Current title of this post: "Paper investigating police chief prior to the raids on his office and home."
But it was the newspaper owner, not the police chief, who was raided.
Actual article title and subtitle: "A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops / Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home."
The title as it is this moment on HN was better for me at least, it made it clear that it was in context of ongoing investigative research done by the newspaper against the police.
But it’s missing a key piece of information: the paper was investigating allegations against the newly-hired police chief who was in charge of the raid.
The title doesn’t say the newspaper engaged in the raid. There are other agencies that could raid a police chief’s home. It would be reasonable to assume some agency like the FBI conducted the raid based on the same information that prompted the investigation. That’s not actually the case here, but I think that is a way more plausible reading of the sentence.
It doesn’t say the paper was the entity engaged in the raid. If I didn’t know the broader context, I would assume that sentence meant “A newspaper was investigating a police chief at the time the police chief’s home was raided by another law enforcement agency”. That seems way more likely than a newspaper being referred to as “him”.
How is it that despite not having yet read the article I knew EXACTLY what it meant? The pedantic and intentionally obtuse nitpickery in this thread is silly and absurd.
This is a community of people whose career revolves around precise language.
You knew because you're intelligent and were able to piece things together. Many in society are not so fortunate for one reason of another and so it's important to be precise.
Love the part where a bunch of people subscribed to their news service to show support...including apparently a famous movie producer and screenwriter.
Yikes for the chief...he stepped right on top of a cherished American value. That's instant-villain territory.
I'm sure even a talented screenwriter wouldn't complain when huge chunks of a story offer to write themselves...
> And in this age people really don’t care as long as they wield power.
At least the _ideal_ was that this was a government by the people for the people. The goal being to align incentives to wield power appropriately. When you misuse your power against the people, the people take away your power.
However, if you manage to convince the people (or at least a significant percentage of the people) that the journalists you are going up against are just peddlers of "fake news", you might get away with it...
Not only was this newspaper reporting on a restaurant owners DUI, it was investigating sexual misconduct by the former police chief!!! This is truly heinous cop-on-a-power-trip shit. We really need to curtail the so called justice system in this country…
It's funny how different people can read this and come to different conclusions. When I read this, I think that the system works. The fourth estate (the press) was doing their job and will now bring more scrutiny and possible legal consequences to the police chief.
How is the system working when clearly the newspaper is in a desperate search now for equipment to be able to stay in business after theirs got taken by the police? Don’t you think that is somewhat chilling of free speech?
What would be evidence of the system not working in your opinion? The editor washing up with a bullet in their head? All the journalist sentenced to 20 years of hard labour on the private farm of the police chief?
> What would be evidence of the system not working in your opinion?
The fact we can read about this is evidence that it is working. Evidence that it is not working would be hard to come by because we wouldn't be able to read about it!
Accountability would necessarily include this armed gang that committed numerous violent crimes being treated like an armed gang that committed numerous violent crimes, and getting locked up away from society for many years. Do you have any reason to believe that the outcome of this situation will have anything resembling this? Because I foresee the best plausible outcome, even with all this attention, is going to be something like a bunch of payouts from civil suits, without much really addressing the overwhelming criminality.
uh, I'm obviously talking about the outcome after due process, and assuming the described facts are roughly correct. I'll repeat the question - after the justice system has run its course, and assuming that the description of events is roughly correct, do you foresee any possibility of the perps ending up in prison?
In the age of ubiquitous information sharing, the news of cops raiding a newspaper office is rather not a signal the system is working, than it is a klaxon that the system is failing.
> When I read this, I think that the system works.
It's possible to assume that the system works if you assume that this is also the only time this has happened. How many times have corrupt cops such as these used the force of the state to silence their detractors and gotten away with it?
I'm not even from the US but I've heard of hundreds of times this has happened there. Only in a very few cases do they not win and who knows how many we don't even hear about.
