Prince Harry Pines For Fictional, Pre-Social Media, Olden Days When Parents Had Full Control Over Their Children

Overhype

from the not-all-of-us-were-raised-in-a-palace dept

Over the last year especially, there’s been a lot of talk about kid safety online and the role (if any) of social media in all of that. It’s a complicated topic that requires nuance, not unproven claims of social media being the cause. Getting this wrong is likely to make kids’ lives worse, not better. Blaming social media is easy. Doing the actual work of figuring out where the real problems are and how to best respond to them is hard.

Unfortunately, there are many people out there who want to spend their time boosting their own reputations by claiming they’re helping kids, without being willing to put in the actual work.

It looks like we may need to add Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, to that list. Prince Harry has a bit of a history of cosplaying as an expert on internet speech, without the actual expertise to back it up. And the latest move strikes me as a very cynical and potentially dangerous approach. Harry and Meghan launched something called “The Parents Network,” which, in theory, could be a useful set of resources for parents grappling with the challenges of raising kids in a digital era.

For example, it could feature resources from actual experts like former Techdirt podcast guest, Devorah Heitner. She has written multiple books on how to better raise kids in a digital age. Her books mostly focus on better communication between parents and kids, and not treating the internet as something icky. This will only lead kids to try to hide their usage.

And perhaps, over time, Harry and Meghan’s effort will get there. The current website provides precious few details. But what it does include seems to suggest the effort is really focused on just demonizing social media. Prince Harry and Meghan gave a big interview about this on CBS News. In the interview, Harry drops a line that is so disconnected from reality that it should turn heads.

Prince Harry said that in the “olden days” parents always knew what their children were up to, as long as they were at home.

“At least they were safe, right?” he said.

“And now, they could be in the next door room on a tablet or on a phone, and can be going down these rabbit holes. And before you know it, within 24 hours, they could be taking their life.”

Except… what? No, in the olden days parents did not always know what their children were up to. Yes, perhaps if you were raised in Buckingham Palace, there was always some adult keeping tabs on you, but for most adults today, childhood included an awful lot of time when parents had no idea where you were.

When I was a kid, my parents would know I was at school during school hours, but from the moment school let out until dinner time, they had no idea where I was or what I was doing. It often involved hanging out at friends, or riding bikes far away, or lots of other things that they had no visibility into. Some of it was almost certainly not particularly safe.

Indeed, there was a big study last year in the Journal of Pediatrics that suggested one major cause for the rise in depression and anxiety among teens was not social media. Instead, it was the fact that adults feel the need to hover over their kids at every waking moment, taking away their ability to have spaces where they can just hang out and be kids, not under constant surveillance.

Furthermore, it may come as a surprise to Harry, but back in those days, sometimes kids (tragically) took their own lives in the days before the internet as well. I have mentioned it in the past, but in both high school and college, I had classmates who took their own lives. It was very sad and very tragic. But surveilling them wouldn’t have changed things. Getting them actual help and treating the actual problems might have.

It’s great that Prince Harry and Meghan want to help families facing trauma. Many useful things can be done. But, kicking it off with such a false claim that kids were magically “safe” in this fictional past doesn’t help. And could, quite likely, hurt.

Filed Under: depression, families, meghan markle, mental health, parents, parents network, prince harry, suicide

Looks Like The Judge Who OK’ed A Raid On A Small Town Paper Didn’t Read The Warrants Until AFTER She’d Signed Them

Legal Issues

from the lol-justice-system-you-so-crazy dept

I am not going to rehash this entire debacle again, but suffice to say a small town police department in Kansas — led by (the now-resigned) police chief Gideon Cody raided the offices of the Marion County Record (along with the home of its co-owners, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less than 48 hours after the raid of her home) to supposedly investigate a computer crime.

Journalists had (legally) obtained driving records of a local business owner. Chief Cody thought otherwise and appeared to be rather friendly with the business owner, who was seeking a liquor license but seemingly had a history of driving drunk. A whole bunch of bullshit began after the raid made national headlines, but TL;DR: there was no crime nor was there enough evidence of any suspected crime to justify an unambiguous assault on the First Amendment. (That Chief Cody was aware the paper was looking into his troubled past only makes things worse.)

