“Last summer, the Sheriff’s Office announced plans to begin keeping tabs on people who have been repeatedly committed to psychiatric hospitals.”
People are going to die because of that.
There is a close friend of mine who, if unlucky enough to live in that hellhole, would have her life made miserable by this. She’s a nurse who’s never committed a crime in her life. She’s also bipolar, suicidal, deals with major depression, and has a less-than-supportive family, so she’s been committed a few times. Being harassed by hyperzealous cops who think they’re fighting terrorists is exactly the sort of thing that could push her over the edge.
I think—and hope—that this is what does them in. It should never have gotten to this point, but they can wave around terms like “reduced crime” and as long as it’s just the bad guys who are being targeted, no one cares.
But I suspect there will be a point soon enough where the sheriff here will find himself answering questions about why his department drove to suicide a mentally ill person with no criminal record, and I hope to god the resulting consequences put an end to this un-American madness, here and everywhere else.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but my father has been practicing civil rights law in central Florida for several decades now, and he's brought multiple lawsuits against police departments there which are very similar to the situation you're describing. In one instance, a young mother with anorexia and mental health issues died after a 300-pound corrections officer sat on her to 'calm her down' until she asphyxiated in her jail cell with multiple broken ribs. This was all recorded on video. She'd been arrested for something along the lines of making a disturbance related to her psychological problems.
There have never been any systemic changes implemented as a result of these lawsuits. If the case goes 'well', the department will pay restitution to surviving family members, but damages for police negligence are tightly capped in Florida, and the department will frequently attribute full blame to the individual officer in question rather than give the impression of general negligence or training problems, which are some of the very narrow means of avoiding the damages cap and making them actually take notice. My impression is that most departments in central Florida treat these cases as the cost of doing business, which is extremely depressing and also indicative of how the cops down there actually feel and act, unfortunately.
It's important to note that, in America, any police enforcement comes with a chance of death or injury. When we make little laws (jaywalking or whatnot), we should be careful to keep this in mind.
I don't think you realize how quickly and universally the people of Pasco county (or really, a majority of most US counties) will praise the sheriff for protecting good people from methheads, criminals, and white trash. I can almost hear the responses: "If they didn't want to get killed, they should have gotten a job, taken their meds, and respected the police."
The general population can be extremely cruel and heartless if the consequences are hidden from them. And they specifically reward people that hide the costs and consequences of these actions.
Halfway into the article it started reminding me of the informant networks of the USSR. Officers peeping through windows, feeding data into the system about the target's friends and family while also fining them for any unrelated arbitrary misdemeanor. This is not what crime prevention looks like in a democracy.
Pasco: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
Stasi: "The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to 'switch off' regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state." [1]
Except this surveillance machine is even more stupid. The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
Can I say this is probably the best presentation of journalism I've seen in a while. It's long form, they have an entire multi-paragraph section on how they retrieved and processed all the date after the footer, and they release the footage. I feel like most news sources at this point would have just a single edited shocker video and then told us to trust them that they have hundreds more hours of police abuse.
Cops are humans, yet as a human being, how in the world does any of this stuff seem like a good idea? How jaded have you become in the world where this kind of behavior seems acceptable?
The first lesson in any data science program covers the explict and implicit biases as well as the difference between correlation and causation. It seems the people involved in this system dont even have this basic knowledge.
We are reaping what we have sown. Science turned into the new state religion and now authoritarians are misusing it believing they can do no harm because God (erm, Science rather) is on their side
The US is transforming itself into a hellhole because part of the country (represented mostly by republicans) cannot accept democracy and want to transform the country into (or maintain it as, you decide) a white supremacy state.
Every time I read these, it's just horrible science and bad math
"The Sheriff’s Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011."
Oh really? Where's your control? What did you control for? What were the other factors?
Perhaps it's the same as everywhere else. Maybe people feel more intimidated so they don't report crime. These measurements are self reported and after more intimidation and fear perhaps there's less self reporting...
