They tell us over and over again that we should have no expectation of privacy or not being filmed in public. Well, IMO they should not have any expectation of privacy or not being filmed when on private property and conducting the work _that we pay for_. They work for us.
That is not just your opinion, that is the opinion of multiple United States Court of Appeals circuits in many many cases, and by its declining to overturn these cases, that is also the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. The United States is a common law country, so really what that means is that your opinion is actually not an opinion at all; you have simply stated established law.
and I imagine that if the INVERSE of this case had come up, the police suing for defamation would have been protected by qualified immunity so no lawsuit would have been possible.
The police being able to leverage civil law against citizens to control their behavior in ways that citizens cannot leverage against cannot to comment on the abuse of power is entirely unacceptable no matter what our laws and judiciary chose to allow.
Cynicism is very cooler-than-thou, but it's not because we don't know better.
It's because we do know how the system fails, and holding power accountable to those high aspirations is the only thing that pushes back
the equilibrium.
Only insofar as those business interests align with the government's interests.
The police get paid by and do the bidding of the government. They work for the government.
While you can screech about the degree of overlap between government interests and big business interests, and it absolutely is something worth screeching about, acting as though they are one in the same is counterproductive to understanding either.
> In one of the music videos, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” surveillance footage shows officers swinging open a gate, kicking down a door, and roaming armed around a living room and a kitchen.
>The other, “Lemon Pound Cake,” shows one of the officers, gun in hand, pausing briefly in Mr. Foreman’s kitchen by a cake inside a glass cloche. “It made the sheriff want to put down his gun and cut him a slice,” Mr. Foreman sings in the song.
Seems like the Streisand effect to me. Suing him over this calls attention to the inappropriateness of police raiding his house. I hadn't heard this story and now I took away from it some embarrassing stories about the cops.
"Mr. Foreman was not at home during the 2002 police raid, but a security camera system and his wife, using her cellphone, recorded the “faces and bodies” of the officers while they were on the property, according to the lawsuit"
"2002"
New York Times, everyone.
Props to afroman for his perfect demeanor/attitude during all this.
They're implying "An establishment calling itself a 'newspaper of record' can be expected to have high standards, such as correctly reporting dates, and I'll hold them to that"
If you can spot a typo in the first few seconds of reading a piece, so can the editor and sub-editor before it's published.
Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed.
I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."
The process these days is more like publish then do editorial review. See it on major outlets all the time - break the story as early as possible, get the eyeballs and ad revenue, then get it cleaned up for posterity.
Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”
They chose not to do so. And the courts are no help, because generally speaking, you can't sue the government unless there's a specific law allowing you to do so (sovereign immunity). The police as individuals are generally immune from civil suits unless they violated some clearly established right (qualified immunity).
Qualified immunity just protects the police, and other government officials personally. If there is grounds for a lawsuit then he could still sue the government that employs the police department.
I think in general, if it is a legit warrant, it is very difficult to win a lawsuit for damage. Though with that video, and how high profile this has been, he might be able to win something. though IANAL, and I'm just going off my gut.
The federal government and a most state governments in the US have laws that waive or partially waive sovereign immunity for tort claims against the government.
I didn't know about sovereign immunity, but I just looked it up and there are exceptions to it. I think this one in particular could fall under a civil rights violation.
People routinely get money from excessive force used by police officers, and I believe that does extend to property too.
Qualified immunity means it is almost impossible to sue the officers directly, which is why so many people have a problem with it. Not only do taxpayers have to pay for the actions of a bad police officer, the officer themself isn't held responsible for their actions.
On the other hand, you don't want officers afraid to engage with a dangerous situation because they might bankrupt their family if they do the wrong thing in the heat of the moment. It is a sticky situation, and before smartphones and body cameras there was no real way to know if an officer crossed the line. As technology improves, I expect there to be more personal accountability, while also allowing the officers enough leeway to do their jobs without hesitation.
Police departments are sued constantly. Most major police departments even have dedicated divisions set up just to assess and respond to lawsuits. Oftentimes by just knocking on the door and handing over a check.
