just chilling

Warning: Much of this is specific to my state. Not even just my country: my state! I've tried here and there to mention other ways things are done, but I have almost ten years of experience in this one and approximately zero in any other.

Part 1: How Cases Begin/"Investigation"

One question seems to come up a lot in true crime cases. That question is: why are the police so bad at this? Why didn't they canvass the scene? Why didn't they get witnesses? Why didn't they (insert incredibly basic investigative step here)?

Sorry to bust your bubble, but police rarely do any actual investigating. Cases most commonly begin in the following ways.

1: Case directly reported to police. There are several different types of this. The most common two are via 911 call and via citizen report (i.e., coming into the police station to report a crime). However, in recent years, we've seen the rise of automated reporting of certain crimes via social media companies, most famously with regards to child sex abuse material. The police will simply get a report that x IP address accessed/shared/downloaded Y image at Z time.

2: Traffic stop. The police saw a car committing a minor traffic violation (ran a red light, headlights out, failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, changed lanes without signalling, etc.) and they stopped it. They found a pretext or got "permission" to search the car from the driver (who likely did not really know they could refuse). Or they got a drug dog to run around the car. (Drug dogs are not nearly as accurate as people think they are; overwhelmingly drug dogs respond to the signals of their handler and not the presence of drugs. I can cite studies if requested.)

3: Narcotics investigation. This is a distant third, but worth mentioning because it's probably the most proactive that most police departments get on a regular basis. They will have undercover officers or informants do controlled buys of narcotics on video, meticulously documented before and after. They take a level of care with this type of investigation otherwise only really reserved for the most violent felonies.

This all isn't to say that cases can't come up any other way. Sometimes police departments really do just do long-term investigations of things. Mostly, I find, they spend so much time picking the low-hanging fruit (guy who had drugs on traffic stop, yelling drunk homeless person) that the more complex and complicated cases just get dropped.

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What happens next?

Next, the police are supposed to investigate. Gather evidence? Talk to people?

This is going to be disappointing to many people as well, but police tend to do the absolute minimum necessary investigation to establish the case and get a conviction, then pass it over to the prosecution. This is even if there are leads and suspects they haven't cleared. They'll just leave that kind of thing out of the final report, unless the defense comes specifically nosing around.

Let me give a few specific examples.

Example 1: 911 call for assault and battery. Officers arrive to find that two brothers absolutely beat the ever-loving shit out of each other at grandma's funeral. Brother 2 has left. Brother 1 remains. The police talk to Brother 1, who has a broken nose. Brother 1 fully blames the aggression on Brother 2, claiming that Brother 2 attacked him unprovoked and broke his nose. Brother 2's wife backs him up. The police, having gotten two witnesses saying one version of events, bring a malicious wounding charge without ever having spoken to Brother 1. A different officer serves Brother 1's arrest warrant and does not interrogate him in any way.

This is not unusual. Once the officers have found enough to arrest one person, often the last thing they want to do is generate more work for themselves by then finding a reason the case isn't so simple and easy. That would mean they then have to talk to many more people, examine evidence, and make a decision as to who the "primary aggressor" was, which will require a judgment call. Meanwhile, their extra investigation has just made it easier for the defense to win at a trial later on, because now the defense has loads of helpful info. They helped the “bad guys” by doing their job better. Can y’all see why an officer wouldn’t even bother? Would just go on to the next easy case instead of staying late and tracking down another witness?

In my past assault and battery cases, it has been just about as common for officers to have spoken to both parties as it was for officers to have only spoken to one party.

Example 2: Reported Property Damage. Girlfriend walks into a police station and says "my boyfriend broke my phone." (In my jurisdiction, a person can just walk straight in front of a judge, swear that what they said was true, and the judge will issue an arrest warrant. This is not true in all jurisdictions and is in fact completely fucking buck wild.) Police ask her a couple questions, look at the phone, bring a warrant, it's done. Maybe they call the boyfriend and ask him what happened. This is most likely the extent of the investigation.

You notice both of these are incredibly low-effort cases that result in easy arrests and immediate prosecutions. Wow, could that help an officer’s statistics? Could it actually hurt his stats if he takes longer and does a better job?

