[HN Gopher] This Wasn't His First Time
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This Wasn't His First Time
Author : mooreds
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-05-24 16:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (magazine.atavist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (magazine.atavist.com)
| joshstrange wrote:
| This is an extremely well written article and like mentioned
| elsewhere the link for this should be changed to:
| https://magazine.atavist.com/a-crime-beyond-belief-vallejo-k...
|
| Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a
| whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the "facts"
| fit their preconceived notions. That they are incapable of even
| considering they could have gotten it wrong.
|
| When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of
| this being a fraud the captain said:
|
| > "We don't know what the final outcome of this case is going to
| be," Captain John Whitney told the Vallejo Times-Herald. "It's
| important that we don't jump to conclusions.
|
| They have no issue at all jumping to conclusions when it makes
| their job easier or when it lets them bend the facts to their
| initial suspicion. It's disgusting that we allow the police to
| lie to and treat suspects like this. Hours and hours of
| questioning attempting to break them down and have them question
| their own sanity.
|
| Let this be a lesson to anyone who hasn't already learned it:
| never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are
| not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an
| easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to
| you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin
| it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a
| lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let
| me go".
|
| I see no path forward for our current police in the US. It's not
| just bad apples, it's bad barrels and they will always choose to
| close ranks over rooting out the worst among them. Be sure, the
| cops who help cover up or know but stay silent are just as bad as
| the ones we would call "bad apples". The system is horribly
| broken.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I always found the "bad apples" argument very ironic. The whole
| expression is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". We are now
| left with a spoiled bunch.
| kipchak wrote:
| I guess the idea is if a few bad apples spoil the bunch, you
| can save the bunch if you can remove the bad apples?
| uoaei wrote:
| I recommend reading up on ethylene. "Paper bag" and
| "ripening" can also be included in the query for more
| practical applications.
| jjulius wrote:
| But you can only save the bunch if you remove the bad
| apples in time. ;)
| lupire wrote:
| Yes but the apples formed a union to prevent that.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| the idea is that if you seal up a barrel with a few bad
| apples, you will unseal a barrel full of bad apples
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > you can save the bunch if you can remove the bad apples?
|
| Sure, except the people making the "bad apples" argument
| don't want to do this part, either.
| Tostino wrote:
| And at this point, you need to remove all the other
| "apples" who have been tainted. That's the whole point,
| you need to act fast, or it will ruin the entire thing.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Or in the case of most police departments, an apple goes
| bad (commits a crime) it gets put on suspension right
| next to the barrel while still being paid as the
| department 'investigates'. If it goes badly for the apple
| they get removed from the barrel, but then they either
| sue and get their job back and get put back into the
| barrel. Or move to next county and get put into their
| barrel.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a
| whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the
| "facts" fit their preconceived notions.
|
| I think your point is made stronger without the hyperbole.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I've taken to saying that instead there are a few good apples.
| Misty Carausu is definitely a good apple, but she seems like a
| major exception to the rule :/
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of
| this being a fraud the captain said:
|
| Police Unions often have an ethos of "we protect our own" --
| essentially gang mentality. I like the idea of policing, think
| they can play a very positive role in society, but also think
| that the unions and that mentality are deeply undermining those
| positives coming true.
| kibwen wrote:
| Everyone on HN already knows that you don't ever trust HR
| departments, despite how friendly they may seem, because their
| job is to protect the company from employees. By analogy, the
| police are the HR department of the state.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| An _armed_ HR department.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They
| are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking
| for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying
| to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much
| rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs.
| Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell
| them X they will let me go".
|
| There are exceptions to this rule, and I think one is when your
| girlfriend has just been kidnapped. Sure, in this case the
| police did absolutely nothing to actually help save the
| girlfriend, but the chance they might help seems worth the risk
| of being deemed a suspect.
| lupire wrote:
| Why? If you tell the public, the cops will find out. They
| won't find her _for you_. They don 't need _you_ to help find
| her. Talking to them only helps them hurt you.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > They don't need you to help find her.
|
| In what way, in a case like this, is your eyewitness
| testimony not a crucial part of finding your girlfriend
| while she is still alive?
| joshstrange wrote:
| I mean we have seen multiple cases (this one included) where
| the cops make you the primary suspect and will do anything
| they can to discredit you or catch you in a lie (even an
| unrelated lie that they use to "prove" you are guilty).
|
| I understand the desire to cooperate but with minor
| exceptions I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or
| with one present.
|
| Cops are interested in really finding who is responsible,
| they are looking to close the file and you are right in front
| of them, a very tempting target.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one
| present.
|
| Yes, I think hiring a lawyer would also increase your
| chances if they can push the police towards continuing to
| investigate all possibilities (such as interviewing
| witnesses or testing all the samples as they failed to do
| in this case) or make them less likely to lie to you (as
| they did in this case about the lie detector test results).
