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all the old links seem to be down

https://nitter.net/bykenarmstrong/status/1701451004825448780

The first paragraph...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio authorities on Friday released bodycam video showing a police officer fatally shooting Ta’Kiya Young in her car in what her family denounced as a “gross misuse of power and authority” against the pregnant Black mother.

I'm leaning towards yes, because despite their inclusivity and the general feel-good vibes of the stories, the characters themselves flirt with police brutality quite a bit, and who knows exactly what they get up to in their lives outside the novels.

Any more nuanced views from my fellow hexbearians (and lemmings)? I'm slightly less articulate than Detritus on a hot day, and I wonder how much the politics and views of Terry Pratchett comes up in leftist discourse.

A slew of Antioch and Pittsburg officers were arrested following an FBI probe into civil rights violations and investigation tampering.

Nine officers across two police departments in East Bay, Calif. were arrested by FBI agents Thursday after being indicted by a federal grand jury. Of those officers were the slimy Antioch cops exposed for calling Black people gorillas, n-words and all types of degrading insults in their texts.

Over 100 FBI agents were deployed to arrest current and former officers from the Antioch and Pittsburg police departments, according to KRON4 News. The 30-page federal indictment accuses the group of crimes including college degree benefit fraud and violating the civil rights of civilians. As if the APD isn’t in enough hell upon the state and federal probes into their employees’ bigoted banter, two of them were accused of slinging anabolic steroids. They were also accused of trying to destroy the evidence. Another APD cop, Morteza Amiri, was accused of excessive force for deploying his K-9 on 28 people and then saving images of the bloody dog bites in his camera roll.

At this point, what haven’t they been accused of?

In a 2020 text, Wenger told Amiri that they needed to “go 3 nights in a row dog bite!!!” Amiri emphasized the message, according to the indictment, and Wenger replied with a homophobic slur about a senior officer, saying they should give the lieutenant “something to stress out about lol.”

In another text that year, Amiri sent Wenger eight graphic images of people with dog bites and described the work week as “very eventful,” according to the indictment.

Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe, who was a target of the racist police messages, issued a statement in response to the arrest calling it a “dark day” for the city.

“People trusted to uphold the law allegedly breached that trust and were arrested by the FBI. Today’s actions are the beginning of the end of a long and arduous process. Today’s arrests are demonstrative of the issues that have plagued the Antioch Police Department for decades,” he said.

Simultaneously, the Contra Costa DA’s office, FBI and California Attorney General’s Office are investigating the officers involved. Over the past 2 two years of the probes, nearly half the Antioch Police Department was accused of something. More arrests could be on the way.

He was only arrested after multiple officers showed up to the scene.

Public urination is never a good idea, but arresting an innocent child for doing something like that is maybe taking the law a little too seriously. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to a 10 year old in Mississippi, Fox Memphis reports.

On August 10th, Latonya Eason stopped by an attorney’s office in Senatobia, MS for some legal advice. Her two children, a daughter and her 10 year old son Quantavious, waited in the car while she was in the office. At some point, Quantavious needed to use the restroom, so he got out of the car and went to pee behind it. At the same time, a Senatobia Police officer just happened to be passing by and caught the kid peeing behind the car.

But it was no biggie; Latonya said the officer was just going to give them a warning: “I was like son, why did you do that? He said, ‘Mom, my sister said they don’t have a bathroom there.’ I was like you knew better, you should have come and asked me if they had a restroom. [The officer] was like you handled it like a mom. He can get back in the car,” she said to Fox Memphis. It wasn’t a big deal — until other officers became involved.

Eason said several other officers showed up, including a lieutenant who said that Quantavious had to be arrested and taken to jail for peeing. Eason admits her son shouldn’t have peed, but she says arresting him over it was doing too much.

“No, him urinating in the parking lot was not right, but at the same time I handled it like a parent, and for one officer to tell my baby to get back in the car, it was okay, and to have the other pull up and take him to jail? Like no. I’m just speechless right now. Why would you arrest a ten year old kid?” she said.

