| ▲ | delecti 11 hours ago |
| I suspect it was less about the legal merits and more about punishing (whether or not they won) through the lawsuit itself. |
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| ▲ | JoshTriplett 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Of course. Questioning their authority is a status challenge, and they're accustomed to having their status go unchallenged. Hence, punitive punishment. One of many aspects of improving law enforcement would be pointedly training out and averting any perception of being "above" people. "Public servant" is a phrase for a reason. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yea it’s as simple and stupid as that. This (black) peasant isn’t respecting our authority and higher status. If we let one slide then everyone is going to think we are equal to them. In their logic, they have to fight in court. | | |
| ▲ | SaltyBackendGuy 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a common archetype when people get challenged (escalation of commitment), they effectively double down. I don't necessarily think it was racially motivated (but also don't doubt that it could have been). | | |
| ▲ | mywittyname 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > don't necessarily think it was racially motivated Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend. And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared. If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable. | |
| ▲ | underlipton 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around. And there is some evidence that the institutions themselves recognize this (or they did, until we elected an openly-corrupt white supremacist to the highest office): https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/us-doj-res... |
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| ▲ | jumpman_miya 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | macNchz 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There’s a name for that, SLAPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ... Many states in the US have laws to try to limit them by making them easier to dismiss etc. |
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| ▲ | delecti 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, the only reason I'm not quite sure SLAPP is right is that he's a fairly prominent and well-off figure and they're a pretty small department. So I guess it's an attempted SLAPP suit, but they aimed too high (poor aim not being unfamiliar to cops). | | |
| ▲ | malfist 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Cops only know how to do one thing: escalate the situation. Even when it doesn't make sense too. Like suing afroman. Like shooting blindly through a house like they did when they killed Breonna Taylor. Like the time they shot Charles Kinsey who was laying on the ground with his hands in the air. Like the deadly game of Simon Says they like to play. Like any of the millions of examples where they shoot someone who was submitting and defenseless. | | |
| ▲ | ctoth 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Millions? That's... A very big number. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway902984 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Counting from the dawns of the various police forces in the country maybe? Impossible to know, but even then... Hyperbole illustrates the point pretty well though |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That was what I was thinking at first too, but if I was sitting on their side, my mind would still go for "Wait, if we sue him, won't this make the news and make things better for him?" immediately, rather than "Yeah, this will suck for him". I'm not sure how they thought this would be bad for him, legal costs? |
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| ▲ | JoshTriplett 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're assuming a rational, reasoned process, rather than an instinctive punishment of a perceived status challenge. When you observe someone acting in a way that seems obviously against their self-interest, it is always worth considering the possibility that there's some interest you don't understand...but it's also worth considering the possibility that they're doing a bad job of considering their own interests. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is an event that took course over 3 years! I could understand the initial actions, statements and whatnot from the department to maybe be instinctual and emotional reaction to events/messages, but during these 3 years, at least one of them must have had some still time to reflect on what they're doing. | | |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's very easy to double down and reinforce your own past thinking rather than re-examining it. It's also very easy to "play a role", even as consequences play out; "reasoning" like "I will do X, then they will do Y which I don't want", rather than stepping back and thinking "if I do X, Y is likely to happen, I don't want Y to happen, so what should I do differently". They assumed they were going to win, and thus enact punishment for questioning their authority. | | |
| ▲ | tehwebguy 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have already spent money in anticipation of a favorable judgement. Cops are largely immune from facing negative consequences so it was probably an incredible shock to lose. |
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| ▲ | evan_ 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars. |
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| ▲ | shadowgovt 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a key insight. Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted"). If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected. |
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| ▲ | mwigdahl 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "The process is the punishment" |
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| ▲ | johannes1234321 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | This may be true in many cases. In this case however the story currently is two times(!) on the front page of haackernews (which isn't a music celebrity gossip site), bringing a musician into spotlight who's career was far from its peak. Hardly any better Marketing campaign one could imagine. |
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| ▲ | throwaway27448 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Billed to the public, too. |
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