularly unusually large number of scandals (even by NYC standards).

Eric Adams didn't win because people wanted more NYPD power in city government; he won because he happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Most New Yorkers didn’t vote for him in any real sense - he barely won a crowded Democratic primary in which the progressive vote split widely, and then in the general election the main vote was that he was better than the pretty far out there Republican candidate.

We're commenting on an article about how the NYPD aren't accountable and aren't even following NYC laws. It is well-known that they don't follow the law in general.

There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything. The NYPD holds tremendous political power, and wields it aggressively. They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor.

Because the various police unions hold enormous power over city council, the DAs and the mayor.

There's nobody in the city that seems to dare hold them accountable, because past experience has thought them they will get completely owned by Pat Lynch.

Quite frankly we lost. We were beaten and tear gassed and arrested and called rioters & looters on the news. Public figures called for more violence against us in major mainstream liberal publications. Many of us are still in jail with six figure bails, some of us are facing terrorism charges.

The entire system came down hard on those protests, from nearly every angle. The democrats refused to endorse or support the goal, and the risks & costs of continuing or escalating were too high. So it stopped, failed.

Who are you to be quoting laws to those who have guns?

because those large protests were mainly young people. Most New Yorkers, especially the middle-aged and older white liberals, are pro-cop. New York city, the supposed bastion of progressivity and human rights, has the most segregated school system of any big city in the nation. Walk around liberal brooklyn and look at the color of the people being served and those doing the service, and you will see a caste system no better than anywhere in the South.

Adams won the Democratic primary by less than one percent, despite aggressive campaigning on his behalf by, among other organizations, the Police Benevolent Association. (I am discarding the general election because his Republican opponent was, let's say, a less-than-serious candidate.)

He also had police reform as a key part of his platform, although at this point his dedication to that seems questionable at best.

I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing.

Yes, but the people calling for outright purges were also calling for significant structural changes.

The real problem is that they blindly copypasted a conservative slogan and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation. That would require increasing police budgets[0], not slashing them. But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work.

The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense. There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department[1]. Underfunded PDs are perfectly willing to hire them because they are the perfect candidate "on paper": they work for cheap and fix the problem, as long as the problem is "people that we don't want being able to live in our city".

[0] Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system.

[1] The slang term for it is "gypsy cops", which is offensive in Europe.

Your stats don't back up your claim. Crime _has_ skyrocketed since the pandemic as both of your links show. Your first links subtitle states: "Violent incidents are up since the pandemic began" and the second link shows a graph with a quite large spike starting around 2020.

That there existed a time in history when the murder rate was a higher than it is now is completely irrelevant.

Yes. In theory justice checks the police. But if the DA and/or judge goes after the police, then the police stop cooperating with them on cases. Even good police in the department who want change will get no leverage that way. I'd love to read a long-form, probably anonymous piece by an NYPD IA officer about their experiences. I'm sure it would be suitably horrifying.

In Czechia, we have a special agency that just investigates possible criminal activity of the police and similar agencies (such as the prison service or customs service).

They seem to be doing a sort-of OK job. There are quite a few cops in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Inspection_of_Security...

> The ruling on appeal was that the police in that case had no special duty to that particular person, but still had a duty to the public at large.

But "duty to the public at large" doesn't mean anything, right? Duty to an individual can be litigated when the police fail to perform it. There's no way to hold the police accountable to "the public at large."

I agree that, taken to its extreme, it would be problematic to hold the police responsible to serving every single call perfectly. But we seem to be nowhere near that standard.

> I think it's a bad ruling, but it doesn't say what people claim it does, and it also doesn't seem to apply particularly strongly outside of the District of Columbia.

Unfortunately Castle Rock v. Gonzalez was a SCOTUS ruling, which is binding nationwide, and it did in fact rule that the police have no duty to protect the public. Worse, the ruling decided that because police have "always" enjoyed broad freedoma (in Scalia's mind), any law which attempts to curtail police freedoms is impermissible. (If that sounds tautological to you, that's because it is.)

That ruling has been used as precedent by lower courts across the country to determine that police do not, in fact, have any duty to protect or serve the public, to prevent crime, or even to halt a crime in progress.

What this means in practice is that you can have a crazy guy actively trying to stab you in full sight of several cops, who refuse to get involved due to concern for their own safety until you subdue the guy with the knife yourself. And, somehow, that's perfectly legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...

> This applies to constitutional law only. Any state or municipality can legislate more specific requirements for policing if they choose, because that’s how federalism works.

When it comes to restricting police powers, they actually cannot. That was a key determination in Scalia's majority opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.

People are always shocked by this, because it goes against how they understand the legal system to work. And they're right to be surprised, because it is a truly incomprehensible ruling when you pick it apart. But it's right there in the text of the ruling. And it has been treated as binding precedent and applied as such by lower courts in the years since.

Court found that if there’s a crime in progress, police aware of it don’t need to do anything about it. They aren’t crime stoppers. The court case was from when police were alerted to an ongoing break in and rape/battery against several women, the police arrived and left after the attackers told them it was ok (with the women tied up upstairs). One of the women had called the police, which then alerted the attackers that there was another woman in the house they hadn’t known about, who they then found and attacked as well. Court found the police had done nothing wrong by trusting the men and leaving without entering the home or doing anything else, after the woman’s 911 call. The ruling said that the police have no obligation to follow up on reported and active crimes, even if they’re already present at the scene - it’s simply not their purpose.