Quantavious said he was scared and started shaking when the officers took him to jail. Once there, they held him in a cell, charged him with “child in need of services” and then released him to his mother.

keep reading : https://jalopnik.com/police-arrested-10-year-old-peeing-behind-his-moms-car-1850752223

Stonewall was a riot — but in some cities, Pride officials have banned “political” groups and welcomed cops. Now activists are organizing radical Pride marches to show that Pride is a protest, not just a party.

In 2016, Toronto was preparing for its annual Pride march. For the first time, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, would attend alongside the thousands in the parade, with Black Lives Matter (BLM) as guests of honor. But BLM was angry, after years of seeing Blockorama — the only Pride month event for black queers — moved further from the march, even as police were welcomed at the parade. Objecting to their presence, BLM blocked the march for thirty minutes.

This cop involvement especially mattered because Toronto Pride had first begun in 1981 as a protest against a police raid on four bathhouses in the city. That February, officers armed with crowbars and sledgehammers had arrested over two hundred fifty gay men in “Operation Soap.” Black activists who participated in that first Pride were back in 2016 and were joined by both younger protesters and indigenous drummers in bringing the march to a halt. Faced with the protests, Toronto Pride’s executive director, Mathieu Chantelois, signed off on BLM’s demand not to allow the police to return in future — but then backtracked, claiming he had only done so to get the march moving again. After widespread criticism, Chantelois resigned; next time around, the police float was noticeably absent.

Toronto is hardly the only city where police have joined Pride. In a similar action in Britain last year, activists from Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants (LGSM) broke through the barriers at London’s Pride march to stage a die-in. Holding funeral bouquets and draped in pink veils, they held up the march for twenty-three minutes — one minute for each person that had died in police custody since 2020 — to protest metropolitan police officers joining the parade.

One participant in the protest, Ink, explains, “I watched friends cheer on the police at London Pride, despite understanding their role in oppressing queer people. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, the presence of police at pride became especially unconscionable and we felt it was important to reclaim Pride as a space hostile to the presence of the state and its violence.”

Criticisms of mainstream Pride, made by queer participants like Ink who would prefer to see it returned to its roots in protest, have been bubbling under the surface for years. In 2001, Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist who cofounded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries alongside fellow Stonewall riots veteran Marsha P. Johnson, called modern Pride “a big smokescreen.” Baulking at how corporations use Pride to present themselves as virtuous — what we now call pinkwashing — she mourned a modern Pride that only believes in the “almighty dollar,” stating “this is no longer my Pride.”

Gay rights have progressed, but activists still debate assimilation versus liberation — whether queer people should adapt to the norms and values of wider society or else change society to one that doesn’t privilege certain queer identities. Indeed, as Pride events have become mainstream, so too have certain versions of fitting in. Equality for some LGBTQ people means the freedom to marry, adopt kids, or even to get a well-paying job at an arms company with the same rights and protections as a straight colleague. That is lauded as progress whilst queers who can’t — or don’t want to — obey such norms continue to be marginalized.

Corporations and the state use diversity and inclusivity in this way to wash themselves clean. At this year’s Pride in Washington DC, arms industry giant Lockheed Martin drove a sponsored float through the city, much to the disgust of socialists and queer activists. This year in London, big oil was the target of protests as activists picketed the annual LGBTQ awards sponsored by BP, Shell, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Santander, Amazon, and Nestlé. Days later, this July 1, five activists from Just Stop Oil were arrested after jumping in front of BP’s float and halting London’s Pride parade, reminding onlookers that there will be no pride on a dead planet.

In recent years, Reclaim Pride groups sharing these criticisms of contemporary Pride celebrations have sprung up from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Oslo, Norway, and New York City. Some groups have tried to reclaim Pride by protesting, as BLM and LGSM have. Others have chosen opt out and create their own celebrations that stay true to Pride’s roots in a riot against police violence.

