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So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
On Masks. I don’t think the left wants ICE to unmasks for actual operational reasons. I think it’s because ICE is doing something we would all agree is mean and a bad thing but also necessary. It’s not nice to deport people who probably are economic migrants who just want to be richer.
That being said long-term I do not think Amerindians will assimilate into traditional American culture. They just don’t have the group level IQ to do it. So I support deportations.
Kicking them out of the country is deeply un-American as it both feels equivalent to turning away Jews during WW2 and Mary and Joseph being turned away from the inn. And probably countless other text. We just don’t do that.
I would put the desire by the right to not take off mask as: 50% legitimate fear of leftist target 50% yes we are the bad guys and don’t want to our faces.
For the left the reverse %: 50% we don’t think people want to show their faces being the bad guys so they will stop. 50% out activists will target ICE
On the Libertarian to fascists pipeline I submit Jeremy Kauffman on twitter. Of the New Hampshire Free State movement who posts he supports a lot of authoritarian things as a libertarian. I think his recent thoughts summarize to “if we don’t protect the shire the shire will not exists”
Voting patterns support this. https://x.com/tadgh_dc/status/2019016043025289503?s=46
Highly improbable, even at first glance. Essentially no one sees himself as the bad guy, let alone a full 25% of the population.
I see my current views as the bad guy. Maybe I’m wrong but i assume most of ICE knows they are the bad guy. How else can you deport a 5 year old kid. We are the bad guy.
The 5 year olds parents are the villain of that story. No different than if some parents of a 5 year old committed a burglary and were sent to prison.
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Pretty easily, apparently.
By which standard/from whose perspective? If the people [who wanted to abuse the fact that cleaning up their mess can be made to look like murderism] actually cared about the well-being of 5 year olds (beyond their usefulness in this matter) actually cared, they would have done something else. But they are not, so telling me I'm the bad guy for not caring is an isolated demand for rigor. Same with the USAID stuff.
Everyone's always the bad guy, everything anyone ever does eventually results in some dead 5 year old. Something can be terrible while still being the correct thing to do; hence the inherent tension in anyone who thinks with both heart and brain.
We are the bad guy. I’ve accepted it. Deporting a 6 year old Ecuadorian and his family is a bad thing to do.
I’ve looked at the math. It’s smart to do. But make no mistake we are the bad guy.
If you genuinely think your preferred policies are bad, maybe you should start supporting policies you think are good, rather than spouting off like a melodramatic teenage Goth or Robert Oppenheimer.
I think my preferred policies are mean and bad in that sense but absolutely critical to prevent America turning into Brazil. We are likely already half way there. California’s already crossed that line.
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Why would you want to take a 5 year old kid away from his family? What kind of monster wouldn't deport him? What else would you do? Stick him in a residential school and brainwash him with whiteness and then kill him and bury his body under the playground?
Actual villain behavior, right?
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More evidence for the body cam vibe shift, here is a New Yorker article from two days ago: The Body-cam Hustle Targeting Young Women which seems to be attacking bodycams from the angle of the classic joke “World Ends; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit ”. Of course the article presents zero evidence that youtube bodycam channels are actually somehow targeting women. The article’s subtitle is “Police body cameras were supposed to prevent abuses. Now YouTubers are using the footage for clicks.” The word choice there “supposed to prevent abuses” even carries with it the implication that “we know we told you guys to support these things years ago but we’re changing course now.”
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RE: Body Cams
A couple articles does not a vibe-shift make. At the height of BLM Dems were more likely to support body cams than Reps (92 to 84%), but support was about as close to unanimous as any topic gets. I couldn't find any data newer than 2015 but it would take a massive vibe shift to put a dent in 92% support. Given the Dems are pushing for cameras, that seems unlikely.
Also, your ProPublica link isn't against body cameras. It's accusing the police of acting improperly with the footage they have.
The only legitimate argument one can make against body cameras, IMO, is that judges become way too reliant on them. I have seen this shift over the past few years where many judges seem to have a crippling addiction to body/dash cameras. In practice, this makes cases that should take minutes, often take hours.
By way of example, I'd offer a pretty standard DUI. Misdemeanor, guy is clearly drunk, refuses the breath test at the station.
Pre Body Cam a simplified version of the trial goes like this: 1) Did you respond to an accident? Yes. For a man who had hit a pole with his car. 2) I got to
and there was a guy in a slumped over in the drivers seat with his car smashed into a pole. 3) What happened next? I woke him up and tried to administer field sobriety tests but he kept falling down and couldnt do them. So I arrested him. 4) Then at the station? He refused the breath test.Post body cam: The same thing, but we watch 2 hours of field sobriety tests attempting to be be performed, and 30 minutes of dragging a drunk guy to the breath test station and refusing.
One of the main effects of body cameras is for defense to use discriminatory policing angle. Lawyers can sift through months of bodycam footage of any given policeman and prove that he let some other offender on the same charge thus proving racial profiling etc.
I think this is one of the more insidious aspects that bodycams have. In a sense they turn policemen into modern robocops, they know that they are constantly surveilled and that the smallest mistake can be used against them. So their policing may turn into a procedural nightmare - you are not talking to a police officer, you are talking to a Moloch that now controls policeman's actions. You rob policemen of their agency, they will no longer rely on their intuition, experience or hunches. They will be less likely to utilize their judgment when it comes to leniency or more strict policing if needed.
I think it completely changes the meaning of many laws, which were designed on assumption that some things will be fuzzy and that they will rely on personal judgement. It is similar effect to may other laws. Your anti-jaywalking or littering or loud noise laws may be fine if they require some action on part of offended party and randomness of police officers being around. The same laws will look differently in some future city full of cameras and drones with capacity to be personally assigned to every citizen on the streets.
I have seen this attempted fewer than a handful of times, and never seen it work. Even in my very blue jurisdiction, judges are not going to fall for a compilation video of an officer arresting black men and call the cop a racist on the record. The only people who try it are very new defense attorneys (often public defenders) that are pie in the sky idealists that haven't had a chance to understand they are torpedoing their reputation and credibility by trying it.
Thats not to say there aren't bad cops, a few years ago a state trooper was outed as faking hundreds of DUIs. He was discovered by, not some enterprising young defense attorney, but instead by internal investigations who were investigating him for his suspicious amounts of overtime.
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It should be noted that bodycam footage, like court hearings, are generally not uploaded to social media by the police themselves. They are public records which many jurisdictions make publicly available on a government website, and then YouTubers grab the video and make content out of it.
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I have conflicted feelings on what ICE is doing in MN. I think they were basically sent there specifically as an act of punishment against Walz and democrats for opposing Trump, which I find repugnant. I think their actual mandate to arrest criminal illegal aliens is obviously legal and something local governments shouldn't resist. I think the organized nature of the "protesting" is basically taking the form of a conspiracy to impede federal officer and the form it takes is cynically creating as many tense arrest scenarios as possible to farm clips of brutality which in effect is sacrificing human life on the altar of politics which is despicable. Never the less I think both shoots so far have been bad shoots, which I could take on the chin for the previous reasons but the Trump camp outright lying about the deceased is disgraceful.
This whole episode is a depressing spiral into the worst the red and blue tribe have to offer. I instinctively want to look away from it in shame. This is what we will be doing when we lift a machine intelligence to the heavens and all of civilization comes crashing down around us. A truly pathetic ending.
That said evaluating these asks:
Reasonable if and only if the judiciary is cooperative, needs a clause to say if the judicial doesn't cooperate then they get to use some kind of makeshift ICE version.
I don't think indiscriminate arrets are happening because at the very least they're discriminating on some grounds, this is meaningless.
Seems practically impossible. In practice this just turns ice vehicles int o immigration detention.
Seems reasonable. I understand the complaints, but sorry, if you're signing up to carry out the violence of the state your face is on the line. That's the deal.
Seems basically fine so long as the need to vocalize has some reasonable clause. Honestly though just stamp it on the body cam footage and make sure they're identifiable.
Na, this isn't the middle ages, no sanctuary, sanctuary is in your home country.
Racial profiling is a scourge and violation of liberalism. also I'm pretty sure a case is already going through to make them stop doing it. Presence in certain locations seems fair game though sorry, it's not to much to ask any citizen not to hang around the guy obviously hiring and paying illegals under the table.
Mostly fine, obviously depends on details. In fact make use of the appropriations negotiation to fund good training for these officers.
Sure, feds should share information with locals, if and only if the locals reciprocate. i.e. not if it's a sanctuary city.
Na.
Yeah, that's fair
All what violations?
All limitations? Surely you're want some limitations.
Na, release them all. If the state has officer eyes on this why not let the public have eyes on it? Protestors are there to protest, why should not be seen? Completely ridiculous.
Is ICE even particularly militarized? In all the videos I've seen they're in like rented SUVs wearing pretty normal kit.
Overall ranges from hard "No"s to reasonable enough stuff. We'll see how hard some of the more extravagant stuff is argued for.
This is only reasonable if harassing off-duty ICE officers and their families is made a felony and is brutally and efficiently enforced. Given how conservative Supreme Court Justices were harassed at their homes (a federal crime!) we know it won't be
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You skipped quite a lot here. How adamant are you about this principle? Should this be a federal law: no facemasks for SWAT teams, Delta Force members or any police officers making high profile arrests of dangerous gangs, cartel members or other members of organized crime who routinely come after families of police officers? How do you feel abut undercover agents getting the ultimate mask in form of whole new identities during their operations, so they can escape any accountability from public including those that sympathize with criminals they targeted?
Where is the boundary and how does it apply for ICE agents in year 2026?
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I think that's rather misconstruing the point of the request. The idea is not to create Hunchback of Notre Dame-style sanctuary areas, but to prevent misuse of ICE as an authoritarian tool - to prevent "immigration enforcement" being used an excuse for the state to send armed goons wherever it pleases, and especially where they can intimidate political opponents. The list above does seem a bit over-expansive, but the principle is sound. Above all, in the current climate I would not want ICE anywhere near a polling station during an election, just as a question of principle - and surely you'll grant that in no plausible scenario could that particular restriction result in substantially hindering immigration enforcement.
(Do I actively believe Trump would order ICE agents to threaten people into voting Republican? No, not really. But blah blah Caesar's wife blah blah. And indeed, even if the agents behaved impeccably, doing this would open the Red Tribe up to endless accusations otherwise from the Blue Tribe, and be fertile soil for a whole new "stolen election" craze. You do not want to live in that world.)
