We should maintain QI but this second test needs an update.

How do you enforce laws that you don't know or understand?

Think about it. These guys mobilize themselves to use force to achieve their goal. How is step 0 of this whole process not "check if what we are about to do complies with the law"?

If they mobilize themselves to use force to achieve a goal through illegal and criminal means, they are not different than organized crime.

> A former reporter for a weekly Kansas newspaper has agreed to accept $235,000 to settle part of her federal lawsuit over a police raid on the paper that made a small community the focus of a national debate over press freedoms.

> The settlement removed the former police chief in Marion from the lawsuit filed by former Marion County Record reporter Deb Gruver, but it doesn't apply to two other officials she sued over the raid: the Marion County sheriff and the county's prosecutor. Gruver's lawsuit is among five federal lawsuits filed over the raid against the city, the county and eight current or former elected officials or law enforcement officers.

> Gruver's attorney did not immediately respond to emails Friday seeking comment. An attorney for the city, its insurance company, the former chief and others declined to comment but released a copy of the June 25 settlement agreement after the Record filed an open records request. He also provided a copy to The Associated Press.

https://apnews.com/article/kansas-newspaper-raid-lawsuit-b0b...

Interesting way to reduce the value of the info and effort for the request. Send a copy to the paper's competition first/too

Police force is the largest expense for local governments, doubling or tripping the costs seems like an unwise and inefficient thing to do for a society

Requiring officer-named insurance would create immediate pressure to weed out bad behavior and prevent bad cops from being re-hired one county over.

Computer programmers aren't authorized and licensed by the government to inflict violence like police officers. Computer programmers are not licensed by the government to prescribe dangerous medications or perform surgeries.

That's like saying the cleaning crew at the local police station have ruined plenty of lives due to police brutality.

It has nothing to do programmers and everything to do with Post Office’s management. If they bought buggy software they had years to seek recourse for that.

In al critical systems they are just one part of a chain and all their work has to be verified/validated by at least a few additional actors.

A policeman can just decide to randomly murder someone (and often face no repercussions). While a construction worker or a software developer can cause significant harm as well they almost never have near complete autonomy.

Also, if you aren't working as an engineer for another company but are self employed, it's not a bad idea to get some form of errors and omissions insurance, which is comparable to the malpractice insurance doctors get.

As a developer I don't have the power to stop these bad decisions. I just have to stew in them. Holding me responsible for the bad code that gets written to kludge past the bad decisions.

Better I suppose than the company that had me build a rails app to move millions of records an hour, hosted on their personal windows laptop. (yeah rails on windows)

More likely that a frayed power cord (or one of a thousand other things) on your laptop will catch fire while you're on the client premise, causing thousands in damages, or that same laptop has some sort of trojan/virus that you spread through the client network, and you're on the hook for remediation.

IME, most of the time that's why an independent consultant needs business insurance. The quality of the work is generally handled by the contract.

But YMMV.

There is liability / duty of care / grounds to sue for negligence only when the injury / damages were directly related to the nature of the business, not when there is an incidental freak accident which happens to occur on the premise.

What does front end dev work have to do with the statistical random chance that wires somewhere in the building are frayed?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palsgraf_v._Long_Island_Railro....

It's precisely because of the importance of policing that we don't want the people responsible for oversight and discipline of the police to have a "solid working relationship with faith and trust running both ways" -- there needs to be an arm's length relationship, with the watchdogs incentivized to monitor for wrongdoing, and the police somewhat afraid of being called out by them, certainly not buddy-buddy with them.

The principle is very clear: officers of the law are given monopoly on the use of force by the state. That state-enforced monopoly on force comes with an enormous amount of responsibility and that responsibility means that breaches of trust should be prosecuted with prejudice.

The other situation is a private entity making a decision about what kind of content it wants to host on equipment that it pays for.

We can talk about whether certain companies are too big to have full freedom to make that call, but creating a parallel between that and state-ordained police officers wielding guns barging into people's homes to intimidate them into shutting up is either naive, ignorant, or disingenuous.

But they don’t. Or at least these are completely different types of ‘monopolies’ that don’t necessarily have that much in common

> Freedom of speech and press are part of the first amendment in the US for a reason

It only applies to the government though. If taken to the extreme limiting the rights of a social network/other tech platform to spread missinformation or propaganda is a violation of their freedom of speech that’s not clearly compatible with the first amendment.

What I object to is your framing in the initial comment that it's unprincipled to oppose police suppression of speech but not oppose platform refusal to project speech. That's just the popular but mindless internet attitude of "anyone who disagrees with me is not just wrong but bad", and that attitude is far worse for public discourse and freedom of expression than anything the platforms are doing.

