The cops love them because they're basically a living version of the huge maglite flashlight; uncooperative subject being a general pain in the ass holed up somewhere? Send in the dog, that'll teach 'em!
They're also a breathing probable cause generator.
Drug dogs are worse than a coin flip for correctly signaling on drugs (I don't know about explosives or the 'flash drive' dogs and yes, the latter is A Thing) but I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were also BS.
The dogs are extremely eager to please, and they can pick up on cues from their handler that the handler thinks there are drugs.
The US Supreme Court ruled they're constitutional regardless of being worse than random, which at the time was one of the more perplexing rulings by the court. It gave cops free license to bypass a constitutional right.
The police have been using drug dogs, which are known to have only a 30% hit rate, as an excuse to strip-search teens on their way into music festivals, despite there also being evidence that young people in possession of drugs tend to give them up when told the dog has indicated on them. And they haven't even been properly recording their 'justification' for the searches.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/13/nsw-p...
Here's hoping they get a smackdown from the courts. The NSW police seem to be the worst in Australia for this and are basically killing the music festival scene in that state, through a campaign of harassment and charging extortionate, mandatory fees to public events.
It is a photo of NYPD. Some of the officers are wearing their vests over their uniforms and some aren't. There are also some wearing jackets.
- The black officer's hands in the back are "possibly weird until you zoom in" - it's just the shadow/low-light hiding his pinky.
- outfits all different.... that's... fine?
- "bunch of other weird details"... downvoted because you didn't even try...
Every one that I've seen (which is several, but a long way from comprehensive—there are a hell of a lot of them) features the main characters frequently and deliberately violating suspects' rights, both Constitutional and otherwise, in order to get the evidence that they "know" has to be there, with widely varying degrees of ostensible justification being provided.
My ire is more at the box usage than the content, honestly. The second oldest profession also involves sales. Just snake oil instead of self.
Heed Kendrick: turn the TV off.
2 retail workers in the last 2 weeks have told me about thefts happening in their stores where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door. It doesn't mean that society is crumbling or that we need police to be more vicious, but I think there is something going on and it would be worthwhile to address it somehow. It feels corrosive to the fabric of society when this stuff happens. Maybe not as corrosive as cops beating and killing people, but it's also bad.
My pet theory is that the #1 problem in the USA in the past few decades is wealth inequality, and if we can find ways to stop the rich extracting wealth from the poor, many of our issues will sort themselves out.
The other two don’t have such an issue because they have cheap and small housing options, which are effectively banned in the US due to the effect of various regressive and “seemingly progressive” housing policies
It's much simpler. People notice they can just take things with no consequences...so they do.
There's 2 different things here, though. There's casual shoplifting, and there are organized gangs of shoplifters. What you're describing is organized gangs of shoplifting, and that's not cause by a corrosion in the fabric of society, that's caused because these gangs know that retailers aren't interested in stopping them.
A random person might steal an item or two, but a random person isn't going to load up a cart with merchandise and walk out the door. But organized crime will happily take advantage of retailers who won't do anything about them.
A person sneaking an item or two into their pocket is pretty much only affecting the store and that individual. I guess it has a broader effect if it happens so much that the store locks up the merchandise so customers have to ask for assistance.
On the other hand, when shoplifting is normalized to the point where everyday shoppers don't feel any shame about shoplifting, then that shows there's significant damage to our social fabric. But this isn't what's happening.
i feel i can get a quicker read on people listening to them rather than reading something carefully crafted. I searched and listened to this
I don't understand how you can tell this story, pivot to a discussion of people who you feel selectively report statistics, and then never get back to the obvious question of whether crime rates decreased after these policy responses. (They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...)
That article doesn't say any such thing in the way you are strongly implying it does.
In that it doesn't discuss retail theft at all. Violent crime is down. It refers to property crime, but only one (relatively small, about 11%) segment of property crime is retail theft.
The government threw money to combat "organized retail theft" and you point to a reduction in violent crime as being a result?
Indeed, California itself seems to believe it had no effect: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee... - "reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades"
Notably, if you click into that report, it also illustrates a huge reduction in property crime since California passed its three strikes law in the mid-1990s. That seems like another big example of how we can directly observe "more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer", despite the author's claim that it doesn't.
It really, really seems to me like the author is engaging in the behavior he describes as "copaganda", selectively telling only the stories that fit in with his vision of how public safety ought to work.
>The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
A good point, but criminals still must face consequences for their actions.
>And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
That's just nonsense.
1: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee...
Police and Medical procedurals are the main settings for stories with the character growth flipped. Meaning, that in these procedural tragedies (typically, though some comedies do exist) the growth in the story, the change, is not in the internal lives of the characters, but in the story itself. The birth of this was with Edgar Allen Poe's detective stories [0], but most famously popularized with Sherlock Holmes. In these tales, the characters are very flat and unchanging from story to story, experiencing little growth through an individual episode. Though in recent media, we tend to see growth in characters over the course of a season, belaying the procedural model a fair bit
Some variations exist in the procedural setting with Legal, Journalism, Fire/EMT, Cybersecurity, Coast Guards, Forestry/Game Wardening, and Political setting serving as mostly variations to the Medical and Law Enforcement settings. The most novel and most recent additions to the procedurals are in Historical Restoration and Cooking/Kitchens. If I've missed any, please let me know.
So, to me, thing like copaganda more reflect the dearth of settings that the procedural model of story telling has available. The variations above really aren't as dramatic as the literal life and death stakes that Police and Medical situations come across every story. You can get close with Legal and Fire/EMT settings, and you can also have high stakes and life and death with Political procedurals, though typically off-stage. The nature of the audience's attention is just naturally going to gravitate to the most dramatic stories, and those are the Medical and Police ones, I think.
I've seen lots of medical dramas which, while not the main subject, place some emphasis on corruption, big pharma, perverse incentives, malpractice, doctors that do needless surgeries, cases where "do no harm" is not followed, insurance denying rightful treatments, funding problems from corporate sponsors, drug addictions in doctors, exploiting nurses, residents making mistakes because they are exhausted, etc.
Of course, all sprinkled with personal drama, romance, and interesting cases, this being television after all. One example in mind is "The Resident", but there are others.
throw0101d•7mo ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda