Police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom
npr.org
npr.org
It sounds like a tragic and suspicious situation, and what I'm most curious about (since this is HN) is whether the federal government will step in, and figure out what's going on.
Btw, from what I got by glancing past the comments in the original post, whoever runs this newspaper is a total rat. What started all this is the newspaper snitching on a self-employed woman who lost her driver's license 15 years ago, and telling the police she's still using it for her job. This doesn't excuse the raid, but god I hate petty small town people.
To quote you further, you claimed they were "snitching" and that "god i hate petty small town people".
Perhaps these could be more valid claims about some truly trivial squabble, but the woman in question has previously been driving while DUI (driving under the influence; usually alcohol in America, since you claim to be a foreigner and may have different legal terminology in your nation), severely endangering the lives of others as is well-established by decades of studies on the increased risks of accidents (especially lethal ones) by drivers who are intoxicated on alcohol.
Moreover, in America DUI laws are (in this writer's opinion) extremely relaxed. One minor DUI with nobody harmed absolutely does not stop you from getting a license -- the penalty for kansas is 30 days minimum and needing to use a special device to test one's breath's alcohol levels before starting their car.
Even if she got a lengthy suspension, which I haven't deeply researched into (though by your own admission, neither did you), she made the choice to endanger others' lives significantly and would have then had potentially up to 15 (or let's say 14, to presuppose a year of suspension) years to attempt to get a valid license, an inexpensive process.
Instead, she kept driving without a license, and with a proven history of making poor decisions where other peoples' safety and rights to life are involved. Might she also have lacked insurance? Then in the event she caused any crashes or accidents, the outcomes could be even harder upon the victim.
Now, some of these issues reflect deep systemic problems with American justice, law, poverty, education, and public transportation / city planning. However, this immediate article and situation is not something so simple or vulgar as "total rat(s)" or "snitching", and I'd even beg the question of if a situation is really "snitching" when it may be actually probing if the police are suddenly complict in ignoring a crime they might be happy to use against someone else once it suits them.
Likewise, I believe you're greatly lowering the quality of dialogue on hackernews by this sort of impulsive response. If I've gotten anything wrong, I'd be happy for you to specify, but what you've written only serves to confuse others about the truth. I may be wrong about such a developing story too, but please consider that I've attempted to broadly make my claims search-able or referencing specific parts of things you or the newspaper have said.
P.S. I'm well aware nobody (else) is likely to read this, but decided I'd spend 20 minutes writing on the subject in case of other readers like myself who tend to go over old hackernews comments looking for insights on events that may have been ignored by corporate or mainstream media reporting.
Or, TL;DR There appears to be nothing of substance to these claims, move along.
The Marion Record was in the process of investigating the Marion police chief. He used to work for the Kansas City (MO) PD. Allegedly, he was demoted for "sexual misconduct" before he quit and came to work for Marion.
This reveal comes in an interview of the Marion Record's publisher. It's an interesting read and he's an interesting guy. One of the old school reporters, in a very good way.
https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-the...
The other new development is the Kansas Bureau of Investigation revealed they were part of building the case against the newspaper. KBI didn't participate in the raid, but were otherwise working with the Marion police.
https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/13/kbi-director-on-mario...
> When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.
Not a lawyer and I know it takes quite a lot for a judge to be disciplined but that would seem to be something a judicial conduct board would want to look at.
https://apnews.com/article/marion-kansas-newspaper-raid-aca0...
[1] https://www.wypr.org/2023-01-23/whats-with-those-the-greates...
I assume you've read or watched "We Own This City"? I'd be curious about your take on it.
Side note but I remember when they first rolled out that Baltimore bench slogan... I vaguely remember some explanations that the previous slogan ("The City that Reads") was also rather "aspirational", given the illiteracy rate.
https://www.mcguirewoods.com/news-resources/publications/med...
The choice is in your hands to continue to attribute credibility to institutions that may no longer merit it.
They consider independent reporting (eg YouTubers) to be the main threat, thus why we don't really see them making national headlines out of their suppression and why they even go out of their way to exclude them from their definition of press.
They're saying that a YouTuber is most often not seen as a valid journalist in the eyes of the government despite Freedom of The Press being a supposed "unalienable right". Once they've been disclaimed as a journalist ("go out of their way to exclude them from their definition of press"), suddenly they're performing espionage if they report information that someone in the government didn't want to be revealed.
