[Shengbo]

Halfway into the article it started reminding me of the informant networks of the USSR. Officers peeping through windows, feeding data into the system about the target's friends and family while also fining them for any unrelated arbitrary misdemeanor. This is not what crime prevention looks like in a democracy.

[rmrfstar]

The Stasi parallels are frightening.

Pasco: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

Stasi: "The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to 'switch off' regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

[jacobush]

Except this surveillance machine is even more stupid. The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.

These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.

[HarryHirsch]

These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals

What if that was the point? The system is making work to justify its continued existence. The police aren't working for you, they are working for the sheriff, and these interest do not match.

[save_ferris]

Could be. The current fight around felons receiving their voting rights in Florida adds another incentive here: the justice system was/is being used to suppress votes by aggressively penalizing kids to take away their voting rights. You're basically picking who gets to vote at that point.

[non-entity]

This is a sherrif too, so they're elected, not neccesarily by any sort of experience or merit.

Nobody likes to hear it, but I'm willing to bet this person has been in office for a while. Tough on crime is popular among "model citizen" voters even if it utilizes dystopic tactics.

[baq]

what if people who could run against this guy in an election turned out to have high risk pasco profiles?

[pchristensen]

Their grass might be 1/4" too long, or they might not have numbers on their mailbox (examples of justification for police harassment from the article).

[pchristensen]

The article says he was appointed by the governor in 2011, and has been re-elected every time since 2012.

[naringas]

I think about the "war on drugs" with that same pattern.

what if the point was never public health but increasing overall corruption?

they knew prohibitions increase corruption after the alcohol prohibition... so why not?

[djaque]

That was very explicitly the point. We now have top Nixon advisors explaining that they couldn't make hippies or black people illegal, but they could do it by proxy with "the war on drugs" [1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-ant...

[coliveira]

Exactly, it is in the interest of police to create more criminals so they can justify their work. It seems absurd when clearly stated, but that is the end result of what they do.

[pstuart]

Just like the War on Drugs.

[_jal]

Manufacturing your own criminals has a variety of attractive aspects. Obviously, you know how to find them so the work is easier. But you also get to tailor the charges to whatever's best for your department/career, arrange PR for the arrests and so on.

This is why, for instance, the FBI does it so much.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-is-manufacturing-terrori...

[dfxm12]

How does this not protect the current power structure? It feeds people into for profit prisons and also suppresses voting rights and job opportunities for anyone who gets a record.

This is a conscience effort.

[BrianOnHN]

This is "limited federal government" at work.

Plausible deniability.

"It wasn't us(the federal government), it was them(the local government)."

In the end, still protecting the power structure, just more effectively. So many protectors that accountability becomes next to impossible.

Ladies and gentleman, what we have here is:

Decentralized power structure protection!

[throwaw4y-plate]

Would it help to put it on the blockchain?

[BrianOnHN]

It is a blockchain.

Legislation is the consensus algorithm,

Attorneys & Judges are the miners.

Edit: Criminals are the energy/electricity,

And the police are the power company that harness and distribute that energy.

[throwaw4y-plate]

This is where I make a joke about "local government" and finding "proof of work"

[b4ke]

reply to the reply.... grumble grumble traffic cameras

[HumblyTossed]

> These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.

This. How can you expect these kids to grow up and be productive members of society [0] when you make it all but impossible to get a decent job later!?

[0] Which I'm sure they would claim is a goal.

[soneil]

It strikes me this is likely to be very self-reinforcing, too. If the people they target end up in jail, you can almost guarantee that it'll be used as a metric that their junk science is working.

It's probably a very effective way to weaponise "three strikes" too.

[ashtonkem]

Don’t think about the system as a whole, think about the motivation of individual parts of the system, since often individual parts can have motivations that are unique and potentially counter productive.

So rather than asking “why does the government do this”, ask “how does this help the police”, since that’s the part of the government doing that.

[r00fus]

Broken windows make for a lot of work cleaning them up. Prison industry wants more product.

[sydd]

> The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.

It was not, most of the time they were harassing outliers, not people who wanted to make a regime change. Some examples: Religious people, people who listened to western music, men who had long hair (you were assumed to be a fan of the western hippie culture), people with noble ancestry if they did not show support for the communist party,..