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Okay, what happens now? The police have a suspect, they (in theory) know what happened.

Next, police seek an arrest warrant.

This involves going before a judge and swearing that there's probable cause to believe that their suspect committed their crime as alleged.

1: The Affidavit. There are very few rules for what they can and can't say in these affidavits to get their search warrants. Police officers can attest/swear to things that other police officers saw, because of "imputed knowledge." They can quote witnesses. They can decline to identify informants, as long as they say that their informant has a history of being reliable. (They do not have to provide any evidence of that history.)

They don't have to include all the facts. They don't have to include facts that contradict their version of events. They're not supposed to lie, but sometimes these affidavits are not provided to defense counsel and are sealed, so the defense can't even find out later what they said. And they can shop around for judges who are the most friendly. If one judge says "no," they can try another.

On top of that, all they have to show is "probable cause." Nobody is willing to put a percentage likelihood on "probable cause," but places tend to agree to things like: if there are four guys in a car and you find drugs where all four could reach it, you have probable cause for all four. It's not that you probably did it. It's more than a suspicion that you did it. In my experience, "probable cause" means that there's literally any reason to believe that this person might have actually done this thing.

2: No-Knock Warrants. The media has made a big deal these days of no-knock warrants and nighttime "warrant service." These are when the police bust into someone's house without announcing themselves, at night, in order to take everyone by surprise. This is horrendously dangerous! And yet, police seem to crave it. They get really, really mad when anyone tries to take it away.

My jurisdiction banned arrest warrants after dark, but didn't do the same for search warrants. Guess when all search warrants seem to get served? Goddamn midnight, that's when.

Furthermore, police seem to be able to request exceptions to the no-knock, daytime only rules. Recently, I saw a case where that exception was granted for the following reason: "drugs can be consumed or sold with great speed so might not be there in the morning." Okay, cool, if that's a good enough reason to dispense with the knock-in-the-daytime requirement for one case, that means that literally every other drug case qualifies for dispensing with that requirement too.

3: When to serve the warrant? After business hours on a Friday, obviously. That means that the person they arrest will be in holding over the whole weekend before getting to see a judge on Monday. That's like forty-eight extra hours of jail time, in which they won't have a lawyer, for police to visit them and try and pressure them into confessing, or just intimidate them into feeling like shit.

4: What happens when warrant is served? The suspect is arrested in whatever they were wearing, sometimes allowed to grab phone and wallet but sometimes not for reasons I can't even attempt to explain, they are driven to the jail, and they are processed in. They then wait until they can see a judicial officer to hear about the question of bond. But that's the subject of the next post!

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.

And of course a lot of these studies suck. A lot of them didn't actually think to ask WHEN the schizophrenic acquired the cat, so it's just always presumed that the cat came before the schizophrenia. Most don't really account for the fact that a schizophrenia diagnosis is often a very slow and complex process due to specific regional legalities associated with having "doctors can turn your rights off whenever" disorder. Basically, the same scientific half-truths that surround the phenomenon of "drug-induced schizophrenia," that is the conflation of schizophrenics self-medicating before their formal diagnosis is set and the ambiguity of proving when symptoms onset in relation to that, has been completely replicated for cat-induced schizophrenia lol.

And I love this because it's kind of a perfect demonstration of how the stigma associated with schizophrenia works in medical and scientific settings, right. Everything becomes possible to pathologize, from smoking weed to owning a cat. While the science here is usually pretty bad, "science communication" outlets make it much worse because they run with the most broad dumbass versions of these stories and present them to the public as if there's a clear causal relationship between owning a cat and having schizophrenia, instead of actually reading through the research with an appropriate critical lens and demanding real actual meta-review of obviously flawed studies.

Which is not to say that schizophrenia can't be caused by cats or THC exposure, but that the standard for a concept to become "scientifically true" when dealing with schizophrenia is uh, let's say lower?

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

it is fun, because when he's a brain slug in a Canadian setting, he has the ability to 'mask'. because he's puppeting someone's body and wrapped around their brain, and he can use what's left of their mind to smooth out any social situations.