And also, you’re not a Dirty Fucking Hippie. So you’re golden, right?
I understand that the IRS is legally able to audit your taxes. Anytime they want. As many times as they want.
It would be fine then, if the upper levels of the IRS decided that they were damn sick and tired of your idiotic comments here on the SDMB, and gave you the enjoyment of an audit with a fine-toothed comb every month for a year. That’d be perfectly legal. You could complain of course. To the IRS. Who would be (I’m sure) very sympathetic, but would let you know “nothing personal fella. And very legal. So suck it up buttercup.”
“If it’s legal, it’s good.”
I seriously doubt the NYPD gives a fig about six year old $25 unpaid tickets. Certainly not enough to devote six officers to chasing down one petty criminal.
Neither were these guys ring leaders to be targeted. The entire purpose was to intimidate.
The NYPD is sending a message to ALL protestors that the police will fuck with them if at all possible with only the slightest pretext. This has a chilling effect on those who would like to protest.
How do I know you won’t go out in an hour and defecate on a police car? You probably won’t but you might.
Here’s a notion…how about the police arrest people when they actually commit a crime rather than harass them ahead of time. There is no evidence I am aware of that the guys the police got were planning to poop on cars. Absent evidence that the people are planning a crime it is not appropriate to assume they will commit a crime. If the police see them pooping on a car then sure…arrest them.
Nothing the NYPD could do about it?
Well, they bashed in your door so you have a $300 or more bill to have that replaced.
Also, consider the recent Supreme Court case on strip searches. The guy who brought the case was arrested for not paying a fine. Thing is he had paid the fine and the police made a mistake. So, off to jail he went and got strip searched.
So sure, the NYPD could do nothing to you except arrest you, strip search you, rummage around in your ass looking for drugs, then let you cool your heels for a few days till they figure out their mistake then send you home with a, “Sorry about that.”
Right, and Al Capone was sentenced to ten years in prison(the maximum sentence for his crimes), plus fines and leins against his various properties all because he evaded paying his taxes. No, these people were targeted because they were linked to people who might have been planning to cause chaos. Not saying that OWS is a criminal organization, or equating DFHs to crime bosses, but let’s not pretend that the 25$ ticket was what this was really about. It was the excuse, not the reason. I think we agree on this.
Let’s also not pretend that what the DFHs beleived or said was what the police were concerned about. Police in this country are not concerned about what you say, they are concerned by what you DO, or what you can cause others to do. Sure, scream “I HATE insert whatever here!” Just get the proper permits and conduct yourself in an orderly, lawful manner.
Given this, I believe that the police executed this particular warrant because they had genuine concern over the impending actions of a few individuals.
The goal of the police, in this particular case, was to intimidate a group of people. Intimidation is a viable tool that police use, and they used it here. The people they directly intimidated may very well have been totally innocent of the suspected crimes. But the people the police indirectly intimidated were those fully intending to break the law. What the police did was entirely ‘legal’, there’s not too much arguing over that. But ‘right’ or ‘moral’ is another thing entirely.
I guess it comes down to whether you think it is wrong to allow police to use loopholes in the legal system to induce the intended effect of intimidation. I tend to put this kind of thing in the grey area. It isn’t illegal, but certainly unethical. But I believe it comes from the right place. The goal here was to stop certain extreme elements of OWS from breaking the law and disrupting public order, not simply to inhibit free speech. If the police hadn’t heard of the alleged law-breaking plans, this would not have happened.
The only part that it’s hard to defend the police on is that the DFHs in this case were probably innocent. But from the POV of the police, they had to at least try to stop the actions they had heard about from happening. If they didn’t, they would not be doing their jobs. So they picked a target that they could legally target, and intimidated them to intimidate the people they were really after. In some cases, that’s what needs to be done. That’s a hard reality to accept when it comes to policework and that doesn’t make it ‘right’ or ‘moral’. But in some cases it is necesary.
I’m sorry that the DFHs were treated as they were. They didn’t deserve it. But if that’s what it took to stop people from unlawfully clogging the streets and disrupting public order(something which often leads to greater destruction than a broken door and a strip search), then I’m glad that the police were willing to do it.
It has a chilling effect on those who ignore warrants. Law-abiding citizens - not so much.
That’s what happened.