This seems more to do with how polling stations work rather than something that ought to attache to ICE in particular. Aren't there already laws around what can help in and around polling stations?
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The point wouldn't be to threaten people into voting Republican. It would be to suppress turnout in blue precincts in purple states. There are a lot of US citizens who care more about not attracting the attention of hostile government authority figures than they do about voting.
Would Trump order ICE to run a major publicity campaign before the elections to say that they would be carrying out random immigration checks outside polling stations in Atlanta, Philadelphia etc? (State Republican parties have pulled this kind of stunt in the past) Actually carry out the checks? (probably not, although if it was Stephen Miller's call he would).
This is an interesting one. The key policy point here is that ICE should not be picking up illegal immigrants who came to their attention because they were victims or witnesses in criminal trials - otherwise you create bad incentives which undermine justice for US citizens and legal immigrants. But not arresting at courthouses is both over and underinclusive here - you do want to be able to arrest e.g. acquitted defendants, and you want a credible commitment not to arrest witnesses and victims outside the courthouse as well as inside it.
ICE should 100% be deporting illegals who pop up as witnesses. The entire point of ICE is to make it so illegals have no rights an self-deport.
This sets up some pretty fucked incentives. Setting up fucked incentives has historically not gone well.
Every prosecutors office in the country has people who know how to set up witness visas. This has been thought of.
People just don't like doing work.
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I think the fear is that, if these witnesses do not show up, then the criminal they would have been testifying against will walk free, and potentially an American Citizen will be denied justice.
The problem is, we have let the problem go unaddressed for so long, no matter what we do there will be sympathetic people who have less than optimal outcomes. In aggregate I believe enforcing immigration law is the best action to take. There will be cases on the margin where someone gets screwed, but largely because of how big the problem got and how little we did to address it for decades, until it ballooned up past the point we could not ignore during Biden.
Agree. Trade-offs exists.
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The fact that it says "near" rather than "in" implies a different motive not too dissimilar from restrictions we place on where sex offenders can live--if everywhere in town is "near" a sensitive location, then you've just made the entire city a sanctuary.
Certainly that's a valid concern, and a key reason why I would strike "schools and child-care facilities" from the list at least. But even if you believe that it's being used as a Trojan horse for this less savory gambit, I do think the principle I describe is valid in itself, and should be implemented even if divested of the excessive add-ons.
You would need to divest a lot more than just "schools and child-care facilities" to avoid the problem I mentioned. Further, if I agreed with that principle, I'd apply it to all government "goons", not just ICE. These provision proposals are clearly not being made in good faith.
If you're not careful here, you're going to end up with nonsensical results like "ATF can't arrest you for unlawfully possessing (or using) a machine gun, as long as you do so within 100 yards of an elementary school." Or the DEA for drugs. I guess there aren't any machine gun sanctuary states, so the local cops could still go after you, but those theoretically could exist in the current framework.
Missouri tried it, and it was specifically shot down by a federal court. For some strange reason, none of the people screeing about federalism now were offended then.
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I will start taking the anti-ICE protestors more seriously when they also advocate for states to ignore all federal firearm laws.
... now you're just threatening me with a good time. Can we advocate that the states ignore the FDA too while we're here?
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Local cops are still "government goons". OP's principle generalizes to "the government shouldn't be permitted to enforce laws because doing so could be intimidating".
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I don't see how this is any more than talking big. I'd imagine that the most likely outcome is that the republicans agree to some minor stuff like body cams while doing nothing substantial, and the dems just cave after kicking the can down the road and everyone gets bored of it. The minor concessions will allow dems to claim victory while nothing really happens.
I don't see how the leverage changes at all because it seems like a shutdown is a shutdown, even if the bill is over dhs. Dems aren't going to stop grandstanding in exchamge for some lame pork on the side so it's not like it matters that any of those other bills have already passed.
The only happy ending I see for any party is the democrats caving and taking the face saving items, because if the republicans cuck it would be the biggest self own in the history of anime and turn an already tough midterms into a rout. A prolonged shutdown is good for noone but dems are gonna be asking what the heck they're doing in a standoff while evil nazi ice is still out there executing browns on the street in cold blood.
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I'm in a position to watch body cam footage on occasion as part of my job. I think there is one other factor that should be explored as an extension of the above.
Firstly, when an officer is wearing a body camera they do act differently. A cop's supervisor is always in a position to have a look at the footage, and this encourages stricter adherence to protocols than without the body cam. If you're a left-wing voter, you probably think this is great.
But there's a cost to having police constantly aware that their actions might be scrutinised too. That dad who forgot he had a stanley knife in his pocket on the way home from work gets pulled up by police? Police are now in a position where they cannot use their personal judgement about the matter, and instead are forced to charge the guy. The law was clearly written with the intent to stop hoodie wearing 16 year old boys carrying knives on trains, but the law isn't supposed to discriminate, so can't be written to target e.g. scummy looking teenagers. Previously, common sense would largely prevail. Now? If you exercise common sense as a police officer, you may be pulled up for breaking policy upon returning to the station.
You can do the same exercise with speeding, assault, neighbourhood disputes. Police frequently let people off with a warning, or just used their authority to resolve a situation outside of court. But now, just being a good community cop who enforces the intent of the law isn't a thing. You're going to have to charge everybody with everything and let the magistrate decide what to do with them.
A particular case I know of was a country cop who had been in the same region for about 15 years. A years long dispute between farming neighbours over everything from "he's stealing too much water from my dam" to "he waved his gun in my face" had been routinely resolved by the cop showing up and adjudicating the problems. A very old school town sheriff type story. When body cams were implemented, his ability to do this was grossly perverted. He could no longer personally resolve these issues, and was being forced to e.g. confiscate guns, suspend drivers licences, report problems to the EPA around the water sources, etc. I'm not so much lamenting the sheriff-style approach as I am the issues that arise from deferring problem resolution to a blind, unfeeling public entity. The EPA ruled that one guy couldn't access the water anymore (despite it having been shared for thirty years) and crushed the neighbour's farm. The other guy had his licence suspended and had to abandon the farm to live with his son.
I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that body camera footage has been an almost complete victory for the conservatives (as you are implying above) in the sense that now everybody can see that these guys getting shot generally did everything they could to get themselves shot. To show that police aren't just finding black guys to rough up, they just tend to be the type to act crazy in a shopping centre carpark on average.
But there has been at least some cost to body camera footage. Every cop knows if he lets the 50 year old white woman go with a warning, but charges the young mexican gang-banger, there's always a possibility that some organisation pulls the footage, calls you a racist and ruins your career and reputation. For me, I want the law applied differently in different circumstances. I know that's very open to rebuttal, but I'd prefer a world where cops are trusted to use their own personal judgement too.
This is a misunderstanding of how bodycam footage works- the storage capacity on bodycam footage is not infinite, as part of the paperwork on a police interaction officers have to outline and save their bodycam footage. Routine stops like that aren't getting reviewed by a supervisor, they're getting reviewed by an office lady who checks to see if this needs to go to a prosecutor for a ticket, the officer needs extra time to drop off an arrestee at the station, the judge on call to sign warrants needs a phone call, or if he needs to get sent over to dispatch for another call, etc.
This is pretty normal bureaucracy for running mobile operations. Bodycam footage might be saved and owned by the municipality, thus making it technically a public record, but they're probably not being viewed by police supervisors unless the arrest generated a complaint, or there's a new system being tested, etc. Police supervisors have actual jobs to do that don't entail personally watching officers do theirs(they system was set up to have officers work with limited supervision).
It's ten years in my jurisdiction at a minimum. With appeals this might be 15+.
Yes they are, and at any time they can be. Officers can have a full shift review if e.g. they ding their vehicle or receieve a complaint. Or for any other reason the supervisor has to check.
Obviously their job is to supervise and some portion of that is reviewing arrests or interactions.
It's not even my higher level point anyway. Police now have to operate as if their footage might be looked at in the future. This stops dirty cops planting guns, sure. But it also stops good cops from applying the law commensurate with the intent of the law.
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How much of a problem is this in reality though? How many police chiefs are disciplining beat cops for discretionary acts of mercy? I ask because I regularly see bodycam videos of exactly that: the officer being kind and understanding toward someone who technically broke the law but clearly doesn't deserve punishment, and these officers recieve nothing but praise. Local PD facebook pages regularly post these types of videos themselves as a PR move. And personally, the one time I've been pulled over in the bodycam era involved a courteous interaction where the officer let me off with a warning and we both parted smiling.
I am sympathetic to the argument. It's consistent with some of the problems we see in other areas where overly strict compliance rules result in loss of discretion and worse outcomes. But based on what I've seen and experienced, bodycams seem to have a salutary effect on officer behavior without overly restricting their ability to exercise discretion and apply mercy.
It really depends on whether hindsight proves him to be wrong a lot of the time, if we are being honest.
You see this a lot in judicial retention races. Two judges can release the same % of domestic batterers from jail prior to trial, but if one of them has two guys come back and kill their girlfriend and the other has zero, you know who gets the campaign against them. Same for an officer that lets a guy who had 3 beers off with a warning, then T-bones a family of 5 months later.
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Speeding offences might have latitude. Something that may end up in court obviously doesn't. Something where a supervisor might have a different opinion, you're going to have to steer towards that.
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This is what people say they want. I mean, it worked for China. And governments are regularly jealous of China's state capacity to identify and punish dissidents. Then again, part of the reason it worked for China is that it was a society so low trust that the blind unfeeling public entity was genuinely considered preferable.
Yes but in practice nobody does want it. They want the intent of the law followed. If they're generally they safe drivers they want to be pulled over and given a warning for marginal speeding. They don't want a guy to say "the rules are the rules" and give them a ticket.
But they also want serial speeders heavily punished for making the streets unsafe.
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This is a good thing, though. If a badly-written law is on the books, it should be rewritten by the legislature. An executive who refuses to properly enforce a badly-written law is just kicking the can down the road at best, and enabling discriminatory enforcement at worst. Enforcing badly-written laws to the hilt inflames voter sentiment to make the legislature do its job.