In 2019, as preparations were underway for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, activists in New York City organized an opposing Queer Liberation March instead. The official parade ran for twelve hours because there were so many corporate floats, notes Paul Nocera from New York’s Reclaim Pride Coalition. He told Jacobin how activists had become disillusioned with Pride — and the way acceptable queerness was policed by letting in some people and shutting out others: “The barricades don’t just contain people, they set up an entertainment dynamic where the people on one side are the audience and the people on the inside are the entertainment. This is a march, we’re not the entertainment,” he explains. “It really gives so much control over the message, the method, the anger. All the aspects of what we’re trying to do in our march get squashed . . . the cops want to have a march that doesn’t mean anything, that doesn’t make any complaints.”

For activists in New York, it was important to have a protest with radical politics to mark the anniversary. Each year since, they have held one on the same day as New York’s official Pride parade. Sometimes — Nocera told me — he gets disillusioned and exhausted, “It’s really tough because we do this every year and I don’t see anything changing — so what the hell are we marching for? But I was reminded that this is the moment when the community gathers together and link arms. Whether were faced outward and yelling and screaming or faced inward and having a teary eye, it’s still the gathering of the community, and that’s hugely important,” says Nocera. “To not have a march, to not have any radical gathering of people and spirits, that would be a huge loss.”

Over in England, Sheffield Radical Pride (SRP) took things a step further and organized the city’s only Pride march this year, scheduled for July 22 to coincide with Tramlines music festival when tens of thousands descended on the city. In 2018, the previous organizers declared the event was a march of “celebration, not protest.” They banned political groups from taking part and demanded banners and placards be inspected for approval to avoid causing offense. This sparked outrage from many in the queer community, who criticized Pride Sheffield for conveniently forgetting the previous fifty years of history. Since the pandemic, Sheffield has struggled to organize a Pride and 2023 marks the third year the council has not funded one.

Over winter, a group of young, largely transgender activists started conversations about how their organizing could reach the wider city and decided they should step in and organize this year’s event. They want to turn Pride back into a street movement they hope those at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 could be proud of. A month before the march, SRP announced cops and corporations were banned. “It’s exciting and it’s fun . . . I’m glad that we have the opportunity to make Sheffield’s only Pride one that is genuinely radical and one that is free of corporations and cops,” says Alex, one of the organizers.

This year, the theme for the Queer Liberation March in New York was “Trans + Queer; Forever Here!” Nocera says trans people have been at the forefront of organizing the march for years, but they felt in 2023 trans liberation needed special attention. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking 491 anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States, and a large number of those attack trans people in various ways such as limiting their access to health care and preventing social transition or education about trans people in schools. Some have already passed laws attempting to limit drag performances and prevent cross-dressing. In New York, where trans people led the Stonewall riots, Nocera says the focus of this year’s march has given a sense of “continuing the legacy of Stonewall which is protest, resistance and resilience as a community.”

Organizers of Sheffield’s trans-led march have also seen the recent attacks on the trans and queer community from both far-right street mobilization and the UK government. One of the recent attacks from the British state came from the Tories’ so-called equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. In April, she announced plans to change the legal definition of “sex,” which could see the trans community lose vital rights and protections.

For the trans community, pride has to be a protest — because pretending they can safely celebrate their identity simply isn’t an option. Across the UK, grassroots Trans Pride marches have appeared, with the largest held annually in London. Another of their organizers, Matt, tells me that the vitriol targeted at trans people is the first step to revoking everyone’s rights: “This pushback and backlash against trans rights is a gateway to repealing more equalities and targeting more minorities. It’s being done by some people in the name of feminism and women’s rights but really, these people are partnering with fascists.” He adds, “Rights aren’t this permanent thing once you’ve achieved them — they can also go away.”

In making Sheffield Pride a protest, Matt and Alex hope honest conversations can be had about queer liberation and the challenges it faces: “We’re not putting on this façade about how everyone’s super-accepting and how some company is going to sell you products and hire you and therefore homophobia is over,” says Matt. “We’re not going to radicalize everyone who comes. But we can tell people how it is for queer people now and we can’t be silenced through threats over funding or permissions.”