Is there actual, independent corroboration that the police broke down the door?
I am not sure what the point is - the Supreme Court ruled that jails can (optionally) do a strip search on arrestees. This has nothing to do with free speech rights. And there was no mistake about the outstanding warrant for the OWL protester, as far as I know. Nor am I aware that he got strip searched.
Well, that link worked, at least. But some judge complaining that the police in Oakland have not submitted a plan to deal with complaints is not real good evidence that the NYPD is stifling free speech, unless you think there was some coordination between New York and California police. Especially since the complaint seems to be that the police used “an overwhelming military-type response”. That’s hardly illegal. The other complaint, that one of the protesters was hit by a bean-bag round instead of a tear-gas round also does not strike me as a gigantic outrage against human rights. At least not until I can get some kind of context.
Many of us are not as well informed as you. Perhaps you could expand upon this, and enlighten us as to precisely what heinous acts were in the works. It would also be interesting to know precisely how the police came to be aware of this conspiracy to commit traffic-clogging.
I wish I could say this is un-American, but I know better. The proud tradition goes back many, many years, to the age when the disorderly traffic-cloggers sought to commit dastardly acts in pursuit of the eight-hour day, pensions, and other such parlous threats to the public order.
It must be noted, in fairness, that they don’t club or shoot anyone anymore. Merely a generous application of pepper-spray and legal harassment. That’s nice. So much to be proud of.
I had a friend who became a Chicago police officer. Once when we were having some drinks and talking about the police (in general) and why it is wise to not piss them off. He told me it is drop-dead easy to find something to arrest someone for. Even if a court finds them innocent later their goal of hassling you has been achieved and they can do it all quite legally.
The point is the chances are excellent there is something you do, however minor, that violates some law.
You may want to nitpick the “three a day” bit but the bottom line is you can easily commit crimes you do not even know you committed and police could use that, legally, to harass you.
You were talking about OWS habit of disrupting traffic and pooping on cars. Were these guys arrested for pooping on cars or a six year old $25 ticket? You were making the point that it is good to stop these guys, even on a pretext, because they poop on cars. You are presuming they will commit a crime and use that to justify actions against them. By this token I could suppose you will commit a crime tomorrow so it is ok if the police come and get you today.
I linked two stories to this. I have seen none suggesting it is bullshit. If you can find it then feel free to post it.
You maintained you would not care if you woke to find the police standing at the foot of your bed, having knocked down your front door, to arrest you for an unpaid ticket.
I was suggesting you (anyone) would care. Your cavalier attitude is not convincing.
The defense of this still all boils down to a few main points:
What the NYPD did is not illegal. Therefore there is nothing wrong with it.
So they harassed some Dirty Fucking Hippies. So what. I don’t agree with the politics of the Dirty Fucking Hippies anyway. I’m not a Dirty Fucking Hippie, and I will never complain about anything that anyone in authority does, so nobody will every harass me, and I don’t give a shit.
It’s good that they harassed the DFH, because they were probably going to do something bad anyway. It’s just good policing to crack down on people like that who will probably commit a crime sometime in the future.
Again, you are leaving out the part where none of their rights were violated. The first time it may have been a mistake, but the second it becomes clear that you are doing on purpose.
And here you move into outright lies. No one has said that it was good that they were harassed because of their politics, no one has said they would never complain about what those in authority did, or that it was good policing to arrest someone for something they had yet to do.
It does not fucking matter if none of their rights were violated. I don’t give a shit if none of their rights were violated. This is still "it’s legal so it’s OK territory.
Later today, Professor **Shodan **was witnessed letting schoolyard bullying go on unabated. He was quoted as saying “Well ? He *isn’t *touching you, little man. So what’s the problem ?”
And here I thought everyone understood Minority Report was meant to be a dystopia from the get go.
From the article in the OP:
“A day before Occupy Wall Street hopes to shut down New York and cities across the country in massive May Day protests, the NYPD visited at least three activist homes in New York and interrogated residents about plans for tomorrow’s protest.”
Certainly sounds like criminal activity to me. No one outside of the police has the right to “shut down” anything. When you protest, you should do it legally. I wouldn’t call the perspective crimes stated here ‘heinous’, but they are disruptive to public order. Since it’s the duty of the police to prevent these kinds of things if they can, I’m for it.