Furthermore, the stifling of not just Assange or Snowden no withstanding, there has also been direct vilification of people who stand up for the first Amendment; people seem to have glossed over that James Larkin (of Backpage infamy) who commited suicide while under extreme duress for his trail is actually a newpaper owner.
He had been committed to standing up to power in a litany of documented stories, and even got settlements from them to keep operations going, it's sad, but I don't think the US mainstream news is worth anything but a coaxed form of derision, fear and a perverse 'infotainment.'
Being from SoCal in the 90s I saw how the paprazzi made everything about celebrity a cult-like mania, and car chases, I still remember the OJ case being played where cartoons once stood; in the 2000s I saw it go to chasing on reality TV and socialites and just tuned out. It's also why I saw social media for what it was: it was a eye-ball grabbing solution to fill the vacumm in order to cash in on people's need to doomscrool and engage in pointless online fighting--most of us who grew up on the internet at the time had been in enough flamewars to know what this was.
Honestly, I wish I could say I was entirely immune to it by only following a few sources and journalists, but I did follow the riots during COVID and saw the Blueleaks thing unfold and saw this captures people's attention.
Elon destroying what little credibility he has since taking over Twitter/X and desperately holding on to his cult of personality the Market may have bestowed him by taking credit for his worker's efforts with reality TV like antics (celebrity fighting?) has been amusing but his comeupance raises a valid point: there is no trusted news source since its been so monetized.
I feel that because British disinformation and Soviet/Russian propaganda tactics have been so pervasive and effective with these mediums that no one really knows what is going on at all. And that may be intended.
I'm reminded about this clip from Newswipe of Bitter Lake [0] at least every 6 months, and seeing how more relevant it becomes with every passing year.
You have to prosecute and pursue justice after the crime/s, not before. Justice is rarely a fast event. It's identical to someone walking into a convenience store and robbing it. You can't literally stop that from happening, you have to have a justice system that will prosecute crime. There are of course no precogs yet (Minority Report [0]).
What happens next is far more important than that it happened.
> If this is allowed to pass without the people ordering the raid fired, I am not optimistic about what the future holds.
Given the scale of the US, that's overly dramatic for sure. All sorts of bad things - far worse than this - happen on a small level in the US across the states, that have practically no impact on the wider nation.
Where there is no consequence to the police departments go after the press who are investigating them?
I don’t know that we see that all the time! In fact, that’s why this story is news!
Like, I totally agree with you about qualified immunity and law enforcement abuses of power, but come on, you're using this story to make extremely tangential points.
This isn't an example of law enforcement attacks on the press going unpunished. I saw this on the Today show this morning. This is mainstream national news. The criminals who perpetrated this are no longer the beneficiaries of a system that is corruptly stacked in their favor, they are f'd. They will be speaking to the US DoJ, and soon, and the conversation will not go well.
For sure, when abuses of power don't get widespread attention, they can easily go unchecked. And that's bad. But this isn't that.
My claim is that there's less distance in the mind of the police between beating up a reporter for taking pictures of the police behaving badly, and raiding a newspaper for investigating reports of the police behaving badly.
OK, I'll bite. What was the punishment?
Do you think this is a story about something that happened last year? This happened on Friday and started receiving attention two days later, which was yesterday. This is the third day since this happened. It will take months to investigate this kind of thing, and the actual punishment, after that investigation and trials, will be years from now.
If you want to have a conversation about how quickly investigations happen, fine, but three days is a completely absurd expectation.
If this gets buried and nobody deigns to prosecute it, I'll happily pick up my pitch fork and join the rest of you, but until then, for goodness sake, have some patience.
If this gets buried and nobody deigns to prosecute it...
Is this one is the last straw, then?
To your second question, no, it's not a last straw situation. I've been outraged by specific things in the past, and I'm sure I will be again in the future. But I'm not outraged by this specific thing, in the present, because all signs point to these people being brought to justice in due time.
