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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/nyregion/undercover-officers-ask-addicts-to-buy-drugs-snaring-them-but-not-dealers.html?_r=0quote:Brian L., a 21-year-old heroin addict, was arrested after the police said he bought drugs for an undercover officer who approached him in a McDonald’s. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times I'm not against police stings generally, but this is just so hosed up and pointless. Really glad to see juries and judges aren't buying it and are acquitting these people.
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 22:34 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:36 |
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I wonder if the NYPD has one of those "the more you bust, the more likely you are to get a raise and/or a promotion" policies.
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 22:41 |
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There's absolutely some sort of problematic incentive system at play here encouraging these sorts of busts. Not sure if it's tied to promotions or funding or what, though. This idea of going after some random homeless person instead of the dealer he walks over to is just so absurd though.
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 22:44 |
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That's real slimey law enforcement and the worst way of trying to deal with the problem, especially not using it to find supply networks or catch dealers. That said, I don't see entrapment here, if anything I'd say these examples were down right predatory in finding perps that would fail entrapment standards. How does an addict argue they wouldn't normally buy drugs if not for the police intervention? peengers posted:I wonder if the NYPD has one of those "the more you bust, the more likely you are to get a raise and/or a promotion" policies. The prosecutors and higher brass certainly love being able to cite these sorts of inflated numbers to prove their tough on crime bona fides, so stings like this are helping advance some people.
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 23:09 |
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Coolness Averted posted:That's real slimey law enforcement and the worst way of trying to deal with the problem, especially not using it to find supply networks or catch dealers. It's entrapment in the sense that these people aren't (necessarily) normally dealers, even if they are users. They aren't charging them with drug posession. Also "“For him to put the money in my hands, as an addict, let me tell you what happens,” he said. “I like to think I could resist it, but I’m way beyond that. My experience has shown me that 1,000 times out of 1,000 times, I will be defeated.”"
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 23:11 |
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Xandu posted:It's entrapment in the sense that these people aren't (necessarily) normally dealers, even if they are users. They aren't charging them with drug posession. Also Oh I completely agree it's morally repugnant, and I wasn't trying to go for the pedantic " *ahem* technically your thread is misleading, it's not entrapment because..." I think law enforcement in this case is specifically doing their best to get away with skirting it through technicalities or their perps being too honest for their own good (and too poor for adequate legal protection). Saying "Well, yeah I did go buy this for him, but users do this all the time and here's why..." is a reasonable/person on the street way of explaining away the absurdity of these folks being 'dealers' but ends up being an admission of "yes I meet the legal definition of a drug dealer, and committed the crime you're accusing me of." I'm glad the two listed in the article had sensible juries, but as the article pointed out most of these cases don't ever make it to juries.
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# ? Apr 4, 2016 23:46 |
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i think the issue lies with the drug dealing charge would addicts of their level usually deal? no, they'd likely use their whole supply on themselves. so the entrapment comes from the police creating a situation that turns them into temporary "dealers' plus charging these people as dealers doesn't get rid of the real dealers, nor does it rehabilitate them in the least.
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 00:19 |
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Entrapment would be more concerned with what exactly the officers said to the defendants I would think.quote:Entrapment is a complete defense to a criminal charge, on the theory that "Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute." Jacobson v. United States, 503 U.S. 540, 548 (1992). A valid entrapment defense has two related elements: (1) government inducement of the crime, and (2) the defendant's lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. Mathews v. United States, 485 U.S. 58, 63 (1988). Of the two elements, predisposition is by far the more important. https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-645-entrapment-elements Condiv posted:i think the issue lies with the drug dealing charge I'm guessing this wouldn't work because addicts dealing part time to fuel their habit is a very common thing. It probably isn't technically entrapment, so good on the juries acquitting because the case is obvious bullshit instead.
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 01:59 |
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Reminds me of Miami Gardens:quote:Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years. There's an excellent this american life episode about this, they basically incentivized arrests and the department was so corrupt and useless that everyone did it. Their old police chief resigned over this, and the new police chief was arrested in a prostitution sting. Why did he solicit two prostitutes for a threesome? “The stress overwhelmed me, and I made a very bad decision to deal with that moment I’ve never experienced before.”
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 02:23 |
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peengers posted:I wonder if the NYPD has one of those "the more you bust, the more likely you are to get a raise and/or a promotion" policies. NYT posted:His lawyer, Sam Roberts of the Legal Aid Society, asked Detective David Guevara, an investigator working on the case, whether any officers of the nine-member field team on the case followed Brian L. to see where he bought the drugs. The answer was no. Uh ok genius who do you want to arrest for drug dealing, that big drug dealer with the pitbull and the shotgun or that emaciated homeless guy with seventy five cents and a bag full of hats? You're gonna go far on the force
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 02:36 |
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Why would you arrest the dealer in this situation if your goal is to arrest homeless people? You need the dealer. They probably used the same dealer every time and they were probably in on it.
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 05:37 |
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LorneReams posted:Why would you arrest the dealer in this situation if your goal is to arrest homeless people? You need the dealer. They probably used the same dealer every time and they were probably in on it. You joke, but I think this is one of the ways Bratton is technically complying with his promise to reduce broken window policing. The public would be angry about another few thousand arrests for petty misdemeanors like possession or loitering. So stings like this help push the stats on misdemeanors down and up the stats on felony drug dealers taken off the street, which the public is usually more sympathetic towards, plus you still get to 'clean up the streets.'
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# ? Apr 5, 2016 05:47 |
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The level of human scum the NYPD continually find new ways to sink too never ceases to amaze and anger me
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 06:52 |
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:Entrapment would be more concerned with what exactly the officers said to the defendants I would think. if they were dealing they wouldn't have needed to call a dealer in every one of these cases. also you can't presume they're dealing just because they're addicts (innocent till proven guilty). as for "what they said" there was that one undercover officer who claimed she was going through really nasty withdrawal. i think that counts on the verbal side of things, even if giving penniless addicts poo poo tons of money to buy drugs with doesn't for some weird reason. and I'm still iffy on how that's not entrapment. would it be entrapment if you offered money to a starving person to rob a house for you? i think yes, and a drug addiction can get so bad as to have the drugs be nearly as necessary to the addicts as food.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 07:02 |
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It isn't even a ton of money. The article quotes $10-$20 scores. I mean, that's gotta be pocket change to any actual dealer, not something you have to go hit up a supplier for.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 11:53 |
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It's remarkable how the US maintains the fiction of legal equality while having what are de facto parallel legal systems depending on how much money you have. If you're wealthy enough almost any charge is beatable, if your middle class you probably have a decent shot at beating charges but you'll have to dip into your pocket, and if you're poor then often you live in the equivalent of a third world kleptocracy, complete with a massively corrupt police force that treats you as a source of income and an archipeligo of (often privatized, since it's "Murica) gulags where you can look forward to stamping license plates or working in a call centre when you're not busy being raped or conscripted into one of the numerous and powerful prison gangs. It's like somebody created 21st century America by stacking the society from 'Gattaca' on top of a foundation made from Robocop and the Running Man.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 18:08 |
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Helsing posted:It's remarkable how the US maintains the fiction of legal equality while having what are de facto parallel legal systems depending on how much money you have. I struggle to think of a place where this isn't the case with how modern legal systems are established.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 18:18 |
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Xandu posted:There's absolutely some sort of problematic incentive system at play here encouraging these sorts of busts. Not sure if it's tied to promotions or funding or what, though. They play a lot of these drug sting systems on Cops too, and yeah it seems very much unfair to addicts and just a sick way for cops to pad their total.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 18:19 |
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The American legal system is not geared for preventing crime or punishing criminals. It's geared toward shoving as many people into prison as possible. It has successfully disenfranchised millions of people. In many places once you get in the system you never, ever get out; prisoners are deliberately set up to fail once released. Once you understand that the system makes a lot more sense.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 18:28 |