They are talking about "Warren v. District of Columbia" court case.

To quote from wikipedia: "Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine."

It kinda means (very loosely): If you call the police to help you, but they don't show up, tough luck. You can't sue them over that.

"Protect and serve" is a slogan not backed up by anything. Police can observe, e.g., a mass shooter, and take no action. They have no responsibility to take any action.

No, but you'll definitely get charged with false imprisonment if a judge decides your citizen's arrest was unwarranted.

> Makes me wonder if anyone has ever been charged with resisting a citizen’s arrest.

Citizen's arrest is a state phenomenon, meaning that there it's not one single law but rather a function of a variety of laws in states and which differ between states.

That said, most modern citizen's arrest systems in the US trace their origins back to the Civil War era, to provide a way to arrest alleged escaped slaves (emphasis on "alleged").

You can imagine how that played out in practice.

What are some specific examples of the "federal government using law enforcement for their own agenda" and what is that specific agenda that they are using law enforcement for?

Uniformed police are a relatively recent invention.

In the US and England, the police evolved predominantly out of a desire to socialize the costs of protect the capital interests of the wealthy. This was protecting warehouses and such for the north/Europe, and slave patrols in the south. (As, at that point in history, the slaves were considered property, not people.)

Over time, the police merged -- some from slave patrol origins and some from protecting trade -- into uniformed organizations per city. Some directly trace their origins to slave patrols for sure though.

Other parts of the world saw police evolve from things like shire reeves, the night watch, etc. All of which were considered pretty unpleasant responsibilities -- people would be required to put in a portion of their time as night watchmen, however the wealthy could pay others to take over their shifts. The evolution from "I'll pay you to take my shift because I'm too rich to work the night watch" to "I'll pay for the night watch to protect my stuff" to "wait, what if we had everyone pay for the watch to protect my stuff" is typically the path things went outside of slave owning societies.

Edit: Responding to the Rome post here, because I apparently cannot create more posts right now:

The Romans had a few police organizations, but they were either slaves (who in turn acted as slave patrols) called the Vigiles. Those weren't widespread across Roman cities. They were a small one time thing, eventually absorbed into the military. Mostly they were firefighters.

The Cohortes Urbanae were a similar unit, explicitly part of the military that policed the city of Rome. They were more like riot cops than crime fighters though.

Otherwise, in Roman populations they had night watches like most other European cities. A group of people who were charged with keeping the peace overnight. This was considered a deeply unpopular job in Rome, and was typically given to slaves to perform. The Triumiviri Nocturni, if you want to search for more information.

But none of these are police forces -- they are either night watches pushed to those who had no other choice or they were military units. Using a military to keep the peace is very different from a police force.

The first uniformed police force came about in the 1850s. Prior to that, police forces weren't the central utility they are today. Yes, there were guards, but their roles, responsibilities, and behaviors were quite different.

I posted a bit of history in a sibling comment, but it's not technically wrong to say that the 1800s was the century in which we got the police forces we have today. (But yes, obviously there were other institutions that predated them.)

I believe the poster is talking more specifically, about the history and development of policing in the United States.

> but implying police and prisons were invented after 1865 surely takes the cake

I don't think they, nor anyone, is making this assertion.

There is a direct lineage from modern day police departments to slave patrols. If it helps to understand it, think about Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. This set of laws criminalized being Black and were enforced by police.

I'm a firm believer that law enforcement should be held to a higher standard when it comes to breaking the law. For instance, a person in law enforcement for any crime should have the punishment doubled after sentencing.

The people serving the bourgeoisie feel untouchable themselves usually before a period of upheaval.

Maybe also a silent reminder that many police officers will abuse every inch of power they're given?

I've actually heard that this is a gang surveillance tactic. The police will act in car pairs to shadow a gang's car from a block over. And not use their sirens or lights to not alert the criminals.

Or maybe that's just conjecture.

A well-intentioned version of this is just having a couple of the overhead lights on - not strobing, and not running red lights.

Not another illegality story but I remember in the first weeks of Toronto lockdown walking past a few unmasked police who laughed at me for putting my mask on as their group came near me, with one saying “Too late!” to me with a gleeful grin.

I've seen this in Seattle. My friend took me to some famous ice cream shop. As we are walking in, firefighters nonchalantly come out with their ice creams, get into their truck and start blasting the siren for people to make way.

well here's the thing. shut down the NYPD, fire all the cops, they all go back home to Suffolk County.

Now let's recreate the NYPD as something new! Let's hire all new cops. All 36000 of them.

Who's going to apply for those jobs? Seems likely most of that original 36000 would be in line.

that is, if you have cops, someone has to do that job. It seems like the job as practiced in the US naturally gravitates towards the kind of policing we seem to have. I think that all extends from the fact that guns are basically fully legal and ubiquitous throughout the US which puts it on police departments to be hyper aggressive, highly armed and dangerous, and generally mistrustful of the public; it also does not help that the educational background requirements for cops in the US are very low.