If you have attached a device to my vehicle without my consent, you've forfeited ownership. I have no idea how any rational person (or court, especially) could conclude it would be theft to remove the tracker. It's good to see some sanity.
However the article pointed out (and it's pretty reasonable honestly) that when the woman first found the device she didn't know what it was and was concerned it might be a bomb. Given that someone has attached a device to your car without informing you of the intent of that device I think it's perfectly fair to destroy the device - if someone asks for the device returned you can explain the situation and, as long as you didn't clearly know what the device was (i.e. have search history for that exact tracker device or have testimony from a mechanic or technician who advised you on what the device is) then I think it'd be extremely difficult for you to be found at any fault.
Car bombs are a thing that happens, they happen thankfully quite rarely but destroying a suspicious device is probably the best general course of action.
Edit to add: I think there's also no reason to believe that someone planting a tracking device on your vehicle is working with law enforcement - it could easily be a stalker or someone acting maliciously. This actually seems like really risky behavior for the cops if they ever want the device back - I'd assume the devices they actually get returned are by pure luck alone.
Unless... that person is a police officer, then you could be charged with and likely be convicted of assaulting an officer. Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people - that's partially for a good reason due to the line of work they're in - but some people do abuse it and leverage law enforcement privileges and equipment to abuse random folks. Like, for instance, planting a tracking device on your partner to see if they're cheating on you - probably illegal and IA will probably come down on that officer - but they're much more likely to get away with it scott free.
Well, you can be charged for anything, and criminal charges themselves do a lot of damage, but whether you get convicted is a completely different matter. That depends on the court; there have been cases of people shooting police who burst in unannounced, and having the charges dropped, or being acquitted.
I endorse this.
There are obviously some situations you would not want to allow for anybody but LEO, but I think those are rare. In all other interactions with the public, LEO should be accorded the exact same privileges as a civilian. It just drives the point home when you reverse that sentence and say civilians should have the same privileges as LEO.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-016-9261-3
You see, this is the wonder of due process. In a mostly-reasonable jurisdiction, police officers are required to, first and foremost and at the very least, identify themselves clearly as law-enforcement, and with that carries the implicit suggestion that "you need to cooperate and not fight back". No identification and they might as well have arrested you without reading you your Miranda rights.
> Police officers in America, and most other countries, need to adhere to a completely different and much more lax set of rules than most people
I wouldn't call it lax but I'd settle for slightly different. Of course, a lot can be said about abuses of this "privilege to be different", which is maybe why observers would say law-enforcement is held to a relaxed standard.
It is different but not lax because:
- ordinary citizens can't break down doors into private property but law-enforcement can if they have probable cause (Have you watched Breaking Bad?) or a search warrant. Good luck obtaining a search warrant as an ordinary citizen, if that's even possible.
- ordinary citizens are not ever expected to result to fisticuffs and if they do so, they would face fees or even jail. But law-enforcement can do so except there's gonna be a fuck ton of paper work afterwards and, should their reason for resorting to force be successfully challenged, face suspension or dismissal but hardly ever fees or jail time.
Of course the MOST IMPORTANT caveats here are (a) law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, even for reasonably-democratic territories and (b) this is HN playing r/legaladvice, which is fun but not as productive IMO.
I am speaking for the United States.
A police officer is treated as an expert witness in a courtroom. If it's just you and the police officer in that alley, the officer's word will be taken over yours. Officers have a strong incentive to lie about the incident since they will always be believed.
This was new to me and I'm not sure but I think I might have heard that it was because of some case in the 70ies or something.
I'm not arguing one way or the other whether escaping from prison should be criminalized. I'm just saying the stated argument is really bad.
Whether juries actually pay attention to this or not I cannot say.
I had the prosecuting lawyer explicitly ask us during jury selection if we would "take into account that police officers have training which [we] wouldn't have access to as a civilian." And repeated it during the trial. All without a peep from the judge. So YMMV on that.
