>I understand the principle of what you're advocating for, but the unfortunate reality is that miscarriages of justice are the norm and not the exception. I'd put forward another principle; it is better to let 1000 guilty parties go free than to condemn 1 innocent party (and "innocent" here should be taken to include people who are committing a "crime" that is normally tolerated, employed as an excuse to arrest someone - each of us commits dozens of these "crimes" regularly, without realizing it).
I think the ideal solution to this would be to work on fixing the system, not avoiding contact with the system. Hold police accountable for violating people's rights. Remove laws that don't need to be enforced, and consistently enforce ones that do need to be enforced.
>When you give them that invitation, they will make the absolute most of the opportunity.
When my car's window was broken and my work laptop was stolen, I reported it to the police and they didn't seem to do anything besides enter it into a database. I even have the thief's blood, but the police didn't want it.
> I think the ideal solution to this would be to work on fixing the system, not avoiding contact with the system. Hold police accountable for violating people's rights. Remove laws that don't need to be enforced, and consistently enforce ones that do need to be enforced.
This is a fair point. Personally I don't believe this reform is possible, as I believe that the nature of police powers is such that they will always become abusive and insulate themselves from accountability. Regardless, in the same way you go to war with the army you have, when you contact law enforcement, it's the law enforcement that you have and not the law enforcement you believe should exist.
> When my car's window was broken and my work laptop was stolen, I reported it to the police and they didn't seem to do anything besides enter it into a database.
I'm sorry that happened. Once my laptop with full disk encryption was stolen - while it was booted and asleep (thus defeating the full disk encryption), and I felt like such a fool.
I meant this more as a mental model of what the worst case scenario you should anticipate is. Because we simply cannot predict how law enforcement will respond on a spectrum of not giving you the time of day to showing up with their weapons drawn, we have to consider whether the most extreme scenario is acceptable before contacting them.
For what it's worth, I believe we should have a more diverse array of emergency services, who can be contacted directly, so that you have more control over what kind of response you are requesting.
Yeah, you have some good points. It's a complicated situation.
>while it was booted and asleep (thus defeating the full disk encryption)
Well I thought it would require a cold boot attack which would be extremely hard against a laptop with soldered RAM (like my stolen macbook pro). Until I looked it up just now and found this video...
I think the ideal solution to this would be to work on fixing the system, not avoiding contact with the system. Hold police accountable for violating people's rights. Remove laws that don't need to be enforced, and consistently enforce ones that do need to be enforced.
>When you give them that invitation, they will make the absolute most of the opportunity.
When my car's window was broken and my work laptop was stolen, I reported it to the police and they didn't seem to do anything besides enter it into a database. I even have the thief's blood, but the police didn't want it.