That's my point. I accept it's unpopular, but we actually do want discrimination in the application of the law. A law written to reduce the amount of 16 year olds stabbing people on the train can't be written as "but let grandpas with swiss army knives go". We can instead rely on the cop to use his common sense.
I think it's pretty simple actually. Simply arrest the sixteen year olds who stab people on the train or restrict knife carrying to adults (God knows more retarded weapons laws are on the books).
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Sure, if we want to create a police state with multi-tier citizenry and where everyone's technically guilty at all times. This seems like a bad idea.
That's the exact opposite of what I said.
That's certainly what you seem to be saying. You make some law that outlaws a normal thing like carrying a pocketknife, then you only enforce it against 16-year-olds and not grandpas.
No, I'm saying that law already exists where I live. And if you'd read my post more keenly you'd recognise I'm not suggesting any new laws (no idea where you got this from) and arguing for the exact opposite of a police state. Like, the exact opposite. Reducing the amount of cases that go to court by using common sense is a great way to avoid police/legal over reach.
It's usually a very bad conversation etiquette to tell somebody what they're saying, especially after they've said they're not saying it.
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Three Felonies a Day came out back in 2011.
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It sounds like most of the problem here is even dumber than that. There is no law requiring cops to press charges every time they catch someone with contraband - but apparently some police forces have policies that cops should do so.
If police forces have dumb policies that have only survived because beat cops ignore them, then those policies should and can be changed without involving the legislature. In most municipal police forces it wouldn't need to involve elected officials at all.
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Not to be excessively nitpicky, but it's not just that the bodycamera footage shuts down narrative soft-control (e.g., leaving out unhelpful facts) - it's that it actively disproves a lot of the active lying that is done by private individuals either close to, or discussing these cases. All the way back to the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" lie around Michael Brown, the lies told about what Jacob Blake and Trayvon Martin were doing at the time they were shot, etc.
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Yeah, I'm really not pleased about this and if we see a shutdown over it the odds of me voting D in '28 will probably slip from medium back to low. Really need to see some actual compromises about actually doing immigration enforcement from Dems before I'll be happy with any further restrictions on how we execute it.
Why should they compromise? They hold all the cards. Either the Republicans capitulate, or the Democrats shut down DHS, which they're fine with.
IIRC TSA (which is part of DHS) causing domestic air travel woes was one of the things that brought both sides to the table a couple months ago. This part of the year isn't quite as busy, but I still would expect it to force eventual cooperation.
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Or the government shuts down and Trump just shifts funding around, illegally, to keep his priorities going. You know, like he has a propensity to do.
The government won't shut down. Only DHS funding. And if he tries to shift funding around every Federal judge will immediately say "no", including the Robed 9.
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Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
That is a strange thing to call Palantir.
Seriously, there might be some illegals where the government is not even aware they exist, but I was persuaded by others here that they might actually be a minority of the illegals. In particular, any illegal who was convicted of a crime will likely have left a paper trail in the court system. Probably most illegals are on facebook, too.
I generally dislike cops going on fishing expeditions. Facial id technology makes it much more feasible to find illegals without violating anyone's rights -- take pictures of people in public, check them against the database, then go after the ones which come up positive.
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Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
Okay, this immediately makes me think this would be a problem. Because every single time I've heard "that will never, ever happen, don't be absurd", guess what? It happens.
You honestly think the same people who are handing out whistles, co-ordinating groups, and driving around after ICE vehicles won't find some way to be nuisances on this? Really? The people screaming abuse, recording video, and passing around handy tips as to what is and is not legal (even if that is totally wrong)?
You have a much higher opinion of the reasonableness and law-abiding nature of the activists than I do.
As I mentioned elsewhere, protestors are literally already doing this. They are accosting suspected ICE personnel and demanding their identification. So what exactly are you afraid is going to happen?
Besides, the original claim was that this is 'completely unreasonable'. The only person being unreasonable is Nybbler, acting as if a policy change would occur with literally zero guidance, that protestors could 'hack the system' by DDoSing agents during an arrest, like it's a video game and they can chain-stun them.
Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."
The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.
No, in fact it did not occur to my tiny, cramped, suspicious, cynical mind. Not when we have things like the church incident where a mob turned up after identifying (as they think and perhaps in fact) an ICE manager as one of the pastors. Not when people are sharing online lists of "This is the home addresses of ICE agents". Not when you get malicious compliance of this sort:
You really can't imagine that, for instance, a group of "citizen observers" wouldn't mob an ICE agent demanding his ID? Pretending they couldn't hear the answer? "What's that, hmmm?" "No, no, who are you, how do we know you're legit? What's your badge number?" "Sorry, what was that?" "Can you repeat that?"
And if said agent tries to arrest them or push past them? "Help, help, I'm being assaulted! Vicious unprovoked attack! State violence!"
Well, how nice to know all the protesters will be well-behaved, law-abiding, and will not be screaming abuse and frothing at the mouth. Oh, wait:
No way this could turn nasty, with a bunch of self-appointed vigilantes deciding to turn up and 'encourage' the presumed ICE nark to leave.
In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.
This is what-about-ism at its worst.
I'll cop to sarcasm because that is my besetting sin in commenting, but I've been burned one time too many over "this will NEVER, EVER, happen AT ALL IN ANY WAY so shut up shut up shut up with the objections" and then we get "that thing that never happens just happened again".
So I don't expect a random mob of protestors who think they are the White Rose but are, in fact, misery tourists (see our pal who did some light protesting in the morning with his missus then they toured the museums in the afternoon) to behave like sensible, disciplined groups when they're high on hysteria over "we are fighting the Nazis!!!" and I don't expect well-meaning regulations to be workable when the rubber (bullets) hit the road. Some bunch of activists are going to spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the regulations that will let them engage in "I'm not touching you!" provocation.
And then somebody else is going to get shot. Just like Good and Pretti. For the same stupid reasons on both sides.
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Sure. A standard. Not these unreasonable-on-their-face ones, which have obvious failure modes which you're trying to pooh-pooh away as if the anti-ICE side will be at all reasonable, which it is clear from their behavior they will not.
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I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
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I think this comes back to the fact that what the left wants from a police force is fundamentally incoherent:
If a young black man gets shot dead in the ghetto, the odds are overwhelming that the perpetrator was another young black man, and thus the best way to ensure that the perpetrator faces justice for his crime is for the police to aggressively investigate young black men who the victim knew. Is this "racial profiling" (or more accurately, "demographic profiling": the "young" and "man"* parts are almost as important as the "black" part)? I guess so. But I'm not persuaded that the right of young black men not to be questioned by the police automatically supersedes a murder victim and his family's right to justice, and refusing to properly investigate a crime solely because it might "inflame community tensions" is exactly the kind of attitude that led to Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. It's just one of many trade-offs that come with living in a free society. Of course it's not the fault of any young law-abiding black men that they belong to a demographic which commits a disproportionate amount of violent crime (esp. violent crime within their own demographic group) and I don't want them being harassed morning, noon and night, or their civil liberties persistently violated, on that basis alone. At the same time, denying police the right to exercise their own judgement and use statistical heuristics in pursuing lines of investigation because it might result in some hurt feelings seems like a recipe for a) a dramatically reduced murder clearance rate and b) a vastly higher murder rate, once murderers realise it'll be much easier for them to get away with their crimes.
And this isn't just a "he whose ox is gored" situation, where I'm indifferent to this topic because it'll never affect me or anyone I care about. My uncle (Irish, like me) lived in Britain at the height of the Troubles, and was routinely questioned by police officers whenever there was a bomb scare (his bright red hair made him difficult to miss). His sister once cited this example (in a debate about present-day racial profiling) and said it was outrageous, but personally, I didn't really understand the complaint. During the Troubles, most Irishmen were not in the IRA, but most (if not all) IRA members were Irishmen. Whenever a bomb scare was called in on the British mainland, it was usually done by an Irishman. Of course there are familiar examples of miscarriages of justice in the period (the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four), but I'm not persuaded that the investigative method is fundamentally unsound. If the IRA calls in a bomb threat, it's reasonable to assume the perpetrator is Irish. If a man goes to a crowded place and bellows "Allahu akbar!" before attempting to blow himself up, it's reasonable to assume he is Muslim (and consequently that he is a member of an ethnic group disproportionately likely to practise Islam).
*Indeed, everyone accepts that most murders are committed by men, and I'm sure the police, knowing this, will much more aggressively investigate known acquaintances of a victim who are men than those who are women. Is this "sexual profiling"? Is it fair that men will attract disproportionate attention from the police on the basis of their basic demographic traits? As Rob Henderson recently noted, nobody interprets the overrepresentation of young men in prisons as evidence of ageism on the part of the criminal justice system.
When investigating a crime, it is perfectly reasonable to investigate people who have some connection to the crime, and mostly it isn't a huge problem if there is profiling in choosing which of those people to investigate.
It's also perfectly reasonable in most cases for the police to use statistical evidence in looking for and deterring crimes, if doing so in ways that do not impose any real cost on a person (say driving patrols, something that is more valuable in higher-crime neighborhoods).
It is not reasonable to randomly stop people because they are statistically more likely to have committed a hypothetical crime. You can't stop young black men just to see if they might have stolen goods in their pockets and you don't get to stop hispanic people just to see if they might not be legal immigrants.
I wouldn't say I'm a total hard-liner on this, it's more reasonable to investigate people with a more tenuous connection to a crime when problems are more impactful and more intractable. The Troubles is a good example, El Salvador's gang problem is probably another. It is inappropriate to use similar tactics on something that a large percentage of the populace doesn't even think is a big problem, and certainly so in a community where a majority of the people who are supposedly being impacted by the problem would prefer you weren't enforcing it at all!
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Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
Sentence, ideally no. Arrest, yes, though the bar is high. Suspect/investigate, all the time.
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Police do not only arrest people who have already been found guilty in a court of law. There would be no criminal justice system if that were the case.
Here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police, then keep him detained under suspicion until they get a clear picture of the accident.
ICE isn't arresting people for "being 'likely' to commit a crime." They are arresting people for being likely *to have already committed a crime." We know millions of people have committed the misdimeanor of coming into the country unlawfully. The crime has been committed, they are investigating and making a suspect list.