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Vermain posted:I struggle to think of a place where this isn't the case with how modern legal systems are established. Any justice system is easy to manipulate when you have money and going to prison will tend to suck anywhere in the world for most people but Americas penal system still stands out in terms of how awful and corrupt it is. For instance, every existing police force has some issues with corruption, but I don't think most first world police forces have been blatantly re-purposed into a money grab from the racialized underclass to quite the extent that many towns in America have done.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 19:00 |
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This sort of thing just seems so depressing and pointlessly cruel. Addicts need treatment, not punishment. The only thing separating me from people like those in that article is the fact that I have a supportive family and stable income stream with which to maintain my addiction* (which is arguably a bad thing, since it indefinitely prevents me from hitting the "rock bottom" that is usually necessary for addicts to quit). When I think of how physically and emotionally devastating my addiction is and how much worse it must be for poorer addicts like those in the article, it just seems insane to make their lives even shittier. *Adding further to this, the opioid I use is actually more expensive than, for example, heroin, but it's also legal. So I'm basically able to legally maintain my addiction due to having a stable income stream. Poorer addicts have no choice but to break the law to maintain their addictions. edit: As a side note, the idea of being arrested and going into withdrawal while in jail (where you have no medical aid or support) is probably one of the most terrible things I can imagine, yet it routinely happens. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Apr 6, 2016 |
# ? Apr 6, 2016 20:02 |
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quote:One juror said that what troubled the jury the most was that a nine-person narcotics squad — which included two undercover officers, several investigators and supporting officers — would bring a case against a single addict. I hope there's some kind of investigation on these guys' work habits, because I can't help but wonder if there's officers who are actually sitting at home jerking off while they're "supporting" this case.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 21:47 |
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teardrop posted:Uh ok genius who do you want to arrest for drug dealing, that big drug dealer with the pitbull and the shotgun or that emaciated homeless guy with seventy five cents and a bag full of hats? You're gonna go far on the force I think it depends upon the neighborhood the individuals are in, does it not? I am sure an officer in NYC would much rather arrest an individual in possession of PCP in a gentrifying neighborhood than they would organize an inter-agency taskforce to go after some mid-level addict/dealer in Rochester who sources from Syracuse drugs which originate in Toronto due to mislabeled shipping logs of chemicals which would appear to originate in Shandong. I've never heard of any in NYCPD getting promoted for involving Treasury in an investigation which could otherwise be handled via arresting an individual in a manner pleasing to Hizzonah's yuppy base. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I hope there's some kind of investigation on these guys' work habits, because I can't help but wonder if there's officers who are actually sitting at home jerking off while they're "supporting" this case. This is a narc squad, crack rear end. Why sit at home jerking it when ya got a legal sanction to utilize whores for investigative purposes?
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 23:02 |
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peengers posted:I wonder if the NYPD has one of those "the more you bust, the more likely you are to get a raise and/or a promotion" policies. It's called CompStat.
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# ? Apr 6, 2016 23:51 |
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Vermain posted:I struggle to think of a place where this isn't the case with how modern legal systems are established. Here in West Australia we used to have a crazy amount of corruption, poo poo I even had a cop confiscate my weed and then *sell it back to me* (with the provisio that if I didnt pay, I'd get charged), back in the 90s. But after the press started howling about it, and with the downfall of the state gov...ernment to the "WA INC" corruption scandle, they put in a corruption commission that really did a good job of clearing out a lot of the garbage..... ..Until we started hearing about the corruption commission itself being stacked with dodgy fucks on the pay. Good times. West Australia is a billionaires playground and the rest of us proles can get hosed, it seems. We're basically Dubai with white people.
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# ? Apr 7, 2016 12:02 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:36 |
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duck monster posted:Here in West Australia we used to have a crazy amount of corruption, poo poo I even had a cop confiscate my weed and then *sell it back to me* (with the provisio that if I didnt pay, I'd get charged), back in the 90s. But after the press started howling about it, and with the downfall of the state gov...ernment to the "WA INC" corruption scandle, they put in a corruption commission that really did a good job of clearing out a lot of the garbage..... Hey (I'm assuming) Perth buddy! I moved to a non-garbage state and can confirm that it's a great choice. The weed possession laws are way better and the police actually aren't complete tools. In short, get as far away from Barnett as you can.
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# ? Apr 7, 2016 14:50 |