Is it censorship if I don’t let you shout slogans in my living room at 2am, too?

I’m from Sedgwick county, nearby.

Before we get too excited, there's lots of ways this can go wrong. People don't understand just how rigged the justice system is not to prosecute authority figures including the police. For example:

1. Manu jurisdictions require felony charges to first be approved by a grand jury. This is meant to protect citizens from spurious felony charges. The grand jury proces empanels a group of people, just like a jury, but they'll only hear evidence that the prosecutor presents. There is no defense counsel. The defendant is not present. Anyone interesting in pursuing a prosecution is not present.

So what can go wrong? A prosecutor can intentionally bring a weak case and then hang their hat on the grand jury denying to pursue charges. It happens all the time.

Why would a prosecutor do this? Because they rely on the police for prosecutions. If a prosecutor gets a reputation for locking up the police then their police witnesses start getting sick and missing court dates. And that prosecutor's conviction rate goes down, which ultimately is the only thing they care about.

2. Judges often either have a prosecution bias or they outright work for the benefit of the prosecution. There can be multiple reasons for this. Many judges are former prosecutors. Depending on your state, judges may be politicians effectively as they have to campaign for their position or their name is on the ballot to extend their term so narratives like "tough on crime" start appearing.

There are three big recent examples of this:

1. The YSL trial in Georgia. The judge had ex-parte meetings with witnesses and the prosecution with no defense cousel present during which a witness was coerced to testify for the prosecution by the judge. That judge was ultimately forced to recuse themselves because thsi was such an egregious breach of the rules;

2. The Karen Reed trial in Massachussetts. This wasn't on the news much but was covered heavily on social media, particularly Tiktok. The list of sins by the prosecutors and judges are really too great to enumerate.

3. Alec Baldwin's trial for the death of a crew member on the set of Rust. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. They hid bullets in a file of another case so the defense would never see it. This led to the case being dismissed with prejudice, rightly so. This is what's called a Brady violation [1]. Now because that was a high-profile case that happened. But sometimes the Brady violation is ignored. In a famous Supreme Court case (Connick v. Thomson [2]), the Supreme Court ruled that if just one prosecutor in an office does a Brady violation then it's fine. It's not a systemic problem. Crazy.

Now we have had high profile cases where the police have been successfuly prosecuted, most notably Derek Chauvin. But those really are the exception. We're a long way from a conviction.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson

> In a famous Supreme Court case (Connick v. Thomson [sic]), the Supreme Court ruled that if just one prosecutor in an office does a Brady violation then it's fine.

The first paragraph of that decision [0] contradicts the claim. Thompson had two convictions against him overturned because of a single Brady violation. The Brady violation was not fine, and the court system recognized that. After all, Brady itself is a SCOTUS decision that holds that the eponymous action by the prosecution is unconstitutional under Due Process. Thompson received his due process upon review.

On a topic unrelated to the constitutional question of the Brady violation, Connick v. Thompson asked whether Thompson was due civil damages because of a systematic failure of the DA's office to train its prosecutors, which he failed to show.

[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/563/51/

OTOH, judges are mostly ex-prosecutors, and if I were this cop I would take a bench trial and gamble on the judge acquitting me regardless of the evidence. As one judge said to me, on the record, "police officers are allowed to commit crimes to gather evidence."

"In Monday’s report, prosecutors highlight a section of state statutes indicating that charges against Cody might be related to statements made by former Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell that Cody urged her to destroy evidence of text messages the two had exchanged."

http://marionrecord.com. Paper cleared; ex-chief faces felony charge

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/08/13/former-marion-police-...

A conviction would likely only result in probation for a low level felony he is no longer in a position to repeat offend in.

https://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dion-lefler... "We can safely assume the video recording is accidental for two reasons: 1) At the start of the conversation, Cody warns Newell, “We can’t write anything” to each other and she replies “Yeah, I know, I understand.” And 2) Immediately after he hangs up, Cody video-recorded himself taking a leak in the men’s room at a Casey’s General Store."

https://www.kake.com/features/special-content/untold-story-k... "The day after we completed this interview, Newell revealed the chief had asked her to delete text messages between them after rumors began that they were romantically involved. She says there's no truth to those rumors, but she deleted the texts anyway - then immediately regretted it."

You can, perhaps, use an "Official Misconduct" statute as the basis for the charge, but I've not heard of it done.

There are federal criminal statutes for violently violating someone's constitutional rights under the US constitution.

Edit: I'm probably wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241327

I guess it can be tricky to prosecute local police because it has to be interference from outside and people don't like that?

It's an unwinnable game. The only way to get traction is with media coverage.