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We don’t arrest people but we do question them for being “likely” to commit a crime. See the original quote:
Nothing here about arresting people based on ethnicity
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People who care about actually stopping the thing in question. It's a huge point of data that we're supposed to ignore, what, just because it gives you warm and fuzzy anti-racist feelings and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
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Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Racism works. It’s efficient.
How was it efficient for 2 decades 70 year old ladies had to take their shoes off at airports when we could have just racial profiled every Muslim male for additional screening? Then everyone could leave for the airport 30 minutes later because airport security did not exists for them. And here’s the thing about racial profiling it’s better for Muslim men too. Since they are about 1% of US airport passengers they would have a security guard screen that thoroughly for 10 minutes which still saves them 20 minutes of their day.
Suicidal empathy like you described worked as an argument 5 years ago. Today people just want a society that functions well.
Racial profiling is good because it improves net happiness in society.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
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It should be pointed out that Israeli airport security includes racial profiling so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized, yet their policies have largely escaped outrage.
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We actually do arrest people for having 'likely' committed a crime. That's what "probable cause" is. And as @LotsRegret points out, we sometimes do detain people on an even lesser standard even if we think they haven't committed a crime yet (the original "articulable suspicion" case, Terry v. Ohio was about a robber casing a target, IIRC)
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It isn't required to arrest someone, you can detain them pending investigation as long as you have reasonable articulatable suspicion, then you can arrest them with probable cause.
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The "atrocities" this is supposed to stop are cases where US citizens who did not provide ID and were believed to be an illegal alien that ICE was looking for were arrested and detained until they were identified. This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Sure it would. Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
The least charitable implementation is what to expect.
I can see how, again, you could imagine a poorly worded rule that would have this consequence. But any reasonable implementation would provide the necessary protections so that before someone is locked up in a detention center, ICE would be required to do due diligence on the person. Obviously anyone, US citizen or not, who refuses to give their name would not be protected by this. How could you imagine it otherwise? But there are cases where a US citizen told ICE who they were but were still arrested and taken to a detention center, and had to call a lawyer to get out. That's obviously unacceptable!
Again, any reasonable implementation - in fact scratch that, literally any implementation - would provide guidance on when and where ICE agents need to identify themselves. Seriously, how do you imagine this stuff works? Not to mention, your horror situation doesn't even rely on the new rule, protestors literally already do this!
It’s not obviously unacceptable. I’ll fine with spending a day a month in ICE lock-up while they verify my identity. I’ll gladly do my time to help ICE out.
I would gladly wear a masks if I thought it would prevent COVID or get a vaccine if I thought they worked. Or lock myself at home to stop the spread (I actually locked myself at home a week before any lockdowns began).
It’s unacceptable if you think the mission is wrong or would fail. It’s not unacceptable if you think it passes costs-benefit analysis.
Sorry, that's insane. I'm not going to dignify it by treating it as an argument.
Your response is wildly disproportionate to the suggestion, which (to be clear) is that ICE should make checking someone's citizenship part of standard operating procedures for immigration enforcement arrests so that US citizens aren't arrested and detained when they shouldn't be. It's already the law that they cannot detain US citizens for immigration, once they know that person is a citizen they are required by law to be released - this is literally just saying 'hey, you have to check if they're a citizen'. It's a procedural remedy to a mistake ICE has been repeatedly caught making. Your cost-benefit analysis is so off the rails it's laughable.
It isn't. Currently they sometimes arrest people believing they are not citizens, then they verify their citizenship, and they let them go. The "remedy" would be they somehow have to prove they are not citizens before arresting them. Which is like saying you have to convict someone before arresting them, which is entirely backwards.
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I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
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Yes, now protestors can ask ICE agents for their ID, but if the ICE agents don't give it, they've done nothing wrong. If they were required to give it, protestors could and would do exactly as I said, and the agents or ICE itself would be in trouble if they didn't answer.
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Profiling obviously works, when we abolish it cops can't stop teenagers in the hood while we all pretend it's fine that the TSA gives extra pat-downs to grandma. You profile everyone relentlessly every day of your life, it's drawing patterns from observations, it's how cognition works. Throw infinite quantities of money down a blackhole because AI keeps profiling and the principled anti-racists say it shouldn't be allowed to do that. I think this attitude is anti-civilization, if we have to jump through hoops to act on information everyone obviously knows is reasonable, what are we even doing here? We know where the illegal immigrants are coming from, we know what they probably look like. Sorry for anyone mistakenly detained for five minutes while ICE works through the exceptions, it's a minor inconvenience we promise, until the lawyers get involved. Along similar lines, we can't kill criminals anymore, because activists made the death penalty so expensive, so now they say we should just get rid of it entirely. No thanks, let's profile all the illegal immigrants so we can deport them faster and have a country again, I can put up with a little racism in the process.
If you were a Spanish-speaking Hispanic citizen you would feel differently. If you were routinely stopped by ICE until you could prove your citizenship, solely on the grounds of what you look like, you'd be rightly furious.
ICE should not be rounding up people who look like they could maybe be illegal and demanding papers from them. That's insane! And blatantly illegal! You cannot detain someone on the grounds of 'looking Hispanic in public'.
There's a huge difference between you treating someone differently based on assumptions you make from their appearance, and law enforcement openly targeting people for the same. It's a totally different standard.
Tell us honestly, if you were out shopping for groceries, for instance, and a police officer stopped you and said something like, "We are looking for a group of car jackers, some of whom match your description. Give me your license so I can make sure you're not one of them."
Would you freak out, try to ignore the police, tell them they have no right to do this? Complain about racial profiling because someone who appears like you will also likely share your race, so race is likely one of the criteria they used to single you out?
Or would you maybe get a little tense, a little nervous that there will be a paperwork mistake, but give them your license, get cleared, and then move on with your day?
If this happened once a year, do you think people would be sympathetic if you complained or would it just seem like a funny story?
If it happened every day, I would see where there is room for complaint.
I have yet to see a story like, "I get stopped every day for my ID." I don't think I've seen someone complain about it happening to them more than twice.
I think the real complaint is, "Some of these people have removal orders they've been ignoring and are going to show up on the database as such when asked for ID."
With a side helping of, "Leftists have terrified minorities into thinking that ICE is going to lock everyone up on the basis of skin color, they're not even checking if you are a citizen or have an unexpired visa. This makes what should be a routine, quick, painless check into something horrifically scary. We will ignore that it's our fearmongering that made it so."
Just to be clear, your argument is 'profiling doesn't happen that often, so stop complaining about it'?
It's wild to me how many people are biting the bullet on 'yes let's just racially profile people' despite the fact that it's illegal to do so.
No, that would not be my argument.
I've been talking to a lot of people across a lot of comment chains, so forgive me if you've heard this before:
ICE’s policy is that no one can be lawfully taken into custody, or even questioned, on the basis of skin color. Ethnicity is never on it's own a sufficient basis for probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. However, several factors when taken together can create reasonable suspicion:
the types of job they worked (people unlawfully present disproportionately work in certain kinds of jobs)
presence at particular locations (people unlawfully present are disproportionately found at certain places, like car washes and construction sites)
language and accent (people unlawfully present disproportionately speak languages other than English, or speak English with a heavy accent)
apparent race or ethnicity.
The Supreme Court agreed with ICE on this assessment that in combination (though not in isolation) these factors can create reasonable basis for a Terry Stop. That using these factors in combination does not count as simple "racial profiling" and does not violate anyone's constitutional rights.
Refusing to cooperate with a Terry Stop, refusing to roll down your window, show ID, get out of the vehicle when asked, etc, are all things that will get you arrested, whether it is ICE or your local beat cop who's trying to talk with you.
For example, here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police. This is actually really normal! Refusing to identify yourself to law enforcement, even in absence of suspicion of committing a crime, will get you detained.
Being questioned in a lawful and constitutional Terry stop can be annoying if it happens once in a while. If it happened every day, that would be a cause for concern that maybe Terry stops are a bad precedent. That is the point I was making here.
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Just to be clear, this is not happening. Race is just one factor of four that ICE uses to have reasonable articulable suspicion for their Terry stops.
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I don't think any one random guy is gonna be stopped all that often, and if he is, oh well he can just have his ID ready. Not exactly a large cost to society. Seriously whatever moral feeling you're having here isn't universal or assumed, you still have to give actual reasons why bad things are bad.
If one random guy is stopped all the time he SHOULD have redress... but is this actually happening? Not so far as I can tell. The US citizens detained seem to be either protestors who were arrested for something other than immigration, people who were mistakenly thought to be targeted illegal aliens, and people who happened to be around where ICE was raiding looking for other illegal aliens. None of those seem likely to be repeated.
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Also:
Is that "no large scale operations in sanctuary cities"?
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For a similar example to the body cam discussion, see blind auditions. It's a nice view into the mind of the left - the way blind auditions were pushed, they most likely genuinely thought they would be good. And it's hard to argue that blind auditions aren't the most fair and meritocratic approach, which was a common primary justification. But when (racial) inequality stubbornly refused to budge, it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.
On the 10 demands, without the democrats giving clear, legally binding proclamations of cooperation on being willing to enforce immigration law and to crackdown on the anti-ICE "protestors" (btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work. Very few would call a pro-lifer trying to physically interfere with abortions merely a "protestor", not even the right), I really don't see how this can possibly work out in a way that doesn't kill any and all immigration enforcement in blue strongholds.
I think you're failing to properly model DEI proponents' minds, here. They still want fairness and meritocracy, but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic. This is not sophistry, this is what a large amount of people actually believe.
Yes/No. I believe that many believe that they want fairness/meritocracy. But if you measure a process purely by getting the outcome you want, claiming that this somehow makes you process-oriented is, in my view, sophistry. And progressives have shown a noticeable incuriosity, often even marked hostility, towards a detailed investigation of the processes itself and how/why some groups tend to disproportionately fail; it always boils down only to getting the correct outcomes. See Ivy student acceptance rates; Merely just investigating the acceptance process is allegedly racist, since it gets the correct outcome, and that's what matters. Unless the outcome isn't correct, in which case you also don't investigate the why, you just change the process until you get the correct outcome.
Secondly, a decent number of progressives have in fact even fully moved on from claiming to want meritocracy, and outright use entirely different justifications, such as representativeness of a community, racial/social justice or equity over equality of chance. In many circles, meritocracy has become negatively connotated.
