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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:

A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.

The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.)

Our own BJ Campbell wrote that this is one of the important differences between the US and Western Europe. A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.

Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?

All Western legal theory falls apart when the subjects of the law start viewing the enforcers of the law as just another competing tribe. Same thing happens when the enforcers of law start viewing the subjects as a competing tribe.

To that end these discussions are very quaint. No one is interfacing with reality.

All Western legal theory falls apart when the subjects of the law start viewing the enforcers of the law as just another competing tribe.

Said enforcers view THEMSELVES that way. The thin blue line, or "the biggest gang in town". Cops view themselves as a breed apart and above ordinary citizens.

I sometimes muse on the viability of an armchair utopia where most police work would function as a kind of national service that ordinary citizens are called to for a couple of years, so that the average beat or traffic cop is not someone who's made "cop" the core of their sense of self.

You know, this is the most interesting idea I've heard in weeks. I've never paid much attention to the idea of instating mandatory national service to replicate what mass conscription did for previous generations because I just couldn't think of what we could possibly do with that labor pool that outweighs the deadweight loss of corvee labor. Now. However, I see the vision: a sort of labor that by its very nature instills pro-social behavior. I can imagine even just having college age students take one or two days out of their week to serve as effectively glorified security guards in return for a small stipend/scholarship/government healthcare wouldn't be obscenely expensive while still instilling a respect for public order.

I don't think replacing career cops with sortitioned cops altogether would work (it would mean everyone would be constantly undertrained), but something like 50/50 might. Cops patrol in pairs, don't they?

Also, while "let's just put somr ordinary people in charge" tends to sound nice in theory, in reality what almost always results is a stealth takeover by whatever permanent administrative support staff you're forced to keep around. Every school board and small town city council I've ever seen has one or two firebrands, then six or seven clueless local retirees who just do whatever the professional lawyer sitting in the corner to "advise" them tells them to. Orfinary people have a pathological desire to defer to authority, even when their entire job is to act as a check on such authority.

We need professional sociopaths aligned with our interests to run things, otherwise we're just abdicating to other sociopaths we have even less control over.

Israel does this. I follow some math professor who does some part-time cop work.

I tend to feel these type of proposals run into issues on how many hours are in the day. But for 90% of the population 4 years as a cop probably teaches them more than 4 years in college. Perhaps we could do these things in a less credentialed world.

Speaking from personal experience(no, I’m not law enforcement, just to be clear here), it’s very difficult not to fall into this mode of thinking when you have access to sensitive information that the public can only be partially aware of and giving info out could get you and your organization in severe trouble.

I know I’ve slipped into calling some groups ‘civilian’ before mentally slapping myself and looking to find another term.

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