About 150 people have been released from deathrow because they were found innocent. That is presumably the trials given the most care. Any system is flawed. Your best chance is to stay clear of it.
Based on a refusal of a search? No, they don’t.
Cite.
No offense, but it is abundantly clear from the above that you are not a cop. Also not a lawyer (neither am I). Nor are you someone who understands his rights.
I am, which may explain why I would submit the sample and you would not.
Regards,
Shodan
As is obvious, even to you, the point was that having limited their pool from 100 (or 1000, or whatever) equal ‘suspects’ who cannot possibly all be tailed, for both logistical reasons and reasons of justification, to 10 people who they can dog like crazy, they will undoubtedly be able to find justification for whatever search they want. Or, as you notably don’t comment on, will be able to just pick your DNA up behind you and test that without your consent.
So this rebuttal of yours is no rebuttal at all - we both know that once the lens has been focused on these people (based on the illusion of evidence, not actual evidence), then they will be the focus of an investigation that will inevitably cough up court orders as needed.
You know, it occurs to me that if this dragnet is large enough, and I were the criminal, and I was really quite clever, I would submit to the dragnet, and bank on the fact that they can’t possibly test everyone they sample. And then I would laugh to myself as the cops harrangue innocent men.
No way in the world would I consent to voluntary DNA submission.
Furthermore, I would remove the shackles from my basement walls, and pour bleach down the floor drain.
Sure, it’s probably more prudent to roll over and take it. But you could say the same thing about an armed robber.
No, actually what is obvious to me is that your statement that they could get a court order is complete bullshit. Now you are back-peddling like mad. Unfortunately -
Well, perhaps you think you know this, but I don’t, and I suspect no one else with any reasonable grasp of the Constitution does either.
Could you produce a cite showing that judges always grant court orders to the police based entirely on illusory evidence? Thanks in advance.
In other words, what you said earlier about the impossibility of anyone being stupid enough to submit a sample if they were guilty was also wrong. There is someone that stupid.
Imagine that.
Regards,
Shodan
Not true. Criminals are often stupid.
Even if that’s the case, they know just as well as you do that its a shot in the dark. I trust most police will act accordingly. Some may be bad, but I’ll take my chances to catch a killer. Besides, who’s to say that a relative of the killer, if he has one, wouldnt give their DNA and through similarity, the police can trace the DNA to a possible familial match. The Unabomber’s brother cracked his case, the same thing could happen here. And again, just asking you for DNA doesn’t hurt you. I certainly don’t believe in the likelihood of the nightmare scenarios you posed to be close to happening
Or he can think like you and merely believe that some people consider their rights in this case sacrosanct. God knows theres a lot of people who think like you.
Really now, I’m not going to keep responding to these assumptions and pointless attacks :dubious:
Had I actually made that argument, you might have someone to debate with.
You have an odd way of assuming “round up” and “questioning” are the same thing. I have no doubt that in this case, the cops would question all 100 people. They might ask additional questions of the 7, but given that the law is on their side and the cops can’t compel them to come down to the station since they are not suspects, I’d hardly consider it an unbearable affront that they’d be asked a few more questions. So yeah, let them question the refusers. If you cannot be bothered to answer an additional few questions over a murder, then I have no time to waste with you
Are you incapable of seeing gray? Is there no middle ground or compromise? It is best to be efficient and should always be done first, within the law. That means questioning people and asking for their sample voluntarily, all legal tactics. Even if the police have no suspects, it is efficient and legal for them to go around asking people for help voluntarily. If you want to assume every time I say “efficient is good” means a police shooting gallery, then you’re simply being insane.
For the last time, its good that the police decided to use the cheap, easy, and efficient way of collecting information, in this case asking for DNA. Then they can move on to harder and more time-consuming and less efficient methods. And they can do all of this within the boundaries of the law
I would have a problem with rounding people up without probable cause anywhere. But I would not have a problem with the police questioning all of the firearms owners if that is how the victim was killed. Innocent or guilty, nobody should find a problem with the police coming to your door and asking questions in the course of an investigation. You are free to answer or not. But if the act of interrupting whatever you’re doing and answering the door to talk to someone is too much for a person to bear, then they should really be living on an island by themselves. Its just questioning, deal with it
Assuming all extra police attention is definitely harassment is also wishful-thinking-happy-thoughts-deny-reality territory. It can be one or the other. Your assumption needs to be based on facts, not fears. It is equally likely the police would simply do a background check on you without your knowledge, and, finding nothing, move on
Not in a way that their treatment under the law is the same. Its not synonymous at all when you factor in that the police cant drag you off to a holding cell and interrogate you for hours for the former, but they might be able to in the latter (for example, if a person was found at a crime scene)
As I said, criminals are often stupid. And familial ties may give them away.