On an unrelated note, the prosecuting lawyer then proceeded to systematically eliminate exclusively women and minorities from the jury, and specifically removed every woman of color. Which I'm sure was a total coincidence.
Yeah, it's not perfect. But you can't just say it's completely unnecessary without a fucking PHD thesis on the subject going into each and every one of the edge cases and explaining why it's not necessary.
We need proper checks and balances and accountability. Not to pretend we live in a fairy land.
Burden proof goes the other way. The police having ability to get physical with you without being charged with assault would seem to be critical to doing their job. Which is why they have that ability and citizens don't. You want to argue the widely accepted rules are wrong, sure, but the burden of proof is on you then.
I'm not talking about federal agents working on large cases, but the city and county police who often can't be bothered to show up in person to take reports of robberies or assault.
How effective are those officers at using GPS trackers, drones, MRAPs, and other extraordinary equipment to stop crime? If I had to hazard a Gus's it would be not at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police#Effect_on_cr...
Not that cops everywhere else are just dandy. But, as for one example, compare the use of firearms in the US by police with just about every other civilized country.
scenarios such as : 1] i see this thing on my car
2] a saw a sketchy dude messing around under my neighbours car
3] please pull over for secondary inspection before crossing the border
If cops put a tracker on someone's car they can expect the same response to a bird shit on the windscreen.
I knew someone who had done that in a small town. The batteries didn’t last long but it was a “fun” hacking experiment. Tracking was just a basic transmitter which transmitted a ping. The idea was to get a reasonable idea a cop car was “nearby”.
https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142032419/do-police-need-warr...
This gets kinda scary if the person you're tracking is a dealer working with a violent crime syndicate.
I disagree this should even factor in. If they have not presented you with a warrant making clear they installed it, you don't know who installed the device. Knowing what the device is != knowing who installed it, their intent, or where the installer got it from. Nor do I think that a savvy criminal removing a tracker should become grounds for searching browsing history for parallel construction purposes since I somehow doubt third party records are answered in yes/no format, and the phrasing of query strings could be rather broad, leading to a reasonable request of search activity between the dates of installation and when they felt they "smelled a rat". In which could be bundled other incriminating evidence to spawn off new ledes.
If actually telling the person you as a government agency installed it invalidates it as an investigative technique, maybe it shouldn't be being used in the first place. Police shouldn't have to resort to breaking basic decorum routinely in doing their job. It's just converged on that because the population under observation aren't necessarily well equipped or educated sufficiently to be savvy on this sort of thing, or to make enough of a stink. Law enforcement also relies on law abiding people to remain silent on these matters because "it'll never happen to me" when there is no guarantee you won't become persona non grata one day.
"Police say a lot of things and they're both trained and encouraged to lie in the execution of their normal duties."
Fair? Yes. It's 100% fair as far as I'm concerned.
But rational? If I thought I found a bomb, I'd be running as fast as I could from it, then once I was a hundred meters away at least, I'd call the bomb squad. Trying to destroy the bomb myself sounds like a momentously stupid idea for a number of reasons. Foremost being, what if this homemade bomb with potentially unstable explosives goes off in my face? Or what if it's remote controlled and the bombman pulls the trigger once I start messing with it? Or what if I successfully destroy the bomb myself.... what do I tell the cops and my neighbors? That I blew up a bomb but it wasn't my bomb? How many weeks would I spend in jail before my lawyer manages to convince everybody that I didn't make the bomb I blew up and for some reason I never thought to call the bomb squad? I think an unlucky man might end up in prison for many years if he did that.
In fairness, while it was in a garage, it was not on a car.
"We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777...
To me it would only be reasonable to suspect a bomb on one's car if one did not know that the police placed it there.
Why would you destroy something you think is possibly a car bomb or a detonator?
Wouldn’t the best general course of action be to call the police? Possibly unless you’re a meth dealer as pointed out in a sibling comment, of course.