It's unqualified people making incompetent assessments and unilaterally dictating public policy with gobs of taxpayer money to do it. Just atrocious
The article says the 7 surrounding counties experienced similar drops in property crime, and Pasco (the subject of the article) was the only one where violent crime increased.
Where are the "good guys" fighting against this sort of oppression? Are they relegated to coding encrypted messaging apps or is there a strong network of technologists who are working on legal ways to foil these types of systems?
The best answer is to make this kind of thing illegal. The technological shift has outpaced our legal framework for privacy and ownership of our information is not yet a fully protected human right. Support people who are advocating for legal change.
Electronic Privacy Information Center - lobbyist group based on DC
In all honesty, in such situations where persons have become the target of focused policing, it may be time to move cities. Or even move states. Being "in the system" is not a crime but if cops are poking around your house on a weekly/daily basis an incident is inevitable. The time to move is prior to that moment.
This may look like defeat. It is. At the larger scale this would mean cops are running certain people out of town. That is evil. But at the scale of an individual or family, particularly when mental health is an issue, what is best is to not be involved in an escalating situation. Pull up stakes and move somewhere with less oppressive policies.
Moving is expensive, and leaving a city means leaving behind existing support networks (friends, family, etc.). I'd imagine many people don't have that kind of mobility and moving is simply not an option.
MLK had a quote about injustice that seems highly relevant to this kind of thing.
I would prefer to fight the fires where they start. There are half a dozen states barreling toward a cliff because a generation of Californian's were told "just leave if you don't like it" (and if you don't like that example I could just as easily come up with an East coast one). Price out a condo in Denver if you don't believe me.
To everyone saying the title was sensationalized and that it's only one county in Florida, I welcome you to come visit my state.
This kind of stuff is widespread in Florida. Sheriff Gualtieri, Grady Judd, Billy Woods, Darryl Daniels, ex Sheriff Mike Scott, Ric Bradshaw, and I could go on and on and on.
Look across the vast swaths of rural land in the landlocked parts of Florida and you'll find the only industry are prisons and policing.
The title you submitted ("Florida is a police state") badly broke the HN guideline against editorializing in titles:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't do that. If you want to offer your interpretation of the article or the facts, that's totally fine, but do it in the comments, so your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's. On HN, being the one to submit a story doesn't confer any special rights over it. This is important because titles have by far the biggest influence.
Posted article sez: "Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.... They mostly grilled him about his friends..."
"you are legally obligated to tell the cop your name and what you're doing at that very moment. Other than that, Duane says, you should fall back on four short words: "I want a lawyer."
I was thinking this sounded a lot like Minority Report. Then the article said that this was designed to be exactly like Minority Report. Talk about missing the moral of the story.
It’s like reading the Lorax and coming away with the idea that the environment should be exploited for profit.
Also, in Minority Report, they stopped violent crime in the act - the person had gotten to the point where they were actually going to commit it. This article is about messing up the lives of suspects and their families to "prevent" them from committing unknown, undisclosed crimes at some point in the future.
Something along these lines graced HN's front page recently, but I'll repeat my comment from there: Read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. Truly frightening.
[+] [-] _zzaw|5 years ago|reply
People are going to die because of that.
There is a close friend of mine who, if unlucky enough to live in that hellhole, would have her life made miserable by this. She’s a nurse who’s never committed a crime in her life. She’s also bipolar, suicidal, deals with major depression, and has a less-than-supportive family, so she’s been committed a few times. Being harassed by hyperzealous cops who think they’re fighting terrorists is exactly the sort of thing that could push her over the edge.
I think—and hope—that this is what does them in. It should never have gotten to this point, but they can wave around terms like “reduced crime” and as long as it’s just the bad guys who are being targeted, no one cares.
But I suspect there will be a point soon enough where the sheriff here will find himself answering questions about why his department drove to suicide a mentally ill person with no criminal record, and I hope to god the resulting consequences put an end to this un-American madness, here and everywhere else.
