Same for eg. doctors... yes, hospital can get sued, but if you, a doctor, a person, fucked up, you personally can get sued, get into trouble, lose your licence etc.
Same for truck drivers... drive too fast, kill someone, drive drunk, play flappy bird while driving... you personally responsible. Pilots, ship captains too.
etc.
Why the hell are all the public workers exempt from that? Cops, government workers, inspectors, etc.... in the best case possible, taxpayers pay for the damages and that's it. Why?! Someone wanted this subpoeana, his job is to know if s/he can actually request it, s/he signed his/her name on the paper... and then.. nothing?
Except the courts have since interpreted QI in such a way that there’s a Catch-22 scenario. Plaintiff needs to establish violation of a clearly established constitutional precedent to have standing, but since QI was only introduced in the 1960s, there’s very little case law proving that precedence.
While I understand the initial thought behind QI, it does seem the bar to holding law enforcement accountable is way too high. Time to adjust the laws (which requires a functional Congress, which we don’t have).
This is the thing that frustrates me the most about the current state of USA politics. The inability to functionally govern and reach bi-partisan support for a lot of meaningful issues renders us helpless to improve bad systems. Meanwhile, corporations continue to dilute the value of their products and services or jack up the price beyond the rate of inflation and no real regulation seems possible.
> Although a prior court decision had held that it was unconstitutional to release a police dog on a suspect who was lying down, the court in Alexander Baxter’s case granted qualified immunity to the officers because, it held, the prior decision did not clearly establish the unconstitutionality of the officers’ decision to release a police dog on a person who was seated with his hands in the air.
> Because no prior court opinion had similar facts, the appeals court judges dismissed Jayzel’s excessive-force claim, even though they believed Aikala’s decision to tase a potential domestic violence victim went “far beyond the pale” and violated the Fourth Amendment.
> In Jessop v. City of Fresno, police officers stole $225,000 in cash and rare coins when executing a warrant. Prior cases had held that it was unconstitutional for officers to steal, but those cases were factually distinct — involving the theft of different types of property under different circumstances. According to the appeals court, the officers “ought to have recognized” that it was wrong to steal the coins and cash, but “they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment” because prior court decisions “did not put the constitutional question beyond debate.”
Everyone else just has to get insurance, why can't they? If you don't have a downside for something you do more of it. There's even a name for this, moral hazard. This isn't a new phenomenon, so why are these people treated as exceptions?
And worse, any precedent created is interpreted so narrowly as to be ridiculous. If a cop violates your rights on Tuesday, well you are SOL if they do it on Wednesday because there is no precedent for that.
> The evolution of qualified immunity began in 1871 when Congress adopted 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which makes government employees and officials personally liable for money damages if they violate a person’s federal constitutional rights. State and local police officers may be sued under § 1983. Until the 1960s, few § 1983 lawsuits were successfully brought. In 1967, the Supreme Court recognized qualified immunity as a defense to § 1983 claims. In 1982, the Supreme Court adopted the current test for the doctrine. Qualified immunity is generally available if the law a government official violated isn’t “clearly established.”
If qualified immunity applies, money damages aren’t available even if a constitutional violation has occurred. If qualified immunity doesn’t apply, while the government employee or official technically is responsible for money damages, the government entity virtually always pays. So qualified immunity protects states and local governments from having to pay money damages for actions not yet deemed unconstitutional by a court.
Source: https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/qualified-im...
They did so by saying that 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (which was passed by Grant to fight the KKK) which was meant to allow people to sue for civil rights violations clearly intends to provide an exception for police officers if they acted in good faith (whatever that means; given that good faith here means enforcing a racist law often with extreme violence). But there's absolutely nothing in the actual law, the text passed by Congress or in the intent of Congress, that supports this reading. You can read the Section 1983 yourself:
> Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.
A "judicial officer" by the way is a member of the court / judicial branch, not a police officer.
Because there's no law, qualified immunity is a total mess. Different courts and judges apply it very differently. For some it's simply a blanket defense for essentially any acts.
Ironically, Scalia and Thomas have both written dissents on the other side from the liberal judges at times, pointing out that there is literally no basis in law for qualified immunity and the Court should just drop it entirely.
This isn't just a matter of adjusting the law to clarify the interpretation of Section 1983, although that would help. It also requires a long-term realignment of the Supreme Court who shouldn't be able to wholesale write laws this way. That's not me saying this, that's Scalia in Crawford-El v. Britton "[the Supreme Court] find[s] [itself] engaged...in the essentially legislative activity of crafting a sensible scheme of qualified immunities for the statute we have invented—rather than applying the common law embodied in the statute that Congress wrote".
