> For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.
This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
It's obviously a problem with efficiency, resources and incentives. Earlier court dates is reshuffling deck chairs on the titanic, basically after the ship sank.
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
Cynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Your example is flawed because Target has cameras and a security staff watching for shoplifters, and they will detain you as you walk out the door, and they will provide video and eyewitness testimony to the prosecutor. It's a slam dunk case.
The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.
Target has security cameras on the outside and staff constantly walking around wrangling carts. That's why I picked this exact example. The evidence is pretty much the same.
At many locations, cars at grocery stores get broken into pretty frequently. Yet it's unusual for cops to ever do anything about those cases. That's not due to a lack of evidence, most grocery stores have cameras throughout the lot.
Hell, it's even less of an excuse today due to the amount of surveillance via flock cameras cities have adopted. Yet cops still don't do a thing about this sort of theft.
Cops don't do anything about theft if it does not rise to level of a felony period. Most shoplifters don't get arrested until they hit felony level either.
Reason they get arrested for felony shoplifting is big box stores gift wrap those convictions. They have watched them, tracked exact items they have stolen down to UPC with price, have all the video/spreadsheet and it's all handed to cop/prosecutor on DVD. Those cases are so easy for prosecutor because conviction rate is ~100% and any testifying required is all paid for by big box store.
On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Vast majority of time when shoplifters get arrested, it's because they are still at scene of the "crime". AKA, they enter big box store, facial recognition fires and off duty cop there is notified or cops are called. They show up, take the person into custody and get their gift wrap.
Person stealing the bike is long gone before cops are notified.
> On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Singapore has it figured out but nobody here likes to admit it. Fines are broadly ineffective and imprisonment too costly, when what most people really need is to get get smacked hard with a stick a few times.
Kids picking up carts aren't going to detain anyone. It's the detaining that makes it work. The cops just come pick them up, they have eyewitnesses and video. Easy work.
The security guards that do the actual detaining are often off-duty LEO picking up extra hours. Even Kroger here has an armed officer at the exit door. So they can legally detain you and even arrest you.
True that they don't care about the bike outside. It's not their property.
They cannot detain you. Cops can detain you, Target staff can insist you have to stay, but they cannot easily and practically bar you from leaving.
They can initiate a citizen's arrest, which would permit them to detain you But if they are wrong, and you've committed no felony, that guard is civilly and criminally liable for false imprisonment -- a pretty serious charge. Most store security are unwilling to risk their own personal necks to protect the company's interest in $20 of shampoo or whatever.
In IL, a "shopkeeper" can definitely detain someone:
> (a) Detention. Any merchant who has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed retail theft may detain the person, on or off the premises of a retail mercantile establishment, in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable length of time for all or any of the following purposes:
> (1) To request identification;
> (2) To verify such identification;
> (3) To make reasonable inquiry as to whether such person has in his possession unpurchased merchandise and to make reasonable investigation of the ownership of such merchandise;
> (4) To inform a peace officer of the detention of the person and surrender that person to the custody of a peace officer;
> (5) In the case of a minor, to immediately make a reasonable attempt to inform the parents, guardian or other private person interested in the welfare of that minor and, at the merchant's discretion, a peace officer, of this detention and to surrender custody of such minor to such person.
Hah, my phone was stolen and being sold on eBay. I found it because the person who bought it on eBay got my contact info and asked me to unlock the phone, I refused, he demanded a refund from the seller and gave me the seller's info, who lived about ten minutes away from me.
I found my phone. On my phone, and each and every phone I bothered to try, the IMEI failed checksumming because the last two digits had been transposed. Effect: seller looked "legit" (hah), and I couldn't find the listing by searching my actual IMEI.
What was on his page of listings? 100+ phones, most "activation locked", all "no chargers, cables, accessories.
Same with laptops. "No chargers, no cables, no accessories", many "locked".
All ridiculous prices (like $500 for a 'like new' m3 pro MBP).
Gave this info to the police.
They could not care less.
"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself..." (i.e. even they felt pretty sure it was all stolen).
"Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Could not care less. They had a slam dunk case in mine alone. My phone had been stolen, a police report had been filed with them, and it had shown up in California where someone who bought it on eBay gave them the seller's info, someone who lived near me.
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
I really do appreciate the sentiment, and in a flippant sense I agree, but if we're being real, the potential for harm to innocents, at least in the short/near term, is far greater if society devolves into vigilante mobs; study the Cultural Revolution if you want a realistic picture of some of the failure modes here. On the other hand, a period of chaos might be beneficial in the long term; that's the accelerationist position. Worth considering, but be careful with that mode of thinking. The ends justifying the means has gotten a great many people killed for ends that never manifested.
Another thing that enables the plea bargain system is the existence of bail, which has long been criticized for being a pay-to-win scheme baking inequality into the legal system. It's also seen by other parts of the world as bizarre.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
Waiving rights is weird. It’s well understood that you can’t waive your right not to be a slave, for example. Why should you be able to waive any right? The 6th amendment doesn’t say “unless the accused doesn’t want it.”
You can waive your right not to be a slave, but no one can gain the right to legally own slaves. The 13th amendment doesn't guarantee the rights of people to live free, it bans the practice of slavery. If you find someone living in slavery you don't arrest them for being a slave, you arrest the person who enslaved them. If someone asks you to do something illegal for them, you are obliged to say no; even if they are the only person directly impacted and they insist they want it, it is not in your authority to grant the request.
You can choose not to exercise any right, that's what makes it a right. Freedom of religion does not imply an obligation to practice religion, freedom of speech does not compel speech, right to bear arms does not imply an obligation to bear arms, etc. Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
> Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
I think there's a difference between waiving a right and not exercising a right.