As the fallout continues, everyone involved is seeking to exonerate themselves, ranging from the local prosecutor who claimed all of this happened behind his back (not true!) to the judge who handled the clearly deficient warrant applications, Laura Viar.

Caught in the fallout, Judge Viar was facing possible discipline for approving these search warrants. But she has managed to avoid being (at least professionally) tainted by here involvement. But her defense of her actions raises more questions than it answers, as Sherman Smith reports for the Kansas Reflector.

The magistrate who authorized last year’s police raid on the Marion County Record escaped discipline from a state panel by making claims that contradict statements in federal lawsuits about how the search warrants arrived in front of her and whether the police chief swore they were true before she signed them.

Magistrate Judge Laura Viar’s secret explanation, obtained by Kansas Reflector, adds a new layer of confusion and mystery to how law enforcement were able to carry out the search and seizure of journalists’ computers and cellphones without regard for state and federal laws that prohibit such police action. It also raises concerns about the low standards set for judges by the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct.

The Reflector’s reporting focuses on statements about who actually delivered the warrant requests to Judge Viar. County Attorney Joel Ensey has maintained he and his office were never involved. But emails obtained after this case blew up seem to say he sent one of his office managers to deliver them to the judge. On top of that, former police chief Gideon Cody says he emailed them to Ensey, who stated he printed them off without reading them.

That alone is a problem. A prosecutor should be reviewing warrants forwarded to them because that’s how you stop something like this from happening. This is dereliction of duty but I can see why some prosecutors might see it as something far more useful: plausible deniability. If you don’t read the affidavits, you can claim you weren’t aware your cop buddies were planning to start violating a whole bunch of rights.

According to Viar’s letter [PDF], she was approached by Judge Robson and an “unknown officer” with the warrant requests. Robson did not introduce this person to Judge Viar. Instead, the judge asked a couple of leading questions to the officer about the involvement of the KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) and exited the room.

Judge Viar asked the “unknown” officer if the warrants were time-sensitive since she had other things to deal with. The officer (introduced as the “chief of police”) answered in the affirmative, claiming investigators were waiting for him at the sheriff’s office. Viar’s letter states affirmatively that “Chief Cody did appear before me,” which contradicts her earlier statement.

Right past this point is where I think it gets really sketchy. Never mind the conflicting narratives about who brought the warrants and who may have seen them before they ended up in Judge Viar’s hands. The real problem here is how Judge Viar handled the warrants.

This is from Judge Viar’s statement — the one she used to help escape being disciplined for botching this essential part of her job.

I began looking over the paperwork when I was told [the officer] was going to be called back because his signatures were not authorized. He returned and swore that the facts in the applications were true and correct and that it was his signature on each application. I then signed the applications.

Fantastic. That’s an essential part of the equation. But it’s only part of it. The really important part of this process had yet to be accomplished. But that didn’t stop Judge Viar from signing the applications.

Here’s the next part of this narrative, in the judge’s own words:

Very quickly after Chief Cody left the office I began to review the applications.

Do you see the problem here? The warrants had already been signed. It was only after the judge approved the warrants that she finally decided to read them. And while some people might look at the narrative in Judge Viar’s letter and come to conclusion she read the affidavits prior to the officer’s return for the swearing and signing, they’re only lying to themselves about what happened here.

Why do we know that? Because Judge Viar can’t even definitively state whether or not the reading of the affidavits occurred prior to the officer’s return to her office. And that’s in the statement she made to defend herself against accusations she mishandled these warrants.

I do not recall if he returned immediately, as [sic], or after I had reviewed the warrants.

That’s the kind of fact that needs to be remembered. Chances are that if you can’t remember whether or not officers are still in your office while you read their affidavits, it’s because they’ve usually already exited with signed warrants in hand. At no point does Judge Viar state that she asked the officer (presumably Chief Cody) any questions about the applications. The only statements she makes in terms of verification was asking him to verify his signature and swear that the statements he made are true and correct.

