Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You can join/support a radical organization (and you should) but the basic reason there isn't something like an EFF is money. Sure, the EFF goes to bat for consumers against government and giant corporations, but there really aren't that many of them.

In contrast, there are a lot of law enforcement agencies, because there are 300 countries, many towns, most college campuses have their own police, most transit system s in cities have their own police, many federal agencies have their own police. The total is estimated to be about 18,000. If you use a narrower definition the total is still about 15,000.

That's a huge number for any single organization to keep track of or to hold accountable. Even if you just follow up on every single death with a law enforcement angle that's ~1000 homicides by police annually and ~4000 deaths in jails and prisons. That's a huge amount of data to collect and organize before you even begin to evaluate questions of avoidability or accountability.

Say it takes an hour just to receive information of a death, establish the identity of the person involved and the data and location and create a database record or standardized wiki page that can act as a stub for document submission and information collection. With ~100 deaths a week that's a full-time job for 3 people just to produce a barebones list, and I'm being really optimistic with the time estimates. Realistically it's probably 2 or 3 times as much.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jul/10/...

Here's the report mentioned in the article, because it's no longer available at the original doj.gov link: https://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-p341-pub.pdf



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: