Category: News You Need to Know

Body Cameras Are Doing What They Were Meant to Do

The number of complaints against police since the large scale adoption of body cameras by law enforcers has obviously plummeted, right? And the officers caught doing unlawful things by their body cameras have lead to a lot of corrupt officers being arrested and tried, right? As it turns out, not so much:

But what happens when the cameras are on the chests of police officers? The results of the largest, most rigorous study of police body cameras in the United States came out Friday morning, and they are surprising both police officers and researchers.

For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras.

While this study is interesting I think it’s a bit unfair to judge body cameras by criteria they were never designed to address. Were body cameras meant to address police abuses the officers wouldn’t have control over when they record and the video wouldn’t be uploaded to servers controlled by the departments. Instead the cameras would be record constantly and the video would be streamed and saved to a server controlled by an independent third-party charged with holding officers accountable.

The reason law enforcement agencies have been willing (and often enthusiastically willing) to adopt body cameras is because they recognized that such devices would prove useful for collecting evidence. If an officer wants to collect evidence, they just need to press the record button and video will be uploaded to a service like Evidence.com that their department has full control over. If the video is evidence of a crime, it is saved so it can be used in court. If the video records something that might embarrass the officer or the department, it can be tossed down a memory hole.

You Can’t Own Property, Man

I’d estimate that a vast majority of Americans mistakenly believe that their home is their property. But if it was your property you wouldn’t have to pay rent property taxes on it in order to stay in it. Moreover, if it was your property you’d be able to sell it for whatever you wanted

DENVER — A Denver mom says she did not know her home was part of an affordable housing program when she bought it and the city is preventing her from selling it at market value – nearly $80,000 more – according to KDVR.

[…]

Just days before the home closing, Lopez was told her home was part of an affordable housing program that Denver created in 2003.

Out of 5,000 homes built in Green Valley Ranch, 642, including Lopez’s, were priced as affordable housing. That meant 642 homes could only be sold to buyers who qualified as low income.

[…]

Nothing could be found in the title documents that mention affordable housing restrictions.

The woman, Cynthia Lopez, mistakenly believed that the home she paid for was her home but it actually belonged to the City of Denver, which decided to exercise its ownership privileges by restricting the maximum rental transfer price. Lopez also made the mistaken of believing that she had to sign some kind of documentation for rules to apply. She obviously never heard of social contract theory, which states that everybody agreed to a contract upon birth (which is apparently the only contract one can legally agree to before coming of age but I digress) that allows the government to change the rules whenever it feels like doing so.

Everything Evil is Capitalism, Everything Good is Communism

The release of the iPhone X is nearly upon us. Demand appears to be high and it’s doubtful that Apple will have enough units in its initial shipment to satisfy demand. This has lead to prospective buyers coming up with schemes to ensure they can be one of the first to own the anticipated phone. Some will set their alarms to wake them up in the early hours of the morning when the preorder system goes live and others will plan to camp in front of an Apple store to claim one of the first shipped devices. And, of course, a bunch of communists plan to ruin the fun by pointing out that this capitalist ritual is built on the backs of people who are basically slave laborers.

Every time a highly anticipated electronic device is released the communists try to shit all over everybody else’s good time by blaming capitalism for the poor labor conditions in the countries where these devices are manufactured. What seems get lost in their diatribes against capitalism is the fact that the country that manufacturers a lion’s share of these devices, China, is a communist country.

Why is capitalism getting all of the blame here? Shouldn’t communism at least share in the blame? After all, it has apparently failed to elevate the working class of China above the practically slave labor conditions that communists keep complaining about. Isn’t that exactly what communism was supposed to stop?

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If the evil capitalist Americans are to blame for the demand, then the holy communist party in China should be blamed for allowing their workers to be “exploited” by said evil capitalists.

Now You Too Can Be Big Brother

We all know that Big Brother is watching us. Local law enforcers, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and various other government agencies are investing an incredible amount of resources into watching our every move. What if I told you that the day has finally come where you too can play an active role in Big Brother’s great surveillance apparatus? Axon is going to make that a reality:

Axon, the company formerly known as Taser, either wants to encourage helpful citizens or snitches—depending on how you feel about talking to police—to come forward.

On Thursday, the company announced “Axon Citizen,” a new “public safety portal” that lets civilians submit text, video, and audio files directly to participating law enforcement agencies that use its cloud storage service, Evidence.com.

While I spent the opening paragraph of this post mocking this product, I’m sadly aware of the fact that there are a lot of boot lickers out there who will actually use it. However, there is some hope that a bunch of decent people will get together and try to flood Evidence.com with useless data such as videos of lamp posts that are several hours long and high-definition pictures of pigeons. It would also be interesting to see exactly how much porn Evidence.com can store.

Counting People Killed by Law Enforcers isn’t Straight Forward

How many people have been killed in the United States by law enforcers? That question is actually more complicated than it appears because there is a lot of questionable data being used to establish that number:

Over half of all police killings in 2015 were wrongly classified as not having been the result of interactions with officers, a new Harvard study based on Guardian data has found.

The finding is just the latest to show government databases seriously undercounting the number of people killed by police.

“Right now the data quality is bad and unacceptable,” said lead researcher Justin Feldman. “To effectively address the problem of law enforcement-related deaths, the public needs better data about who is being killed, where, and under what circumstances.”

Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.

