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Notes -
Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:
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?
If you don't suppress such evidence, police will not bother following the proper trail of investigation; they will simply do what is expedient. This is great if you want more incidents closed by arrest (and more criminals caught if the cops are at least honest, though 'expedient' can go beyond that point), but lousy if you want to get around without being hassled by police if you have any resemblance to common criminal types (age, sex, color, clothing, etc)
Wouldn't people trying to differentiate themselves from the criminal types instead of imitating them be a good thing?
No, I do not want sumptuary laws enacted through some back door
Some of those things are unavoidable, such as age.
Is it really back door sumptuary laws to say “maybe dont wear gang colors in a gang area”? I don’t think that’s reasonable, as really wearing gang colors and flashing gang signs in the wrong area is a good way to get pegged by a rival gang. This isn’t hard stuff either. Dont carry a colored hanky in your pocket, don’t wear a doo rag, and dont do weird signs with your hands.
That doesn’t seem like a high bar. You can still dress pretty badly
Yes.
I mean I just don’t see it. The bar is pretty low, and most people would pass it just by chance. Things like the colored hanky are pretty rare in most places. Doo rags are maybe a bit more common, but really they come off pretty easily. And as I mentioned above, it’s already dangerous for people to walk the streets dressed like a gang member because rival gangs will shoot people who look like members of other gangs.
What I am suggesting is that it shouldn’t be considered authoritarian for a cop to recognize obvious signs of gang membership and act appropriately— which at minimum would be investigating why that person is in the area and whether or not they are armed or match the description of a suspect. I get that you need to have some caution about letting a cop detain or seize someone, but if the only way to solve a crime is for the cops to catch them in the act, there’s no reason to have the police investigating crimes.
The problem with this, as you know, is that there's a really, really easy proxy for this: evaluating based on the gang colors you can't take off. (Unless you're Michael Jackson, I guess.)
That's the classical liberal concern with doing this: that targeting gang colors is already accepting this should be done (and in so doing destroying the noble lie that profiling is useless), and are back to haggling over the price. Skin color-ism lives at the bottom of that slope.
I consider it authoritarian when a progressive recognizes signs of my "gang membership" (I can't really hide being male) and acts "appropriately" [or, were I an appropriately tomboyish woman, would consider it authoritarian if a traditionalist saw "woman" and does the same], and I don't [and wouldn't] like that, so per veil of ignorance I feel I would have to consider this authoritarian too.
Whether I care about not being authoritarian is another matter given outgroup consensus is to do it to me.
I don’t see that as horrific. I think cops should be given enough leeway that noticing and responding to anything that makes a person likely to be committing a crime or likely to have committed a crime.
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