Something else must be a blocker here.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-still-so-rare-f...
Burden of proof remains the same as for a state-appointed prosecutor. And judges still get similar leeway in sentencing.
The solution seems too simple.
That makes me think that the underlying thing causing this issue to plague American society isn't what you suggest.
Because the regime wants their agents to blindly obey orders they push down, or foster to happen at lower levels. If this could suddenly come back and cause actual consequences for some of the regime henchmen, it could be that they might consider not obeying.
by definition, the incentives that exists in a state is not to do what is best for the people its supposed to serve. The bigger and wider a state becomes, the more perverse incentives exists, and since a regime can create its own laws and regulations, it will do so to protect itself first and foremost
The immunity doesn't reach all public workers. Only politicians and law enforcers
Those countries include the US btw. The rules are basically the same for all of them, that they have to have not just made a mistake, but made an unreasonable mistake. It is often hard to lose a license this way as you need to balance just shit happening, things going wrong when you made the right (or a reasonable) choice vs when you made a gross mistake. And of course, the conditions are based on decisions made a priori, not post hoc. Because post hoc is a dangerous game to play given so much more clarity.
e.g. for Doctors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628513/
Of course, this doesn't say anything about cops or the state of affairs here in the US. What surprises me more is that despite what many think, there is quite a lot of distrust for the police.
What someone needs to tell me is how most Americans have "very little" to no confidence in Congress and they keep getting elected. Its pretty universally agreed that no one wants a geriatric in the White House yet here we are. How we distrust all our institutions and yet continue to prop them up.
At this point I'm no longer mad at them. I mad at us. We are being enablers. Even down to local elections I hear so much uproar and low polling rates and yet watch these officials get reelected. I don't think it is foul play because I hear people talk about how they hold their nose while voting. City, county, state, or federal, it is all the same.
Clearly we've made our own bed, but we just don't want to lie in it. If you're going to half ass your job you can't complain about how shitty everything is. Before you go blaming others, take a long look in the mirror. I'm sure __you__ are better than that, just the way __you__ can't be manipulated by propaganda and how __you__ can't be tricked by scams. Clearly, we've been played. Clearly we're still being played. So stop blaming your neighbor or pointing to others until you look in the mirror. We all need to do it if we're going to get our shit together. Because we're all in this together, for better or worse.
But what I fear most is that because we'd rather stroke our egos to claim our own team is best we won't ever realize that it is this action that creates the radicals. It is my fear that we won't solve problems before they are problems. That we believe so much in "don't fix what ain't broke" that we won't ever perform basic maintenance. It is far more expensive to fix what is broken than to fix what isn't. My fear is we won't fix things until the streets run red. And that's my biggest fear, that we, the people, won't realize that the blood isn't just on the hands of the elites, but that it is on ours too. We are happy to play the mafia boss who has fully convinced himself and matter-of-factly asks "do you see blood on my hands?"
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...
In a typical police apprehension, there may be a second or less to draw your weapon and fire. Nobody would take the job if they had to be perfect or lose their freedom or life savings.
Speaking of life savings, most of the criminals they apprehend have nothing to lose. So maybe you're on to something. Let's hire police who are currently incarcerated and have no assets, family or wealth to lose. Then they can be subject to the draconian measures of your fantasy and worst case is they got a few months of freedom. Smart guy you are:)
It seems like it would be in X/Meta/Alphabet's interest to get the question in front of a judge in order to require warranted subpoenas.
For the per se dispute, absolutely. That's what you went to court to get.
If your demand caused damages, that's a separate controversy that isn't cured by withdrawal.
Defendant: J/K!!!! lulz!!!!!
Judge: case dismissed! <bang>
It probably depends on how wealthy the defendant is (if an individual), or the size of the the org defendant represents. If you're a LEO type of org, then I'm honestly shocked the judge didn't just dismiss with prejudice from the off
The distinction is that blackmail and extortion are crimes. It's the act of sending them itself that is the crime, not the demand. If you withdraw it, it doesn't matter, because the crime already happened.
There's no criminal statute here. The NYPD asked for something. Someone challenged it as being "not something the NYPD is allowed to ask for". The NYPD said "never mind, you're right". That's the end of the story. If you want the law granting the NYPD the power to issue subpoenas to be withdrawn or modified, the solution is to elect representatives to do that for you. Courts are just the backstop for this process, and an imperfect one.
That said, if a law was passed to make "knowingly or recklessly false warrants" a crime, that might be one way to approach the issue.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-e-d-nor-car-sou...
* https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nypd-stationed-oversea...