As groups like Sheffield Radical Pride and the Reclaim Pride Coalition continue organizing marches, we can hope Pride is slowly returning to something Sylvia Rivera might recognize — and be proud of.

Report on law enforcement being caught placing GPS trackers on an activist’s car in so-called Michigan. For more information and photos, go here.

On Monday August 1st, Michigan activist Peatmoss found 2 GPS tracking devises attached with powerful magnets to the rear axle of their car, see pictures here. This happened after Peatmoss spent a week hanging out with friends at the Camp Gayling Week of Action against the Camp Grayling national guard base.

A lawyer calling the police on Peatmoss’s behalf relayed that the police confirmed the trackers were placed by law enforcement, though they refused to name the agency.

Three days before, on the evening of Friday July 28th, Peatmoss was arrested outside Lansing, MI after being followed by a large blue Ford pickup truck into a church parking lot to meet two other folks. The arrest stemmed from a warrant issued in another area of Michigan. During the arrest the police verbally stated that they believed the car had been present at a recent legal demonstration put on by Sunrise Ann Arbor on the sidewalk in front of Accident Fund headquarters, an insurer of the Cop City project. The cops stated they knew the car had driven by the home of Accident Fund CEO Lisa Corless, which was nearby at 3945 Turnberry Lane, Okemos, Michigan.

While in custody police attempted to coerce consent to a DNA sample by threatening Peatmoss with a longer detention. Peatmoss refused and was released without giving a sample. They also noticed their file had an “FBI number” highlighted underneath their SSN.

The second week of May, Peatmoss was followed for 45 minutes by a blacked out Ford sedan. The car began following them at their legal residence, the first time they had been home in several months. The car followed them onto the highway, off the highway, around in circles in a neighborhood, and then back onto the highway, only leaving when they were about to cross the Michigan-Ohio state border. They had given their legal name and address when putting money on many Atlanta Solidarity Fund defendants’ commissary accounts earlier this year.

We, comrades and supporters of Peatmoss, wish to remind all of our comrades that repression is ongoing, but that we can build resilience together. This means affirming our solidarity and standing behind those targeted and sharing information broadly about repressive tactics. Understand that surveillance, like that faced by Peatmoss, can be both a tool for repression from the legal system, but also, conspicuous surveillance can be a tool of repression on its own as a way to chill otherwise legal activity, spread fear and distrust.

We encourage everyone to speak with comrades openly about repression they are facing or concerned about, and to educate yourselves on best practices when dealing with law enforcement or facing criminal charges.

Report on law enforcement being caught placing GPS trackers on an activist’s car in so-called Michigan. For more information and photos, go here.

On Monday August 1st, Michigan activist Peatmoss found 2 GPS tracking devises attached with powerful magnets to the rear axle of their car, see pictures here. This happened after Peatmoss spent a week hanging out with friends at the Camp Gayling Week of Action against the Camp Grayling national guard base.

A lawyer calling the police on Peatmoss’s behalf relayed that the police confirmed the trackers were placed by law enforcement, though they refused to name the agency.

Three days before, on the evening of Friday July 28th, Peatmoss was arrested outside Lansing, MI after being followed by a large blue Ford pickup truck into a church parking lot to meet two other folks. The arrest stemmed from a warrant issued in another area of Michigan. During the arrest the police verbally stated that they believed the car had been present at a recent legal demonstration put on by Sunrise Ann Arbor on the sidewalk in front of Accident Fund headquarters, an insurer of the Cop City project. The cops stated they knew the car had driven by the home of Accident Fund CEO Lisa Corless, which was nearby at 3945 Turnberry Lane, Okemos, Michigan.

While in custody police attempted to coerce consent to a DNA sample by threatening Peatmoss with a longer detention. Peatmoss refused and was released without giving a sample. They also noticed their file had an “FBI number” highlighted underneath their SSN.