[+] [-] pigscantfly|5 years ago|reply
There have never been any systemic changes implemented as a result of these lawsuits. If the case goes 'well', the department will pay restitution to surviving family members, but damages for police negligence are tightly capped in Florida, and the department will frequently attribute full blame to the individual officer in question rather than give the impression of general negligence or training problems, which are some of the very narrow means of avoiding the damages cap and making them actually take notice. My impression is that most departments in central Florida treat these cases as the cost of doing business, which is extremely depressing and also indicative of how the cops down there actually feel and act, unfortunately.
[+] [-] pradn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
The general population can be extremely cruel and heartless if the consequences are hidden from them. And they specifically reward people that hide the costs and consequences of these actions.
[+] [-] mulmen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shengbo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmrfstar|5 years ago|reply
Pasco: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
Stasi: "The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to 'switch off' regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
[+] [-] jacobush|5 years ago|reply
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
[+] [-] Puts|5 years ago|reply
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
[+] [-] tomatotomato37|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcomis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownianemotion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okennedy|5 years ago|reply
Data is no more objective than the people collecting or analyzing it.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
The first lesson in any data science program covers the explict and implicit biases as well as the difference between correlation and causation. It seems the people involved in this system dont even have this basic knowledge.
[+] [-] dawg-|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodluckchuck|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattdeboard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|5 years ago|reply
"The Sheriff’s Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011."
Oh really? Where's your control? What did you control for? What were the other factors?
Perhaps it's the same as everywhere else. Maybe people feel more intimidated so they don't report crime. These measurements are self reported and after more intimidation and fear perhaps there's less self reporting...
It's unqualified people making incompetent assessments and unilaterally dictating public policy with gobs of taxpayer money to do it. Just atrocious
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlbrown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrianOnHN|5 years ago|reply
There will always be someone to replace them, but you'll certainly slow down the progress.
[+] [-] dawg-|5 years ago|reply
Electronic Privacy Information Center - lobbyist group based on DC
Electronic Freedom Foundation - Bay Area roots
ACLU - obviously
[+] [-] panax|5 years ago|reply
https://mclynasforsheriff.com/pcso-corruption/
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
This may look like defeat. It is. At the larger scale this would mean cops are running certain people out of town. That is evil. But at the scale of an individual or family, particularly when mental health is an issue, what is best is to not be involved in an escalating situation. Pull up stakes and move somewhere with less oppressive policies.
[+] [-] ericwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|5 years ago|reply
I would prefer to fight the fires where they start. There are half a dozen states barreling toward a cliff because a generation of Californian's were told "just leave if you don't like it" (and if you don't like that example I could just as easily come up with an East coast one). Price out a condo in Denver if you don't believe me.
[+] [-] rootsudo|5 years ago|reply
I joke, but somehow I think this means a Google Maps license and 3 analysts to copy/paste reports.
[+] [-] kaydub|5 years ago|reply
This kind of stuff is widespread in Florida. Sheriff Gualtieri, Grady Judd, Billy Woods, Darryl Daniels, ex Sheriff Mike Scott, Ric Bradshaw, and I could go on and on and on.
Look across the vast swaths of rural land in the landlocked parts of Florida and you'll find the only industry are prisons and policing.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't do that. If you want to offer your interpretation of the article or the facts, that's totally fine, but do it in the comments, so your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's. On HN, being the one to submit a story doesn't confer any special rights over it. This is important because titles have by far the biggest influence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] BrianOnHN|5 years ago|reply
Furthermore, there are a startling amount of startups that sell these technologies to the police. They love testing on Floridians. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-priv...
Edit: I probably just increased my points— +1 for reading the article, and +2 for posting this comment.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
A Law Professor Explains Why You Should Never Talk to Police https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvkgnp/law-professor-poli...
"you are legally obligated to tell the cop your name and what you're doing at that very moment. Other than that, Duane says, you should fall back on four short words: "I want a lawyer."
[+] [-] jdechko|5 years ago|reply
It’s like reading the Lorax and coming away with the idea that the environment should be exploited for profit.
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobltobs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cameronsr|5 years ago|reply
Welcome to Raccoon City (Florida)...
[+] [-] platetone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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