I think that they still have a point. The liberal ethos was all about equal access to opportunity to achieve American dream of happiness and success. Except that we have a problem - if you believe in liberal tabula rasa, then there is no other way to measure equal access to opportunity other than outcome. Unequal outcome means unequal opportunity and thus DEI is good. The only liberal defense was that we did not achieve true
socialismmeritocracy. We need more education or welfare etc. and we will see the meritocratic utopia maybe next generation. In a sense DEI people claim the same - except that they want to accelerate these gains by redistribution now on grounds that we will achieve true meritocracy maybe even sooner by magic of representation and other DEI effects.Or you do not believe in tabula rasa and you believe that some differences in opportunity are inevitable or ingrained etc. But then you are no longer believing in the same meaning of the word "merit", which than catches too medieval of a flavor of having certain classes or people who are inherently more meritorious as opposed to common uneducated plebeian caste. This is too right coded and in fact plays toward lefties sensibilities as they see this obviously as hated ancien régime which needs to be fought at every step for true progress.
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I've heard people say this and I'm hesitant to claim they don't really believe it... but do they really believe it?
The same people absolutely believe discrimination occurs in culture/education/training/etc. If I cited an article showing that e.g. childhood participation in private music lessons for orchestral instruments had a race skew (which it does), would they be surprised? I really don't think so. Do they believe that lessons and practice just... don't matter? That's the only way I can think of to justify the notion that a fair meritocratic test of orchestra applicants wouldn't show a similar skew even assuming uniform innate capacity and interest.
How about in a different context? It's no secret that, say, chess grandmasters are not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would this hypothetical DEI proponent truly claim that chess is not a fair and meritocratic measure of chess ability? It's also no secret that just about everyone who gets to that level has played a lot of chess, almost always from a young age, and that that's not uniformly distributed across race and gender. Would they claim that that experience doesn't actually make someone better at chess?
The (slightly different, much rarer) explanation I sometimes encounter is that, while applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application, they'll quickly 'catch up' once placed in a position congruent with their innate ability. I find that claim dubious -- if nothing else, it suggests that a 30-year-old who's played chess four hours a day since the age of five shouldn't be expected to be better than a 30-year-old who's done so since the age of 29 and a half -- but I have no trouble believing someone actually could believe it.
The thing is, I wouldn't want to be the person in the meeting saying 'applicants from disadvantaged groups are in fact less capable at the time of application' regardless of how I follow up on it. I could see myself choosing to say the former, clearly untrue statement instead to avoid the possibility of hostile misinterpretation. But maybe I'm just being cynical and people actually do believe it?
They really believe it in the sense that they've been taught to always presume discrimination and have never really thought through specific cases.
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The usual justification I hear is something you're brushing briefly against here: interest. What DEI proponents think is that the underrepresented minorities are not taking private music lessons for orchestral instruments because they don't feel welcome or invited in those fields. They feel it's a white or asian thing, not for them. Culturally, it's less of a thing they're likely to be introduced to.
So to steelman the DEI side here (which I must state I disagree with, but it still deserves steelmanning), minority enrollement in these activities requires bootstrapping; get a generation of these under-represented minorities in there or two by putting your thumb on the scale if necessary, hype the fuck out of them, and hopefully the next generation of the under-represented minority will be inspired by the DEI hires, will get on the pipeline early and the minority will not be under-represented anymore and you won't need to put your thumb on the scale.
I don't think it has ever worked, but I think that's the general idea.
*EDIT: To clarify why I don't think it ever works, is because it's extremely conceited. You have to assume that people are dumb and won't notice that your thumb is on the scale, and won't notice that the DEI hires are worse than the meritocratic ones. Which has a tendancy to backfire, if all the pro/famous under-represented minority athletes of a specific sport, or orchestral musicians are noticeably worse, it's likely to reinforce the idea that there is something innate with the group that makes them worse at that activity. Which would be worse than having only a few less-than-representative numbers but at least they perform to the same standard as others, which doesn't damage the "interest gap" potential explanation and won't discourage the people who do have the interest.
Sure, this is a sane position, whether or not it's true. But someone who believed this wouldn't (truthfully) say
Where, in context, the 'process' is a means of assessing applicants for a job, e.g. blind auditions to an orchestra. This argument admits that until the interest gap is closed, there will in fact be a skew in qualified applicants. It argues that you should hire the less meritorious applicants from certain groups anyway, but it doesn't claim that a test saying members of those groups are less meritorious is proof per se the test is biased. Which I agree with @WandererintheWilderness is something people sometimes say.
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Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.
If we went solely by disparate impact, based on the numbers we would need to assume that cops are several orders of magnitude more sexist (against men) than they are racist (against blacks). But I haven't seen a single DEI proponent arguing that we need to eradicate female privilege in arrests/prison sentencing/etc. The right has no problem with saying that men are inherently more likely to engage in criminal behavior than women, the DEI/blank slatist/etc. camp doesn't really have an answer to this.
Also Native Americans per capita commit more crime than blacks in certain categories, with similarly high arrest/imprisonment rates. And while the DEI crowd will argue that Natives are discriminated against, I don't see it claimed that the discrimination is to a greater extent than that faced by blacks. Discrimination against blacks actually gets almost all of the airtime.
They aren't optimizing for explanatory power but for political power; they still earnestly believe everything they say. Accusing them of inconsistency is like accusing a tiger of not fighting fair--it's just a misunderstanding of what you are dealing with. They are not playing the "game" of mutual pursuit of truth by rational discussion, and so they are not bound by the rules of that game. When they appeal to those rules in an argument, it is merely for a strategic advantage. They do not apply those rules because they believe in them, but because you do.
Sure, but as fun as going "On the Demons and Their Lies by Frieren the Slayer" might be, my side still needs to win elections.
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Didn't blind auditions essentially succeed at what they were meant to do, ie. eliminate gender bias in classical musician auditions?
As I understand it, it seemed to solve a gender bias, but it certainly failed to solve a racial bias. The latter was the reason it fell out of favor for progressives.
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They surely eliminated gender bias. But the claim that they helped women (I.e. that bias against women existed without them) is not really supported by the original study on it.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/
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Apparently disputed. I'd guess the large change in hiring of women was mostly a matter of attitudes changing so that it was perfectly acceptable for women to be in classical orchestras, and blind auditions came along because of that too.
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IIRC they were supposed to ensure a perfectly blended mishmash of all races, genders etcetera and then they didn't actually lead to that
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"Obstructor"?
Pro-life direct action(entering abortion clinics to be enough of a nuisance to stop operations without actually hurting anyone) prefers the term 'activist'. Perhaps a polite euphemism, but more accurate than 'terrorist', which should be reserved for people who actually get violent.
More to the point, "terrorist" should be reserved for people who are actually trying to create a climate of terror in order to have an outsized effect relative to the amount of firepower they've got. That's what terrorism means. Random mayhem, however violent, is not terrorism if that is not its aim.
The George Floyd riots certainly count as terrorism in my book. I, personally, was terrified. They blocked off the main highways going through downtown that I used everyday and burned buildings.
The Don Lemon stunt also looks like terrorism to me. But it was done with intimidation, rather than violence itself. So some kind of terrorism lite. The point is, if they weren't charged, there would be nothing to stop them from shutting down that church every week.
I would be happy with calling some of the BLM stuff terrorism, yes!
Not all of it, mind. I think blocking roads is fairly normal protest stuff that doesn't really serve to create a climate of terror in any straightforward sense - not sure how it could terrorize you, would honestly appreciate elaboration. Were the Canadian truckers terrorists? If anything, blocking roads looks to me it's a straightforward show of strength. The protesters demonstrate the ability to actually impede everyday life and the local economy on a meaningful scale if they don't get their way. That's not really the same kind of strategy as the archetypal terrorist attacks - small-scale acts of extreme violence which the terrorists couldn't scale up to a strategically meaningful extent, but which they leverage to frighten people into getting what they want anyway.
(Maybe 9/11 confuses the issue because it's intuitively "big"? But as I see it, what makes it a terrorist rather than merely military act is still the fact that the people who did it could not have repeated it enough times to actually defeat the US militarily. They merely hoped that taking out one or two high-profile targets would freak the enemy out to an irrational degree. Which, alas, it did.)
But certainly, a lot of it was terrorist in nature. Burning buildings is a very good example.
"Terror" is just shorthand for "anti-Establishment activity", because 'the state of being terrorized' is trivially gamed.
Everything $political_opponent does is terrorism- always has been, and it always will be.
Under this definition, yes. The reaction to it (freezing bank accounts) was also an act of terrorism for reasons I don't think I really have to explain.
I mean, I was afraid. They were damaging property downtown and I lived a mile away. They were blockading the major thoroughfares that I used every day and I saw videos of people being ripped from their vehicles. They were establishing physical dominance and scaring people to make a political point (that we better reduce police funding... or else). And that is what my city did.
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Interestingly I had just asked chatgpt and it proposed "obstructionist" as the top option, and a lot of lesser options including "interferer", "disruptor" and "agitator". "Obstructor" is probably a good choice.
"Agitator" was on the tip of my tongue.
Yeah, I see it commonly used, but it has a bit of a different connotation imo. On the one hand, you can be an agitator without doing any obstructing or interference, just purely based on your rhetoric, and in that sense it's actually still a lesser word. On the other hand, it usually implies agitating for violence, and as much as I dislike the obstructors, they generally stop short of that.
Vigilante is closer to the right meaning, though in this case it's not so much trying to take the law into your own hands than it is trying to take the law out of the police's hands.
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Yeah, that is an important distinction.
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This is what suggests to me that the situation is pure power politics. The reason for the face coverings is targeted harassment, doxing, stalking, and even violence.
Demands on this front aren't credible given the environment.
It's complaining about a problem that they caused.
Would love to see someone (with awareness of the circumstances!!) steel man the request.
Last time I checked, ICE was in the lead 2:0 as far as the body count in Minneapolis was concerned. To the degree that the SJ left is coordinated, it certainly has not picked a strategy of grievous bodily harm. Sure, there might be outliers, but city cops deal with that every damn day -- with the additional kicker that the people they antagonize are much more likely to live a chill 20 minute drive from their families' homes.