The second week of May, Peatmoss was followed for 45 minutes by a blacked out Ford sedan. The car began following them at their legal residence, the first time they had been home in several months. The car followed them onto the highway, off the highway, around in circles in a neighborhood, and then back onto the highway, only leaving when they were about to cross the Michigan-Ohio state border. They had given their legal name and address when putting money on many Atlanta Solidarity Fund defendants’ commissary accounts earlier this year.

We, comrades and supporters of Peatmoss, wish to remind all of our comrades that repression is ongoing, but that we can build resilience together. This means affirming our solidarity and standing behind those targeted and sharing information broadly about repressive tactics. Understand that surveillance, like that faced by Peatmoss, can be both a tool for repression from the legal system, but also, conspicuous surveillance can be a tool of repression on its own as a way to chill otherwise legal activity, spread fear and distrust.

We encourage everyone to speak with comrades openly about repression they are facing or concerned about, and to educate yourselves on best practices when dealing with law enforcement or facing criminal charges.

For more information on resisting political repression:

https://ccrjustice.org/if-agent-knocks-booklet
https://www.nlg.org/know-your-rights-english/
https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/24/when-the-police-knock-on-your-door-your-rights-and-options-a-legal-guide-and-poster
http://grandjuryresistance.org/
http://resistgrandjuries.net/
https://ssd.eff.org/en

https://nitter.net/radleybalko/status/1687897806906732544

@grapes21495407 "I think its more likely that the cop used excessive force whilst using the slide"

Climate emergencies, including heat waves, hurricanes, flooding and wildfires are quickly becoming a common staple of American life. If that isn’t dystopian enough, the NYPD announced it’s piloting test drones to fly over at-risk neighborhoods and make public announcements during emergencies.

On Sunday, at the tail end of a weekend of heavy rainfall and flooding, New York City’s emergency notification system tweeted that the NYPD would be “conducting a test of remote-piloted public messaging capabilities” at a location confirmed to AM New York as Hook Creek Park in Queens.

The NYPD told AM New York that the drones were being tested to make announcements during weather-related emergencies, and were being tested in advance of more flooding expected this weekend. The comments suggest that public announcement drones could be deployed in a real-world scenario very soon. The NYPD did not confirm any timelines on using the drones to Motherboard when asked.

Besides the eeriness of a drone instructing New Yorkers during life-threatening emergencies, the test raises questions about the NYPD’s compliance with laws that require the agency to alert the public when deploying surveillance technology.

The NYPD is required to post an impact statement and use policy on its website and seek public comment 90 days prior to deploying new surveillance technology to comply with the 2020 POST Act. However, according to the law, the NYPD merely has to amend old use policies if it is using previously existing surveillance tech for new purposes. For its use policy for unmanned aircraft, finalized in April 2021, there is no mention of the emergency announcements. The document says, “In situations where deployment of NYPD (drones) has not been foreseen or prescribed in policy, the highest uniformed member of the NYPD, the Chief of Department, will decide if deployment is appropriate and lawful. In accordance with the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, an addendum to this impact and use policy will be prepared as necessary to describe any additional uses of UAS.” No such addendum appears on the website.

The NYPD did not return comment when asked by Motherboard if a new use policy was introduced or if an amendment was made to include public announcements, and a list of impact reports and use policies on the NYPD’s site has not had any documents posted more recently than April of 2021.

The NYPD was criticized by a city oversight agency for its interpretation of the POST Act and its tendency under Mayor Eric Adams to declare that much of its newly-acquired technology—including a much-criticized robot dog—were all covered by previous use policies because the equipment merely used different versions of other technology. The oversight agency found that the NYPD issued “boilerplate language that failed to provide sufficient detail” and also that it “grouped related technologies and issued a single (impact use policy) for multiple technologies” which “limits the information made available to the public.”

The decision to use drones for public messaging also raises the risk of alarming the public without a clear reason, particularly when so many other forms of communication, including cell-phone push notifications are available.