Like I said, I don’t think every person ‘interrogated’ deserved it. But I’m glad that the police were willing to go to these lengths to prevent certain extreme elements of the OWS movement from engaging in criminal behavior.
“A day before Martin Luther King’s march for civil rights that hopes to block streets in a massive protest, the NYPD visited three black people’s homes and interrogated them about plans for the protest.”
Sez who? This newspaper says so? Have they offered you a Certificate of Mass Telepathy for your perusal? No? Then by what means do they determine this? And meet your strict standards for verifiability? Who did they quote? Story is attributed to a fellow named Adrian Chen, have I any reason to believe the has the inside scoop on the OWS? The OWS doesn’t have the inside scoop on the OWS! How the fuck does he have it?
In the cases in which Martin Luther King fought the injustices blacks faced in mid-1900s America, police visiting the homes of three black people and interrogating them about their plans of protest would be the least of the crimes police committed.
The Civil Rights Movement, as it was run during the time of MLK, never made their plans secret or covert. In fact, they relied on as many people knowing about them as possible, both their freinds and their enemies. The police would hardly need to interrogate black people in their homes to find out what was going to go down. One of the most astounding things I read about the movement when I was a kid was how organized and orderly the protests were, considering the injustices that had been commited.
People involved in the Civil Rights Movement knew what they were getting into when they protested. The police were going to hassle and intimidate them not just because it was their job, and because quite a few of them were racist fuckers. Quite frankly, if police did not react as they did when the Civil Rights Movement took place, the protesters themselves would have been dissapointed. They WANTED the police, and the general racist public, to react the way they did, because it drew more attention to the injustices the movement sought to end.
So you ask me whether I would be ‘ok with that’. Hardly a fair question considering the differences between two senarios that, on the surface, might look the same. I’ll say this: Had this hypothetical situation occured EXACTLY the same way back then that it did today, I’d be glad it did. Because it would cause more upheaval, it would bring more attention to the injustice of ‘Jim Crow South’, and would simply be playing right into the movement’s hands.
Yes it appeared in print. Yes, that’s all I got. It’s also the only reason I even knew this story existed. I was not at the houses where the police allegedly broke in, nor do I know anybody who was. I’m guessing you don’t either.
If we go into the territtory of not believing what we read in the papers, then why don’t I question whether the DFHs quoted in the story even said the things they supposedly said? Because their needs to be some commonly accepted sources for any dialogue over this story to be had.
And if we get into the arguement over what sources to trust, how far to trust them, and what information is ok to trust from a printed article, then I guess there’s just dialogue to be had. Hey, some Pit threads have meaningful discusions over issues, some don’t.
Yes, all well and good, but you are quoting this as fact, using it to justify police actions based on the fact. Are the police telepathic, then, and didn’t need to rely on Mr. Adrian Chen? Did they have some surveillance and intelligence gathering on the Supreme Revolutionary Cadre of the Central Committee of the OWS? A press release, maybe, from the Commissar for Truthiness?
I have no complaint about inferences and suppositions, freak freely, says I. So long as you don’t try and pretend its anything more than that, we got no beef.
Fair enough, and if there’s anything the dope has taught me, it’s to ‘freak freely’ :D.
My modus operandi is to trust all (fact-based)aspects of the initial source in an OP until proven otherwise, as that is normally the story most of the people who take part in the discussion will have read. Only when the source is particularily untrustworthy(Militant Islam extremist, the OP’s nephew’s cousin’s mother’s blog, Fox News, etc.) do I question the initial source. Helps keep discussion on a relatively even keel, IMO.
So what I got from the source article is that the police became aware(no idea how) of certain aspects of OWS intending to carry out unlawful acts. So they acted in acordance with this information. This was the situation, as I read it. I don’t hold my view(nor the article’s) omnipotent by any means.
So I gather that you feel that this police activity was along the lines of an intelligence gathering operation, rather than a “lets intimidate some random Dirty Fucking Hippies so the rest of them will get the message” sort of operation.
Do you have any evidence that these particular DFH’s had access to important information of future crimes? That they were specially selected based on police information? If so, one would have thought that the warrant would have specified that. Or were they just the lucky ones that happened to have a 6 year old unpaid ticket for the police to use as an excuse?