If I don't own a gun, I'm not waiving my right to own a gun. Waiving my right would be something like, signing up for a registry which makes it actually illegal for me to own a gun, and I could go to prison if I buy one. I can decide not to exercise my right to life by jumping off a bridge, but I can't generally waive my right to life and make it legal for someone else to kill.
In short: you aren't required to exercise your rights, but someone else isn't allowed to violate them regardless of whether you're exercising them or not.
Well if you choose not to exercise your right to a swift and speedy trial you're not signing a registry saying you will never exercise the right in future trials. The word waive does not necessarily imply permanent relinquishment, it only implies the voluntary nature of the relinquishment.
Regardless of the word you choose to use for it, the point is that a swift and speedy trial is a right you have. There's nothing fundamentally illegal about a long trial taking place, you just can't force it upon someone. Slavery on the otherhand is explicitly forbidden. You can waive your right to freedom all day long, it doesn't make slavery any less illegal.
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
As for permitting someone to kill you, this falls very much into the same category of explicitly forbidden. Murder is illegal, and "he was asking for it" is not a valid defense. On the other hand, something like euthanasia, so long as you're in a jurisdiction that does not consider it murder, is permitted. In neither case is your right to live or lack thereof a question.
Your right to life is very much a question when the state kills you. For example, George Floyd's assailants were convicted of violating his civil rights, in addition to the murderer being convicted of murder. And Floyd declaring that he waived his civil rights wouldn't have changed that.
I think we should allow people to declare that they will accept a non-speedy trial. But we should allow people to assert their rights at any time even if they have previously declared they will not. It should not be possible to waive your rights in a way that's binding upon you in the future. The combination of these things would mean that effectively the state has to prosecute you within whatever window is defined as "speedy" because otherwise you could wait until that window expires, then say "whups, changed my mind, you violated my right to a speedy trial, I'm going home now."
Obviously this isn't how things actually work. But how things work and how they should work are often pretty distant, especially when it comes to the justice system. I also have major problems with things like plea bargaining and binding arbitration which are other staples of the American system.
The speed which enables the most fair outcome overall is subject to interpretation. More time to prepare your case is probably good, but the longer the process drags out, the greater portion of your finite life you've lost to the process. Weighing these two factors, with all the other various factors, can't be done objectively for a generalized case that can apply to all real cases, hence giving the accused some amount of say over the matter.
Plea deals were illegal for the majority of America's history.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
And are still illegal/unused in the vast majority of the rest of the world.
And in most of those jurisdictions where it is a possibility, its use is massively less (less than 1% per capita) and also far more regulated, and subject to review. In the US a judge ostensibly has the power of veto over a plea deal, though in practice this is nearly never exercised unless the miscarriage of justice (in either direction) is so egregious that it can't easily be ignored.
> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
Part of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution.
Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later.
If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
Right, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves.
You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
Get together a law firm to do a class action on behalf of all the people wrongfully convicted. Make it too expensive for companies to provide these sorts of services to the government. But the companies will be covered as 'agents of the state' and given qualified immunity.
And, to put a charitable gloss on it—many of your clients who protest their innocence did actually have something true-positive on them. TFA cites manufacturers claiming a 4% false positive rate in lab conditions, and protesters claiming a 15-18% FPR in field conditions [*]. Offensive and intolerable in the aggregate, yes; but as far as base odds for any specific case in front of me?
Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison?
Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever.
Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?”
I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases.
False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume.
One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person.
[*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system.
I might accept a 0.1% false positive rate - but 4% is unconscionable. Yes, trials are messy, but this isn’t a trial - it’s a bad test.
Tbh, your “people are complicated” stance feels like the position of someone who believes they will never be on the wrong side of situations like these. I hope you never are, but I don’t think it’s a position that is defensible if you’re including people who are in groups likely to be subjected to tests like this (e.g. prison inmates)
You know, why not just make it a lot faster and more convenient and just go by the expert assessment of the officer on scene? No need for all the bloat.
More specificity would help. Cops, cop culture, incompetent and purposely harmful training, and the appalling nature of our criminal "justice" system is what ruins lives. Some other parts of government might be just as bad, but in other ways for other reasons.
It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.
But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
It does make sense, because if you were developing a bad or evil system then you would obviously want to obfuscate that as much as possible. The first thing you'd do, clearly, is proclaim that the purpose of the system is something good.
This is a common fallacy or I guess maybe shoddy reasoning I see often. Because someone or something either does not announce their intentions or says their intentions are good, then the thing they are using must also be good. Or, we must assume it is good until they announce they're going to use it for not-good purposes.
Like with Flock. There's a lot of people who think the simple defense that Flock thinks it is used to fight crime means it's good. Or DOGE. The simple defense that the people behind DOGE say it's to prevent fraud means it's good.
But what people say and what actually happens are two different things, and the what actually happens part is 1000x more important. Anyone can say anything, and obviously bad actors will lie. That's just a given. So you can't use the stated purpose of something as a defense for that something. You just can't, it makes no sense.
I never said the stated purpose is a defense. The purpose is the purpose not the outcome. Just because you can’t know the true intent of every actor involved does not mean you’re justified in assuming the purpose is what it does. That is lazy broken epistemology.
I agree what a system does is what is important, so why dilute that fact with assumptions of intent and glib moralizing thought terminating cliches?
Will say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.
Well duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.