You said that the people involved were punished: This isn't an example of law enforcement attacks on the press going unpunished. You then walked back this comment when pressed: The punishment is not a "was", it is a "will be". I get it, though. Your original comment is not defensible.
all signs point to these people being brought to justice in due time
What signs? There's a history of cops doing this, getting caught and and the biggest reaction (I don't think this meets the level of "punishment") might be quietly moving them to another jurisdiction. I thought this was common knowledge, but I guess it needed to be spelled out. A lack of punishment (jail time, revocation of pension, whatever), is more or less codified as QI. Maybe the city gets sued and taxpayers have make a payout to the victim (these are civil cases). You seem to be implying that this case is different because the DOJ is involved. It's not. We know, as just one recent example, based on the DOJ consent decree in place in Minneapolis, and an ACLU lawsuit against the Minneapolis police department, that (among other things) the DOJ was aware of cops assaulting the press. There was a settlement that the city had to pay, but no one involved was brought up on criminal charges from this though. This is what the signs are pointing towards.
Where exactly do you see the words "were punished" in that quote from me, or in anything else I've written? It's not there...
Something "going unpunished" means it remains unpunished indefinitely. There are lots of examples of things happening in the past going unpunished. But this is a thing that is happening in the present, which may or may not go unpunished in the fullness of time. But not nearly enough time has passed to say either way.
The signs that justice is likely to be done here is that this created a national outrage, with the perpetrators having only local small town allies, which neither the US DOJ nor even, I suspect, the state of Kansas will find intimidating in the least.
Everything you're saying is totally true for things that don't get broad media attention. My thesis is that this case is different by dint of being featured in the NYTimes and on Good Morning America.
For instance, Derek Chauvin is in jail in very large part because he came to the attention of the Sauron's eye of the national media. This is like that, and it's why I think it's likely these people will face justice.
For instance, Derek Chauvin is in jail...
Ok, I'm glad at least one cop who murdered an innocent person is punished. Maybe cops can't get away with literal murder anymore if enough people demand justice. Now, to get back on topic and to reiterate what I had posted before: all the cops that assaulted all the protesters, and press covering the story, in the wake of George Floyd's murder got off without punishment, even with the DOJ's knowledge, pressure from protestors & a lot more media coverage than this story is getting. That is the status quo.
Pointing out the difference between things that happened in the past and things that are still developing in the present is not a "semantic game". I don't think anyone besides you is confused by what I'm saying here...
But your other point is a good one. You're right that my "media attention" thing is too narrow. I think another thing that matters is whether there is some broader political debate that they can latch onto. With respect to the protests in 2020, there was a lot of political disagreement about the protests themselves, which (unfortunately) made a lot of people sympathetic to those police officers.
But in this case, there is not any broad political disagreement about whether it's appropriate to intimidate local news outlets in order to cover up your corruption.
First you say it's really important to prosecute all crime because justice is about the response to crime.
Then you say it's silly to be worried that a bunch of "small crime" (furthermore, there's nothing to indicate in this case that this is a small crime) goes unpunished all the time.
Which one is it? Do we care about crime or don't we? I'd say it's actually the little crimes going unpunished that worry me the most... car theft, shoplifting, etc. These signal to participants that it's okay to behave in a way that is not in line with the stated laws of the land. Building this safe space for petty crime is far more dangerous than having a one-off corrupt asshole who committed a more "serious" crime run free on a legal technicality, because the safe-space normalizes bad behavior and desensitizes society to crime.
In the short term, there is and will be overreach by law enforcement and prosecution.
In the intermediate/long term, we should recognize these incidents and ensure redress is made and justice is brought.
Which seems a pretty reasonable position:
- People need flexibility to do their jobs
- We should have robust oversight to review actions taken
- We should consider irreversible actions extremely seriously (or prevent them outright)
Given that the KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) was in on it, and given that a Kansas district judge signed a search warrant in the absence of an affidavit (which I'm sure this judge was well-aware was needed, but it seems this judge simply didn't care about the rule of law), one can say that multiple organs of the Kansas state acted in cohort to violate the First Amendment.
OP wrote:
> If this is allowed to pass without the people ordering the raid fired, I am not optimistic about what the future holds
If the state of Kansas doesn't hold the people who did this to account (especially, at the very least by impeaching this judge), we absolutely need the federal government to step in, and hopefully both prosecute & imprison the individuals involved in this egregious rights violation. IANAL, but 18 U.S. Code § 242 "Deprivation of rights under color of law" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242) seems applicable here.
If both Kansas and especially the federal government fail to prosecute the hold the people who ordered this raid into account, I'm not particularly optimistic about the future of the U.S. either.