I think that the main reason ICE agents hide their faces is not that they fear violence. Instead, the SJ left has plenty of ways to ostracize people which they do not like which are legal. ICE agents might find themselves getting kicked out of blue area bars, or their dating prospects reduced to the women who do not have SJ girlfriends they want to keep, which seems perfectly fine to me. Plus some harassment which is not fine, of course.
OTOH, having ICE agent act like masked stormtroopers is not only terrible optics, is also removes one of the few remaining checks on them. When ICE shoots someone, the Trump administration declares that shooting justified and praiseworthy within hours. ICE will not help with any state investigation because federal forces enjoy immunity. And the federal investigation will be lead by the very same administration who already decided the outcome before the victim's corpse was cold. If the shooters are never identified publicly, (which clearly was the idea of the Trump administration), then that is the end of the story, unless you get a Democrat administration in three years and Trump does not bother to shred the FBI report.
With the shooters identified on video, the loved one's at least know who fired the shots, and even if the shooters do not face criminal consequences, they can at least be punished by ostracism similar to OJ Simpson.
Part of applying violence on behalf of a democratic government is that you are willing to do so openly. If you believe that something is morally right and the will of the people, you should be willing to show your face. I am sure that the 101st Airborne was not particularly popular in the South when they escorted the Little Rock Nine to school in 1957. Yet they did not cover their faces, even as they knew that their countrymen might consider them race traitors.
Or which is not legal but does not actually cause grevious bodily harm, and for which local law enforcement can look the other way.
The public now knows the names of the three shooters; the masks made no difference.
ICE will not help with any state investigation because the state is actively resisting them and cannot be trusted. There is in fact no neutral arbiter possible under the circumstances. Certainly there is no John Adams type in Minnesota willing to ensure the ICE agents would get a fair trial there.
I think that the fairness of a trial is a sliding scale rather than a boolean quantity. Juries have their own sentiments and are made of humans, not of personifications of the abstract concept of justice.
Say that unfairness is a quality between zero and one. At zero, judges and jury are perfectly impartial. At one, they are willing to disregard conclusive evidence to get the outcome they want -- convict someone of crimes they clearly did not commit, just because they hate them.
There are a lot of examples of trials where the unfairness is significantly more than zero. A black man standing accused of raping a white woman in Texas in 1952. A violent jihadist in NYC in 2003. An open Neo-Nazi accused of tax fraud in SF in 2020.
However, this does not mean that justice is better served by not having them tried, though I concede that there exists some level of unfairness where a guilty verdict is assured, and I would not want to send anyone to such a court (at least if I was not very much convinced of their guilt).
For the ICE shooters, I think the biggest difference from SOP would be that they would not get the cop bonus from prosecutors and juries. This does not automatically mean that they are found guilty.
I imagine that the verdict would be similar as if Pretti had been shot during a funeral procession of the Hell's Angels he was disturbing with other protesters. In the end, it depends on the details more than how sympathetic the defendants are. I could totally see circumstances where a jury would rightfully acquit the Hell's Angels or ICE (e.g. if the other person drew his gun and pointed it towards them). Sadly, from the facts we know of the Pretti shooting, this does not seem to be such a case. From what I have seen in the footage so far, I would even convict normal cops who were out in the streets stopping drug dealers or whatever. To excuse such trigger-happiness, I would have to assume that Minnesota is also a war zone and every day ICE agents get blown up or something.
One of the nice things about a trial is it cuts through all the shades-of-gray stuff and provides a result. There's a verdict, guilty or not guilty. If you say to the unjustly convicted man that his trial was only somewhat unfair, most people will realize you're talking nonsense.
An assured guilty is "[s]ome level of unfairness", sure. A very high level of unfairness.
I do not believe that. A Minneapolis jury will absolutely convict. Both in the Pretti case AND the Good case.
I think your binary justly convicted vs unjustly convicted only covers a minority of cases, generally the ones where there is a dispute of fact -- did he do it or not to the act.
For more cases, there is some sliding quantity differentiating legal conduct from criminal behavior. Having sex with someone who can not consent due to being blackout drunk is illegal, having sex with someone who had half a glass of wine is legal, so there is some grey area in the middle where you are less than 100% guilty but also less than 100% innocent, and a jury might reasonably reach either verdict. Likewise for killing someone while going over the speed limit.
That does not mean that it is unfair. If the jury would also convict if Pretti had shot first, injuring an ICE officer, then I would grant you that there is no justice to be found from them.
As it is, the shooters -- particularly in the Pretti case -- are not clearly innocent. "We heard a gunshot and then we put ten rounds into some nearby person we thought was armed" is a pretty big fuckup. Even normal cops might go to jail for that if it was caught from multiple cameras. Regular citizens or gang members will definitely go to jail for it. The case against the Good shooter is weaker, but also something where I would not call it a miscarriage of justice if it a guilty verdict was delivered for a similar case in resulting from a neighborhood argument.
"A jury will absolutely convict [for particular cases]" is not an argument that a trial is unfair. Few people were surprised when Charles Manson was found guilty of murder -- the known facts would have made any other outcome unlikely. The test is if they would also have convicted him of unlikely charges like invading Poland, shooting Lincoln, or using witchcraft to cause stillbirths. If jury would have been willing to convict him of these, then I would concede that he did not get a fair trial.
That isn't a fair summary of the Pretti case -- and it's a summary that could be used (unfairly) for the Rittenhouse case as well, which you may note ended in acquittal. The cops who shot Pretti may well be guilty, but I don't believe the outcome in a Minneapolis case would depend on their guilt.
So a woman is intermittently blocking the road with the car, two random guys object to this, she drives right at one of them, he shoots as he is struck, he should be found guilty? No, if those two guys weren't ICE agents, there'd be little question of the validity of their self-defense cse.
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I agree that ICE should be allowed to operate openly, under the authority of the president, in any American city. I think the real-time obstruction of their operations is bad (and a calamitous mistake as well).
But allowing agents to wear masks destroys accountability and increases the volatility of every interaction by introducing uncertainty about their authority. Lack of accountability erodes confidence that the government can carry out its commitments, which depresses future cooperation.
On a more visceral level, even the mildest encounter with an armed, masked man is scary as hell. I wager it will badly degrade Americans' view of law enforcement officers if it continues much longer.
I'm sympathetic to the interests of ICE agents: their desire for not just their safety, but the safety of their families. But masks ask too much. The tradeoff isn't worth it, especially when there are alternatives: pursue the threats against agents, investigate, throw the book at the culprits, whatever. But don't empower stare security forces to become a nightmare that no one wants their political opponents to control.
It seems to me that the reasonable compromise is for ICE agents to have clearly identifiable and displayed badges.
I am once again asking for them to have unique hats.
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That would probably be sufficient, though I wouldn't really like it.
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These aren't plausible alternatives when local officials refuse to enforce state and local law. ETA: And federal judges show little willingness to allow prosecutions.
I agree that the intransigence of local officials strengthens the case for allowing masks, but:
Example, the man who threw a sandwich at an ice officer got no charges. The man who bit an agent's finger off does not appear to have been charged. Have local officials charged any of the individuals in Minneapolis who have been engaging in threats, assault, battery, property damage, and disorderly conduct incessantly? Even a single one?
The DHS has referred multiple cases for charges related to threats against the families of ICE agents. In Portland, children and spouses were repeatedly harassed and threatened. No charges were filed. In multiple other cities, protests outside agent's homes, engaging in harassment and disorderly conduct. No charges were filed then either.
I would genuinely like to understand what's been transpiring. I'll be shocked if authorities identified the man that bit the agent's finger off and did not charge him.
I know you can't prove a negative for some of these events, but can you link resources for the others? The DHS referrals or reporting on the harassment and threats in Portland? I'm inclined to believe those occurred, but that prior doesn't give me any sense of the magnitude and won't motivate me the same way that verifiable reports will.
I'll search when I have time, but the easier you make it for me the more likely I am to support your position.
Women, actually, and they have been identified. Federal charges were filed, but I couldn't find any indication of state or local charges. WRT to other things, unfortunately I don't have references to the places I read about them and searching is useless with the terms involved. How about this as a compromise though - I would concede requiring officers to not conceal their identity if protestors were also required not to conceal their identities. Undoubtedly a big reason for lack of charges is an inability to identify the individuals involved.
Interesting. I'll read up on the woman's case.
I am against protesters concealing their identities as well, and would support minor sentencing enhancements for doing so in the commission of any crimes (or any other reasonable way of deterring it).
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Woman. She's facing Federal charges only, and a local Democratic official has called for activists to lie their way onto the jury and acquit her.
https://alphanews.org/local-dem-urges-people-to-act-neutral-to-get-on-jury-acquit-woman-accused-of-biting-federal-agent/
Thank you, I'm looking forward to reading about that.
For what it's worth, the comment I was originally responding to said "The man who bit an agent's finger off does not appear to have been charged" ... implicitly "at all". The local Democratic official's call is execrable, if true, but I think my skepticism has been vindicated.
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This is a problem entirely of the lefts making.
You want to have a good argument for why they shouldn't have masks? Don't be evil.
Harassment, stalking, doxxing, and violence are the tools of evil - and the left feels that way when it happens to those they support.
The need and desire for masks are caused by the actions of the same bad actors demanding that they don't have masks.
You don't like it? Fair - but fix the actual problem first.
I think obstructing ICE operations is reckless, deadly gamble. I think the people that participate share some responsibility for the injuries and deaths over the last year.
Furthermore, I acknowledge and condemn the abuse of on-duty ICE agents. Are you suggesting those incidents justify the fear of harassment, stalking, doxxing, and violence against off-duty officers?
My position, the steelman you asked for, is that we cannot absolve law enforcement officers of all accountability as a precaution.
How many shootings have there been at ICE facilities? More or less than at drug enforcement agency facilities, who often wear masks (and not just in the US either, there's plenty of drug bust photo ops with masked agents in Europe, too)? Enough that it seems reasonable there might be shootings of off-duty agents were their identities more common knowledge?
Also, we do know that people were willing to harass an off-duty ICE officer when they learned what church he preached at. Hell, they didn't even make sure he was actually there before harassing everyone else in the building just for being associated with him.
I agree they face threats to their safety and peace of mind, and that they do not deserve to be harassed outside of work. But I disagree the threat is so great that it's worth the tradeoff in legitimacy. Unfortunately, it's hard to quantify declines in legitimacy, which makes it difficult to gauge where mask supporters stand.