For many people, the police are an actively antagonistic threat, not protectors of safety. In this very case, they used legal threats against her. Why would she trust them with her safety?
First off, the issue would probably get routed to the local police who take these kinds of calls, not the state police who planted it.
This would probably create some paperwork that would frame the event as a crime before it comes to light that the state police were behind the planting. Bring in a good lawyer and you might have a better shot in court over this nonsense.
Regardless, if you're not trained, probably best not to destroy a suspected bomb on your own unless you have no choice.
How is she to know that they were state vs local police, and whether they were working together.
Besides, it seems clear to me she only "didn't know if it was a bomb" at first, but at some point likely after taking to NAACP, she found out it was a tracker. So therefore at no point in time was she thinking she was disposing of a bomb. That's a fantasy.
(You call the bomb scenario a fantasy, but that is what this sub-conversation is really about and it's the scenario you were responding to up thread.)
Also I'm not sure destroying a device you suspect of being an explosive is recommended.
It's not clear which NAACP. The NAACP LDF (Legal Defense Foundation) certainly sounds to me like a good choice to call.
Also, if the police are doing something sketchy to one person, then it is probably not the only instance, and an organization like the LDF could pursue the broader issue.
By analogy, if a corporation steals $20 from you, it may not be worth personally crusading for it back, but if you tell the right person about it, they might file a class action.
Given that there was an active investigation against her, and that they had gotten a warrant, And that she knew to reach out to the NAACP, it’s pretty likely she was aware ahead of time that the cops might want to track her.
Sometimes when you’re reading statements by the “victim” in a one-sided article like this, you have to read between the lines. As you say, if she thought this was a car bomb, she probably would not have gone straight to the NAACP to ask them if it was a tracking device.
What they can do, of course, is find a judge who orders me to return it. Could be, though, that they have to answer a few embarrassing questions in the process.
Unless legislated law states otherwise, it is certainly the case at common law that they “failed to manifest their desire to exclude others” and forfeited ownership. This is the basis behind “possession is 9/10th the law”.
There's no reason to expect the law to be rational or objective. Why is it a felony when I steal from my employer, but a civil suit when they steal from me?
Because that's what the people who wrote the laws wanted. Applying the same reasoning to this case, I'd be shocked if the courts don't decide that the police have the legal right to reclaim their tracking device.
Are you stating your personal take on the issue, or what the laws and courts have decided?
It may be a touch naive of me but I'll tend to give the benefit of the doubt to identifying tags.
Of course, that doesn't guarantee that calling them on it will end well for you, but being in the right never really does.
I doubt so, at least with the special powers (and immunity) they have. That would be like saying that if they fly a drone into my property I could shoot it down and salvage its parts. I'd probably be jailed for destroying police property although it's their device that was actually trespassing. It's a complex matter, but with police involved in one side one should expect to lose anyway.
1: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/23/716248823/court-says-using-ch...
This is almost certainly yet another place where the law simply hasn't caught up to the technology available.
This is essentially the same idea - something was left on your car, potentially maliciously even.
They didn't consider that the device might have been lost, and the suggestion that it was stolen was never a good one. ("One used tracking device for sale. Contact owner...")
You are making a "if I own the wallet, I also own its contents" argument. It doesn't fly unfortunately, and for that matter has never flown. Possession isn't the same as ownership. This is even more so true if you have knowledge of the source of the contents. How else would we catch thieves if it were?
>Like ownership, the possession of anything is commonly regulated by country under property law. In all cases, to possess something, a person must have an intention to possess it.
Custody might be a more appropriate term to use against ownership.
You could have cause to sue them while also breaking the law for stealing their device; no one should trust your interpretation of the law, because it is wrong in every jurisdiction I’ve heard of it being tried.
Would stop tracker attempts, unauthorized tow trucks that don't make attempts to contact the owner first, and thieves alike.
Now I have to get sprayed with fart spray when a random guy touches a random car as I'm walking by?
All I get is the negative consequences of the decisions of strangers who do want cars.