But you seem to be commenting as if the U.S. federal government has already failed to uphold this duty. But that makes no sense because this just happened. Now that this is widespread national news, there is very little chance that these criminals get to walk away from this. These people are all going down, whether on state or federal charges (or both). But it will take months or years, because that's how long it takes.
There is almost certainly a story here about how it requires widespread news attention to get something like this sorted out, but once there is widespread news attention, the jig is up.
While I'm sympathetic to your comment in isolation, do you think there is any chance that after the slow wheels of justice do turn, these violent thugs and their facilitators are actually going to end up in prison for armed assault, robbery, kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, etc? This is the breakdown in the rule of law that people are outraged about, regardless of the somewhat unreasonable desire that justice should happen quicker. If justice were merely slow but still dependable, people wouldn't be nearly as outraged.
Also if there were a consistent pattern of rogue law enforcement employees getting designated as having acted outside of their state-granted authority, prosecuted as regular criminals, and going to prison, this particular incident would have been less likely to happen in the first place. So given the larger context it's a bit specious to say we just need to give the situation time, when time mostly serves to make the widespread attention fade.
This is not a demonstration of the breakdown of the rule of law, until the law actually fails to act on it. And I think that's incredibly unlikely at this point. But maybe the justice system will indeed fail to act on this, and then we should have this conversation and you'll probably find I agree with you.
But it's impossible for the justice system to have acted on this yet.
It's good to be outraged; our outrage is why this will be acted upon, so we must maintain that. But it's, frankly, dumb, to jump to this "the entire system is broken because these people are still walking free after a non-zero number of days!". That's just not how it works!
And actually I'd say this substitution of different crimes is definitely part of the problem. Having a parallel set of laws that apply to government employees is still preserving this notion of a two class justice system where cops are immune from regular laws. If anything, the perps should be charged with both the various color of law framings for the damage to their institutions and for the straightforward crimes of their personal actions outside of their lawful employment duties.
Fine, you want to have a broader discussion, that's your prerogative. But it's just not true that the current facts of this case are evidence for anything going wrong in US society. That doesn't mean nothing is! I'm honestly not interested in having that broader nuanced discussion in this forum. But I am interested in pointing out nonsense when I see it, and using this case in its current state as evidence of any kind of break-down in the rule of law is just that: nonsense.
Edit to engage directly more:
This is not the same as a mob raiding a newspaper, because law enforcement is, for good reason, given the benefit of the doubt. Especially when they actually do involve the courts by getting a warrant. This makes it worse than a mob when they act corruptly, and especially when the courts also acted corruptly. It's worse, but in ways that make it slower to investigate. The criminality of a regular mob is clear, while the criminality of a law enforcement agency with the support of a judge is unclear. Whereas it would not be hasty to arrest all the members of the mob in a couple days, it would be hasty to arrest all the police officers and a judge prior to figuring out the full story, which takes time.
So no, the system has not failed if it takes more than a week to see arrests. It will likely take more like 6 months to a year. And yep, I would absolutely like complex investigations to go way faster, but it's not unusual or evidence of corruption when they take months or years, it's the normal state.
I think the root of the distrust is there are many other similar cases which seemingly go completely unpunished (eg Afroman). So the details being much worse here is causing proportionally more outrage, when the reality is that those details being more severe means we might actually end up seeing some semblance of justice for at least some of the perps on this one.
If you publish some awful stuff, other people are allowed to point out that you said awful stuff and there are consequences for that, and that's how it's supposed to work.
You're talking about the American First Amendment specifically, not freedom of the press generally. The World Press Freedom Index includes sociocultural context and safety; if journalists are being attacked by mobs of angry citizens that is obviously a problem for the freedom of the press. To assert otherwise is ludicrous.
And violation of those laws is a threat to the freedom of the press.
Let's consider a hypothetical but plausible example: A billionaire named Elon Bezos is tired of journalists exposing his illegal schemes so he hires the Pinkertons to stalk and harass journalists, dox them and post their personal information on 4chan with claims of those journalists working for the pizzagate illuminati, and threaten their friends and family with life ruination and murder. In this hypothetical everything done is illegal and none of it was done by the government; would you therefore earnestly conclude that none of it constitutes a threat to the freedom of the press? Ludicrous.