A systems purpose depends on its creator. Creators regularly fail to produce intended results. It’s absurd to say an unintended result is the intended result
How long is it ok to produce “unintended” results without changing anything, before you can say that’s now an expected part of the system? Because i think that’s the issue. It’s not that the US has a goal to criminalize poverty - the constitution doesn’t say anything about that - but since it’s been that way for so long it seems the system is unwilling to do what needs to be done to prevent that. It’s part of the expected behavior of the system.
Intent - what someone wanted or expected the system to do.
Purpose - what the system does in practice. The reason, or primary function for it.
Some classic examples -- post it notes were intended as a aerospace adhesive, but found their purpose as low tack papers.
If you want a classic systems example, standardized testing is a good example of difference between purpose and intent. It was intended to be a mechanism for measuring schools and ensuring every kid got an equal education. But now its purpose could be described as the metric schools game. It narrows curricula, encourages teaching to the test. Those outcomes are not the original intent. Or even desirable.
So I wasn't being flippant (maybe a little flippant) when I was saying intent and purpose are different.
Other classic examples -- the US senate, social media algorithms, animal bounties (paying people per head bounties on killed rats, frogs, or snakes results in people breeding those animals), war on drugs, zoning laws, etc.
It's very closely related to the idea that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
But one last question to help me understand your position then I’ll leave you alone.
Why do people post this saying as if it has import? What point are they trying to make?
IME I have only ever heard this phrase used as a reaction against single failures as a way of maligning the operators of a system without any associated analysis or consideration of how the system actually works. Do you disagree this is the rhetorical purpose?
This quote says to me that we need to think about outcomes early AND late in the life of designing and operating a system. We have unintended consequences, and when we elect to not (or ineffectually) address the side effects of a system, we are making a choice to adopt the purpose of that system.
It's a way of reminding us that the behavior we ignore is the behavior we accept. That outcomes matter more than intent.
Personally, I think people are too permissive towards mistakes in large systems, categorizing them as "a few bad apples" or "an occasional error". Yes, i deploy this quote when single failings happen, but I also deploy it in broad critique of structural failings. It also prompts thoughts about why -- systems are built on top of systems, on top of systems.
As an example, our Justice system has both specific incidents (e.g. George Floyd) and structural failings (racial bias, high incarceration rates). Those are both cases where I would use this quote. It might seem that a single incident is wrong to deploy this quote, but the George Floyd incident doesn't happen in isolation. We need to look at the whole system. How are police trained? How are Americans trained to interact with police? How does the Justice system interact with minority and poor communities? How do we address mental health in this country? All of those questions are complex and nuanced, and are themselves contributors to the purpose of the police.
So, for me, it's not meant to be quippy or punchy or malignant. It's meant to highlight failures aren't isolated incidents, they are part of a system that is failing to prevent this outcome. Probably for complex reasons, but we as a society are choosing not to address those complex reasons.
See, this is the funny thing; I agree with everything you said, except that this phrase helps in those ways.
In other words, IME, the purpose of the system of the phrase “the purpose of the system” is to cause thought terminating moral superiority, even if _you intend_ for the phrase to highlight complexity and unintended consequences. ;)
Anyways, thanks for the full explanations of your position.
Organizations such as OSF/OSI (Open Society Foundations, not Open Software Foundation) have successfully placed their preferred candidates in positions of power in many major US jurisdictions. If you research, you'll see many cases of OSF DAs prosecuting or not prosecuting based on their political ideology. Many prosecutions are politically motivated, but now we have foundations funding activist candidates who are all pushing the same agenda. The result is diminished trust in government, which the activists will exploit to eventually make things even worse, because "capitalism is not working."
You make it sound like they are doing corruption. I.e. don’t prosecute your friends, do prosecute your enemies. But this is more like using the power at your jurisdiction level to oppose unjust laws.
I.e. where i live the city council long ago directed police to stop arresting people for marijuana possession - on the grounds that this is an unjust law and criminalizing it is tying up resources and doing more harm than good, and because the majority of the city’s population supports legalization. City gov doesn’t have the power to change those laws, but they can fix it locally by directing enforcement away from them. A decade later, it was legalized - imo proving that it was the right decision.
This did not “diminish trust” in the gov. In fact, laws that the majority disagree with but stay on the books do far far more damage to the credibility of gov, in my opinion
If you want to effect change, then change the laws through the approved processes. Do not install a DA that ignores the laws. Doing so WILL diminish trust in government.
Actually, DA discretion is a normal part of the functioning of government. There are a thousand laws on the books that get ignored every day [1]. And every election, candidates run on platforms promising to “crack down” on this or that crime (read: selectively increase enforcement).
Gov enforcing laws that the majority of people do not want is a subversion of democracy that alienates people from the idea that gov can be responsive instead of oppressive. I don’t trust a gov that claims to represent the will of the people, but charges people for crimes most don’t see as criminal.
So maybe you trust a gov less when you see laws you want enforced being set aside, but you’re in the minority here. How do i know? Because these DAs are getting elected (not installed) to do this.
Prosecutorial discretion is a normal part of a DA's job. If extenuating circumstances exist, a DA can charge a lessor crime. If exculpatory or insufficient evidence exists, a DA can decline to bring charges.
These circumstances are altogether different from a DA making blanket declarations that they will not bring charges for certain crimes. The latter indicates a dereliction of duty. They're not doing their job.
Elections are a dirty business. The candidates who spend the most money are often the winner.
Nefarious foundations donating large sums of money with the intent to install DAs who will subvert justice could be seen as a threat (and a conspiracy) to the US justice system and prosecuted as a crime.
All of the simple drug tests are intended for use as screening tools, with positive results sent to labs for verification.
