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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

Nobody was hiding anything as far as I can see. The state epidemiologist asked her department to temporarily remove one data field from the public report while they verified some data. Then, they asked it to be re-enabled a few hours later.

From what I can tell, Rebekah's supervisor didn't mention the reason for removing the data, he just told her to remove it. She told him it was "the wrong call", but did it anyway. He then told her to add the data back a few hours later, which she did.

So, it looks like she got the wrong end of the stick about deleting data, and was then fired for insubordination. Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...

https://www.lsureveille.com/daily/crime-briefs-student-charg...

https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...

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If you want to dispute the facts go ahead, but don't bother with this character assassination BS.

Brian Burgess is a political operative, not a journalist.

The State of Florida has all of her email correspondence at work and after firing her for insubordination the best evidence they can offer from a person they allege is such a terrible human being is that she sent an email that said "that's a wrong call" and then complying with the request.

As far as I can tell Jones' work since her firing has been fine and that the Governor felt the need to use his platform smear her just bolsters her credibility, as does this absurd police action at her house.

Looks like you did more research than the original article.

Just a few mins of googling to try to dig up the facts.

> Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.

Please do not post off-topic and irrelevant information onto existing threads, you run the risk of derailing the current conversation.

Her criminal history has nothing to do with whether or not this specific warrant, raid, and overall government response was justified.

"battery against a police officer" obviously relates to the level of danger that a police officer would be expecting. If that happened before, it is more likely to happen again.

Two problems:

A) That is an extremely dangerous road to encourage law enforcement to go down. "Charged with" is not the same as a conviction, and resisting arrest is a broad category that can encompass a wide variety of behaviors. Police in most instances should judge danger based on the current information they have, based on who is actively presenting a threat -- not based on whether or not someone was charged with something in the past. I can go into more detail on that if you want, but... I don't really think it should be hard to figure out why that would be problematic.

B) Even ignoring the above point, your comment is exactly the kind of off-topic change I was warning about. This thread was started by someone claiming that Rebekah's whistleblowing was justified and that it was worth throwing financial aid her way because she was doing the right thing. It was followed by another commenter questioning why she deserved aid, and as evidence that she didn't, that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record. Now we're debating whether the police used excessive force and whether they should have been scared of her.

The thread is off topic. The point is, the police shouldn't have done a raid over a crime this minor in the first place. Rebekah's previous criminal record doesn't have anything to do with the severity of the crime that caused this raid. The conversation over how police should have acted during the raid is a distraction from the original point that this was not the kind of crime that warranted breaking down someone's door and pointing a gun at their family.

"battery against a police officer" in a completely separate case does not change that point. It's irrelevant information to what we're currently talking about.

>another commenter questioning why she deserved aid

No, that is incorrect. OP claimed she was a whistleblower, with no evidence. I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.

>that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record.

Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".

What do those prior charges against her have to do with whether or not she's a whistleblower in this specific case? Nothing.

> Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".

It is when it's irrelevant information tacked on just just to give an impression that her account of what happened here is untrustworthy. If you had left that sentence off and not mentioned her prior charges, would anything about the rest of your comment have needed to change? What were you trying to accomplish by bringing up unrelated prior charges other than to impugn her character?

> I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.

Eh... let's not go overboard here. You linked 2 relevant articles, one of which is largely sympathetic to Jones' account, and one of which is an opinion piece that devolves into the same personal attacks in your own comment.

Then to drive home the point of how important you thought her prior charges were, you linked a 3rd article that's only talking about those charges and nothing else.

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