Guavanaut posted:

darkwasthenight posted:

Hail Cake Prince and eat the Monarchy, literally.

Oberleutnant posted:

The real weight of the criticism is laid at the state, and the state as class relation, rather than as a "thing". The behaviour of the police is dependent on the desire of the dominant minority class to protect itself against the majority. Change the class dynamic, and you're going to change the nature of the violence that it perpetrates.

Morally I can't support the police in the current state of class relation because of what it represents - despite the fact that yes I'm sure that sometimes it does objective good. Under a different mode of society? Who knows?

TheHoodedClaw posted:

Can I ask which bit of government is funding you? I've got PMs enabled I think.

Prince John posted:

Thanks. Where are all these cool snake pics coming from?!

Prince John posted:

Thanks. Where are all these cool snake pics coming from?!

Tesseraction posted:

It's the Gadsden Flag, famously touted by libertarians and those who look wistfully back to the slave-owning days of America's history.

TomViolence posted:

Interestingly, I think in the UK the right to silence is not a defence against self-incrimination. The whole "failing to mention something you later rely on in court" bit actually weighs heavily against you so whether you're arrested under terrorism charges or not it's very much in your interests to cooperate as fully as possible with the police or they could consider you to be lying by omission.

TomViolence posted:

it's very much in your interests to cooperate as fully as possible with the police or they could consider you to be lying by omission.

big scary monsters posted:

I've spoken with the police while being detained for a drug search after a sniffer dog apparently indicated on me

big scary monsters posted:

That seems like poor advice, the failing to mention clause only matters if things go to court. If the police are interviewing you that likely means they do not have the evidence to charge you yet, why would you speak to them and potentially give them that evidence by accident? Even if you have done nothing wrong you should not speak with them until you have a solicitor - their goal is to get you to say something they can use to charge and convict you, not to help you go home.

Oberleutnant posted:

I read something a while back that put forward the argument that sniffer dogs (for purposes of drug searches) are statistically as useful as random chance at detecting drugs, and are mostly picking up on the handler's body language, emotional state etc when they start getting interested in a person, and in that sense are just a pretext for stopping whomever the officers want stopped. I don't know what, if any, evidence this was based on, or how accurate it is at all. I just thought it was interesting.

Oberleutnant posted:

I read something a while back that put forward the argument that sniffer dogs (for purposes of drug searches) are statistically as useful as random chance at detecting drugs, and are mostly picking up on the handler's body language, emotional state etc when they start getting interested in a person, and in that sense are just a pretext for stopping whomever the officers want stopped. I don't know what, if any, evidence this was based on, or how accurate it is at all. I just thought it was interesting.

Trickjaw posted:

The only response when being interviewed by the police, at least in non terrorism situations, is 'No Comment'. Politicians don't use it for no reason.

Kaislioc posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4f_vi7yKuU

Prince John posted:

I have a friend who trains these dogs and can verify that they can detect drugs, at least in a training session anyway. That sounds like an interesting study though.

quote:

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.
For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

quote:

tests are often so poorly designed that it's impossible to say whether the dog is detecting drugs or reacting to its handler's cues. But even well-designed, double-blind tests grossly exaggerate a dog's ability to provide probable cause for searches in real-world conditions. As University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Richard E. Myers explains in a 2006 George Mason Law Review article, the basic problem is that drugs are always present in the testing situation but rarely present in people's cars. So even a dog that is very good at finding drugs in a "controlled testing environment" will generate a lot of false positives when sniffing randomly selected cars. In fact, Myers says, it is easy to imagine how even a well-trained drug-detecting dog could generate many more false positives than true positives.

Oberleutnant posted:

So even a dog that is very good at finding drugs in a "controlled testing environment" will generate a lot of false positives when sniffing randomly selected cars. In fact, Myers says, it is easy to imagine how even a well-trained drug-detecting dog could generate many more false positives than true positives.

Guavanaut posted:

Reminds me of that neural net computer sponsored by the military, where they fed it a ton of photos with and without hidden tanks in them, until it could tell them apart with 100% accuracy. Then when fed a new set it performed no better than chance. Turned out that the tank set were all taken on a cloudy day and the non-tank set were all taken on a day with clear skies, so they had the most expensive 'is it cloudy?' detector ever built.
I guess Google found it useful later with deep dream though.

Guavanaut posted:

Reminds me of that neural net computer sponsored by the military, where they fed it a ton of photos with and without hidden tanks in them, until it could tell them apart with 100% accuracy. Then when fed a new set it performed no better than chance. Turned out that the tank set were all taken on a cloudy day and the non-tank set were all taken on a day with clear skies, so they had the most expensive 'is it cloudy?' detector ever built.
I guess Google found it useful later with deep dream though.

Pissflaps posted:

I cant believe the BBC ditched the Met Office.

Pissflaps posted:

I cant believe the BBC ditched the Met Office.

Silly Hyena posted:

Actually both sides traded and owned slaves at the time, the British Empire didn't abolish slavery until 1833, fifty years after the war ended.

Silly Hyena posted:

It's based on a revolutionary flag from the American war of independence. The snake was a symbol of the states joining against the British Empire, made popular by Benjamin Franklin. For some reason modern libertarians co-opted it.


Actually both sides traded and owned slaves at the time, the British Empire didn't abolish slavery until 1833, fifty years after the war ended.

Guavanaut posted:

I think Kafkaesque is the best word for it.

Or some word for the godforsaken child of Kafka and Orwell.

XMNN posted:

"I do not consent" is actually pretty effective at making the police uninterested in matters as long as the other party is part of the government.

XMNN posted:

"I do not consent" is actually pretty effective at making the police uninterested in matters as long as the other party is part of the government.

quote:

Jersey care inquiry: Yacht club abuse claims 'hit dead end'

Graham Power said investigators had been unable to obtain the yacht club registers, which had logged those present at social gatherings

Investigations into claims that police socialised with suspected paedophiles at a Jersey yacht club "came to a dead end", a former police chief has said.

Graham Power was in charge when the police investigation into historical child abuse began in 2006.

He told Jersey's abuse inquiry that officers could not access the yacht club registers, which would have shown who was present at gatherings.

Mr Power was suspended in 2008 over his handling of the investigation.
'Out at sea'

He said there were reports that children were abused on boats.

"I was told that a group of police officers and senior officials, and people who were subsequently associated with paedophile activity, used to meet as a group at the yacht club at the same time and socialise together.

"The reports that things were happening out at sea all seemed to join up into a sort of set of circumstances that merits investigation."

He told the hearing that during an investigation into the abuse of a sea cadet, a suspect had text messages on his phone to a retired senior police officer asking for advice about the inquiry.
'Long-running conspiracy'

Mr Power retired in 2010, while suspended.

His suspension was described as unfair in the Napier Report, released in 2010, which he said exonerated him.

Mr Power said the meeting at which he was suspended by ministers lasted 35 minutes, and he was given an hour to decide whether he would resign.

He said: "It was clearly a craftily devised, long-running conspiracy between them."