Life is not a movie. These things happen all of the time without some Hollywood feell good ending. You dont get to just go "oh good old journalism will just fix this". Did you even read it? They can't publish? They were decimated. The Kansas state governors office needs to getting involved and I have an alarm set to call Kelly's office when it opens tomorrow.
I live in a small town where the press is in the pocket of the powers-that-be. That situation doesn't get press. This situation is a lesson to every newspaper that might out of line, not to do so.
That is to say, you're confused. Corruption is the usual thing a small American city. A paper reporting when it gets out-of-hand is unusual. Cops screwing with the paper or anyone who reports their dirty dealings is normal. Cops getting flack when they do this happens but often they just get away it. Even when the cops get flack in the press, they usually come out OK in the long run. Even a paper gets a lot support and congratulations in the short, they often wind-up screwed in the long run.
And sure, a raid is kind of a crude reaction. Local corrupt officially usually have a more subtle way to send a message. Perhaps the local cops felt a need to make their point strongly.
For those who can support the paper, an annual electronic subscription is just $34.99. The subscription link is buried on the marionrecord.com homepage under "MORE..."; here's a direct link: https://marionrecord.com/credit/subscription:MARION+COUNTY+R... .
The chilling affect has me not even wanting to post this excerpt: “People in this town have been very supportive, but not publicly. And I talked to one person who said, “Oh, are you sure It's ok that I can talk to you because they might come and seize my computer?””
"Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner"
"Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and the Marion County Record newspaper office Friday, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home."
Know anyone in a small news outlet? Now would be a great time to talk to them about the importance of secure, redundant, off-site backup and archiving. Obviously wouldn't have prevented this— for all I know these folks were doing all of that— but it would mean police in this situation couldn't stop you from accessing your data (and likely, leverage,) even if they controlled your equipment.
According to an update posted to the newspapers website [0], the owners mother just died. The police had raided both the newspapers office and their home. In the interview they had mentioned she'd been very stressed out by the raid.
Just proves anonymous expose and investigation is superior to attaching your name and identity to your muck raking. People will kill you for uncovering their secrets.
This story omits the most crucial information: why was the warrant issued?
Judges issuing warrants is one of the least accountable aspects of our legal system. Warrants can cause major damage, disruption, or even death. There are never consequences for a mistake (cf. Breonna Taylor incident).
They can also cause political interference and there's little mechanism to prevent abuses. The FISA warrants against Carter Page were later declared invalid[1]. Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump). There could be good reasons for all of this but there's not really any mechanism to sort it out. Next time there might not be good reasons, and the target might be a politician we desperately need (rather than Trump).
A corrupt LEO can get a warrant to search your house easily, and so getting a warrant for a (completely automated process!) that hands them your entire digital life is even easier. It just takes a message to google/apple/meta and they have access to.... your digital soul, basically.
Big brother is scary, but corruption at the local level is a very real threat to individuals and democracy as a whole. Imagine trying to run an election against a small town sheriff who is willing to abuse their power. Within a local political system complacent in that abuse? This isn't hypothetical. The judge in this case approved this warrant.
Anti-privacy efforts like the current trend of anti-encryption proposals really need to be better labeled as anti-democratic by the politically active.
Document mishandling can lead to a slap on the wrist if you let the investigators come in and take a look (Clinton, Biden), but if you refuse to give investigators access, and brazenly lie to them about the documents you still keep, then their only option is warrants and raids (Trump). Then they might indict you, but only about documents that you didn't hand back when they asked for them.
If we call every legal action against a political candidate political interference, we have two systems of justice, and all you need to do to have no consequences is to keep running for office. Then any investigations on you or your family become a witch hunt.
The mechanism to sort it out is that the data must come to light at trial, and people can make their own minds regarding whether the investigation did everything that was remotely reasonable to get cooperation or not. But then again, thanks to the US media environment that is more interested in entertaining than informing, people's opinions might have little to do with reality, thanks to their own political biases. That allows someone to, on the campaign trail, call for locking up the opposition candidate, while claiming that everything is a witch hunt when any investigation heads in their direction.