Threat of what? “Confess or we’ll give your DNA to the insurance companies and you’ll never get life insurance!”? What is it you think they’ll do? Do you think the police in general are in the business of framing people they have DNA of but cannot prove guilty? That’s a conspiracy worthy of some other board, but not GD
Unlike a few strands of DNA, I need my car. Giving it up for a month is an unacceptable hassle to me, even to solve a murder. The only way I’d do it is if I knew the victim. I would not have any problems with people who actually do hand over their car though, as you seem to have with me. If they want to, good for them. In this case, I’ll gladly look like the crook
Seriously, do you have a speed other than “Stop” and “RUN!!!”? There is a level of cooperation I’m willing to give the police. DNA does not register on my non-cooperation list so I’m happy to do it.
Again, baseless assumptions
Well that’s your belief and I cant help you with that
The Constitution is regulating me giving something to the cops voluntarily now? Tell me what laws I’ve violated by voluntarily giving them my DNA
I’m saddened that by this time, I cannot tell if you’re kidding or not
Like I told berg, a family member may give away the suspect accidently by submitting DNA. Or through some other circumstance.
Plus, criminals are often stupid
Lowering 300 million by 1 WILL help, just not by much. But if we take this topic to be the average, then about half will and half wont. Lowering 100 by 50 helps a lot more than 1 out of 300 million
No, I always meant that the illusory evidence of refusing the dragnet would be the first step of a investigation that would dig for evidence that may, or may not, be substantive, with the goal of building a case that would eventually be sufficent to grant a court order, if such was deemed necessary.
Which is after all why I said
I mention this lest anybody be fooled by your bullshit strawmanning of my position.
Burn that strawman! Burn that strawman!
Because you know that my actual argument is right, and thus, impervious to your desire to not be proven wrong in any way.
Oooh, you’re so clever, calling me stupid in such a clever way! Such a manly MAN man, you are!
On the pretense that somebody is around who’s interested in thinking rather than retorting first and asking questions later, there are clearly three ways that the crook could be before the investigation:
A) Among the people in the neighborhood.
B) Not among the people in the neighborhood.
Now, for A-type criminals, the dragnet is the best thing in the world for them. It will waste the police’s time and maybe money collecting a huge pile of DNA samples and then maybe halfheartedly testing a handlful of them, and it will create a nice pile of suspicious people for the police to waste their time harassing while the real crook kicks back in complete safety.
But what about type B criminals, who will be presented with the dragnet? There are two ways they can go:
B1) They give up their DNA.
B2) They don’t give up their DNA.
Now, on first blush, and I admit I fell for this myself, there is no way the crook should participate in the dragnet! It would be giving himself up! He would be arrested in minutes!
Of course, that’s the thinking that the dragnet is based on. The cops aren’t doing this for the sheer malicious purpose of justifying harassing the innocent; they’re doing it to box the crook into a smaller corner that they can give a thorouch search without going to the effort of declaring martial law and impounding everybody. This is why they will harass those people brave or stubborn or suspicious or foolish enough to refuse the dragnet; because they are certain that one of them is the crook. Cops harass crooks; it’s their job.
But, what if the crook does give his DNA? Well, it’s certainly a risk. While it’s pretty much certain that not all the of the DNA taken will actually be tested, there’s a chance that your sample might be, and at that point you’d be screwed. But then, you’ll be screwed if the cops start following you around with a cotton swab, too. So, yeah. At that point it’s a calculated risk - the more people who participate in the dragnet, the safer it becomes to join them, and the riskier it becomes not to participate.
So yeah. A very clever criminal might assess the risks and decide it’s better to be sampled and have that sample ignored, or to be among the people the police actively suspect. But it’s an assessment. And of course, the smart criminal who leaves no evidence whatsoever probably doesn’t commit his perfect crime in his own neghborhood, so he just can sit back and point and laugh as the dragnet leads the cops astray.