Making up details of the incident doesn't help either. They didn't eat anything, a cop just did a double-take at the lemon pound cake, and Afroman wrote a song about how they wanted to eat it.
He is a seasoned professional at this. He was respected in the diss track game in his day, he definitely understands the boundaries of defamation. And what has long been known in rap in newspapers: even if you're right it's not worth it to be on the stand defending defamation. "It's average size your honor."
They’re not liable to repair damage incurred from a raid or any other action. If the fire department has to chop your door open with an axe to gain entry to your home, they don’t pay for that either, you do.
If the police execute a search warrant on your home and kill your pet or a person, guess who is responsible for cleaning up the blood and mess? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the police.
There's even a legal case where police took a backhoe to a building and tore one wall completely out instead of negotiating during a hostage situation. The homeowner was unable to get compensation for their destroyed home.
His mistake was stopping when the lawsuit failed. Anyone can rent a backhoe. People forget that there is also a court of public opinion you can appeal to.
They tell us over and over again that we should have no expectation of privacy or not being filmed in public. Well, IMO they should not have any expectation of privacy or not being filmed when on private property and conducting the work _that we pay for_. They work for us.
That is, in fact, what the law says and what the courts have agreed with multiple times.
That is not just your opinion, that is the opinion of multiple United States Court of Appeals circuits in many many cases, and by its declining to overturn these cases, that is also the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. The United States is a common law country, so really what that means is that your opinion is actually not an opinion at all; you have simply stated established law.
and I imagine that if the INVERSE of this case had come up, the police suing for defamation would have been protected by qualified immunity so no lawsuit would have been possible.
The police being able to leverage civil law against citizens to control their behavior in ways that citizens cannot leverage against cannot to comment on the abuse of power is entirely unacceptable no matter what our laws and judiciary chose to allow.
> They work for us.
Ooh sweet summer child.
Cynicism is very cooler-than-thou, but it's not because we don't know better.
It's because we do know how the system fails, and holding power accountable to those high aspirations is the only thing that pushes back the equilibrium.
well, to be fair, there are a higher-than-average number of business owners on here, so they really might work for them
Only insofar as those business interests align with the government's interests.
The police get paid by and do the bidding of the government. They work for the government.
While you can screech about the degree of overlap between government interests and big business interests, and it absolutely is something worth screeching about, acting as though they are one in the same is counterproductive to understanding either.
> In one of the music videos, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” surveillance footage shows officers swinging open a gate, kicking down a door, and roaming armed around a living room and a kitchen.
>The other, “Lemon Pound Cake,” shows one of the officers, gun in hand, pausing briefly in Mr. Foreman’s kitchen by a cake inside a glass cloche. “It made the sheriff want to put down his gun and cut him a slice,” Mr. Foreman sings in the song.
The man has a sense of humor.
Seems like the Streisand effect to me. Suing him over this calls attention to the inappropriateness of police raiding his house. I hadn't heard this story and now I took away from it some embarrassing stories about the cops.
He's also a savvy businessman, this will be great for his career
I highly recommend people watch video from the trial--specifically the officer testimonies. It's absurd this lawsuit was even fit for trial.
"Mr. Foreman was not at home during the 2002 police raid, but a security camera system and his wife, using her cellphone, recorded the “faces and bodies” of the officers while they were on the property, according to the lawsuit"
"2002" New York Times, everyone.
Props to afroman for his perfect demeanor/attitude during all this.
There used to be a Twitter account that pointed out typos like this—I think exclusively—in the NYT.
2022. I'm not sure phones recorded useful video in 2002.
Right. It’s a little hard to parse but they’re saying “The NYT has a typo”
And what he's implying. "The NYT has a typo, it's all garbage!"
They're implying "An establishment calling itself a 'newspaper of record' can be expected to have high standards, such as correctly reporting dates, and I'll hold them to that"
If you can spot a typo in the first few seconds of reading a piece, so can the editor and sub-editor before it's published.
Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed.
I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."
Newspapers used to have copyeditors for this kind of thing. I thought NYT still did.
Youd expect them to have a checklist too though.