They don't care. They undoubtedly know this and knowingly just lie about it. There's no point in typing that stuff out.
Of course, then I fell for it to. Politics here is bad enough but when people repost the lowest effort, lowest thought string-of-words they've been trained on... I mean, I could just go read Truth Social directly.
For rights discussions you have to consider the exceptional cases, too. If we don't insist on rights for people we think are wrong, then the rights are hollow.
100% of the warrants I have read (all of which were signed and in the process of being executed) had obvious factual errors in them, and all had been made under penalty of perjury by law enforcement.
> Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump).
“Document mishandling” (with classified documents) always results in an investigation. When there is overwhelming evidence that the investigation is being actively obstructed, things get spicy.
Police in the US are becoming lawless gangs. Abolish qualified immunity. Stop having taxpayers' foot the bill, start using their pension fund and watch police make a 180 degree turn in terms of behavior and professionalism.
Qualified immunity does not protect government employees who break the law. There are laws/rulings that specifically disqualify them from using qualified immunity as a defense. The problem is prosecutors, judges, and juries who allow government employees to commit illegal actions with no consequences. This is furthered by citizens who pay no attention and let these people stay in power.
It's near impossible to even charge a cop or a prosecutor with a crime. I had cops and prosecutors commit crimes against me, but I ran into dead ends every which way I tried to even file police reports etc. Not a single police agency will take a report against an officer or a prosecutor. And in theory you can report crimes directly to a prosecutor's office, but again, they won't take reports against police officers (who are the ones that keep them in business) nor other prosecutors.
I don't know what the solution is.
Chicago has an agency specifically to report police misconduct, but it seems to get shut down every couple of years due to rampant misconduct inside the agency.
It does protect them from civil suits, which have a lower bar for the burden of proof. When a citizen does manage to win damages in a civil case, it is paid by the city (aka the taxpayers). It should be paid from the police pension or an individual insurance similar to malpractice insurance.
>Qualified immunity does not protect government employees who break the law.
Well qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal cases, but civil suits are generally the only way survivors and their families can get compensation for violations of their rights.
Reading about egregious conduct where the government was somehow able to be granted qualified immunity will make anyone wonder how we could allow this to happen.
I don't think prosecutors, judges, and juries do that, do they? That's the court system in a criminal trial deciding guilt, not deciding whether the guilty should get away with something.
Well maybe because stealing, getting bribed by rich(individuals or corps) and doing nothing to serve and protect became legal. They no longer need to break law, when they can make same things within the law.
My point remains that this has always been the case and if anything is getting better, not worse.
You can always cherry-pick examples of individual things getting worse, but I ask again: do you really want to go back to the 60's and 70's? Because yikes.
Prosecutors, judges, law enforcement agents all belong to the same group: so, they collude in the name of co-operation; they are paid by the government. They are the enforcers of "state monopoly on violence". Usually, these folks (prosecutors, judges, LE agents) don't want to step on the powerful elite, as the latter can take these cases all the way to SCOTUS to clamp down on abuses. That's why prosecutors use "prosecutorial discretion" to NOT prosecute so that these cases won't get appealed further.
When elites splinter into two groups, that's when you see some progress. Otherwise, two-tier justice is a common, hidden, feature of any system out there (be it Western democracy, communist, dictatorship, etc).
Yeah because people can use their brains? Just because Trump was in bed with his Justice Dept doesn't mean Biden is. I haven't seen a SINGLE shred of evidence that Biden has even so much as thought about Merrick during the last 3 years.
It's almost like a police force trampling on first amendment rights is appalling like a candidate trying to subvert the results of an election, incite a riot, pressure election officials, put up a knowingly fraudulent, illegal fake voter scheme, or pay off a porn star.
Abolishing qualified immunity leads to situations like Uvalde where police don’t want to intervene for fear of reprisal.