But that’s the most important part of reviewing warrant applications: the review. Given the narrative provided by the judge herself, it appears that the standard operating procedure is to approve first and review later. And if Cody’s signature had already been notarized (which might have happened if the prosecutor had bothered to review the warrants before sending them to a judge), it’s not unreasonable to assume Judge Viar would never have bothered to read the underlying affidavits.

While I realize that 95% of law enforcement work is the same thing over and over, each warrant is limited time/place permission slip to violate the Constitution. For that reason alone, every warrant should be scrutinized prior to signature and the presenting officer should be there to answer any questions raised by their application. If more judges would take this part of the process seriously, we’d see a pretty steep decline in civil suits, suppression motions, and challenges raised by third-parties hosting other people’s information and communications. Just do your job as though your own rights depend on it. Because they do.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, gideon cody, journalism, kansas, laura viar, marion county
Companies: marion county record

Daily Deal: The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and more. It’s on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

EU Officials Seem Pretty Pissed Off At Thierry Breton For His Censorial Letter To Elon

Free Speech

from the eu's-censorship-czar dept

Yesterday, we wrote about EU Commissioner Thierry Breton’s preposterously stupid letter to Elon Musk, warning him that Elon had to make sure his Spaces conversation with Donald Trump did not include any “harmful content” or it might violate the DSA. He also demanded that Elon tell Eurocrats what ExTwitter was doing to make sure that no “harmful” speech from Trump could possibly reach Europeans’ brains.

It was very stupid.

Elon’s response — posting a meme telling Breton to “fuck yourself in the face” — while not exactly a masterclass in diplomatic communication, at least made his feelings on the matter abundantly clear. It also made the point that Breton appeared to be using the DSA in a manner that Europeans insisted the DSA would never enable: to order companies to censor content.

Since then, I’ve had (mostly) Europeans in the comments to my post and on Bluesky arguing something to the effect of the standard argument every time I point out the censorial nature of EU laws: “the EU doesn’t have a First Amendment, you stupid American, and we’re just trying to stop Elon from enabling more violence.”

This is not a particularly compelling response. I may be a stupid American, but I still think I’m allowed to discuss the actual impacts of laws that will be used to regulate speech. I’m quite aware that the EU has no First Amendment. All I’m pointing out is how that enables problematic and concerning censorship, such as what Breton sought to do this week.

Indeed, it appears that other EU officials agree that Breton went too far. The Financial Times covered the story by noting that other EU officials were wholly unaware that Breton was going to send that letter, and they sound displeased about it:

On Tuesday the European Commission denied that Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter.

“The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated or agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners],” it said.

An EU official, who asked not to be named, said: “Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking.”

Now, remember, EU Commissioners are not elected. After each EU election, each country gets a Commissioner who is in charge of something as picked through some sort of opaque process involving the European Council and the Commission-President-elect. The President-elect gets to submit a full slate of Commissioners, which the EU Parliament only gets a yes/no vote on (the entire slate, not individual Commissioners).

So now we have an unelected bureaucrat who was put in charge of a law that enables him to kick off investigations that could result in massive fines to (almost entirely) American companies, who appears to have total free rein to send threatening letters based on his own personal censorship desires.

It seems less than great.

In Politico, another unnamed EU official is even more direct about how bad this looks for Breton and the DSA.

Four separate EU officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Breton’s warning to Musk had surprised many within the Commission. The bloc’s enforcers were still investigating the platform for potential wrongdoing and the EU did not want to be seen as potentially interfering in the U.S. presidential election. 

“The EU is not in the business of electoral interference,” said one of those officials. “DSA implementation is too important to be misused by an attention-seeking politician in search of his next big job.”

So, it sure looks as though some others in the EU are similarly disturbed by Breton using the DSA as his own personal censorship tool. Perhaps, if the various Europeans want to insist that the DSA won’t be used for such censorship, they should fix things so that an “attention-seeking politician in search of his next big job” can’t abuse the law that way? The DSA needs safeguards to prevent abuse by overzealous regulators, or it risks enabling the very censorship many insisted it would prevent. Unless, of course, they want more EU officials being told to perform anatomically challenging acts.

