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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23431 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.

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.

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