You need to stop conflating the First Amendment with freedom of the press. The First Amendment is one law that aims to protect the freedom of the press from one specific kind of threat; threats coming from the government. It does not preclude the existence of other kinds of threats to freedom of the press.
> That is a crime of harrassment and other "You're being an ass to someone" crimes. A private person cannot violate the freedom of the press
A private person can violate the freedom of the press using the crime of harassment! If a private person goes around murdering journalists they don't like, that's an attack on the freedom of the press. How can you possibly be so myopic as to not see this?
That's the important bit. Assuming that use of violence against journalists is illegal and the law is enforced, then that is freedom of the press. Similarly your right to own property is protected even if there are burglars out there.
If, due to publishing an article, everyone decides to stop buying the newspaper or a subscription to the newspaper, and to stop placing ads, then that's a form of retribution/negative consequences.
Freedom of the press does not mean that people must not exercise their right of free association.
If you believe in "Freedom to publish without retribution", you believe in "might makes right".
What are you on about? Honestly. Violence and violent intimidation are not free speech, if violence against journalists is coming from any party other than the government, how is that not a threat to free speech simply by virtue of it coming from parties other than the government? Can you answer that without going off on wild tangents?
Reminder that I responded to a claim that only governments can threaten the freedom of the press. Do I need to explain to that non-governments are capable of murder, or do you understand at least this much?
Which the government would never ruin the facade of freedom so they follow through at unofficial capacities
But good luck with a definition of freedom of the press that doesn't include when white mobs would break into black newspapers, break the presses, and burn the building down. Does freedom of the press give the government an obligation to prosecute, or nah?
Yes.
You can make "freedom to publish without retribution" possible only by qualifying the kind of publishing and/or the kind of retribution.
But I don't think that's what's happening here at all. I have seen this story all over the place in national news. And what I think is that the mere fact that any of us living nowhere near this little town are aware this happened means that the people responsible for it are in deep sh*t. I think they'll be made an example of. I think the state and federal justice systems will be racing each other to make an example of them.
And if I'm right about that, it's not an upsetting indictment of the system, it's an affirmation of its success.
It asks for "your" information to find the record, but based on the allowed uses you can definitely get records for other people. I would say a journalist accessing DUI records would fall under permitted use case M. That accessing this is identity theft is a farcical claim.
Pretending to _be_ someone, _stealing their identity_, is identity theft. Absolutely nothing in this story sounds like that, and it sounds like the warrant is entirely farcical.
"They're afraid. They're really afraid that the police power is unchecked, and that they can be punished like this."
In both cases he says that they are investigating allegations. In fact, at one point it is said, they turned over information to the police because they thought it might be related to a civil matter (somebody's divorce). They don't feel they have enough information to make the allegations public.
Something never change but the semantics, police are trying to find the leak, IMHO.
The cover-up is always a bigger story. Ask Nixon :)
> Newell said she believes the newspaper violated the law to get her personal information as it checked on the status of her driver’s license after a 2008 drunken driving conviction and other driving violations.
> The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it verified through public online records. It eventually decided to not run a story because it wasn’t sure the source who supplied it had obtained it legally. But the newspaper did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell confirmed that she’d had a DUI conviction and that she had continued to drive even after her license was suspended.
However, I'm not sure "verifying a rumor via public records" is what the various "using a computer to do crimes" laws are about, especially because my understanding of various public records and registry searches are precisely to allow the public to verify these kinds of rumors.
Reading between the lines, it seems that they were most interested in unmasking the identities of these anonymous sources and sending a message to the newspaper.
Just, Devil's Advocate.
Or, I guess, "Founder's Advocate"?
But isn't that what we're supposed to do here in the US?
I mean, you know, Constitutionally speaking?
[1] https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/11/police-stage-chilling...
[2] https://kiowacountypress.net/content/opinion-powerful-voices...
Presumably the restaurant owner accusing the newspaper editor of identity theft gives good cover for the police chief to get a warrant and search for anything else (ie information about investigations into himself). That does give a veneer of legality to the raid.
I would have agreed, if it hadn't been for the County Attorney (who according to their website is "the chief law enforcement officer in Marion County."[0]) putting his foot in his mouth, and the paper exposing the relationship between him and the restaurant owner. It makes it pretty clear what actually is going on here.