Also, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. Instead of pissing off the police unions and dealing with the eternal backlash from that, you could instead push for something like Florida’s Sunshine Laws which would provide needed transparency into universities, the police, and the government.
> Abolishing qualified immunity leads to situations like Uvalde where police won’t want to intervene for fear of reprisal.
This couldn't be more wrong. Despite the existence of qualified immunity, the Texas police still cowered like cowards, and are using qualified immunity to shield themselves from the lawsuits of the families whose children they failed to protect.
What do you mean by "fear of reprisal"? It seemed pretty clear to me that they didn't want to head in for fear of confronting someone who can shoot back for a change.
I chose the wording of "shoot back for a change" very deliberately. Cops act tough and intimidate people who they know can't fight back, but are cowards when society actually needs armed peace-keeping.
If the police aren't used to confronting armed threats, then clearly in the vast majority of cases they shouldn't need to be armed themselves.
I'm saying that the stark difference in those officers' performance vs their usual behavior shows that they usually expect to not be facing armed threats. Society is worse because they usually go into situations thinking "I'm armed and they aren't", and would improve if they weren't armed by default.
It wouldn't have helped in Uvalde if police weren't armed by default, but I'm not sure anything would have helped, because they already had all the tools they needed for that situation.
Idk much about the situation but in a few of that guys posts he made prior to being raided he talked about sniping potusa from afar with time, place in mind, pictures of him with rifles, and threats to answer FBI with guns. Afaik obese scooter bound people can still aim a rifle from afar. He basically provoked a situation and was treated as credible threat based on his own actions.
There's a handful of stories that lead me to distrust the police, and one of them was about a teenager being sexually harassed by a sheriff's deputy who kept pulling her over for no reason, and a police chief - who ran the DARE program - being a meth drug lord who was arresting his competition. Both were from downstate Missouri.
That whole region is fucked up. Did you know the Oklahoma Panhandle was a gift from Texas? The Missouri Compromise basically said no new slave states north of Tennessee and NC, so Texas chopped the top of their territory off and gave it to Oklahoma, which was already about 34 miles to far north.
I won't say "small town anywhere", that's probably not true. But also true of small town Tennessee.
"Everybody knew" the sheriff took kickbacks from the bootleggers (it was, and still is, a dry county), and probably quite a bit more. I mean, I knew, and I was a high school kid. He did eventually get busted roughly a decade after I left.
Cities have corruption too, of course. But the hypocritical gaslighting nonsense about how pure and clean small town life is horse shit.
Nothing in there is specific to Kansas, or really small town America. See if you haven't read it yet, the amazing Ferguson Report - extremely concise and readable for a government report - which collected testimony of corruption every which way and concluded with doing nothing and a full trust in the locals sorting it out for themselves. And then again and still higher scale, cities around the San Francisco Bay Area and all the way to San Francisco. The specifics vary greatly and creatively (?) but the overall theme is there.
Because small town Arkansas or Atlanta or Dublin are so much better in this regard? Is there any evidence that such shenanigans are more common in Kansas?
It is potentially bad in small town anywhere just dude to the low population, maybe one or no news source and etc. Lots of power in a few hands, little oversight.
Small town not far of me there were billboards up about how the local police are crooks and on and on. Someone really felt strongly about that topic.
The businessman who bought the billboards did an interview. Story was businessman supported the local police chief's election. Then business man's business partner was being investigated for selling drugs and the state police raided their business. Businessman called the local police police chief and told the chief to call off the cops. Police chief said he couldn't do that because he knew business guy and had to stay out of it.
Businessman got upset and bought a bunch of billboards about "corruption".
One man's corruption is another man's ethical choice.
That's pure nonsense. Oligarch says something about wealth and maybe how you gained it. That is it. You might as well have said "rich person behaviour".
Also, have cruel must one be to take joy in others pain because of what state they are from!
But it was the newspaper owner, not the police chief, who was raided.
Actual article title and subtitle: "A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops / Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home."