* https://archive.is/ZOYiw / https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/nyregion/terrorism-nypd-i...
On the one hand, municipality to municipality (Antwerp to NYC) makes sense since both will have similar challenges in law enforcement activities.
On the other hand, this seems to be a channel that bypasses the Feds, who are ultimately the ones with the National Security purview, and most/all foreign threats to NYC will pass through the Feds jurisdiction (border control, customs, coast guard etc)
After 9/11, it seems fair for New York to want to take anti-terrorism into its own hands, even if that duplicates certain federal functions. (I'm not arguing it's effective. Just that it makes sense for the city to not entirely trust the Feds.)
This is more than total military expenditure of Romania.[1]
A $115 million of this 5.3 billion was used to settle lawsuits last year.[2]
[0] https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/nyregion/nypd-police-misc...
[1]: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypd-overspending-on-ov...
It has a more complicated remit than most countries' militaries. (For example, the NYPD functions as the UN's ersatz security force.)
[0] Yeah yeah, "one country two systems", whatever, it's still a relevant comparison.
I wonder whether the media is going to write hysterical propaganda pieces about this, like they did with chinese 'international offices'.
With the media, it's always accuse others of what you are doing.
The NYPD's international offices do not have policing powers. They can't arrest people. They can't search or seize suspects. They're there with the full knowledge and coöperation of their hosts.
The Chinese police departments were exercising police powers on foreign soil without the host countries' permission. Night and day.
no, there is a lot of law and history to make those laws.. that specifically and in great detail, separate the roles, responsibilities, oversight, legal powers and funding, for obvious reasons.
X/Twitter notified the person, sent a copy of the the subpoena, suggested legal representation, provided recommendations, and defied the NYPD order of silence.
> The notification included a copy of the subpoena, which warned X not to tell Clancy of its existence. "You are not to disclose or notify any customer or third party of the existence of this subpoena or that records were provided pursuant to this subpoena," the document read.
> But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union.
When the police dept wrote: "You are not to disclose or notify any customer..." is that a legal demand backed by law, or simply a request? I wish I knew more. I suspect it is a request, and that is why Twitter would ignore it. I am sure that Twitter has very conservative internal and external legal counsel to advise on these matters. Plus, there must be many, many of these requests from NYPD.
If it's not backed by a court order, it's a polite request.
But even when it's a court demand, companies have several different counter-measurements. For example, they can tell the court "we can't provide data because we don't have that data" (Signal does this), or "we do have that data, but extracting it is resource-intensive, so the court should pay up" (some of the "Twitter Files" were precisely about this), or straight up ignoring non-American court orders (this is or at least was Reddit's general policy).
While it’s certainly nice to have, we shouldn’t have an expectation that a private business to defend us from the corruption of the police. Like, that’s a much bigger problem that Twitter does or doesn’t do
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/cvs-rite-aid-walgree...
There should be consequences when large service providers fail to protect the rights of their customers. Walgreens/CVS are pretty close to a duopoly.
The NYPD may have pulled this request to avoid scrutiny, but they probably didn't pull all the similar requests that succeeded. The problem is that it's impossible to generate standing in the court if you can't know about their requests.
The issue is that the subpoena told Twitter/X not to inform the accountholder that their information was going to be given to the NYPD, nor inform the accountholder of the subpoena's existence. While that's enforceable with a warrant, it is not enforceable with a subpoena.
This shows how NYPD is attempting to compel companies to provide them with personal information of users, and keep it secret from the users, all without needing a judge's approval or warrant. That is not the proper channel to do this, and they know they have no legal leg to stand on which is why they aren't going to try to fight it's legitimacy in court.
However it does look like this is different from the normal subpoena process. This doesn't seem to be part of discovery - there is no action. The referenced "Section 14-137 of the New York City Administrative Code" seems to basically grant the NYPD commissioner powers a judge usually has. So there is something to worry about.
Having been the victim of these on many occasions, I can also see the original article seems to have things slightly twisted. The SCA gives the power to any governmental body to subpoena metadata from providers under an administrative subpoena without notice to the user. 18 U.S. Code § 2703(c)(2) I think.
It's the content of records that starts to get into constitutional areas such as 4th Amend. requirements.
The third-party doctrine muddies this under current law.
This action puts Mallory at risk of getting disbarred. Submitting illegal subpoena's under the color of authority is fraudulent and a disbarrable offense.
Multiple people at the NYPD broke the law and should face criminal action.
And there's only been a straw donor scheme with multiple guilty pleas, a fundraiser with $150,000 in unexplained gifts, and illegally accepted donations from Turkish citizens resulting in FBI seizure of electronic devices. [2] This all feels like it's gonna get a Clarence Thomas response.
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/01/07/mayor-eric-adams-hires-ex-nypd...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/13/investigations-eric...
There are ways to hold lawyers accountable that sadly don't exist for cops.
> But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union.
That's actually the first decent thing I've heard about x since the rename. Good job!
(I assume there won't be any penalties for this action given that it was warrantless in the first place.)
> As my lawyer put it: “Sounds like you could have a first amendment right to quash the subpoena”. Cool, let’s go.
> Surprisingly, it worked! I think it cost around $7,000 but the subpoena was quashed
> [While] Google was nice enough to let me know there was a subpoena for my account data but guess what? Nobody else even bothered to tell me. And by nobody else I mean: Paypal, eBay, 3 domain registrars, merch makers, VPN providers, and every other online service I had used with that email in the last five years. They had all been subpoenaed and happily handed it over without even letting me know and it works that way even to this day.
If one company stands up and says "no" and then discloses to the subject, it both raises the risk of exposure on other government entities considering the same and increases the likelihood of another company opposing it next time.
Both are wins to build upon.
Why?
It obviously works better if more people do this. But the single notice is still working to some degree.
Congress needs to let the patriot act lapse. We’re not in an emergency anymore, despite the rhetoric -it’s been over 20 years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Reauthorizations (scroll to the bottom of the section)
The NYPD would legally fight to retain this power to the bitter end.
This is where groups like the ACLU come in.
So while the police may have broken the law, caused damages, etc, and whatever, other police aren't going to pursue it and neither will most district attorneys.
why is that? is it like australia, where everyone is just deep down a narc?
Police make money and provide services for profitable corporations.
Taxes cost profitable corporations money, except when they're really annoying to deal with, in which case they give money to a small group of corporations.
So taxes are designed to be as irritating and painful as possible, and are continually attacked, whereas police are defended.
Because the same group of people that hate the tax office and a working healthcare system also have a deep pathological fear of the underclasses rising up. And the only thing that will protect them from this is a gang of uniformed thugs.
That group also holds ~half the political power in the country.
At least in New York, support for the police diminishes with income. Manhattan is the anti-police borough. The richest neighbourhoods within it elect the most anti-police politicians (with few exceptions).
The most common run-in I have with them is standing at a crosswalk or sitting in an Uber and watching them put on the sirens and move everyone out of the way just so they don't have to sit in traffic. I'd estimate seeing this happen, oh, I don't know, about a thousand times while simultaneously I have never once seen them pull anyone over for any kind of traffic or moving violation.
They all seem to treat it as a one-off event, when it doesn't seem to be. I can guess at the difficulties involved, but the question isn't raised and the issues aren't examined.
Also wtf kind of email is IntelSubpoenas@nynjhidta.org? I guess it probably means "New York New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area" but why do they need their own domain? Why not just use an NYPD email?
Weird stuff.
https://lede-admin.hellgatenyc.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
They're dealing with the primary monetary fault line of organized crime and gangs.
And drug enforcement is their big cover for almost all abuses.
We need to decriminalize and end the drug war, if only just to stop the Mexican drug gangs.
To take it to a higher geopolitical level... China is likely undergo a demographic collapse soon and possibly one due to totalitarian government paralysis. The geopolitical significance of petroleum is vastly decreasing with EVs American bakken shale oil supply and alternative energy. That means the u.s probably will not be policing the oceans as much to enable free extended trade and logistics lines.
So we will be onshoring manufacturer, and likely a great deal of it in Mexico.
So we're going to need to solve the Mexican drug problem and our drug war in a constructive manner in the next decade
[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/08/29/cop-left-creepy-voice...
[2]: https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-officer-poses-as-311-operato...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/what-if-your-a...
It's also odd that the PDF redacted the name of Michael Gerber, the Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, when the NYPD issued a press announcement naming him (https://www.publicnow.com/view/A505A75813F7F2F483905D075F4AD...) and tout him on their public website (https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/administrative/legal.p...)
It seems that either Michael Gerber, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, is clueless about the law, which reflects poorly on his Harvard Law alma matter, or Michael Gerber, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, was illegally using threats and coercion and false subpoenas to investigate political opponents and chill free speech.
Either way, this does not reflect well on Michael Gerber, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, nor the Harvard Law school from which he allegedly graduated.
> Clancy, for his part, said that he's undaunted, and that the NYPD has no business rummaging through his social media content and metadata.
> "Why would you use a shower curtain and close the bathroom door when you take a shower, if you have nothing to hide?" he asked. "Because it's none of your business, that's why. What the police might want to know and what they have a legal right to know are two different things."