> A Record reporter later requested a copy of the probable cause affidavit necessary for issuance of the search warrant.
> District court, where such items are supposed to be filed, issued a signed statement saying no affidavit was on file.
> County attorney Joel Ensey, whose brother owns the hotel where Newell operates her restaurant, was asked for it but said he would not release it because it was “not a public document.”
---
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230215034526/https://www.mario...
I honestly can't see how anyone with a law degree would have even touched this situation under the same circumstances. Journalists? Preexisting business relationships that are documented and freely available to the public.
Jeez, at least hide stuff in holding companies or trusts or something. What were these guys doing?
Looking it up, the county only has a population of ~11.8k[0], and the town only has 1.9k residents[1]. Which is on the verge of "doesn't exist" usually for news.
Also editing the original comment, because apparently he's also their chief of police.[2]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_County,_Kansas
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion,_Kansas
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230215034526/https://www.mario...
> The County Attorney is the chief law enforcement officer in Marion County.
Most likely yes, and he isn't wrong to believe that. This is genuinely how small towns & rural areas function even still. The sheriff, judge, police chief, school principal, county commissioner, and the most significant business owners and landlords will all be part of the same segregation-era country club or masonic lodge or some other thing and they'll make decisions and ask favors together over there.
Usually the local newspaper owner would also be part of this clique, and I guess the county attorney misjudged the ramifications of that. But this sort of local corruption is rampant and the people doing it can count on the fact that it almost never gets picked up as a national news item.
My entirely unevidenced belief is that this happens _all the time_ and recent events are only notable because they didn't just go away. With local news in freefall if anything I imagine this is happening more and more.
I mean who is going to do anything about it? They are in charge of who gets indicted and who doesn’t.
> County attorney Joel Ensey, whose brother owns the hotel where Newell operates her restaurant
[1] https://peabodykansas.com/direct/restaurateur_accuses_paper_...
What was originally intended to be a show of intent, a brassy display of the sort of wheeling-and-dealing political life that has always existed in small rural towns has detonated with a spectacle not seen since the Beirut explosion. This is the sort of scandal that disbands police departments under consent-decree and sends your entire small town leadership from the city council up to the mayor out the door.
If the point was to ensure a coverup, you couldnt have done worse. constitutional transgressions like this have the ability to dissolve the Marion entirely.
[1] https://marionrecord.com/credit/subscription:MARION+COUNTY+R...
Is that wrong?
I am asking here about the actual interpretation of the law, not the "ideal world" scenario...
This is the best case I could find:
The police can and will do all kinds of illegal things, regardless of the law. It's up to the courts and DoJ, etc, to sort that out after the fact, there's not much anyone can do before it happens.
<Edit>
Need to explain reference.
There is a video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY
It kind of glorifies small town justice/vigilantism. Like, the rest of the country is falling apart, but the small town wouldn't let that happen (wink, wink).
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1188966935/jason-aldean-try-t...
But then the original post, story about small town sheriff raiding a newspaper kind of shows indications of small town corruption.
So the point is about the dichotomy of 'small towns' being pure and glorifying taking "American Justice" into their own hands, and also how they can corrupt those same values.
The original post is a counter story about how things can go wrong there too. You can have small town 'justice' also take the form of actions that go against American Values like freedom of speech.
Remember, hanging negros for looking at women is what would happen in a small town in america.
From the website it states the following.
"It is a snapshot of the media freedom situation based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists in each country and region."
Is there an different list to compare against?
@Kapura since your country is big: would it be better to compare each state individually?
Traumatizing a 98yo woman to death also doesn't help the police's image.
https://boingboing.net/2023/08/14/cops-raided-a-smalltown-ne...
So will the Stasis be charged for manslaughter? Oh right this government is totally corrupt.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/does-the-fbi-investigate-graf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbs_Act
Really goes to show you how wide interstate commerce clause goes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/13/another-terror-arrest-an...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a47390/alabama-isis-pe...
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/the-state/fbi-frames-menta...
https://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/19/how_the_fbi_created_a...
The police officers, individually can have qualified immunity. The governments that employ them do not.
What a good system.
The only reason to favor the insurance scheme over, you know, actual justice, is if you stand to profit from it.
Pointing out hypocrisy is giving "them control over you"? TFA is posted on npr.org.