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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

NYC, SF, and other big cities behave this way, but most of the rest of the country doesn't.

What are you talking about? Small cities are just as rife with corruption. The nationwide "cash for kids" scandal occurred in a small city in Philadelphia. Pasco County, whose largest city is less than 20,000 in populace, literally collected lists of children's names and families for extra surveillance under the assumption they would be future criminals regardless of actual criminal history. Sundown Towns, a notion where hate crimes are effectively legal after dark, were enforced by local law enforcement (i.e. the law enforcement were lynching black people).

There's no reason not to believe that law enforcement everywhere can and does turn dangerous to the local population without stringent education, repercussions for bad behavior, and transparency.

Local law enforcement branches can be very corrupt, but don't have the resources to run a surveillance/police state like this.

Police state doesn't mean surveillance

In a small community where everyone knows everyone you don't need equipment to run a surveillance state.

What about medium communities? Tech is very scalable, federal antiterror funds are significant, and surveillance is a profit center for police forces. Many medium police forces fund the majority of their budget through fines and fees.

Again: I don't think you're accurate here. The Pasco County case kept heavy surveillance of children by trawling every school in the county and systemically categorizing every child in the county by GPA, Attendance, credit count, etc. to identify which children to put under heavy specific surveillance (e.g. showing up dozens of times at family members workplaces unprompted and with no suspicion of crime) effectively harassing entire whole families out of the county.

I would 100% consider screening every child to identify future criminals and then cracking down on their families, including unprompted visits to workplaces dozens of times, to be police state stuff.

Small town budgets don’t stop pigs from using surveillance tech, it’s just with more budget constraint

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/27/961103187/surveillance-and-lo... Etc

Most? Corrupt county sheriffs are a tale as old as time. I don't know why people try to give a pass to non-big city policing with a brush off like this.

Small town police departments are worse. They just don't get all the press.

They also don't have the same level of power as the NYPD, which is a big difference.

I doubt that. They do have higher levels of relative power within their tight-knit communities. And for the most part, their instances of corruption would be investigated much less often, simply because there's no one there to investigate them.

Small town cops would literally get shot if they behaved the way NYPD officers behave towards citizens. Their accrual of power depends on being nice to the 30,000 people in the town. In turn, they get away with a lot of bad stuff.

The NYPD also needs to be nice to about 30,000 people to accrue power too, but that is wielded against a city of 40 million, with industrial scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30012544

> Their accrual of power depends on being nice to the 30,000 people in the town

No it doesn't. Small town cops get their power from their lack of having anything to do and the blind support of the community.

The small town I grew up in had a cop murder four people because he broke chase policy and even left his jurisdiction. The town newspaper wrote a weeks worth of articles talking about what a great guy he was and how all the youths in the town loved him.

Don't piss off a small town cop. They have literally nothing to do and can/will pull you over every single time they see you.

Edit* I have to edit this due to this forums anti-discussion features

Sorry, most police departments have rules about how far/fast you can chase someone in a vehicle who is fleeing. They have these in place so cowboy cops don't engage in dangerous behavior for low value.

This cowboy pulled into a cul-de-sac and some kids who had some weed on them got spooked a pulled out. He started to chase them, it turned into a high-speed chase on rural roads. They flew through a stop sign and t-boned a car with four people inside of it. Killed them all. Over some weed.

That's why the policies exist in the first place, he violated it, and four people paid the price.

I suspect that the difference in views is at least partially related to location - pclmulqdq sound's like something that I've heard from people in the Appalachians before, while your experience very much matches what I've observed in small town TX.

No actual data to back this suspicion of course, it's just anecdotal based on what I've seen and heard. Would be interested in data if anyone can provide it.

What's Chase policy? Is it about the bank, Chase? (I'm in Europe and don't know much)

They're talking about the policy for a car "chase". They edited their post to explain how the policy was broken.

Thanks for explaining, you and cmh89

One of the local cops around here got the Dick Cheney special at about "across the room" range a couple years back.

Of course the guy that shot him got railroaded but they never did tell the public what he and the guy with them were doing on that guy's property two towns out of their jurisdiction without a warrant...

I can see why the cop was feeling cockey though. This state has just about the lowest rate of firearms ownership in the country. They're not used to getting shot back at.

Nope. Look at the "Ending the Criminalization of Poverty" section of https://civilrightscorps.org/our-work/. It's full of successful lawsuits against small town police departments that turned around 40% of the population into a cash cow they ruthlessly exploited for unconstitutional fines and fees.

If anyone shot the cops the entire system would rush resources in and teach them a lesson. This is why the idea the second amendment protects against tyranny is silly.

Edit: s/unconditional/unconstitutional

I have to give it to you, you're sticking to your preconceived notions. However, that's not a good trait with the preponderance of evidence against your notion. Maybe you're not from a smaller community to be able to understand how much control someone can actually have. Whether it is the local law enforcement, a coach, or a minister, history is full of examples where smaller communities have been kowtowed to those in positions of authority. To me, it's even easier as the smaller community doesn't have the numbers to support each other to fight against the oppressor. There's a reason there are so so many 80s films where the out of town tough guy comes in to rescue the local community.

It very much depends on which citizens.

I have a friend who lives in Republic, WA - if you're not from hereabouts, you might have heard about that place from national news in the context of Loren Culp. She's an old leftie from the bygone era (used to be active in anti-war movement during Vietnam etc) and her politics are not exactly a secret there. At some point, one of her neighbors placed signs on their property saying things like "liberals and communists not welcome", "get out while you can" etc, angled specifically towards her driveway. The local cops - then still under Culp - not only didn't see any problem with that, but they actually told her it's good neighborly advice.

In absolute terms, sure. But in relative terms, I'm pretty sure a small town with a thoroughly corrupt police force is worse off than NYC.

Do you have any sources on that claim?

Police in the rest of the country behaves in worse ways, it just that they don't usually get put under a microscope unless they kill a sufficiently photogenic person.

The system of checks and balances between police and the people they are supposed to be accountable to is completely broken.

(Even if by some miracle, you do manage to hold a small-town cop accountable for something he did, he can make it his life's goal to personally make yours a living hell. At least in a big city, you're not going to be driving past any particular cop, every day, on your way to work.)

Did you miss the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina? Might want to review that the murderer's family was in charge of basically the entire justice system in a wide swath of that state. For the last 100 years.

Where is your evidence for that?

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