Dzokhar Tsarnaev is in custody, his brother is dead, America is "safe" again.Don't think me ungrateful, I'm glad they caught the guy and he's alive to be put on trial, but given that I no longer reside in the New England area (I've been watching this whole debacle go down from a military base in Southern Arizona) I have to raise some potentially serious safety, legal and economic concerns about how this whole operation carried itself out.
Show me the Judge who took the time to issue a warrant to search EVERY HOUSE in Watertown MA. I want to see the warrant itself!
Technically if the cops show up at your house, even for a simple noise complaint, you don't have to let them in your home even if they ask: Without a warrant they can't come inside unless you let them in, even to "just have a look around." Cops have a job to do, it's dangerous and it really blows at times, but just because they ask doesn't mean you HAVE TO say "Yes." But before you take my word alone on this, I'm going to very strongly recommend you ask a lawyer: Laws vary greatly depending on what State (and obviously Country) you live in.
Just over 30,000 people live in Watertown. It must have taken law enforcement a very long time to search each bit of property in the city before they finally found Dzokhar. I'm willing to bet, given the circumstances, people let the cops into their homes without question. Unless they have a warrant, they can't search you nor your property without your consent. I'd like to state at this point, as this is being typed up, that I have no evidence indicating either way if there were warrants issued to search the entire town or not, but I sincerely fucking doubt it.
Boston Police were telling people not to film cops doing their jobs. Didn't they lose a major lawsuit a while back for doing this?
I'm reasonably certain that they weren't just talking about reporters here. While I find the use of closed-circuit cameras in public places Orwellian, this statement also seems to include people with smart-phones and internet access. Which as far as I understand it, because spotty and erratic as events unfolded: A lot of people seem to think that service was shut down deliberately while all this was happening, but I can find no solid evidence to support this.
When we are no longer allowed to photograph or film our own people doing bad things to each other, our rights are dead in the water. Not all cops are the good guys, and I'm not just talking about the one bored pig in Windham Maine who pulled me over with an obvious hard-on (admittedly I WAS speeding, but come on!) Cops and Soldiers answer to the same government we do, when they do wrong and get caught they need to be brought to justice just like any other criminal.
Which brings me to my next complaint about how this whole ordeal is being handled: Calls for torture. At this point, what is this really going to accomplish? There were only two suspects, both working only together, one of them is now dead. Torturing the prick isn't going to bring him to justice, it would be an act of petty and degrading revenge and a horrible abuse of power.
Only in fucking New York, man...
Has anyone had a good long 'think' about the other ramifications of shutting down one major US city even for a single day?
People missing work (unless you work for Dunkin Donuts, of course) and students missing class, court-dates and medical appointments suspended and cancelled, essentially a few million lives irrevocably disrupted. I'm not a business expert by any mean or measure, but I wonder how many surviving businesses these days may have lost some serious productivity or revenue from all of this... Anyone in the restaurant business can tell you how one bad day can fuck your entire operation, even Gordon Ramsay can't do anything for you at that point.
Any readers from the Boston or Watertown areas: How was YOUR day-off? I'd love to hear about how the big shut-down impacted your life, because maybe I'm wrong about every little bit here but I don't tend to get a lot of feed-back these days.
I'm mostly shouting in thee dark, here. These are mostly just my ideas and opinions, but these things DO concern me.
Show me the Judge who took the time to issue a warrant to search EVERY HOUSE in Watertown MA. I want to see the warrant itself!
Technically if the cops show up at your house, even for a simple noise complaint, you don't have to let them in your home even if they ask: Without a warrant they can't come inside unless you let them in, even to "just have a look around." Cops have a job to do, it's dangerous and it really blows at times, but just because they ask doesn't mean you HAVE TO say "Yes." But before you take my word alone on this, I'm going to very strongly recommend you ask a lawyer: Laws vary greatly depending on what State (and obviously Country) you live in.
Just over 30,000 people live in Watertown. It must have taken law enforcement a very long time to search each bit of property in the city before they finally found Dzokhar. I'm willing to bet, given the circumstances, people let the cops into their homes without question. Unless they have a warrant, they can't search you nor your property without your consent. I'd like to state at this point, as this is being typed up, that I have no evidence indicating either way if there were warrants issued to search the entire town or not, but I sincerely fucking doubt it.
Boston Police were telling people not to film cops doing their jobs. Didn't they lose a major lawsuit a while back for doing this?
When we are no longer allowed to photograph or film our own people doing bad things to each other, our rights are dead in the water. Not all cops are the good guys, and I'm not just talking about the one bored pig in Windham Maine who pulled me over with an obvious hard-on (admittedly I WAS speeding, but come on!) Cops and Soldiers answer to the same government we do, when they do wrong and get caught they need to be brought to justice just like any other criminal.
Which brings me to my next complaint about how this whole ordeal is being handled: Calls for torture. At this point, what is this really going to accomplish? There were only two suspects, both working only together, one of them is now dead. Torturing the prick isn't going to bring him to justice, it would be an act of petty and degrading revenge and a horrible abuse of power.
Has anyone had a good long 'think' about the other ramifications of shutting down one major US city even for a single day?
People missing work (unless you work for Dunkin Donuts, of course) and students missing class, court-dates and medical appointments suspended and cancelled, essentially a few million lives irrevocably disrupted. I'm not a business expert by any mean or measure, but I wonder how many surviving businesses these days may have lost some serious productivity or revenue from all of this... Anyone in the restaurant business can tell you how one bad day can fuck your entire operation, even Gordon Ramsay can't do anything for you at that point.
Any readers from the Boston or Watertown areas: How was YOUR day-off? I'd love to hear about how the big shut-down impacted your life, because maybe I'm wrong about every little bit here but I don't tend to get a lot of feed-back these days.
I'm mostly shouting in thee dark, here. These are mostly just my ideas and opinions, but these things DO concern me.
No comments:
Post a Comment