Filed Under: censorship, donald trump, dsa, election interference, elon musk, eu commission, free speech, harmful content, thierry breton
Companies: twitter, x

AT&T Gets A Wrist Slap For Advertising A Satellite Calling Service That Doesn’t Exist

Overhype

from the just-makin'-stuff-up dept

AT&T’s never been much for worrying about the finer points of reality. This is, after all, a company that spent years lying to its users telling them that capped and throttled wireless service was “unlimited.” It’s also the same company, you’ll recall, that tried tricking customers into thinking 4G connectivity was actually 5G by simply… changing the icon on your phone.

Most recently, AT&T found itself in lukewarm water for lying about a satellite calling service that doesn’t exist. At least not yet. AT&T’s been running ads claiming that it now offers Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS), which as the name implies, lets you make calls when out of range of cellular towers by using low Earth orbit satellites.

The problem: while AT&T has struck a deal with AST SpaceMobile to hopefully offer such a service someday, the service doesn’t actually exist yet. This has apparently rankled AT&T competitors like T-Mobile, which filed complaints with the The BBB National Advertising Division (NAD). NAD, after several appeals, encouraged AT&T to stop running ads for a service that doesn’t exist:

“AT&T, which is also famous for renaming its 4G service “5GE,” reluctantly agreed to comply with the recommendation and released a new version of the satellite-calling commercial with more specific disclaimers.”

It will likely be many years before AT&T’s SCS service is actually available (commercial satellites for the service haven’t even launched yet and there’s no clear ETA when they will be), and NAD found AT&T didn’t bother to make that clear to anybody.

The problem: NAD is an industry self-regulatory regime intended to forestall any sort of actual regulatory action against companies that engage in false advertising. NAD rulings aren’t really binding, there’s no financial penalty, and usually by the time a complaint has wound its way through appeals process the ads have already been running for months and had their intended effect.

So every so often you’ll see NAD pop up to give a light wrist slap to a telecom for misleading people (like when Comcast tried to pretend its cable network was “10G,” or when Verizon overstated 5G availability), but it doesn’t mean a whole lot. Because the end goal isn’t actually trying to get telecoms to stop lying, the goal is to ensure they don’t see real government or legal accountability for said lies.

Filed Under: cellular, false advertising, lies, marketing, satellite, telecom, wireless
Companies: ast spacemobile, at&t

Pittsburgh Might Be The Latest Major City To Drop ShotSpotter After Years Of Underwhelming Results

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the very-much-not-as-advertised dept

Re-branding isn’t going to save ShotSpotter. While it would prefer to be called “SoundThinking,” its flagship product is still its acoustic detection tech — something the company claims reliably detects gunshots.

Whatever the preferred (and trademarked) nomenclature, the claims the company makes are rarely backed up by facts. Even when it works, it still kind of doesn’t. It scrambles officers to areas where shots may have been fired, only for officers to realize there’s little value in wandering around a neighborhood in search of a shell casing or two to justify their presence, much less the tech’s existence.

Even if we look past the efficiency and accuracy problems inherent in this tech, we’re unable to ignore the uncomfortable fact that this tech has largely been inflicted on low-income neighborhoods, subjecting minorities to yet another layer of always-on surveillance.

For a long time, municipalities just assumed the tech was useful. It generated reports of gunshots. Occasional arrests were made. Every once in a while, homicide cases were closed. But did any of this mean the tech actually contributed anything to the public safety bottom line?

Once these questions started being asked, the answers made it pretty clear cities were spending millions to accomplish nothing. The tech wasn’t creating more leads to close more cases. It wasn’t even all that great at detecting gunshots, generating false positives at an alarming rate.

It seems any time a city takes a close look at ShotSpotter, contract terminations tend to follow. Several cities — both major and minor — have decided it isn’t worth spending money on. They bought into the tech thinking it would help reduce gun violence and now that it hasn’t, they’re looking at other options.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the latest major city to consider dropping ShotSpotter, as Justin Vellucci reports for TribLive.

Over the past decade, Pittsburgh has sunk nearly $10 million into ShotSpotter, the most widely used gunshot-detection system in America. The controversial crime-fighting technology uses sound to quickly pinpoint gunfire, allowing police to be rapidly deployed to crime scenes.

Its makers claim it can help reduce gun violence and save lives.