“This plan just isn’t going to fly. The city already has countless ways of reaching New Yorkers, and it would take thousands of drones to reach the whole city,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project told Motherboard by email.

“The drones are a terrible way to alert New Yorkers, but they are a great way to creep us out. More alarmingly, the NYPD is once again violating the landmark Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which requires public notice and comment before deploying new surveillance systems.” Fox Cahn called the drone announcements a “PR stunt” meant to distract the public from criticism that the mayor didn’t do enough to address wildfire smoke that made New York City’s air hazardous for several days, the subject of a city council meeting last week.

“No gadget is going to be a substitute for effective city management and communication practices,” Fox Cahn said.

Residents in Greenpoint, Brooklyn reportedly took it upon themselves to catch the culprit who had been throwing ripped-out pages of 1970s porn magazines, junk mail, children’s stories, Bibles, and old Reader’s Digest pages from his car every Sunday for four years. NYPD Sergeant John Trzcinski was identified and received a slap on the wrist for years of excessive littering on Noble Street in April, Gothamist first reported.

The problem was noted only by those in the community until Greenpointer reported on the issue in January. “I need to stress to those who have yet to experience this phenomenon with their own eyes the SHEER VOLUME of papers floating down the street,” Emmy Davey, who was a local resident wrote in the post. “It looks like the work of someone with an enormous collection of old books who spends their weekend tearing apart pages before scattering them in the wind.”

Davey reported that the NYPD said it was investigating the incidents, but reportedly couldn’t confirm the suspect’s identity because of the low-quality security videos. It was then that residents took it into their own hands to catch the compulsive litterer and bring an end to the weekly barrage of papers that covered their streets.

A series of events led police to Trzcinski who had lived on Noble Street from 1989 to 2014 before moving to Nassau County, Long Island. The discovery began with one unnamed resident who readjusted her home surveillance camera to catch the offender earlier this year and met with success when it captured a person throwing papers out of a car window at 5:30 a.m.

“I would estimate he had a box in the passenger seat, filled that baby up, driving nice and slow – 15 miles per hour,” the resident told Gothamist. “I think he was double-fisting one time,” the resident added, saying they saw pages thrown from the car on both sides of the street.

But it wasn’t until another unnamed resident arranged to stake out the area that the car’s license plate number was confirmed, four neighbors told Gothamist. The plate identified Trzcinski as the culprit, something his sisters said was shocking. “He’s the kind of guy who would pick up trash off the street, not leave it there,” Trzcinski’s sister Ann told the outlet, adding, “He’s an environmentalist.” Trzcinski’s other sister, Mary, said simply, “That just doesn’t sound like my brother.”

In response to the findings, public records reviewed by Gothamist revealed Trzcinski wasn’t issued a summons by the sanitation department nor did he receive a fine which could range from $75 to $400. Instead, public records show that the only discipline Trzcinski received was the loss of one vacation day and he now works in the NYPD auto pounds command.

Trzcinski’s motive for dumping thousands of pages on his old home street remains unclear but residents told Gothamist that pages haven’t appeared on the street since the officer was identified.

Then the pig goes and gets his story straight with his commanding officer.

Rollout of up to 40,000 cameras equipped with AI technology in São Paulo is also raising concerns on security, privacy.

One of the key issues highlighted by experts regarding Smart Sampa pertains to the negative consequences the system could generate, particularly for groups such as the Black community, which constitutes 56 percent of Brazil’s population, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Experts argue the project could undermine the right to non-discrimination and challenge the principle of presumption of innocence.

According to Fernanda Rodrigues, a digital rights lawyer and research coordinator at the Institute for Research on Internet and Society (IRIS), facial recognition technology has the potential to lead to false positives – wrongly matching a person’s face with an image in the database – and drive mass incarceration of Black individuals as a result.

“As well as the risks that the information fed to these platforms may not be accurate and the system itself might fail, there is a problem that precedes technology implications, which is racism”, Rodrigues said.

“We know the penal system in Brazil is selective, so we can conclude that [use of surveillance with facial recognition] is all about augmenting the risks and harms to this population”, Rodrigues added, referring to the high representation of Black individuals in Brazilian jails, who account for over 67 percent of the imprisoned population, according to 2022 data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum.

A study conducted by the Center for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship (CESeC), which monitors the impact of facial recognition use by police nationwide, revealed that more than 90 percent of the individuals arrested through decisions based on facial recognition in Brazil are Black. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, the percent of unjust arrests based on photographic recognition and involving Black individuals reached 81 percent in 2021, according to data from the Public Defenders Chamber of Rio de Janeiro.

Another problem relates to the lack of openness regarding the project. One of the organisations behind the national campaign “Take My Face Out of Your Aim” and other initiatives calling for a ban on facial recognition, CESeC and other nonprofit bodies are involved in a number of legal actions against governments that choose to roll out the technology for urban security and other purposes.

Last year the São Paulo City Hall held a virtual public consultation over the last two weeks of August, inviting experts to contribute their views, with a single day set aside for people to get their queries answered.

“Participation was limited and the suggestions made were largely ignored,” said Celina Bottino, project director at the Institute for Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro.

In response to the public pushback, the Smart Sampa tender was updated with a study on the impact of the technology, which acknowledged shortcomings such as a high probability of biases in the facial recognition features, as well as the risk of unauthorised use and exposure of personal data, as well as the likelihood of privacy violations.

To address these risks, the report noted the platform would only consider detections with 90 percent parity, and all alerts issued would be analysed by trained personnel to mitigate injustices, as well as an advanced data protection and access control system.

Apperently, this cop, Justin Dodge, shot and killed a man during a drug bust. After the man dropped his gun and put his hands over his head, Justin proceeded to shoot him multiple times, killing him.

Looks like Mr. Dodge should do a better job at dodging

Another crakkka down

An investigation is reportedly being launched in Connecticut after an audit found a “high likelihood” that hundreds of Connecticut State Police troopers have been falsifying tens of thousands of traffic ticket records over the past decade to hide rampant racism, according to CT Insider.

The report found that there was a “high likelihood” that at least 25,996 tickets were completely made up between 2014 and 2021. A further 32,587 records during that same time period show “significant inaccuracies,” and auditors feel those may be false as well. Keep in mind, the auditors emphasized that their analysis was extremely conservative and “the number of falsified records is likely larger than we confidently identified.” The false reports were submitted by about one quarter of the 1,301 troopers who wrote tickets in the time period.

The outlet also reports that the findings alleged a systematic violation of state laws and that the misreporting skewed racial profiling data to make it appear as though troopers were ticketing more white drivers and fewer non-white drivers than they really were.

“This report suggests a historical pattern and practice among some troopers and constables of submitting infraction records that were likely false or inaccurate,” CT Insider reports the audit read.

Now, Governor Ned Lamont’s administration is said to be conducting an “independent investigation.” However, he also urged the public not to rush to judgment and took issue with the tickets being labeled as “false.” He reportedly emphasized that the issues had been declining over the years.

Schoenbrod told the caseworker he has used the put-a-child-in-jail technique before. Approximately nine years earlier, he said he disciplined his 4-year-old son similarly after misbehaving at preschool. Schoenbrod said he had asked the boy whether he had hit a girl and the boy said yes. So Schoenbrod then told the boy he puts people in jail when they hit other people.

"I took him to the jail and he sat there. And I watched him ... and he was crying and everything, and to this day, if you mention, like, that incident, he’s just like, ‘I would never do that again.’ It was effective," Schoenbrod said. "So that’s why I did it with this. He didn’t hit anybody, but I figured the same thing, discipline. And he didn’t want to go back, so ...” Later, on the hourlong body-cam footage, most of which contained scrambled video, Long could be heard calling the investigation "insane," while Schoenbrod responded: “It’s just disgusting that somebody would drag our family through the mud like this.”