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
I suspect if you disallow arrests based on these tests and require a lab followup, the tests will cease to be used entirely.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
> AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.
This is true for THC (marijuana) tests that look for metabolites of THC with long half-lives. It takes a very long time for the body to metabolize THC through the different steps and then eliminate those metabolites.
For many of the drugs named in the article their elimination is rapid. For some like fentanyl their concentrations are also low. If someone has an appreciable concentration of fentanyl detectable by a simple test they are very inebriated.
The prosecution and the judges and the law enforcement and probation officers and law enforcement who protect the judge and the prison system and the jail system are in quite a cozy and self perpetuating cycle. Prosecutors in USA get such high conviction rates cause they ladder charges to encourage defendants to take plea deals, everyone in system profits. It’s so profitable most large local law enforcement agencies in USA have marketing departments.
The purpose of the system is what it does. Here, drug laws result in tens of thousands of wrongful arrests, some portion of which will take the plea deal even though they are innocent. Typically because they are low income and need to get out of holding so they don't lose their job.
Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.
Don't forget the 'trail tax'. Sentences are 10-20-50 years if you exercise your right to trial, while if you 'voluntarily' waive your right the plea put before you could be 1-5 years. Even if you are innocent, you are now at the point while in jail you already lost your job, your car, your house, are you going to risk that a system that did that to you already is going to give you a fair trial? Or are you going to go off of past experience that system is going to fuck you and just take the shorter bit?
>On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[16][104][105] During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes.
Fundamentally, the problem is that we have too many arrests. An officer arresting someone on the spot because of suspicion should only be done when they are assumed to be endangering people or likely to be victimizing more people. Someone carrying a small amount of drugs is not doing that if they are not visibly impaired.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.
I agree with your thinking in the context of "keeping drug policy broadly the same but improving policing of it".
But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.
The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.
I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.
(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)
They're also pretty awful if you try to use them for safety purposes. Like... how blue can purple be before it's not purple anymore, idk. Last year it was very purple, but now the test is a year older, or is the product non-uniform and that's why it's different...
Basically, if you inject enough suspicion into any situation, colorimetric tests will eventually lead you to believe that you're in trouble. And then later if you bring the sample to somebody with access to real equipment it often turns out there was no trouble besides the sort you were looking for in the first place.
I honestly think we could save a lot of lives by just putting a gas chromatography machine in the library next to the 3d printers and training people to use it.
If it's too expensive and time consuming to determine whether a crime has occurred with the appropriate tools, we shouldn't be prosecuting it. If you're not willing to go to the taxpayers and say we need $80k for a handheld device so we can do random checks, then random checks should not be occurring.
If you had a drunk-driver-detection machine that output "positive" 95% of the time when the driver is drunk and output "negative" 100% of the time when the driver is not drunk, and started administering the test to all drivers on a road, the probability that a positive detection is accurate is only 1.96%. That sounds exactly like what was happening: dragnet testing of bird droppings and little old ladies.
I don't follow. The example in the wikipedia uses the opposite error rates to what you have given: it falsely flags a sober driver in 5% of cases. And it works because the stipulated rate of drunkenness is much lower than 5% (0.1%) so the false positives overwhelm the true positives. In your setup the positive detection should be accurate at 95%, the negative error (a drunk driver passed as sober) - would be around 0.005%, where did you get 1.96%?
Furthermore, as Wikipedia article noted, this assumes total testing. I highly doubt cops are walking around and drug test everyone they see.
but even the pricey tests can wrongfully have positives. if you eat sweets in which poppy seeds are ingredients you test positive for opioids (although near to the detection limit)
It looks like a classic case of "guilty until proven otherwise". Arrests should never be made based just on "it may be", but on some solid evidence. It is much safer to make the arrest when the lab confirms the problem, not when there is a hint there may be one.
> For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.
This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
It's obviously a problem with efficiency, resources and incentives. Earlier court dates is reshuffling deck chairs on the titanic, basically after the ship sank.
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
> ... jails cleared out much quicker
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
Cynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Your example is flawed because Target has cameras and a security staff watching for shoplifters, and they will detain you as you walk out the door, and they will provide video and eyewitness testimony to the prosecutor. It's a slam dunk case.
The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.
Target has security cameras on the outside and staff constantly walking around wrangling carts. That's why I picked this exact example. The evidence is pretty much the same.
At many locations, cars at grocery stores get broken into pretty frequently. Yet it's unusual for cops to ever do anything about those cases. That's not due to a lack of evidence, most grocery stores have cameras throughout the lot.
Hell, it's even less of an excuse today due to the amount of surveillance via flock cameras cities have adopted. Yet cops still don't do a thing about this sort of theft.
Cops don't do anything about theft if it does not rise to level of a felony period. Most shoplifters don't get arrested until they hit felony level either.
Reason they get arrested for felony shoplifting is big box stores gift wrap those convictions. They have watched them, tracked exact items they have stolen down to UPC with price, have all the video/spreadsheet and it's all handed to cop/prosecutor on DVD. Those cases are so easy for prosecutor because conviction rate is ~100% and any testifying required is all paid for by big box store.
On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Which is why I picked the $1000 bike. In the majority of states that's beyond the threshold for felony theft.
Because Cops rarely chase people.
Vast majority of time when shoplifters get arrested, it's because they are still at scene of the "crime". AKA, they enter big box store, facial recognition fires and off duty cop there is notified or cops are called. They show up, take the person into custody and get their gift wrap.
Person stealing the bike is long gone before cops are notified.
> On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Singapore has it figured out but nobody here likes to admit it. Fines are broadly ineffective and imprisonment too costly, when what most people really need is to get get smacked hard with a stick a few times.