I wasn’t saying that I thought rolling over and taking it was best for society, but rather that for any single person it is possibly the most pruden course. If you think that most people are going to accede to the request, then, in the short run, the odds are that you are better off doing so to. If you think that most people will not accede, then you should not. And, in the long run, everyone is better off if people don’t submit under the circumstances I have named.
"the initial contact" sure- but that doesn’t mean that the killer LIVES within 1/4 mile. Just contact.
Very prisoner’s dilemmaish.
You are making two assumptions:
- That only 10% will refuse. As shown here, it’s more like 50%.
- That the police are dumb enough to believe that it can only be someone from that poll of 100.
The Police won’t make either assumption. If our Local PD did, they’d never get around to testing, as I would contact the:
Deputy Chief
ACLU
My Councilman
The Civil Grand Jury
and so forth. The whole thing would be stopped in a day or two.
Sure. Though, if they’re that stupid, why has it come to the dragnet? Clearly they’ve managed to avoid suspicion so far…
Though as has been noted, I’ve changed my position on this. Whether it would be wise to participate in the dragnet would depend to a large degree on the actual risk that your DNA will actually be tested. It seems not everybody here is in agreement on how cheap and easy that actually is to do.
The thing I get most out of this is “I trust …” and “I certainly don’t believe …”. Your position is based on the assumption that the police are on the complete up-and-up, and that the purpose of the dragnet is in fact to check all the samples they collect, rather than to use them as a crude guilt/innocence indicator.
I find it highly implausible that the purpose of this net is to actually catch the crook in the net - the price difference between taking the sample and testing the sample is too great. I think it’s much more plausible that the net would be cheaply cast, and then they’d ignore the contents of it and chase the fish that slipped through the holes.
If he seriously thought this was likely of a person, he wouldn’t have bothered with a dragnet. There’s no point in doing anything that you feel would not limit the suspects to a small, investigatable pool.
I don’t believe that for one hairy instant that any case important enough to inspire a dragnet, which you apparently still believe will involve the tremendous expense of testing every sample they take; I don’t believe that they’re just going to say “we have three guys who slammed the door in our faces; let’s just ask them a couple of more questions and then just give up if they don’t confess.”
Yeah. Right.
As has been repeatedly noted, testing these samples enough that the samples themselves would help is neither efficient or cheap. What is efficient and cheap is tagging suspects for increased investigation based on nothing more than thier refusal to participate.
Personally, I assume that whenever you say “efficient is good”, you’re failing to grip that the point of the dragnet isn’t the samples. It’s the leftovers, who will be given increased police attention.
For the last, time, DNA testing everyone in town isn’t the cheap, easy, and efficient way of collecting information. Pretending to is. At which point, they’ll resume the harder and more time-consuming and less efficient methods of trying to squeeze a convitiction out of the refusers.
Whether this will de done ethically or not is impossible to determine at this point in the hypothetical - but the fact that they believe that filtering the suspects through a dragnet is a valid investigation tactic doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
I’m fine with answering a few questions. For the rest, like asking for my blood, you can kindly stop pretending that none of it’s any more intrusive than asking a few questions. Thank you.
The FACT is, either the cops are incredibly stupid, or the actual point of the dragnet is to filter out a few suspects for increasted investigation, which will be conducted with the idea that these people are uncooperative and have something to hide in mind.
And the FACT is, that sometimes it’s not comfortable to have the cops thinking that you’re a criminal while they’re invesitgating a murder.
Nice strawman. I think there’s good reason to be afraid both of police harassment, and of suspicion by your neighbors if you turn down the dragnet. And it’s not comfortable to be suspected by your neighbors.
You seem to only have the speed “STOP!!!”. You don’t believe for the hairiest tiny instant that anybody could be bothered by the idea of giving a dna sample. You don’t believe for the barest moment that a police investigation could be uncomfortable. It never even crosses your mind that the DNA collection itself might be a sham, intended only to find out who is cooperative and who isn’t. None of this ever crosses your mind.
Regardless of how much hyperbole I try to hit you with to try and avoid you saying, “Oh, it’s only a blood sample. Oh, it’s only an interrogation. Oh, it’s only a warrant for your arrest. What are you whining about?”
