[_delirium]

If you haven't noticed police skepticism on HN until now, you haven't been paying a lot of attention! It tends to go across the civil-liberties-leaning political spectrum. Before the left-leaning Reddit had a subreddit on cop abuses, the libertarian magazine Reason (reason.com) had them as a regular feature. And of course many of us read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown as kids, and I wouldn't say that I mainly sympathized with the "crackdown" side when reading it...

[pak]

There's nothing wrong with police skepticism or discussing libertarianism. Calling cops dumb and fat and saying you can avoid arrest by running faster... ehmm... what the hell passes for intelligent discussion on here now?

[burgerbrain]

"saying you can avoid arrest by running faster"

Is that false? If they cannot catch you, how can they arrest you?

[tptacek]

By ID'ing you from video from any of tens of cameras in the area, coming to your house, arresting you there, and then charging you with resisting arrest.

[burgerbrain]

And in the (lets face it, relatively unlikely) case that you have some degree of fame already, that will likely work. However in the general case, elude arrest for the first initial hours after a non-news worthy crime and you will never be arrested. The best way to do this in the worst case scenario? Run.

People have the tendency to greatly overestimate the usefulness of security camera footage in solving crime. Personally, I blame Hollywood.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab...

[pak]

It is categorically false. Police have radios, backup units, plainclothes units, dogs, helicopters, and some level of support from just about every citizen on the street. Where this happened, you are smack in the center of Cambridge in broad daylight with hundreds of witnesses and nearby patrol units. You can't outrun every witness on the street, or the officers summoned to the block ahead of you. It is absolutely ludicrous.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume he is the next Jason Bourne and manages to elude all of Cambridge, Boston, and MIT police on bicycle. What then? They clearly identified him on the street, so he knows they have his face. They also have his prints from the laptop, and the FBI probably has those filed from the PACER incident, so pulling his complete identity is only a matter of time. Staying at his job and place of residence is therefore out of the question. Does he pull a Whitey Bulger and go into hiding in some remote corner of the US? Give up contact with everybody that ever knew him and change his identity? Even Whitey got caught after 17 years, how long do you give a mild-mannered 24 year old with no ties to the criminal underworld? "Running faster" is only putting off the inevitable and adding charges to the docket.

[burgerbrain]

In this particular case, he was clearly boned. In the general case, RUN. Being in the middle of a city only helps you.

I say this as someone who has never been arrested.