This is much better than beatings and bullets:
Nursery rhymes set to music are deeply uncool. Just ask the bottle-throwing teenagers on the Twinbrook estate on outskirts of west Belfast. Ice cream music was played to them as they misbehaved and it stopped them.
The rest of the article talks about how they were trying to solve the issue with humor and not violence, and yet these police heroes instead got scolded by their command. Not only was this awesome, there are many other examples where a non-violent solution was effective.
Further down in the article is an example where a Los Angeles gang was removed from an area by renaming the street "Gay Street" and "Pansy Square". A commenter mentions that a New York bus terminal was cleaned up by playing classical music instead of rock. And of course there's the Arizona sheriff who found that making prisoners wear pink underwear made them less likely to fight each other.
Tags: Doing it Right, Police, Psychology
Whether or not the officer in question really did use excessive force, the main point here is that the things you write about online can come back to haunt you in the most unexpected ways.
Officer Ettienne said he is now being careful to mask his identity on the Web and that he has curbed his tongue because of the acquittal. “I feel it’s partially my fault, he said. It paints a picture of a person who could be overly aggressive. You put that together, it’s reasonable doubt in anybody’s mind.”
Even your “private” Facebook or Myspace account isn’t so private under the force of a subpoena.
Tags: Facebook, Police, SNS
Schneier covers two videos explaining why it’s a bad idea to say anything to police when arrested or investigated.
The first video is a law school professor explaining why he’s proud to say he will never talk to a police officer under any circumstances. Here are some highlights:
- There are tens of thousands of federal crimes. Many of which are so broad, you could be convicted under completely bogus circumstances.
- Example: If the IRS just wants to “Ask you a few questions” you say no unless they grant you immunity
- There is NO way it can help you. But even if you tell the absolute truth and are totally innocent, there are many ways it can hurt you.
The neat thing is that he gave up half his time to an expert law-enforcement interviewer. The second video is of that expert interviewer explaining some of the tips and tricks he uses to get people to talk. Highlights include:
- Any cop can follow you for a time and find a legitimate violation to pull you over for
- He’ll come into the room with a stack of papers with a videotape on top (so they think there’s a video) and just start doing paperwork. Because people hate silence, eventually the suspect will start talking
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He brings in a tape recorder and eventually says, “I want to talk to you off the record” and he turns it off. The thing is there’s no such thing as “off the record” and every word in an interrogation room is recorded.
- While you may technically be innocent until proven guilty, a jury assumes that if you’re sitting next to a defense attorney, you have a reason to be there.
- If you didn’t know already, police are allowed to lie in interviews
The last thing he stressed which seemed supported by the rest of his talk was that he never tries to send an innocent person to jail. Which so long as the interviewer your talking to has that same viewpoint is very comforting. Since you can’t know their intentions, I think it’s safer to take the first guy’s advice and not talk to the police without representation.
Tags: If You Only Knew, Police
Here's a new twist on how having a tracking GPS in your car can be a GOOD thing. A teenager who was pulled over for speeding was able to prove that he was following the speed limit using the tracking data from his GPS unit.
(H/T to slashdot for the link)
Tags: Police, Tickets and Fines
Of course, this has been suspected/known for a long time, but Ars Technica covers the story of cities that seem to be changing the timing of traffic lights to ever shorter durations in order to increase revenues from red light cameras.
Tags: If You Only Knew, Police, Tickets and Fines
This story of a couple who shined a green laser into the cockpit of a police helicopter is interesting. According to the article, they were just having fun flashing them into the sky like giant light-sabers (which sounds pretty fun to me). Unfortunately, it hit the cockpit of the helicopter which must have diffused and spread the light (or else this couple has some killer aim to be able to hit the retina of a helicopter pilot at 500 feet).
Sounds just like a CSI Miami episode I saw.
And apparenlty, I'm not the only one who's noticed this connection.
(H/T to slashdot for the link)
Tags: Police
When the police in Greece used a surveillance camera network to monitor demonstrations, the head of their Data Protection Authority (along with the deputy head and two others) all resigned in protest.
Too bad our leaders don't have the same level of integrity. We can't even get our new attorney general to admit that waterboarding is torture.
(H/T to privacyorg for the link)
Tags: Accountability MIA, Bushiness, Police
Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn’t considered the effect on the parents.
“Whether we’re talking about dad’s work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship,” Sgt. MacDonald said.
We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn’t take long.
“Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics,” reads Sgt. MacDonald.
He says it’s not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles.
While drugs and underage drinking are likely problems that should be dealt with, some other things should remain private:
even innocent-sounding news can do damage. “They may be talking about how their father is losing a job, and perhaps a neighbor who’s the mortgage broker for the father isn’t aware that the father’s job is in jeopardy,”
Tags: Blogging, For Parents, Kids, Police, SNS
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