It’s completely false to call the idea that police might be less than gentle with a suspected criminal a “baseless assumption”. It’s definitely based on something and that something isn’t as imaginary as the ideal that all cops are perfect angels.
Keep up - you are asking me about what you think my obligation is to deliberately self-incriminate. The constitution is quite explicit on this subject - I am not so obligated.
Or this could be an attempt to bait-and-switch and deliberately mischaracterize me. I can’t tell.
I’m not kidding that I think that f you can’t get [that the fifth amendment exists], then there’s no way you’d get the slightly complex answer I have to a person’s moral obligation to be punished for their crimes.
As for the rest, here’s a little hint: in real life, nobody actually says “Bwahahahaha!”.
(In real life it starts, “Mwa”.)
I will repeat, then, that the OP specified IN the neighborhood rather than LIVING in the neighborhood.
I am still awaiting a cite. Please demonstrate that the police can always get a judge to issue a court order simply by investigating.
I’m sorry, but this is too easy. First accuse me of retorting without thinking. Then tell me the three ways - A and B.
It was a cheap shot, you’re right. And I apologize.
But I’m a weak man. Don’t tempt me like that. You’re going to have to start challenging me and not simply hand over the gimme putts.
Regards,
Shodan
Meh, this is a crazy webside, not a random sample of the population. Plus, we don’t have neighbors here who will whisper about the fact we spat in the cops eye - or cops here who will be doing a hair more than whispering if we refuse.
If a cop believed that only have the population would participation, it would hardly seem worth the effort of running the dragnet at all. There would still be too many suspects to individually follow up in detail, and the crook could easily just refuse to participate. So it would be time and money wasted unless they seriously think that most people would participate.
But the entire dragnet is based on that presumption, is it not? Either they thinking that the crook will actually be caught in the dragnet by a DNA match, or they think that creating suspects by a process of elimination is a valid approach. If there is a serious belief that the crook is outside the range of the dragnet, than the first case is a waste of money and the second is unjustifiable harassment.
So I guess it’s time to get out your address book and start writing letters.
I wanted to get this one in, too -
What you seem to be saying here is that you shouldn’t submit your DNA, because so many people have been exonerated by it.
It’s rather like begbert2’s fiendishly clever idea of staying out of the clutches of the evil police by handing over voluntarily the one kind of evidence that would establish guilt beyond question, on the chance that they won’t really check.
Regards,
Shodan
And here I thought he was saying that maybe, just maybe, getting the police suspicious of you by spitting in their eye during a dragnet had a chance of getting your butt arrested despite your innocence specifically because police might act overzealously and trump up their erroneous suspicions into a conviction.
And yeah, it would be a fiendish plan to dodge the dragnet by getting caught in it. Heck of a gamble, certianly. But as noted, for sufficiently large dragnets it becomes increasingly unlikely they’ll actually test all the DNA they gather. (Though obviously his best approach is to not be in the dragnet in the first place.)
Some cites about possibly sketchy (or not) activity on the part of the police before or after obtaining samples. No idea if they’re any good, but they seemed relevant to the discussion.
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/1999/gattaca-the-documentary
http://www.readthehook.com/Stories/2004/07/29/newsOverzealousRapistDragn.html
Once of the cites says there’s only been ~20 dragnets in the US, but it doesn’t say when or where.:mad:
Some of the claims of harassment seem to be a bit of a stretch. I have a memory of watching some news segment on someone being harassed pretty severely, but nothing is popping up.
Well, the thing is- this hasn’t happened. It was a “what if” on the part of the OP. And, like I said, no professional Police Dept would act in such a way- they’d know it’d be a waste of resources, useless for finding the perp, and edging into violations of civil rights.
So as for "But the entire dragnet is based on that presumption, is it not?" The answer is- there’s no such dragnet** and there won;t be any such dragnet by any professional Police Force in the USA.
Thus "Either they thinking that the crook will actually be caught in the dragnet by a DNA match, or they think that creating suspects by a process of elimination is a valid approach. is a specious conclusion based upon the **invalid hypothesis **that a decent Police Dept would pull this crap.
Now sure, it has happened a few times before even in the USA, but as Ruken’s third cite shows- it has only once actually resulted in a case being solved, and that was likely because the sample was so small (25), the police really did have some solid evidence it was one of those dudes.
And as the cites go on- in a good number of the few cases detailed- the police was changed or the Courts ruled against it.