But as the city stands on the cusp of expanding its ShotSpotter program and weighs renewing a contract with its parent company, California-based SoundThinking, questions have arisen about what exactly the technology is delivering and whether it’s worth the investment.

While a million a year may seem like a drop in a budget bucket for a city the size of Pittsburgh, it’s not exactly nothing. And there’s no reason to keep spending a million a year for something that doesn’t work, even if it’s only one of hundreds of millions being spent annually.

ShotSpotter has shifted its narrative in response to steady criticism of its negligible contribution to violent crime rates, preferring to focus on something else it imagines it does well: alerting first responders to gunshots. According to ShotSpotter’s execs, the greater utility of a vast network of acoustic sensors is decreasing response time to shootings, which means (theoretically) more lives (of shooting victims) are being saved.

Of course, there’s no data to back this up. The company itself can’t even seem to rustle up a spreadsheet of cherry-picked factoids to prove the tech saves lives. Unsurprisingly, cities reconsidering their relationship with SoundThinking are having trouble coming up with anything along these lines to justify continued spending.

Pittsburgh police don’t keep data on gunshot victim mortality rates from before ShotSpotter arrived in 2014, making it tough to link survival rates to ShotSpotter alerts.

And while officials attribute improved police response times to ShotSpotter, there is no evidence locally that the technology makes Pittsburgh safer. Four out of five ShotSpotter alerts in the city don’t even lead to a police report, a TribLive review has found.

A complete lack of data doesn’t prove anything one way or another, so the first paragraph can graciously be called a stalemate between ShotSpotter and its critics. The second paragraph, however, makes it clear the tech isn’t saving lives or contributing to public safety in any meaningful way. Do you know what happens when police come across a gunshot victim? They file a report. They do this even when their first encounter with the victim occurs in a hospital ER.

At best, officers are being “informed” by the tech that a shot may have been fired somewhere in the proximity of ShotSpotter’s mics. There’s almost zero chance these alerts are what any reasonable person would call “actionable intelligence.” The fog of war isn’t dispelled by this tech, either. As the TribLive report notes, the police chief himself doesn’t know where ShotSpotter’s detectors are located.

The debate continues in Pittsburgh. And somehow, despite any verifiable contribution to crime reduction or EMS response to gunshots, plenty of law enforcement officials and city leaders are bullish on the tech. SoundThinking’s PR team talks a pretty good game as well, capable of winning over fence-straddlers who consider reading a press release that has footnotes as the equivalent of cautious due diligence.

As for SoundThinking itself, it still has thousands of law enforcement customers — most of which have never bothered to ask these tough questions, much less institute any form of tracking that would provide some insight into the tech’s contribution (or lack thereof) to public safety.

The upside is that it’s clear ShotSpotter can’t outrun its own reputation, no matter how much spin it applies to each successive piece of bad news. It coasted on an unearned reputation for years. But now people are demanding answers. And it seems pretty clear the company simply doesn’t have any good ones.

Filed Under: ai, gunshot detection, pittsburgh, surveillance
Companies: shotspotter, soundthinking

Time Warner Discovery Merger’s Latest Victim: Cartoon Network’s Entire Web Presence

Culture

from the masterful-mismanagement dept

You might recall that AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was supposed to transform the telecom giant into a modern internet video advertising superpower. Instead, after a massive amount of debt and endless bumbling, AT&T wound up laying off more than 50,000 people, closing a bunch of popular brands (like Mad Magazine), and selling what was left to Discovery.

The executives at Discovery have proven no less bumbling, and after firing more people and ruining a bunch of additional services (like HBO), the company saw its stock tank last week after having to take a $9.1 billion write down on the value of its entire TV division.

Like other mindlessly merging media monstrosities completely out of ideas (Paramount/CBS is engaged in similar cannibalization), Warner Bros Discovery is now looking to miraculously cut costs to reduce massive debt created by its pointlessly doomed merger.

At Paramount, that meant the complete erasure of both Comedy Central’s online footprint and the entire MTV News journalism archive. At Warner Bros Discovery, that most recently meant the deletion of Cartoon Network’s entire online presence (without any warning, we should add):

“Warner Bros. Discovery this week pulled the entire contents of cartoonnetwork.com offline — redirecting visitors to a landing page on Max, its subscription-streaming service, encouraging fans to sign up to watch their favorite Cartoon Network shows. The shuttering of the site appears to have happened Thursday, Aug. 8.”

At the same time users are losing features and history, Max is slathering their products with new ads and restrictions, while endlessly raising prices on a streaming product that’s of lower quality than before the entire saga began.

These mergers were supposed to usher forth a wave of amazing synergies and create a new media juggernaut. Instead they’ve resulted in just endless annoyance and chaos. And the executives in charge of them, like fail upward Time Warner brunchlord David Zaslav, saw accountability in the form of massive compensation packages utterly untethered from any sort of actual competency.

These brunchlords are purely extractive; they don’t care about customers, employees, history, or much of anything else. After mismanaging their companies through the cord cutting revolution they’re looking for quick mergers, a short-lived stock boost, a tax break, and a fat payout before they’re off to the next company to do the same thing, financially incentivized to learn nothing from experience.

Their mismanagement is treated by the business press not as bumbling incompetence, but as some kind of cold but cleverly necessary mathematics. All the problems are somehow caused by ambiguous externalities. Whether pointless consolidation at the hands of raging incompetents is at the heart of the problem isn’t even something most in the business press feels its within their purview to contemplate.

Filed Under: brunchlord, cartoon network, comedy central, cord cutting, media, mtv, streaming, video
Companies: cartoon network, warner bros. discovery

Surprise: Judge Recuses Himself From Elon Musk’s GARM SLAPP Suit

Surprises

from the did-not-see-that-coming dept

Elon Musk’s legal team probably thought they had the perfect strategy: file a SLAPP suit in a court with a judge known for partisan rulings, including rulings benefiting Elon himself in the past. But they didn’t count on one thing – the judge recusing himself.

Last week, Elon sued GARM and the others, claiming that it was an antitrust violation for them to organize a boycott against putting ads on Twitter. There was no evidence presented of any such boycott. Instead, there was evidence that GARM had recommended that advertisers be careful about how it might look if their brand ads appeared next to awful content.

However, we had worried that Elon filed it in the Wichita Falls division of the Northern District of Texas federal courts, knowing it was guaranteed to be assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor. O’Connor is known as a “go-to judge” for all sorts of partisan pro-GOP nonsense. And, Elon already has a case in front of him with his SLAPP suit against Media Matters.

In that case, O’Connor refused to toss it out early (when it obviously should have been). Just recently, Media Matters had requested that ExTwitter have to file an amended statement of interested parties, to indicate that Tesla is an interested party, noting that Judge O’Connor appears to own a significant number of Tesla shares. ExTwitter has insisted that Tesla is unrelated to the case while Media Matters has responded by pointing out how ridiculous that is. Judge O’Connor has not yet ruled on that issue in that case.

However, this morning, he announced that he was recusing himself from this new case and told the clerk to reassign it to another judge.

It’s unclear why (and we may never know the official reason, though how he rules on the Media Matters request may give us some clue).

That said, GARM has already announced that it was shutting down. It’s also possible that the case still gets assigned to a different terrible judge in Texas. Or that the 5th Circuit does what it normally does on appeals and ignores basically all legal history.

But, for a brief moment, Judge O’Connor has done the right thing and recused himself from a case in which the media was already highlighting the very real appearance of bias.

Update: As a few people have pointed out, it appears that O’Connor owns some Unilever stock, and that’s one of the defendants in the case, which could explain things.

Filed Under: elon musk, garm, recusal, reed o'connor, slapp suits, texas
Companies: garm, twitter, wfa, world federation of advertisers, x

Prosecutors Announce Plan To Criminally Charge Police Chief Who Led Raid On Small Kansas Newspaper

Legal Issues

from the bake-him-away,-toys dept

[Extremely War Boys voice]: Oh, what a lovely mess!

The problem with a story like this is that a recap will run a couple thousand words before you even get into the new stuff. To quote another cult classic movie, “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody led the raid of the local newspaper (Marion County Record) after speaking to a business owner about some alleged “theft” of her personal info. The business owner was seeking a liquor license but a tipster had told the paper that this person also had a problematic DUI record of her own.