This revelation isn’t new nor should it be surprising. Statistics is often an exercise in creating the conclusion and fitting the data to that conclusion. If, for example, the government wanted to make its law enforcers appear to be less lethal, it could massage the number of people killed by its officers by coming up with a creative definition of law enforcement interaction. And government agencies can’t even claim a monopoly on this practice. It seems that most individuals and organizations use statistics to prove an already established conclusion instead of using statistics to establish a conclusion.

Now we have at least two sets of statistics on the number of people killed by law enforcers. Which set of numbers is correct? Who knows. The government has an obvious motivation to massage the numbers so it appears that fewer people are killed by law enforcers but Feldman may be motivated to massage the numbers so it appears that more people are killed by law enforcers. Most people will likely pick the set that proves their conclusion and call it a day. And do you know what? I can’t blame somebody for choosing that strategy because realistically both sets of statistics are probably misleading in some manner.

Everything is a Big Ol’ Conspiracy

Can anything occur this day and age without people claiming that it’s part of a conspiracy? Almost immediately after the shooting in Las Vegas, before any investigation had a chance to even begin, people were claiming that the event was part of some conspiracy. As with most conspiracy theories, this conspiracy theory is based on spurious evidence. So far the dumbest “evidence” that “doesn’t add up” is news that the shooter used the freight elevator at Mandalay Bay:

Law enforcement sources told CBS News that Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock is believed to have used the freight elevator at the Mandalay Bay hotel casino in the days leading up to last week’s deadly attack.

It wasn’t clear what Paddock used the freight elevator for or how often he used it.

How could the shooter have accessed a restricted freight elevator without help from the inside? Obviously this is proof that he had help!

Anybody who claims that doesn’t realize just how poor building security generally is. I’ve used freight elevators on numerous occasions, including in casinos, without authorization. They’re usually “hidden” behind a nondescript door or one with a sign that says “Employees Only.” In almost every case the door is unlocked and the elevator lacks any form of access control. If the owners of the building are really concerned about security, there might be cameras that aren’t monitored by anybody facing the freight elevator doors although even that’s pretty rare.

Another way of gaining access to a freight elevator is to ask the person working at the front desk if you can use it to haul up a bunch of luggage. As it turns out, the person at the front desk who is tasked with making the customer happy will often let you use the freight elevator if it makes you happy. Humans are often wonderfully helpful creatures.

So I’m sorry to report that using a freight elevator isn’t evidence that “doesn’t add up.” It adds ups quite cleanly. Although I suspect that access control on freight elevators will become more common now that this information has been released.

Something You Don’t See Everyday

Here’s something you don’t see everyday:

A jury on Monday found a former Minneapolis police officer guilty of a felony for kicking a man in the face during a domestic violence call.

Christopher Reiter was found guilty of third-degree assault for severely injuring a domestic assault suspect in May 2016 while the suspect was on his hands and knees, causing a brain injury.

A law enforcer was actually found guilty for using excessive force. Talk about an isolated incident!

I’m not sure if this decision is the beginning of a change in the culture where law enforcers are no longer seen are heroes but as the regular, fallible human being they are. It seems like there has been a slow shift in that direction, especially with all of the videos of cops behaving badly becoming available. Then again, this decision could also be a fluke. The cynic in me says that this decision was a fluke while the optimist in me hopes that this is the beginning of a shift in the culture.

The Number of Guns is Irrelevant

The media and gun control advocates are making a big deal about the number of guns recovered from the hotel room the Las Vegas attacker used. According to ABC News law enforcers found 47 guns in the room.

Realistically an individual can operate one gun at a time. Technically an individual can operate two handguns simultaneously but not very effectively. So why does it matter how many guns an individual owns? It doesn’t. The media makes a big deal out of the number of guns because it catches people’s attention and therefore leads to more page hits and accompanying ad impressions. Media outlets exist to make money so that isn’t surprising. Gun control advocates make a big deal out of the number of guns for similar reasons although their goal isn’t as noble as making money, their goal is to drum up outrage so they can coax politicians into punishing innocent gun owners by passing restrictive laws.

Having more guns doesn’t make a mass shooter more deadly so the number of guns recovered by law enforcers is irrelevant.

If You Had a Yahoo Account in 2013, It Was Compromised

Yahoo suffered one hell of a database breach in 2013. However, it was only recently that the scale of the breach has become known. As it turns out, every account that existed during the time of the breach was compromised:

Yahoo said a major security breach in 2013 compromised all three billion accounts the company maintained, a three-fold increase over the estimate it disclosed previously.

The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.

“We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected,” Yahoo officials wrote in the update. “Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected.”

This should have been everybody’s assumption from the beginning. If an unauthorized individual had access to 1 billion accounts, it’s safe to say they had access to every account.

Rewarding Incompetence

A lot of people are very upset with Equifax at the moment. The company’s amateur hour security practices allow the personal information of millions of people to fall into unauthorized hands. You would think that a screw up of that magnitude would dissuade any rational business from doing business with it. Well the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) isn’t rational or a business so this shouldn’t surprise anybody:

Between March and July of this year, the credit rating agency Equifax, was infiltrated by hackers who made off with the sensitive personal information of more than 140 million Americans. That sounds like the kind of thing that might hurt a company’s credibility when it comes to security. But Politico is now reporting that the IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to “verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud.”

I don’t know why the IRS feels the need to pay Equifax to verify taxpayer identities when its database is in the wild. I’m sure the IRS could acquire a copy and just perform verify taxpayers itself.

I really need to get into government contracts. It seems like no screw up is so severe that it will dissuade the government from doing business with you.