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think a lot of people think "only guilty
| people/criminals ask for lawyers" (thanks largely TV
| shows and movies that show cops that never make mistakes
| and only criminals not cooperating) and/or think "If they
| just hear my side they will understand and agree with
| me".
|
| In a really gross way I think that getting a lawyer might
| make you look less attractive to the cops (harder to pin
| it on you now) and force them to look elsewhere along
| with your other points of using your lawyer as way to
| push the investigation on their own. Remember, most cops
| are looking for the path of least resistance, not the
| truth.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Multiple cases out of...how many kidnapped girlfriend
| cases?
|
| The cops behavior(and human behavior in general) makes a
| lot of sense if you view them as pattern matching machines.
| If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97
| of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing
| girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a
| cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for
| investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case.
|
| And if merely "multiple cases" is enough to warrant cutting
| them out of your life, consider that you also need to cut
| out pizza delivery people (multiple cases of them robbing
| their clients), baristas(multiple cases of them raping
| people they meet on the job), mail men(multiple cases of
| them assaulting their clients), etc.
| goatherders wrote:
| What a bonkers story. Thank you for sharing.
| mwint wrote:
| This caught my eye:
|
| > As she gripped her gun, she felt as if she'd stepped into one
| of the true-crime documentaries she binge-watched at night.
|
| Seems like an incredibly bad idea for police officers to be
| binge-watching that stuff. They'll get the worse cases drilled
| into their heads, right before going out on a (real) street the
| next morning.
| uoaei wrote:
| Oh, just wait until your hear about the curricula in police
| training academies!
|
| Whole days are spent watching dash- and body-worn-cam videos of
| officers getting ambushed, ostensibly to teach ways to mitigate
| harm, but in practice it just has the effect of deepening the
| chasm between "us" officers and "them" citizens by instilling a
| deep sense of fear bordering on what may be considered an
| anticipatory PTSD. I mean, talk about a garbage biased
| dataset...
|
| (To any pedants in the audience, the trauma occurs when
| watching the videos, so "post-traumatic" is appropriate here
| :))
|
| Here's an account from an ex-cop that made a splash following
| George Floyd's murder, but there are many, many more articles
| exactly like this scattered across the internet:
| https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
| JasonFruit wrote:
| On the other hand, what do you _expect_ them to do, not train
| officers on that stuff so they don 't get an antagonistic
| view of the public? That's like not having pilots read
| accident reports so they don't get spooked about losing power
| on takeoff; it's a real threat, so they should be prepared.
|
| I agree that antagonism between police and public is a big
| problem, but I'm not sure what the solution is to the
| particular problem you point out.
| aosaigh wrote:
| Another great story from The Atavist is "Mastermind":
|
| https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/
| sborer wrote:
| This story is also covered in one of my favourite episodes of the
| Criminal podcast:
| https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-167-48-hours-6-18-21
| corobo wrote:
| Feels like a lot of websites could do with switching their H1 and
| H2s around..
|
| > A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked
| the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling
| set the whole story in motion.
|
| Much more intriguing.
| Forge36 wrote:
| A/b testing would be interesting
| gumby wrote:
| The article is an excerpt from a longer article, which is here
| (and should be the link): https://magazine.atavist.com/a-crime-
| beyond-belief-vallejo-k...
| dang wrote:
| Changed now from https://longreads.com/2022/05/04/crime-beyond-
| belief-kidnapp.... Thanks!
| drooby wrote:
| > Henry Lee was nearing the end of his shift in the newsroom when
| he got another strange email, this time from
| huskinskidnapping@hotmail.com. "Ms. Huskins was absolutely
| kidnapped," the message said. "We did it."
|
| Lmao.. omg such a good read.
| FabHK wrote:
| Reminds me of the movie _Ruthless People_ with Danny DeVito and
| Bette Midler, about "a couple who kidnap their ex-boss's wife
| to get revenge and extort money from him [but] soon realize he
| does not want her back and was planning to kill her himself."
| Hilarious.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthless_People
| a4isms wrote:
| The stereo scene is so funny, I keep a defibrillator handy
| just in case I laugh so hard my heart fails while rewatching
| it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19CvEO3Riy0
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(page generated 2022-05-26 23:02 UTC)