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Copy that.
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Them wearing masks isn't absolving them of accountability.
I would certainly prefer they don't wear masks. But the behavior of "protestors" finding out who ICE agents are and getting into their private lives (most publicly with the Don Lemon church invasion), especially combined with the unwillingness of anyone who opposes Trump to allow any moves against such protestors, demonstrates they have good reason for it.
I propose that, if a government employee's targets can't even identify them, that employee is not accountable in a meaningful sense. A third party can identify them, but it's the target's political opponents, also meaningless.
I agree Don Lemon's stunt was bad, and I'm happy he's being prosecuted for it. But was it even a threat?
Throughout US history, officials have been in the same position as ICE employees: strikebreakers in the late 19th century, DOJ officials in charge of civil rights enforcement, and the varied law enforcement officials that decimated the mafia. All of those officials faced more urgent, demonstrable peril than ICE officers, yet the government protected the officials, they didn't hide them. (With the exception of juries, who are not government officials, and are accountable at least to one another.) Even when judges received death threats and prosecutors were tailed by mob associates, the government didn't conceal their identities, because doing so would have undermined its legitimacy.
Who exactly has not been identifiable by their target? The ICE officials involved in an arrest or detention are all a matter of record, which is available by subpoena should the target initiate a lawsuit.
Sure. But suppose you're a civilian bystander/activist/obstructionist and you've been subjected to unwarranted violence by one of four or five masked ICE guys - even if you can pinpoint which five guys were there at that time via subpoenaed records, you still have no way of pinpointing which actual guy did it should the five close ranks and go Spartacus. I'm sure there are ways out of this still, but it massively complicates the process of getting one's dues.
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The third party capable of identifying them is in the DHS hierarchy, under the authority of their political opponents. That's a system that can work when there's sufficient trust, but that's not what we have today.
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De-masking is obviously a poison pill in this environment. I do agree with you that in a good society they shouldn’t wear a masks. We do not live in a good society. They will be targeted by opposition. It’s a less extreme version of saying Mexican military should demasks and have badges when targeting the Sinaloa Cartel. Obviously Sinaloa would execute entire Mexican military families. De-masked ICE likely see a handful of executions and a lot of annoyance in their everyday life.
We already have checkpoints by the opposition looking for ICE in Minneapolis.
If ICE became a legitimate paramilitary organization with 100k members in some random Arkansas town then we can demask. Where all their families live on a base.
The Mexican military is an ill-disciplined conscript army that loses half its members every year to desertion- the largest part of which is literally just cartels promising better food to soldiers that join already trained.
Mexican marines do the actual cartel fighting- masked and deployed away from their hometowns. They face reprisals but also are literally operating outside of civilian control; the reason they fight the cartels rather than the army is because the cartels have too much influence over the government for forces under full civilian control to be used against them(also, the whole 'half the army leaves to join the cartels for better food every year' thing).
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I'd accept the necessity of anonymizing agents if there were a verifiable history of violence anywhere near the levels perpetrated by Mexican cartels. That appears appears to be about 400 murders alone per year over the last decade. We don't even have to get within an order of magnitude: I'd be more sympathetic if there were a ten or more independently verifiable incidents and for some reason alternative methods of deterrence didn't seem likely to work. I detest the use of masks, but I promise you I am not looking for a reason to lawyer my way out of these conditions.
I've looked for verifiable cases of harassment, stalking or violence against off-duty ICE officers and only found one so far, for threats and harassment, announced today. Perhaps there have been more: I wouldn't be surprised if major media outlets ignored them or applied maximum scrutiny before reporting on them, but I do think the Trump administration would have initiated more investigations and likely secured more arrests.
But from what I can tell, you're asking US citizens to make an enormous sacrifice to combat what evidence suggests is a minor threat, at best. Worse, this is over a year deep into the Trump administration authorizing the practice.
The assumption that Trump would have arrested everyone harassing ICE off-duty is based on your assumptions of Trump's character and the Federal Government's capabilities. Perhaps your assumptions are incorrect here.
There are many people harassing off-duty ICE (does it count when they're at a hotel or is that on-duty? Many hotels have had to close in Minneapolis due to the violence.) There are many people harassing people presumed to be off-duty ICE. The evidence is everywhere. Very few have been arrested, because arrests would depend a lot on local cooperation, which has not been forthcoming.
Videos/evidence of these things:
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/2016846295923642848?s=20
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2013178366988345447?s=20
https://x.com/chiIIum/status/2012706153491235169?s=20
https://x.com/Osint613/status/2012780234861326413?s=20
https://x.com/AlphaNews/status/2012610307663802819?s=20
https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/2011285612402512085?s=20
https://x.com/WellsJorda89710/status/2012413904199061930?s=20
https://x.com/CBPCommissioner/status/2015847860537893029?s=20
https://x.com/camhigby/status/2017764065154895968?s=20
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2018386424739905888?s=20
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2018111147237425556?s=20
Once again, thank you for the links.
I wasn't familiar with the hotel sieges, which are appalling. I don't think masks help with that particular threat, but I understand that your overall point is that there are many people that would like to harass ICE agents, enough that they're willing to harass randos in pursuit of that goal.
Am I right to say that our central disagreement is that masked agents hurt the legitimacy of government? Or perhaps you concede that, but disagree about its significance relative to the importance of protecting agents?
As I've mentioned in this thread, I'd support a variety of laws to deter mistreatment of ICE agents (plus additional funding as needed). For example:
But anonymous law enforcement officers ought to be a last resort. Realistically, it's much worse than that. I'm aware that the substantial contingent of blackpilled commenters here that consider the idea of a free country a hopelessly naive illusion, but I still aspire to it.
Are you willing to move in my direction at all? In order to mitigate the negative effects of masking, would you accept these?
Yeah, I don't see the principle here.
I accept that the government has a monopoly on force under normal conditions. I prefer for this force to be used on bad guys. Bad guys tend to form organizational structures where it would not be uncommon for them to attack law enforcement in revenge. ERO/ICE deals a lot with Cartels and other bad international organizations that have the means and motive to kill in revenge. Apparently leftist/progressives have also turned themselves into an international organization that is motivated to harass and sometimes attempt to murder ERO/ICE.
It has also been very common for law enforcement in all levels of government to cover their faces in the United States of America. The DEA, Portland Police, and Florida police (and many more, this isn't intended to be an exhaustive list, just demonstrating enough that it is wide spread) all do this when they are performing a task with a high risk of retaliation.
I do not remember it ticking people off so much in the past. This isn't new behavior, but the outrage seems new to me. Perhaps I wasn't aware of it before.
As far as moving in your direction, yeah, though it's not a movement because I've already felt this way. Here is what I would like to have change:
How about this as an intuition pump: would it be good if all law-enforcement officers always wore masks?
At several points in this thread, I've tried to make it clear that I acknowledge there are situations where they are acceptable. Some tactical conditions justify them, like SWAT actions and drug raids: that covers the DEA and Florida links you provided. In those cases, the high risk of retaliation comes in the form of credible murder threats. The single failed attack on the Dallas facility notwithstanding, that's not what ICE officers face at the time I'm writing this, as far as I can tell.
I'm not even sure what's going on in the Portland photo: the caption says it's from 2020, so it's hard to tell whether the officers' faces are partially obscured to protect their anonymity or because of COVID. (As an aside, I also agree that gas masks are acceptable for riots.)
I mean that an authority outside Trump's chain of command should have access to information about exactly which agents were present at each operation. Practically speaking, that means it would have to be a Democratic-aligned official, since "non-partisan" isn't really a thing, so add serious penalties for leaks if necessary.
I gather from your final comment on sunsetting that you'd prefer not to interfere with the discretion of law enforcement. I'm sympathetic: for the most part, they know better than civilians when it's appropriate. But I'm not going to surrender my judgement entirely, or this just turns into the red tribe version of submitting to experts.
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I don't appreciate the strawman, but I am grateful for the links. I'm looking forward to reviewing them.
You said:
I really don't think I strawmanned you, I was responding to this specific portion of your writing. If I misunderstood your argument, I apologize.
Me: "more investigations ... more arrests"
You: "The assumption that Trump would have arrested everyone".
The whole issue involves adjudicating tradeoffs, which are a matter of degrees. I think it's reasonable to push back on hyperbole.
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Immigration is a massive threat. To humanity and the US not a “minor threat, at best”
Why do you think it matters if 7 year old non-criminal gets deported by a guy whose face he can see or a guy in a masks?
As an American Citizen I feel no threat by ICE. Worse case they grab me for a day then verify I am a citizen. I do not care if I can see their face.
To clarify, the minor threat I was referring to was the demonstrated threat to ICE agents, especially relative to the historic threats against government employees. I recognize that the potential threat is great,but so far, the verifiable dangers have been nonzero, but hardly comparable.
But what is gained by showing their face? The only thing is it changes is people know who they are. Why does that matter for making an arrest?
In the course of human events, government agents have on occasion abused their powers. There is no way to guarantee they will be held responsible for those abuses, but you can guarantee that they will not be held responsible for those abuses by anonymizing them.
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Oh, you sweet summer child...
Bravo! You didn't speak plainly, so I'm not sure whether you're saying "the Trump administration is incompetent", "even if they did try, Dem judges would block them", "there's nothing to investigate, it's all a MAGA lie", or some baroque objection I haven't thought of.
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Unless this is matched by a program to crack down hard on left-wing agitators and terrorists who would use this information to target and intimidate officers and their families, then it is merely a strategy for the left to empower its own masked paramilitary groups to contest policing authority. They don't want to abolish policing or borders; they just want to be the police and decide which borders are enforced.
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The Vox piece doesn’t surprise me. In the recent Pretti killing, it came out that Pretti previously got into a violent interaction with ICE where ICE acted professionally (if understated). Those interactions probably occurred hundreds of times daily. The media wants you to focus on the numerator of bad cop interactions while ignoring the denominator (the thousands of interactions with bad actors that LEO deals with excellently).
Is LEO misconduct a problem? Sure. But it pales in comparison to suspect misconduct. Vox wants you to focus on the former but not the latter by controlling the numerator and denominator.
The general public does not care about statistics. Both sides of the CW play that game. MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.
The protesters breaking the laws more frequently than cops is to be expected. They are not getting paid by the taxpayer, though. There have been two people killed in MN. Both were protesters who were objectively (with the benefit of hindsight) not going to kill ICE agents. There are certainly situations where I would expect that outcome. If protesters had also murdered three ICE agents in MN in the same time span, that would justify ICE having a high prior that someone wants to murder them, making their snap judgments more understandable.
The other problem is that the Trump administration by trying to take control of the narrative and slandering the victims before their bodies were cold effectively endorsed the killings. SOP for a shooting which looks bad would be to say that the agent involved has been put on paid leave and that it is under investigation, and that it would be premature to comment on it. The Trump admin message to the ICE agents seems to be "if you need to break a few eggs to make our omelette, that is fine. We will shield you from consequences and tell bald-faced lies in our press conferences to provide cover for you."
I'll admit, that got under my skin more than anything else. It took the typical trump lying from tiresome bullshitting buffoonery to, well, hackneyed villainy.
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“ MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.”
Maybe the median MAGA wants you to think this but I feel like the median MAGA has instincts that the intellectual MAGA could express better and with data. Assimilation doesn’t happen. Twitter recently had a thread showing Italian American have a 60% higher criminality rate than Scandinavian Americans. Ellis Island was a long time ago. I am Italian American. We are different. If Nancy Pelosi wasn’t constrained by a larger majority her politics wouldn’t be New Deal it would be Evita Peron since Italians are the dominant force in Argentina. https://x.com/garettjones/status/2018766833134751869?s=46
I came across some writings by Wang Hunig whose basically the chief ideologue and theorists for the CCP and when he has a quote that struck me, “ all political power runs downstream from shared values, culture, and tradition”. Then I bought his book and will work on it this weekend.
I don’t believe Amerindians will assimilate into America. We have multigenerations now an education gaps remain quite large. Criminality is a little more mixed. I don’t believe you can bring in a population group whose descendants will be stuck in a servant class and not change the culture and politics of a country. If they are non-competitive for becoming elites in a country then they will vote for communism.
I think Indian Brahmins and Asians are more mixed. The current debate seems to be on striver culture. And heritage Americans seem to think the country has the right amount of striving. Certain immigrant groups strive less than whites and certain groups strive more than whites. For people like me America had the perfect amount of striving so why would I want it to change.
MAGA doesn’t want the other side to believe every deportation is a rapists. They want the other side to be racists like us. It’s a dog whistle. They want the other side to realize that if you import a lot of Amerindian your country will turn into Brazil or Mexico. Mexico now has a shared culture with its people but all the rich people are European or Lebanese. Their servant class is brown.
And yes my background is a typical urbanite with a lot of highly filtered black, brown, and yellow friends who sometimes play the token Nazi role. The elitists city of highly selected globalists can function. I don’t think it works once you get past the top 5%.
I tend to believe America’s original sin is the primary reason we developed suburban culture and we can primarily only build walkable urban environments in areas with extreme wealth is because of an intense desire to prevent the social dysfunction in schools and public spaces associated with our Origional Sin. To this day any progressive with money who flies all the correct flags will do anything in their power to make sure the bottom 50% of blacks can’t be in their neighborhood or in their schools. If America didn’t have black people private schools would basically disappear.
Centuries later group differences and favoritism never disapear. Bias in juries to favor your own race still exists. A recent interview with an OJ Simpson juror said they voted him innocent despite thinking he was guilty because of Rodney King. A black man can butcher two white people and a black juror won’t convict him. The more you start to see that group differences between populations that evolved in different areas are permanent the more anti-immigration you become.
What MAGA wants you to believe is to be racists like us.
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The problem is that Minnesota and co. believe that these officers are illegitimate by default, and they treat ICE like an occupying force. That framing alone will undoubtedly make incidents more likely to occur.
The plan for the anti-ICE crowd is to continue with their current formula, because current the incentive structure encourages escalation. If I as an indignant protestor can blow whistles, shout profanities, follow and block ICE vehicles with my vehicle, and then have some other indignant protestor record the exact moment an ICE agent crosses the line or arrests me, then I win no matter what. I either get to disrupt your operation (which is supported by state and local government) or you arrest me and I can access one of probably hundreds of civil rights attorneys and a local politician or two to oversee my case and ensure no real harm or deterrence comes to me. Obviously anything that results in me being injured on video by an ICE agent is almost certainly good for the cause.
The comments and tweets from Noem and Bovino were politically disastrous, and that plays into the strategy employed by the anti-ICE crowd. You just need one or two optically terrible missteps by the other side to negate tens of thousands subtler, yet intentional provocations. As long as you can continuously point to isolated incidents that look bad, you can endlessly recapture the narrative.
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It's somewhat callous, but I can't help but think similarly overall. The Renee Good shooting was imo somewhat understandable, since she was spinning on the ice with her wheels pointed forward. That would have scared the shit out of me as well and shooting her before she gets grip is objectively a plausible way to stop being run over. But it still also was a bad shot, in the sense that, as you say, with the benefit of hindsight we know he wouldn't have gotten run over. Pretti was arguably the kind of guy who gets shot, and the left usually has no problem with this if they don't agree with their politics. But again, it was a bad shot in the sense that no ICE agent was factually under threat.
And while there has been a lot of questionable behaviour by obstructors, ICE agents generally rarely get injured and it is claimed that literally not a single agent has been killed in the line of duty in the past few years. Unless we assume superhuman competence for the ICE agents, that does point in the direction that the obstructors do not intend to seriously hurt or kill ICE agents, no matter how little one may like their other goals and/or their rhetoric.
And this simply matters a lot for PR. If you want to convince a normie that ICE agents are in sufficient danger to allow these shootings, you need to be able to provide examples of at least some of them actually being killed. Yes, this sucks, I don't really like it, but I also see little way around it.
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
Not for lack of trying.
Nothing would change if a few ICE agents had been killed. The Twitterati would lie and say they weren't, and the actual media would ignore and downplay it.
It was a legal shoot for the reasons discussed to death on this forum, but as a matter of policing technique it was a bad shoot because
There is a reason why real police are trained not to shoot at moving vehicles as a first-line response to dangerous driving.
Actually cars do have deadman's switches, though not very good ones. The accelerator is spring-loaded and if you let off, acceleration stops. It's true that this won't actually stop the car in many cases, and also that humans who have been shot don't always relax, but that's less than "almost certainly". If (as Ross did not know, and no one will ever know) she was actually trying to run him over, being shot prevented her from squaring up on him.
This did not happen. The car was driving at him. It actually struck him.
Neither police nor civilians are expected to verify that the backstop is safe before shooting in a self-defense situation.
Every quote I've seen from police manuals or policy statements about not shooting at moving vehicles explicitly excepts cases where the moving vehicle is an immediate threat.
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If the officer could reload a previous save game and redo that event knowing what he does now, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't shoot. It may have been a justified shoot in the moment, but that doesn't mean it was a good shoot in a more general sense. Perhaps on a better day, or maybe if the same officer hadn't been dragged by a car recently, then he would not have shot. I don't think he could honestly answer the question "if you could do it over again, would you do the same?" with an unqualified "yes", though he may be advised to do so for legal reasons.
Which is equivalent to precognition. There was no way for him to know at the time he made the decision to shoot that the car would hit him but not seriously injure him. Making judgements based on knowledge that nobody at the time had is a completely unreasonable standard.
To steelman in the point, in a Bayesian sense, the fact that in this case it turned out to be unjustified should update future officers away from shooting in similar situations with similar levels of uncertainty. That makes whether it was a "good shoot" or "bad shoot" in an absolute, hindsight-is-20/20 sense a meaningful, useful question, even if it doesn't impinge on the legality or morality of the event of Good's killing as it actually occurred.
Taking no position on whether it's a good or a bad thing, it occurs to me that you seem to have re-derived qualified immunity.
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Yeah I was just thinking that. If the recent Minneapolis kerfuffles had been two ICE deaths I feel like they'd have made a far smaller dent narratively than what occurred.
Like even if Good had legitimately run down one of the ICE guys obstructing her I can't picture it generating much interest.
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In the EU, there's a concept called the "right to be forgotten", intended to recognise the idea that a crime or misdemeanour which one committed a long time ago and for which one has served one's sentence should not haunt one forever. There is a legal precedent that you can appeal to Google to remove articles containing your name from search results, and in some cases they will honour this request (funny story: several years after leaving school, a guy who was the year ahead of me in secondary school was convicted for possession of large amounts of illegal drugs which could not possibly have been solely for personal use, and in his trial his actual defense was that he was not a drug dealer, but simply a "sucker for a good deal". At some point after his conviction was spent he must have requested all articles about the case be purged from Google search results, because I can no longer find them.) As with anything else, this has its limitations: in the UK, sex offenders are forbidden from changing their names via deed poll. If an adult was convicted of a sexual offense involving children, I do think it's reasonable that this information be made publicly available, especially if they're seeking employment involving children. Likewise if someone was convicted of a severely violent offense and they're seeking employment in a job that involves safeguarding.
But broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, if a person has a mental health episode in a public place, or if a university student has too much to drink and makes a fool of themself, that incident should not follow them around for the rest of their life. It should not be the first thing you see when you Google their name. I agree with Jacobin that police officers uploading bodycam footage of this sort of thing to their official YouTube channels is an improper use of bodycam technology, but really, police bodycam footage is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever anyone has a mental health episode in a public place, you can be assured that smartphone footage of it from at least three angles will be uploaded to TikTok and Instagram within the hour. Videos like "Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired" being uploaded to official police YouTube channels are only a symptom of a broader cultural problem: everything is just #content now. Woman having a mental health episode in a supermarket? #content. The building you're inside catches fire? #content. Man gets struck by car? #content. Soldier stabbed to death by Islamist nutters? #content.
The canonical example of the casual sociopathy of bystanders is Kitty Genovese, a case which was widely misrepresented by sensational journalists. In light of this, it ought to be retired in favour of any of the above examples.
Just a small nitpick, it largely is not police officers uploading it themselves. A lot of bodycam content is obtained by Youtubers filing FOIAs (often at their own expense) since bodycam footage is a matter of public record (except in Minnesota). Some police departments have a policy of uploading bodycam footage on their own, but this usually only happens for critical incidents such as officer-involved shootings, not for "Karen Trashes Dollar General".
Thanks for the clarification.
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