Kids picking up carts aren't going to detain anyone. It's the detaining that makes it work. The cops just come pick them up, they have eyewitnesses and video. Easy work.
The security guards that do the actual detaining are often off-duty LEO picking up extra hours. Even Kroger here has an armed officer at the exit door. So they can legally detain you and even arrest you.
True that they don't care about the bike outside. It's not their property.
To be fair, the only valid exchange with Target is to just take things off the shelf and leave.
That's what Target is there for.
They cannot detain you. Cops can detain you, Target staff can insist you have to stay, but they cannot easily and practically bar you from leaving.
They can initiate a citizen's arrest, which would permit them to detain you But if they are wrong, and you've committed no felony, that guard is civilly and criminally liable for false imprisonment -- a pretty serious charge. Most store security are unwilling to risk their own personal necks to protect the company's interest in $20 of shampoo or whatever.
In IL, a "shopkeeper" can definitely detain someone:
> (a) Detention. Any merchant who has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed retail theft may detain the person, on or off the premises of a retail mercantile establishment, in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable length of time for all or any of the following purposes:
> (1) To request identification;
> (2) To verify such identification;
> (3) To make reasonable inquiry as to whether such person has in his possession unpurchased merchandise and to make reasonable investigation of the ownership of such merchandise;
> (4) To inform a peace officer of the detention of the person and surrender that person to the custody of a peace officer;
> (5) In the case of a minor, to immediately make a reasonable attempt to inform the parents, guardian or other private person interested in the welfare of that minor and, at the merchant's discretion, a peace officer, of this detention and to surrender custody of such minor to such person.
https://ilga.gov/Documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000...
Hah, my phone was stolen and being sold on eBay. I found it because the person who bought it on eBay got my contact info and asked me to unlock the phone, I refused, he demanded a refund from the seller and gave me the seller's info, who lived about ten minutes away from me.
I found my phone. On my phone, and each and every phone I bothered to try, the IMEI failed checksumming because the last two digits had been transposed. Effect: seller looked "legit" (hah), and I couldn't find the listing by searching my actual IMEI.
What was on his page of listings? 100+ phones, most "activation locked", all "no chargers, cables, accessories.
Same with laptops. "No chargers, no cables, no accessories", many "locked".
All ridiculous prices (like $500 for a 'like new' m3 pro MBP).
Gave this info to the police.
They could not care less.
"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself..." (i.e. even they felt pretty sure it was all stolen).
"Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Could not care less. They had a slam dunk case in mine alone. My phone had been stolen, a police report had been filed with them, and it had shown up in California where someone who bought it on eBay gave them the seller's info, someone who lived near me.
Nope.
In Maine there is a lack of public defenders and now must release those who are unable to get a trial in a reasonable time: https://observer-me.com/2025/03/12/news/maine-must-release-p...
This is already happening in Germany.
And the UK.
Burglary? Theft? Biker robbed at the knife point?
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
This seems implicitly preferable than the beauacratic death of the alternative.
Neither are acceptable, so a third way must be found
I really do appreciate the sentiment, and in a flippant sense I agree, but if we're being real, the potential for harm to innocents, at least in the short/near term, is far greater if society devolves into vigilante mobs; study the Cultural Revolution if you want a realistic picture of some of the failure modes here. On the other hand, a period of chaos might be beneficial in the long term; that's the accelerationist position. Worth considering, but be careful with that mode of thinking. The ends justifying the means has gotten a great many people killed for ends that never manifested.
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Another thing that enables the plea bargain system is the existence of bail, which has long been criticized for being a pay-to-win scheme baking inequality into the legal system. It's also seen by other parts of the world as bizarre.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
Waiving rights is weird. It’s well understood that you can’t waive your right not to be a slave, for example. Why should you be able to waive any right? The 6th amendment doesn’t say “unless the accused doesn’t want it.”
You can waive your right not to be a slave, but no one can gain the right to legally own slaves. The 13th amendment doesn't guarantee the rights of people to live free, it bans the practice of slavery. If you find someone living in slavery you don't arrest them for being a slave, you arrest the person who enslaved them. If someone asks you to do something illegal for them, you are obliged to say no; even if they are the only person directly impacted and they insist they want it, it is not in your authority to grant the request.
You can choose not to exercise any right, that's what makes it a right. Freedom of religion does not imply an obligation to practice religion, freedom of speech does not compel speech, right to bear arms does not imply an obligation to bear arms, etc. Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
By that logic, you can waive the right to a speedy trial, but it would be illegal for the state to try you in a non-speedy fashion.
> Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
I think there's a difference between waiving a right and not exercising a right.
If I don't own a gun, I'm not waiving my right to own a gun. Waiving my right would be something like, signing up for a registry which makes it actually illegal for me to own a gun, and I could go to prison if I buy one. I can decide not to exercise my right to life by jumping off a bridge, but I can't generally waive my right to life and make it legal for someone else to kill.
In short: you aren't required to exercise your rights, but someone else isn't allowed to violate them regardless of whether you're exercising them or not.
Well if you choose not to exercise your right to a swift and speedy trial you're not signing a registry saying you will never exercise the right in future trials. The word waive does not necessarily imply permanent relinquishment, it only implies the voluntary nature of the relinquishment.
Regardless of the word you choose to use for it, the point is that a swift and speedy trial is a right you have. There's nothing fundamentally illegal about a long trial taking place, you just can't force it upon someone. Slavery on the otherhand is explicitly forbidden. You can waive your right to freedom all day long, it doesn't make slavery any less illegal.
