[neilv]

At least one of those is currently buried on 3rd page, despite "110 points by uptown 1 hour ago | ... | 19 comments".

It sounds like a tragic and suspicious situation, and what I'm most curious about (since this is HN) is whether the federal government will step in, and figure out what's going on.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Every one of these turns into a flamewar of cynical "America bad, corruption is the norm, there is no free press, etc." comments.

[giraffe_lady]

really makes u tink huh

[gettodachoppa]

As a foreigner, if I could, I'd downvote it if only because it's local news being blown up all over HN, presumably because it's a slow news week. I just don't care. This isn't speaking to some trend in America. It's a hamlet's local drama. Do we really need 2 posts a day?

Btw, from what I got by glancing past the comments in the original post, whoever runs this newspaper is a total rat. What started all this is the newspaper snitching on a self-employed woman who lost her driver's license 15 years ago, and telling the police she's still using it for her job. This doesn't excuse the raid, but god I hate petty small town people.

[6510]

And then they killed his mum.

[burnerburnito]

You're calling them "total rats", yet you say that you haven't read the article and only glanced at it. How is that a basis for making such a bold claim?

To quote you further, you claimed they were "snitching" and that "god i hate petty small town people".

Perhaps these could be more valid claims about some truly trivial squabble, but the woman in question has previously been driving while DUI (driving under the influence; usually alcohol in America, since you claim to be a foreigner and may have different legal terminology in your nation), severely endangering the lives of others as is well-established by decades of studies on the increased risks of accidents (especially lethal ones) by drivers who are intoxicated on alcohol.

Moreover, in America DUI laws are (in this writer's opinion) extremely relaxed. One minor DUI with nobody harmed absolutely does not stop you from getting a license -- the penalty for kansas is 30 days minimum and needing to use a special device to test one's breath's alcohol levels before starting their car.

Even if she got a lengthy suspension, which I haven't deeply researched into (though by your own admission, neither did you), she made the choice to endanger others' lives significantly and would have then had potentially up to 15 (or let's say 14, to presuppose a year of suspension) years to attempt to get a valid license, an inexpensive process.

Instead, she kept driving without a license, and with a proven history of making poor decisions where other peoples' safety and rights to life are involved. Might she also have lacked insurance? Then in the event she caused any crashes or accidents, the outcomes could be even harder upon the victim.

Now, some of these issues reflect deep systemic problems with American justice, law, poverty, education, and public transportation / city planning. However, this immediate article and situation is not something so simple or vulgar as "total rat(s)" or "snitching", and I'd even beg the question of if a situation is really "snitching" when it may be actually probing if the police are suddenly complict in ignoring a crime they might be happy to use against someone else once it suits them.

Likewise, I believe you're greatly lowering the quality of dialogue on hackernews by this sort of impulsive response. If I've gotten anything wrong, I'd be happy for you to specify, but what you've written only serves to confuse others about the truth. I may be wrong about such a developing story too, but please consider that I've attempted to broadly make my claims search-able or referencing specific parts of things you or the newspaper have said.

P.S. I'm well aware nobody (else) is likely to read this, but decided I'd spend 20 minutes writing on the subject in case of other readers like myself who tend to go over old hackernews comments looking for insights on events that may have been ignored by corporate or mainstream media reporting.

Or, TL;DR There appears to be nothing of substance to these claims, move along.