Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. [...] Another example is the use of these tactics on people suspected of downloading child pornography.
Because people suspected of such crimes are generally considered among the lowest of the low, there’s generally little objection to using maximum force to apprehend them. But when police use force to demonstrate disgust for the crimes the target is suspected of committing, there’s always a risk of letting disgust trump good judgment. In one recent case in West Virginia, police violently stormed a house after a Walmart employee reported seeing an image of a man’s genitals near a child’s cheek in a set of photos a customer had left at the store to be developed. After terrorizing the customer’s family (he was out of town), the police learned that the cheek in the photo wasn’t a child’s but that of a thirty-five-year-old Filipino woman.
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By the way, an odd thing: I am stopped from posting a link to this article on Twitter. Even when using URL-shortening, it does't work. I wonder if this is some kind of censorship-like filtering?
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By the way, an odd thing: I am stopped from posting a link to this article on Twitter. Even when using URL-shortening, it does't work. I wonder if this is some kind of censorship-like filtering?
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