The process these days is more like publish then do editorial review. See it on major outlets all the time - break the story as early as possible, get the eyeballs and ad revenue, then get it cleaned up for posterity.
Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”
Serious question: how come the police have not paid for the damage they caused?
They chose not to do so. And the courts are no help, because generally speaking, you can't sue the government unless there's a specific law allowing you to do so (sovereign immunity). The police as individuals are generally immune from civil suits unless they violated some clearly established right (qualified immunity).
Eh? This falls under tort law for damages caused by the government.
The laws that provide a right of action against the government generally don’t cover damages caused by police in the lawful exercise of their duties.
So yeah, sovereign immunity.
Serious answer: cops are not accountable for their behavior, in the vast majority of cases.
If the damaged party tries to sue the police for the damage they caused, the police can get the case instantly dismissed underqualified immunity.
Qualified immunity just protects the police, and other government officials personally. If there is grounds for a lawsuit then he could still sue the government that employs the police department.
I think in general, if it is a legit warrant, it is very difficult to win a lawsuit for damage. Though with that video, and how high profile this has been, he might be able to win something. though IANAL, and I'm just going off my gut.
The government has sovereign immunity which is why you usually have to sue the people involved rather than the government directly.
The federal government and a most state governments in the US have laws that waive or partially waive sovereign immunity for tort claims against the government.
This raid was in Ohio. Here's their immunity waiver: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2743.02
Here's a page that links to a PDF with a table given cites and details for all 50 states: https://www.mwl-law.com/resources/sovereign-immunity-tort-li...
I didn't know about sovereign immunity, but I just looked it up and there are exceptions to it. I think this one in particular could fall under a civil rights violation.
People routinely get money from excessive force used by police officers, and I believe that does extend to property too.
Qualified immunity means it is almost impossible to sue the officers directly, which is why so many people have a problem with it. Not only do taxpayers have to pay for the actions of a bad police officer, the officer themself isn't held responsible for their actions.
On the other hand, you don't want officers afraid to engage with a dangerous situation because they might bankrupt their family if they do the wrong thing in the heat of the moment. It is a sticky situation, and before smartphones and body cameras there was no real way to know if an officer crossed the line. As technology improves, I expect there to be more personal accountability, while also allowing the officers enough leeway to do their jobs without hesitation.
Police departments are sued constantly. Most major police departments even have dedicated divisions set up just to assess and respond to lawsuits. Oftentimes by just knocking on the door and handing over a check.
The government is sued all the time.
Stealing things out of a person's fridge and eating it is not covered under qualified immunity.
Making up details of the incident doesn't help either. They didn't eat anything, a cop just did a double-take at the lemon pound cake, and Afroman wrote a song about how they wanted to eat it.
um it probably is. Wasn’t there a case a few years ago where a dispensary was raided and the cops stole marijuana, and got away with it due to QI.
Qualified immunity.
which is double genius on afroman, because they forfeited qualified immunity to start this trial. now he can even sue further damages.
distrack as legal maneuver.
He is a seasoned professional at this. He was respected in the diss track game in his day, he definitely understands the boundaries of defamation. And what has long been known in rap in newspapers: even if you're right it's not worth it to be on the stand defending defamation. "It's average size your honor."
I'm going to keep this one... underqualified immunity :)
They’re not liable to repair damage incurred from a raid or any other action. If the fire department has to chop your door open with an axe to gain entry to your home, they don’t pay for that either, you do.
If the police execute a search warrant on your home and kill your pet or a person, guess who is responsible for cleaning up the blood and mess? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the police.
There's even a legal case where police took a backhoe to a building and tore one wall completely out instead of negotiating during a hostage situation. The homeowner was unable to get compensation for their destroyed home.
His mistake was stopping when the lawsuit failed. Anyone can rent a backhoe. People forget that there is also a court of public opinion you can appeal to.
Are you suggesting a killdozer v2? I'm not sure what you're implying.
https://archive.ph/sMpjA
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436950
this matches my experience exactly
Explain?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436950
This is the single funniest thing to happen in at least a decade.
You owe it to yourself to watch this testimony from the trial
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV_7xmAEfq0/
Apologies, I wish I had a less cancerous link