>Doesn't every criminal who is followed by a surreptitious police tail then get to claim the same reasonable expectation that nobody should have known about his specific transit from a drug corner to the stash house?
I think that this sentence reveals everything about your position: you aren't thinking in terms of citizens but rather in terms of criminals. And this reveals binary thinking that, fundamentally, cops are the good guys and anyone they are interested in are bad guys, and cops can and should use any and all tools in their power to track down and stop those bad guys.
This is a deeply problematic view to a lot of people here and elsewhere. We have all seen video of the police murdering the homeless; we have all seen video of police brutalizing bystanders and stealing/destroying their recording equipment. And for every concrete video, there are hundreds, thousands of stories of police bullying, abusing, and otherwise misusing their power. We have all heard of photographers being needlessly hassled, and the various abuses, mistakes, and humiliations that the TSA visits upon Americans and America's visitors every day. And that's just here in the USA. I have personally witnessed several instances of petty abuses of police power, physically assaulted for "mouthing off" to an OC Sheriff (I had a camera and would not give it to him, and he grabbed it and the strap and threw me down), and have a friend who was traumatized as a boy by an officer of the law.
One of the biggest problems with how policing is done is that police look for anything "out of the ordinary", and then act to discourage it. If your look or lifestyle is out of the ordinary, you're a target. If you are doing something on your property that is out of the ordinary, you're a target.
Intrusive, scary, brutal, arbitrary, conformist. And these are the people you want to give even more authority and power and control to?
No thanks. We already have police driving around with heavy weaponry in their vehicles, while elsewhere in the world somehow the police make due with a nightstick. They already passively scan license plates for DMV paperwork violations. There is no need to give them more power, more information, or more control over me, my information, or my life.
What you've done here is instead of addressing my argument, invented a cartoon caricature of the arguer (your cartoon version of me favors heavily armed police who assault people for "mouthing off") to argue with instead.
Golly, I am sorry. I thought you might like to know that you have a pervasive bias that is distorting your understanding so badly that it would cause you to argue for police powers on an Orwellian magnitude. But, since I am not interested in rearranging the deck chairs of specific arguments on your moral and ethical Titanic, I'll leave you alone with your thoughts.
I think that this sentence reveals everything about your position: you aren't thinking in terms of citizens but rather in terms of criminals. And this reveals binary thinking that, fundamentally, cops are the good guys and anyone they are interested in are bad guys, and cops can and should use any and all tools in their power to track down and stop those bad guys.
This is a deeply problematic view to a lot of people here and elsewhere. We have all seen video of the police murdering the homeless; we have all seen video of police brutalizing bystanders and stealing/destroying their recording equipment. And for every concrete video, there are hundreds, thousands of stories of police bullying, abusing, and otherwise misusing their power. We have all heard of photographers being needlessly hassled, and the various abuses, mistakes, and humiliations that the TSA visits upon Americans and America's visitors every day. And that's just here in the USA. I have personally witnessed several instances of petty abuses of police power, physically assaulted for "mouthing off" to an OC Sheriff (I had a camera and would not give it to him, and he grabbed it and the strap and threw me down), and have a friend who was traumatized as a boy by an officer of the law.
One of the biggest problems with how policing is done is that police look for anything "out of the ordinary", and then act to discourage it. If your look or lifestyle is out of the ordinary, you're a target. If you are doing something on your property that is out of the ordinary, you're a target.
Intrusive, scary, brutal, arbitrary, conformist. And these are the people you want to give even more authority and power and control to?
No thanks. We already have police driving around with heavy weaponry in their vehicles, while elsewhere in the world somehow the police make due with a nightstick. They already passively scan license plates for DMV paperwork violations. There is no need to give them more power, more information, or more control over me, my information, or my life.