Cop Explains Why He Used License Plate Reader to Stalk Woman

NoDodgeQuestion

Can a native English speaker explain what "I saw a shiny thing" means?

avgDev

Just unacceptable all around. I've studied criminal justice before CS, and after getting to know cops I decided it isn't for me. The culture is awful. It is like high school, a lot of drama, sleeping around, many divorces, abuse of power and just screwed up mentality. What makes this story worse is this for me: "The detective investigating Roman told the man “you’ll get past this bro” during his arrest, and later told the victim that he was "remorseful" and urged her not to post about the incident on social media, according to body camera footage obtained by 404 Media." The detective urged the victim not post about it.....both should be stripped of badges immediately and never get certified again.

quickthrowman

If he didn’t say “Because I wanted to have sex with her,” he is lying. He wanted to have sex with her so he stalked her. I bet this is several orders of magnitude more common than hat is reported among police with access to databases.

cucumber3732842

Cops abuse every system that's given to them, to varying extents. Whining about lack of access controls and rogue (i.e. not using to do their job properly) cops is implicitly saying that this system could/would/should exist if it has "proper" access controls, whatever that means. It's like seeing a slave labor gulag and saying that the prisoners need better recreation ad more frequent laundry. To say these little things like access controlled need to be fixed is advocating for turd polishing. Even with proper access controls the purpose of these systems is to create misery at the hands of the state. The turd is still a turd.

bko

I recently listened to the Flock CEO on All In podcast, and he mentioned an ironic thing about Flock and it's audit trail is that it serves as a honeypot to root out bad police. Flock basically knows what a malicious request looks like. The simple example he gives is someone pinging the same license plate every day without putting it on a watchlist, because the officer doesn't want others to know. They started rolling out auto-detection of bad-faith queries and flagging those to supervisors. If you figure that some percentage of cops are dirty, a simple easily detectable honeypot is extremely effective in identifying them and firing them. I guess the hard part here is actually holding the cops that abuse the system accountable but that's also likely solvable. It's a huge liability for the police force. Usually the ones that are protecting dirty cops are the police unions, but that's a whole different conversation It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader. It doesn't record video or do any facial recognition. And storage typically gets deleted between 1 and 7 days and is up to the precent to set. https://singjupost.com/transcript-all-in-interview-with-floc...

lisp2240

In the 2000s I knew a guy who was transitioning to software development after working in HR at a large American police department. He told me you couldn't become a cop unless you had a mental illness. They psychologically screen candidates to filter out people who have too much empathy. They would reject you if you said you had a close relationship with your mother, for example. They wanted people with aggressive tendencies. They loved it when someone had a superhero tattoo or had a parent die when they were a child. People always comment that we need to do more screening before people become cops, do more training. The screening and the training are the problem.