Hacker News Reader

You do know that millions of younger people (especially these days now that its more socially acceptable and popular) have tattoos of all kinds without being criminals?

The latent authoritarian tendencies of many HN comments are one thing, but blatant, blanket fascism like the above is especially amusing. "Perfectly legal" isn't always the best defense of shitty proposals.

View on HN

It's easy to point a finger at "blatant/blanket fascism" from an ivory tower, but ask yourself, would you feel differently if you were an impoverished person trying to raise a family and live a clean life in one of these areas?

You probably wouldn't, because with laws like those proposed above, it's very likely that your family members in that neighborhood, despite being innocent of any specific act, would be dragnet arrested and hauled off to some shit hole county/city jail because they went for a coke and chips at 3 am but had tattoos and "looked suspicious". I live in a place where the police get license to do exactly these sorts of things with little fear of repercussions, all in the name of "fighting delinquency". The inevitable result has been a ton of corruption and awfully unjust abuses of (mostly) kids doing nothing wrong. The real crime rate doesn't seem to change much despite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com