Although it may have cost Texas more to recover from the ransomware attack than paying the ransom, in the long term a refusal to pay extortionists will help to discourage future attacks.
The US Government Has Done “Almost Nothing” to Stop Cyber Attacks Mother Jones
In 2004, as he sat before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, Richard Clarke famously declared, “Your government failed you, those entrusted with …
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just handed down a refresher [PDF] on a few legal issues, most notably what is or isn’t “reasonable” when it comes to suspicion. Police officers thought an anonymous tip about a man carrying a gun and someone running away from them created enough suspicion to chase down Daniel Brown, stop him at gunpoint, and search him for contraband.
Contraband was found, leading to Brown’s motion to suppress. The lower court said this combination — an anonymous report of a gun and Brown’s decision to run when he saw the police cruiser — was reasonable enough. Not so, says the Ninth Circuit, pointing out the obvious fact that a person carrying a gun can’t be inherently suspicious in a state where carrying a gun in public is permitted.
In Washington State, it is presumptively lawful to carry a gun. It is true that carrying a concealed pistol without a license is a misdemeanor offense in Washington. See RCW §§ 9.41.050(1)(a) (“[A] person shall not carry a pistol concealed on his or her person without a license to carry a concealed pistol . . . .”), 9.41.810 (explaining that any violation of the subchapter is a misdemeanor “except as otherwise provided”). However, the failure to carry the license is simply a civil infraction.
There was no reason for officers to assume Brown’s gun was unlicensed. Since carrying a gun in Washington is “presumptively legal,” the officers would have needed more info than they had to perform a stop to just to ask Brown for his carry license. The anonymous tip officers received said only that a YWCA resident had approached the desk and said they’d seen a man with a gun. No further information was given by the tipster.
Faced with the weakness of the tip and the presumptive legality of gun ownership, the police then argued Brown might have been illegally “displaying” his gun to “cause alarm.” But the court denies this argument — first raised on appeal — as being no better than assuming Brown’s mere gun possession was enough to justify a stop.
Faced with this reality, the government now argues that the officers suspected that the manner in which Brown was carrying his gun was unlawful: it is “unlawful for any person to carry, exhibit, display, or draw any firearm . . . in a manner, under circumstances, . . . that warrants alarm for the safety of other persons.” RCW § 9.41.270. Never mind that nothing in the record could support such a finding. No evidence shows that the resident was alarmed at the time she reported seeing the gun. There is no report that she yelled, screamed, ran, was upset, or otherwise acted as though she was distressed. Instead, the 911 call reported only that the resident “walked in” and stated “that guy has a gun.”
Finally, the government argued that Brown’s decision to flee when he saw police officers was inherently suspicious. Again, the court says this is wrong. While fleeing officers can be suggestive of wrongdoing, it is only one factor and it’s one heavily influenced by the deteriorated relationships many law enforcement agencies have with the communities they serve. The Ninth Circuit quotes Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who put this in his dissent from the Court’s 2000 decision in Illinois v. Wardlow:
Among some citizens, particularly minorities and those residing in high crime areas, there is also the possibility that the fleeing person is entirely innocent, but, with or without justification, believes that contact with the police can itself be dangerous, apart from any criminal activity associated with the officer’s sudden presence.
The Appeals Court adds to this, saying not much has improved since Justice Stevens authored his dissent:
In the almost twenty years since Justice Stevens wrote his concurrence in Wardlow, the coverage of racial disparities in policing has increased, amplifying awareness of these issues. […] Although such data cannot replace the “commonsense judgments and inferences about human behavior” underlying the reasonable suspicion analysis, Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 125, it can inform the inferences to be drawn from an individual who decides to step away, run, or flee from police without a clear reason to do otherwise. See id. at 133 (“Moreover, these concerns and fears are known to the police officers themselves, and are validated by law enforcement investigations into their own practices.” (footnote omitted)).
Attached to this paragraph is a footnote quoting the DOJ’s investigation of the Seattle Police Department — the one involved in the arrest at the center of this case. The 2011 report found the Seattle PD routinely deployed “unnecessary and excessive force” and engaged in “racially discriminatory policing.”
The court goes on to say this isn’t just a problem with the Seattle PD, but law enforcement in general, which gives plenty of people all the reason they need to dodge interactions with law enforcement.
Given that racial dynamics in our society—along with a simple desire not to interact with police—offer an “innocent” explanation of flight, when every other fact posited by the government weighs so weakly in support of reasonable suspicion, we are particularly hesitant to allow flight to carry the day in authorizing a stop.
The public isn’t obligated to stop just because an officer says, “Stop.” In this case, the officers said nothing until Brown was already running. Lots of people have zero interest in talking to the police. Some don’t want the hassle. Most don’t enjoy the experience. And some suspect they’ll probably end up arrested or dead, even if they haven’t done anything wrong. If law enforcement doesn’t like the way this decision breaks, it really can’t blame anyone else for the public’s reaction to the unexpected presence of officers. Even the tipster said she didn’t want to talk to an officer because, according to the YWCA rep speaking to the dispatcher, she “[does not] like the police.” Running from cops isn’t inherently suspicious. Far too often, running from cops just makes sense.
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The Los Angeles Police Department has just received some bad news from its oversight. It’s probably good news for the policed — many of whom are being disproportionately targeted thanks to biased input data — but the LAPD can’t be pleased that its reliance on expensive, mostly-automated tools hasn’t produced worthwhile results.
The department relies on a handful of tech tools to aid in its policing, but it doesn’t appear to be helping. It has CompStat — a holdover from the early 2000’s when Bill Bratton still ran the department. To that framework, it has added LASER — a nifty acronym that stands for “Los Angeles’ Strategic Extraction and Restoration.” The program with the reverse engineered nickname actually relies on input from human analysts to determine where officers should be deployed. But this reliance on data-driven policing isn’t making the city any safer, despite LASER’s focus on violent crime.
Here’s what the LAPD’s human analysts put together for the department’s patrol officers.
In perhaps the most contentious strategy, each of the department’s 21 geographic areas used data to compile lists or “bulletins” of people calculated to be among the top 12 “chronic offenders.”
The program assigns people points based on prior criminal histories, such as arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and parole status and recent police contacts.
This strategy received some public blow-back, resulting in the department abandoning it last August. Nothing of value was lost.
[Inspector General Mark] Smith examined data collected prior to the suspension.
He found 44 percent of chronic offenders had either zero or one arrest for violent crimes. About half had no arrest for gun-related crimes.
So much for curbing violent crime. All it did was create a loop where cops targeted nonviolent offenders, resulting in another arrest/detention that added more points to the person’s LASER record, resulting in even more targeting and, inevitably, more interactions with police officers. It’s a feedback loop no one can escape.
To make things worse, officers had the power to place people into this damaging loop by “nominating” them for targeting with LASER. The point-based system that was supposed to limit this targeting to just the worst of worst street criminals could be bypassed. Nominated citizens would find themselves rising up the ranks on the LASER lists, racking up points simply by officers performing stops based on faulty inputs.
And while the tech is supposedly improving, the quality of policing isn’t. CompStat has had nearly a 20-year run in LA, but its results are negligible. Predictive policing — which has its own bias issues — isn’t doing any better.
Like the other program, Smith found discrepancies with the data collection and could not draw conclusions to “meaningfully evaluate” the program’s overall effectiveness to reduce crime, the report said.
Unfortunately, the report recommends the LAPD stay the course. The LAPD is supposed to spend more time “reviewing” the data that isn’t producing results and tailor its outputs with an eye on Constitutional rights. As it stands now, the LAPD is allowing databases to conjure up reasonable suspicion for stops. That can’t keep happening. But the way forward can’t be more of the same, only at a slightly slower pace.
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