Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/26/california-cops-ignore-science-on-lineups-keep-sending-innocents-to-jail.html
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What?!? Cops are ignoring something that gets in the way of trampling on people’s rights?
/S
I’m surprised they bother with lineups at all:
Sigh. What is it about human nature that makes institutional reform so difficult?
I’m gonna guess it’s greed combined with racism, sexism, and “othering”/targeting members of marginalized groups.
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I’m sorry, but this is very much ignoring the fact that we can change institutions. It can be difficult, sometimes taking lifetimes to do, but we can and humans DO this all the time. Take the Catholic church. it is not the same institution it was 60 years ago prior to Vatican II. Does it need to change more, absolutely, but as Ursula K LeGuin said, any institution made by humans can be changed by humans. Human nature is malleable that way. We live in a completely different world than we did even a couple of hundred years ago, and chalking our current problems up to some kind of immutable human nature isn’t helpful nor is it historically grounded.
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Gee even more content with a defeatist bent from Yoy Luadha; what a surprise.
How not ‘mostly wonderful.’
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Oh well… what can you do. Human nature is what it is, and you can’t possibly change it! /s
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Might as well just give up, lay down and wait to be walked upon.
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It’s the only correct answer…
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Meanwhile the giant, entrenched bureaucracy at Boeing suddenly decided it didn’t need engineering expertise after all, it would be cheaper to make planes that fall apart. Wonder why they were able to change when the LAPD didn’t.
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That’s different, cause see that’s the WISDOM OF THE MARKET dictating change. Humans can’t ourselves change shit, only teh markets… ALL HAIL THE SACRED MARKETS!!!
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I remember reading - many, many years ago - that the lineup procedures most commonly used by US cops were known, as a provable fact, to create false positives in identifications. (And as a result were banned in countries like the UK.) That they were still doing it then, much less now, in the face of the overwhelming evidence, really proves that (US) cops don’t give a shit about arresting the actual perpetrator, they just want to arrest someone. There really couldn’t be clearer proof of it. It’s absolutely damning. It’s not that US cops are corrupt or inept - they are often those, too - it’s that the fundamental goals of the institution are broken and unjust. (And that supporting the idea of “law and justice” is not only not the same thing as supporting the police, the two are actually at odds.)
The very fact that US police are outliers in the developed world in still using these procedures that create false identifications, false confessions, etc. and other countries’ police forces have banned them is absolutely proof of that.
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I skip reading their stories and go straight to the comments.
Didn’t they recently try to tell us that a civil war is coming, too? SMH
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Same author, yes.
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Thought so.
Yeah, I go straight to the comments b/c I’m far more interested in what my fellow Mutants have to say. Re: many of their stories, I don’t even bother doing that.
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Depends upon the topic; sometimes something posted on BB prompts me to go looking subjects up.
I regularly find most of Thom, Rob & Pesco’s posts to be worth reading, and Carla also posts a fair amount of ‘feel good’ content that I enjoy.
That said, I never go to the front page.
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I enjoy most other authors’ stuff here.
I’m also visiting the front page less often.
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Back in 2016, I found the comment section by happenstance; I didn’t even know there was a front page until some months later.
And I had certainly never heard of Cory or Maggie before then…
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Funnily enough, I was going to the main page for around four years before I ever thought to look at the comments pages. Back in 2009 or so the comments pages on most sites were unmoderated hellscapes.
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Yep… sadly many still are. I appreciate a place that can have solid and fair moderation. It makes things much more pleasant to hang out.
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