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
As for permitting someone to kill you, this falls very much into the same category of explicitly forbidden. Murder is illegal, and "he was asking for it" is not a valid defense. On the other hand, something like euthanasia, so long as you're in a jurisdiction that does not consider it murder, is permitted. In neither case is your right to live or lack thereof a question.
Your right to life is very much a question when the state kills you. For example, George Floyd's assailants were convicted of violating his civil rights, in addition to the murderer being convicted of murder. And Floyd declaring that he waived his civil rights wouldn't have changed that.
I think we should allow people to declare that they will accept a non-speedy trial. But we should allow people to assert their rights at any time even if they have previously declared they will not. It should not be possible to waive your rights in a way that's binding upon you in the future. The combination of these things would mean that effectively the state has to prosecute you within whatever window is defined as "speedy" because otherwise you could wait until that window expires, then say "whups, changed my mind, you violated my right to a speedy trial, I'm going home now."
Obviously this isn't how things actually work. But how things work and how they should work are often pretty distant, especially when it comes to the justice system. I also have major problems with things like plea bargaining and binding arbitration which are other staples of the American system.
Because it's presumably beneficial. It gives your lawyers extra time to prepare for the case or to potentially settle on more favorable terms.
If you have a right to both a fair trial and a speedy trial, there should be no trial that does not provide both.
The speed which enables the most fair outcome overall is subject to interpretation. More time to prepare your case is probably good, but the longer the process drags out, the greater portion of your finite life you've lost to the process. Weighing these two factors, with all the other various factors, can't be done objectively for a generalized case that can apply to all real cases, hence giving the accused some amount of say over the matter.
Waiving your right not to be a slave could be beneficial too.
You can become someone's slave if you really want to. The only part that can't be enforced is you can't be coerced to stay.
Plenty of cults have slaves in the US. But because the are willing, nothing is done about it.
Heck, plenty of us companies still rely on slave labor. Look at Aramark's use of prisoners, for example.
That's an explicit carveout in the Constitution allowing slavery as punishment for a crime, not someone waiving their rights.
This reminds me of Futurama:
"You know the worst thing about being a slave? They make you work, but they don't pay you or let you go."
"That's the only thing about being a slave!"
So yeah, you can legally be a slave as long as you leave out the one part that makes it slavery.
Plea deals were illegal for the majority of America's history.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
And are still illegal/unused in the vast majority of the rest of the world.
And in most of those jurisdictions where it is a possibility, its use is massively less (less than 1% per capita) and also far more regulated, and subject to review. In the US a judge ostensibly has the power of veto over a plea deal, though in practice this is nearly never exercised unless the miscarriage of justice (in either direction) is so egregious that it can't easily be ignored.
> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
Part of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution.
Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later.
If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
Right, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves.
You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
Get together a law firm to do a class action on behalf of all the people wrongfully convicted. Make it too expensive for companies to provide these sorts of services to the government. But the companies will be covered as 'agents of the state' and given qualified immunity.
So, an unaccountable system.
And, to put a charitable gloss on it—many of your clients who protest their innocence did actually have something true-positive on them. TFA cites manufacturers claiming a 4% false positive rate in lab conditions, and protesters claiming a 15-18% FPR in field conditions [*]. Offensive and intolerable in the aggregate, yes; but as far as base odds for any specific case in front of me?
Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison?
Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever.
Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?”
I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases.
False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume.
One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person.
[*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system.
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTesting...
[1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-am... and replicated recently https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/
I might accept a 0.1% false positive rate - but 4% is unconscionable. Yes, trials are messy, but this isn’t a trial - it’s a bad test.
Tbh, your “people are complicated” stance feels like the position of someone who believes they will never be on the wrong side of situations like these. I hope you never are, but I don’t think it’s a position that is defensible if you’re including people who are in groups likely to be subjected to tests like this (e.g. prison inmates)
You know, why not just make it a lot faster and more convenient and just go by the expert assessment of the officer on scene? No need for all the bloat.
I would dread the arrival of this officer/judge arriving on the scene.
I. AM. THE LAW.
Dreddful.
Is this satire?
Because this is HN, and especially because it's HN's audience reading it, this is a perfectly cromulent question.
Fair, was probably a bit too deadpan. Yes, satire.
One hopes it's satire. Can't tell, unfortunately.
Ruining innocent people’s lives is what government is best at doing. Don’t think of as convenient. Think of it as realization of purpose.
More specificity would help. Cops, cop culture, incompetent and purposely harmful training, and the appalling nature of our criminal "justice" system is what ruins lives. Some other parts of government might be just as bad, but in other ways for other reasons.
Criminal legal system is what i’ve been using.
Sorry but that's bullshit.
It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.
But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.
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It does make sense, because if you were developing a bad or evil system then you would obviously want to obfuscate that as much as possible. The first thing you'd do, clearly, is proclaim that the purpose of the system is something good.
This is a common fallacy or I guess maybe shoddy reasoning I see often. Because someone or something either does not announce their intentions or says their intentions are good, then the thing they are using must also be good. Or, we must assume it is good until they announce they're going to use it for not-good purposes.
Like with Flock. There's a lot of people who think the simple defense that Flock thinks it is used to fight crime means it's good. Or DOGE. The simple defense that the people behind DOGE say it's to prevent fraud means it's good.
But what people say and what actually happens are two different things, and the what actually happens part is 1000x more important. Anyone can say anything, and obviously bad actors will lie. That's just a given. So you can't use the stated purpose of something as a defense for that something. You just can't, it makes no sense.
I never said the stated purpose is a defense. The purpose is the purpose not the outcome. Just because you can’t know the true intent of every actor involved does not mean you’re justified in assuming the purpose is what it does. That is lazy broken epistemology.
I agree what a system does is what is important, so why dilute that fact with assumptions of intent and glib moralizing thought terminating cliches?
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Will say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.
Well duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.
The purpose of a system is what it does. If that wasn't the purpose, the system would be changed.
That’s as dumbs as the saying “there can’t be a 100$ bill on the ground because if there was it’d have been picked up.”
It's not at all like that?
Claiming that a system's purpose is something it consistently fails to do is absurd. Intentions don't matter, outcomes matter.
This is a pretty basic systems theorist argument, to be honest...
A systems purpose depends on its creator. Creators regularly fail to produce intended results. It’s absurd to say an unintended result is the intended result
How long is it ok to produce “unintended” results without changing anything, before you can say that’s now an expected part of the system? Because i think that’s the issue. It’s not that the US has a goal to criminalize poverty - the constitution doesn’t say anything about that - but since it’s been that way for so long it seems the system is unwilling to do what needs to be done to prevent that. It’s part of the expected behavior of the system.
> It’s absurd to say an unintended result is the intended result
I didn't say that. I said the unintended results are the purpose of a system, not the intent.
This feels like a bait and switch. Can you define purpose for me?
Fair.
Intent - what someone wanted or expected the system to do.
Purpose - what the system does in practice. The reason, or primary function for it.
Some classic examples -- post it notes were intended as a aerospace adhesive, but found their purpose as low tack papers.
If you want a classic systems example, standardized testing is a good example of difference between purpose and intent. It was intended to be a mechanism for measuring schools and ensuring every kid got an equal education. But now its purpose could be described as the metric schools game. It narrows curricula, encourages teaching to the test. Those outcomes are not the original intent. Or even desirable.
So I wasn't being flippant (maybe a little flippant) when I was saying intent and purpose are different.
Other classic examples -- the US senate, social media algorithms, animal bounties (paying people per head bounties on killed rats, frogs, or snakes results in people breeding those animals), war on drugs, zoning laws, etc.
It's very closely related to the idea that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
I don’t think we can agree on that.
But one last question to help me understand your position then I’ll leave you alone.
Why do people post this saying as if it has import? What point are they trying to make?
IME I have only ever heard this phrase used as a reaction against single failures as a way of maligning the operators of a system without any associated analysis or consideration of how the system actually works. Do you disagree this is the rhetorical purpose?
I do disagree that it's the rhetorical purpose.
This quote says to me that we need to think about outcomes early AND late in the life of designing and operating a system. We have unintended consequences, and when we elect to not (or ineffectually) address the side effects of a system, we are making a choice to adopt the purpose of that system.
It's a way of reminding us that the behavior we ignore is the behavior we accept. That outcomes matter more than intent.
Personally, I think people are too permissive towards mistakes in large systems, categorizing them as "a few bad apples" or "an occasional error". Yes, i deploy this quote when single failings happen, but I also deploy it in broad critique of structural failings. It also prompts thoughts about why -- systems are built on top of systems, on top of systems.
As an example, our Justice system has both specific incidents (e.g. George Floyd) and structural failings (racial bias, high incarceration rates). Those are both cases where I would use this quote. It might seem that a single incident is wrong to deploy this quote, but the George Floyd incident doesn't happen in isolation. We need to look at the whole system. How are police trained? How are Americans trained to interact with police? How does the Justice system interact with minority and poor communities? How do we address mental health in this country? All of those questions are complex and nuanced, and are themselves contributors to the purpose of the police.
So, for me, it's not meant to be quippy or punchy or malignant. It's meant to highlight failures aren't isolated incidents, they are part of a system that is failing to prevent this outcome. Probably for complex reasons, but we as a society are choosing not to address those complex reasons.
See, this is the funny thing; I agree with everything you said, except that this phrase helps in those ways.
In other words, IME, the purpose of the system of the phrase “the purpose of the system” is to cause thought terminating moral superiority, even if _you intend_ for the phrase to highlight complexity and unintended consequences. ;)
Anyways, thanks for the full explanations of your position.
It's not as rare as you might think.
Organizations such as OSF/OSI (Open Society Foundations, not Open Software Foundation) have successfully placed their preferred candidates in positions of power in many major US jurisdictions. If you research, you'll see many cases of OSF DAs prosecuting or not prosecuting based on their political ideology. Many prosecutions are politically motivated, but now we have foundations funding activist candidates who are all pushing the same agenda. The result is diminished trust in government, which the activists will exploit to eventually make things even worse, because "capitalism is not working."
You make it sound like they are doing corruption. I.e. don’t prosecute your friends, do prosecute your enemies. But this is more like using the power at your jurisdiction level to oppose unjust laws.
I.e. where i live the city council long ago directed police to stop arresting people for marijuana possession - on the grounds that this is an unjust law and criminalizing it is tying up resources and doing more harm than good, and because the majority of the city’s population supports legalization. City gov doesn’t have the power to change those laws, but they can fix it locally by directing enforcement away from them. A decade later, it was legalized - imo proving that it was the right decision.
This did not “diminish trust” in the gov. In fact, laws that the majority disagree with but stay on the books do far far more damage to the credibility of gov, in my opinion
If you want to effect change, then change the laws through the approved processes. Do not install a DA that ignores the laws. Doing so WILL diminish trust in government.
Actually, DA discretion is a normal part of the functioning of government. There are a thousand laws on the books that get ignored every day [1]. And every election, candidates run on platforms promising to “crack down” on this or that crime (read: selectively increase enforcement).
Gov enforcing laws that the majority of people do not want is a subversion of democracy that alienates people from the idea that gov can be responsive instead of oppressive. I don’t trust a gov that claims to represent the will of the people, but charges people for crimes most don’t see as criminal.
So maybe you trust a gov less when you see laws you want enforced being set aside, but you’re in the minority here. How do i know? Because these DAs are getting elected (not installed) to do this.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/social...
Prosecutorial discretion is a normal part of a DA's job. If extenuating circumstances exist, a DA can charge a lessor crime. If exculpatory or insufficient evidence exists, a DA can decline to bring charges.
These circumstances are altogether different from a DA making blanket declarations that they will not bring charges for certain crimes. The latter indicates a dereliction of duty. They're not doing their job.
Elections are a dirty business. The candidates who spend the most money are often the winner.
Nefarious foundations donating large sums of money with the intent to install DAs who will subvert justice could be seen as a threat (and a conspiracy) to the US justice system and prosecuted as a crime.
https://www.dailynews.com/2024/11/10/ousted-da-george-gascon...
All of the simple drug tests are intended for use as screening tools, with positive results sent to labs for verification.
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
I suspect if you disallow arrests based on these tests and require a lab followup, the tests will cease to be used entirely.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
> AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.
This is true for THC (marijuana) tests that look for metabolites of THC with long half-lives. It takes a very long time for the body to metabolize THC through the different steps and then eliminate those metabolites.
For many of the drugs named in the article their elimination is rapid. For some like fentanyl their concentrations are also low. If someone has an appreciable concentration of fentanyl detectable by a simple test they are very inebriated.
If you relate funding to arrests, more arrests will be made.
Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?
At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge.
Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.
The prosecution and the judges and the law enforcement and probation officers and law enforcement who protect the judge and the prison system and the jail system are in quite a cozy and self perpetuating cycle. Prosecutors in USA get such high conviction rates cause they ladder charges to encourage defendants to take plea deals, everyone in system profits. It’s so profitable most large local law enforcement agencies in USA have marketing departments.
> Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?
More quilty verdicts would be made. Regardless of guilt
The purpose of the system is what it does. Here, drug laws result in tens of thousands of wrongful arrests, some portion of which will take the plea deal even though they are innocent. Typically because they are low income and need to get out of holding so they don't lose their job.
Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.
Don't forget the 'trail tax'. Sentences are 10-20-50 years if you exercise your right to trial, while if you 'voluntarily' waive your right the plea put before you could be 1-5 years. Even if you are innocent, you are now at the point while in jail you already lost your job, your car, your house, are you going to risk that a system that did that to you already is going to give you a fair trial? Or are you going to go off of past experience that system is going to fuck you and just take the shorter bit?
arguably what killed Aaron Swartz:
>On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[16][104][105] During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes.
John Oliver did a fantastic segment on that and called it torture AFAIR.
Fundamentally, the problem is that we have too many arrests. An officer arresting someone on the spot because of suspicion should only be done when they are assumed to be endangering people or likely to be victimizing more people. Someone carrying a small amount of drugs is not doing that if they are not visibly impaired.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.
I agree with your thinking in the context of "keeping drug policy broadly the same but improving policing of it".
But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.
The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.
I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.
(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)
They're also pretty awful if you try to use them for safety purposes. Like... how blue can purple be before it's not purple anymore, idk. Last year it was very purple, but now the test is a year older, or is the product non-uniform and that's why it's different...
Basically, if you inject enough suspicion into any situation, colorimetric tests will eventually lead you to believe that you're in trouble. And then later if you bring the sample to somebody with access to real equipment it often turns out there was no trouble besides the sort you were looking for in the first place.
I honestly think we could save a lot of lives by just putting a gas chromatography machine in the library next to the 3d printers and training people to use it.
Why do you have to wait in jail for lab result?
Police have to be winning the war on drugs but not literally taking that financing that doesn't require congressional oversight away from the CIA.
If it's too expensive and time consuming to determine whether a crime has occurred with the appropriate tools, we shouldn't be prosecuting it. If you're not willing to go to the taxpayers and say we need $80k for a handheld device so we can do random checks, then random checks should not be occurring.
This has Base Rate Fallacy written all over it.
If you had a drunk-driver-detection machine that output "positive" 95% of the time when the driver is drunk and output "negative" 100% of the time when the driver is not drunk, and started administering the test to all drivers on a road, the probability that a positive detection is accurate is only 1.96%. That sounds exactly like what was happening: dragnet testing of bird droppings and little old ladies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_2:_D...
If simple statistics are difficult for people to understand, the Base Rate Fallacy is right out.
I don't follow. The example in the wikipedia uses the opposite error rates to what you have given: it falsely flags a sober driver in 5% of cases. And it works because the stipulated rate of drunkenness is much lower than 5% (0.1%) so the false positives overwhelm the true positives. In your setup the positive detection should be accurate at 95%, the negative error (a drunk driver passed as sober) - would be around 0.005%, where did you get 1.96%?
Furthermore, as Wikipedia article noted, this assumes total testing. I highly doubt cops are walking around and drug test everyone they see.
but even the pricey tests can wrongfully have positives. if you eat sweets in which poppy seeds are ingredients you test positive for opioids (although near to the detection limit)
It looks like a classic case of "guilty until proven otherwise". Arrests should never be made based just on "it may be", but on some solid evidence. It is much safer to make the arrest when the lab confirms the problem, not when there is a hint there may be one.
Drug war is a war on our democracy.
The companies that make these tests need to be sued out of existence.