That business owner said some stuff about this at a city hall meeting. Somehow, Cody got involved. The paper decided to abandon the story — even after it had independently verified the tip via a third-party website providing access to driving records — because the tip had originated from the business owner’s estranged spouse.

This same paper had also been asking Gideon Cody about his decision to abandon his more high-profile and better-paying job in Kansas City to become the chief of small police force in a small town.

All this came to a head when Cody decided he was going to avenge his friend (the business owner has since shared private text messages between her and former police chief in which he not only told her about the planned raid, but also told her to delete any messages between the two after the raid was completed) and take care of the burr under his particular saddle.

The paper’s offices were raided, which included pretty much every bit of electronics (including journalists’ personal phones) seized by the Marion County PD. (For some reason, a deputy from the sheriff’s office and a local fire inspector were also involved in the raids.) So was the home of the co-owners of the paper, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer whose strenuous objection to the invasion of her home undoubtedly contributed to her death two days later.

Everyone involved in the raid sought to distance themselves from it once the paper and its journalists started complaining. The local prosecutor claimed he had never seen, much less given his blessing to the search warrants — something that was proven to be a lie shortly thereafter. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation also claimed it had no previous knowledge of the impending raids — something also shown to be untrue. The judge handling the warrants was not only a friend of the business owner central to the case but apparently had some impaired driving problems of her own.

The fallout continues. Lawsuits have been filed. (One settlement has already been obtained.) The people involved with this raid have been doing all they can to recede into the background. The judge who signed off on the warrants was investigated by the court system. And Gideon Cody himself rode off into the sunset shortly after this became national news, providing this as part of his resignation letter:

I do not want to defend my actions to the Council and I do not want for everyone to have to formally discuss any discipline.

Good news, Gideon! You won’t have to “defend your actions to the Council.” HOWEVER, you will need to defend your actions. This is the latest in the Marion County raid debacle, coming to us from Sherman Smith of the Kansas Reflector:

Special prosecutors plan to charge former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody with a low-level felony for his actions following the raid he led last year on the Marion County Record and the homes of the newspaper publisher and a councilwoman.

The full report [PDF] lists plenty of options for criminal charges, but according to investigators, they only have evidence to support a charge of “Obstruction of Judicial Process.” The rest of the findings clear Cody of other potential charges, as well the officers who accompanied him during the raids. The report was compiled by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

As to KBI’s input, the report (and recent interviews with KBI officials) makes it clear it was aware of Cody’s actions but did nothing to dissuade him from pursuing these searches. However, since it’s far more convenient to do so now that Cody is no longer a fellow law enforcement officer, KBI officials feel comfortable saying how uncomfortable Cody’s raid plans made them feel.

KBI special agent in charge Bethanie Popejoy told investigators that Cody called her two days after the raid while she was in church service. She stepped outside to take the call.

She said Cody told her: “This is a mess. I really wish you guys would take this over.”

“And I said, ‘Well, it’s a little f***in’ late for that now,” Popejoy said.

Although KBI agents had agreed to join Cody in the investigation before the raid, they had not yet reviewed evidence at the time of the raid. Popejoy said when she first read the search warrants several days after the raid, she was “shocked, angry, disappointed, (in) disbelief.”

Cody, faced with intense national scrutiny, asked the KBI to issue a public statement defending his character. Popejoy declined.

Somehow, I doubt this charge will stick. Despite the report being very critical of everything that happened, it also arrives at the conclusion that most of what happened was actually not unlawful. And that’s probably the most disappointing conclusion an investigation like this can reach — something that says it’s going to happen again because cops can violate rights without violating laws. And if they do these things at the same time, they’re more than likely going to be able to be immunized in civil lawsuits. But if Gideon Cody can’t escape these lawsuits because his rights violations were so obvious and egregious, it’s absolutely mind-boggling that the combined forces of prosecutors and two outside law enforcement came to the conclusion all of this was very legal, even if it was extreme inadvisable.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, gideon cody, journalism, kansas, marion, marion county pd, marion county record