Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the wall-scrawls dept

This week, the cops managed to spur both our top comments on the insightful side with two different stories. First up, it’s That One Guy responding to a commenter who accused Tim Cushing of hypocrisy by comparing an earlier call to not serve cops at restaurants with a new post about an ill-fated plan for amateur cops:

If some cops try to take Tim’s words to heart and strive to improve themselves, and some restaurant owners take his words to heart and refuse to serve cops, how the hell are things supposed to get any better?

From the comment section of that article, by the person who wrote it:

The couple of incidents doesn’t seriously mean cops shouldn’t be allowed to eat in restaurants. This little exercise in exaggeration is meant to demonstrate that officers of the law are not inherently honest and decent people, even if there are many among them that are. There’s no reason to give their word more credence than the average citizen’s.

As he noted the point wasn’t to demonize all cops and call them all liars, it was to point out that they do not deserve the automatic assumption of honesty that some people give them because they lie just like anyone else, something putting on a badge does not magically make go away.

As for the question, slowly and with a lot of hard work. Reputations are funny things, hard to build up, easy to destroy, but they can be built back up.

Making it very clear that the majority do not support what the ‘few bad apples’ do such that fellow law enforcement are the first to call them out and demand that they be held accountable for their actions would go a long way to improving their relationship with the public.

When a cop screws up they need to own it, even if it costs them. Whey they deliberately abuse their authority and/or power they need to be held responsible for that, and those around them with badges should be the first in line demanding accountability and punishments for those abuses, holding fellow officers(or law enforcement in general if you’r talking about judges and DA’s) to a higher standard rather than a lower one.

The article just yesterday serves as a great example of how not to improve police/public relations. It should not take a court to tell multiple officers that an invitation to one cop to rest their feet is an invitation for several of them to spend three hours searching a house. It should not require a state supreme court to tell officers(and state prosecutors) that constitutional rights are more than just speed-bumps, a minor inconvenience that can be ignored on a whim.

There are other ways that the relationship between police and the public could begin to be improved, but a lot of it’s on those with badges, and far too many seem entirely indifferent to improving or doing anything about the rot within their ranks. Until that changes things will continue to get worse.

In second place, it’s Anonymous Anonymous Coward looking at the story of cops who lost the use of evidence acquired during a medical emergency that they treated as a warrantless search opportunity, and noting that there’s more blame to go around:

The police are not the only culprits

“Arielle Turner was indicted by a grand jury for the death of her infant.”

“Over at the hospital, an examination did not turn up any signs of abuse or foul play. Investigators believed the infant’s death to be accidental.”

We all know that, if they want to, any DA could indict a ham sandwich (so to speak). But those two quotes above seem directly contradictory. If the investigators found the death accidental, they where the hell the the indictment come from.

It is not just the police officer who performed the search that committed misdeeds. The DA who got the indictment from the grand jury must have told some super duper whoppers.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from hij about the AT&T-linked group sending out ridiculous “your rates will go up” messages to oppose net neutrality:

The joke is on them, the rates were going to increase regardless.

Next, it’s an anonymous commenter on the emerging trend of suing internet platforms for bias:

Well, it is better for the ego to claim that you are being censored, that to accept that you views are unpopular.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Gary with a response to Mike’s post about the telco lobby talking points that were accidentally (presumably) sent to him:

Am I the only one here that sees this as actual proof that Mike is really shilling for the Telcos? He is even part of their inner circle!

In second place, it’s Ninja relating an apropos experience he just had while commenting on our post about how AI is not a silver bullet for content moderation:

Aaaaaand, ironically my comment filled with all those words got held for moderation. Laughing like a maniac here lmao

For editor’s choice on the funny side, first we remain on that post where an anonymous commenter called us up on our phrasing:

The word “bullet” has been flagged as inappropriate; our AI engine suggests “Silver Suppository” as an alternative.

And finally, it’s Thad with a mirror comment to the earlier editor’s choice about platform bias. That was the insightful version, this is the funny one:

“If somebody doesn’t take Pajamas Media as seriously as The New York Times, obviously there’s only one explanation: liberal bias!”

That’s all for this week, folks!