Are we not allowed to know where cops are operating? I would support all US cops and ICE and any other state sponsored authority to wear GPS and body cameras at all times.
Do you not feel you'd just be creating a utopia for criminals? You could take that data and create a program to show, amongst other things, minimum response time by area greatly facilitating crime. And then of course you'd also be essentially ending any undercover operations which are very important for breaking up criminal organizations.
I'm fully on board with bad apples in the police being held accountable, but I'm not sure this sort of idea that you're proposing would accomplish much beyond greatly easing crime and criminality.
Any criminals with more than a single brain cell already know what cop response times are in their area. In the 60s-90s everybody had police scanners and cops talked over open radio about their locations and calls but crime still dropped massively in that time.
We already live in the safest time in the last few hundred years atleast, if not of all human history, all these fears about rampant crime are unfounded. And most crimes are committed by people you already know. Hell the biggest source of theft in the US, which dwarfs all other forms of theft combined, is employer wage theft. The cops deserve no trust because they have spent the last 6+ decades doing everything possible to militarize and become more draconian while extorting the poorest of society for fines and funding. Civil forfeiture laws are still abused on the daily and the entire US population knows it. Trust is earned, not given, and US cops and courts have done everything possible to destroy any trust between them and average citizens.
Maybe if I could trust that being executed on the side of a road by a cop in full view of the public and on camera would result in them going to jail people might support them having a bit of leeway, but they have repeatedly destroyed that notion. Cops are a far bigger threat to me than any petty criminals, most criminals were driven to crime through desperation so I can atleast sympathize with some of them. I have yet to meet a cop that wasn't a complete and utter asshole looking for any excuse to arrest or harass me or others around me.
Crime rates were substantially lower in the 50s, and prior, than they are today. The narrative about collapsing crime relies on starting sampling near the 60s at which point crime started exponentially skyrocketing, peaking at the 90s - where we hit the highest rates seen in modern history. The collapse of crime starting around that era correlates with an exponential rise in incarceration. In 1960 something like 400k Americans were imprisoned. Today it's around 2 million with the US having the highest incarceration rate in the entire world.
Similarly, the idea that crime is mostly by people you know is driven by another falsehood. That is only when the relationship between the victim and offender is known. The wide majority of crime has an offender that was either unknown to to the victim, or "relationship unknown." And the total number of cases of people killed by police who were not instigating physical resistance or aggression towards them is very near zero. There have been some really egregious cases, but they are very far and few between.
And yeah the 'cop personality' is pretty common, because it's cultivated in the training. They are going after the sort of people you probably don't even know exist, certainly not in the quantities that they do - especially with this image of reasonably people driven to desperation you've built up in your mind. These people will take any sign of hesitation or weakness as something to exploit. The 'cop personality' is a tool to help them do their job, even moreso than the tools on their belt.
That's, at the minimum, debatable. The primary point of people reporting on the location if ICE agents is to enable other people to evade or interfere with law enforcement. And that walks right into the illegal zone in various ways - accessory, obstruction, interference, aiding and abetting, and so on.
It really isn't debatable. You aren't responsible for what other people do with information you give them. If someone told you "I'm going to commit a crime, tell me if the police are nearby" it would be probably illegal to tell them (as furtherance to a conspiracy), but without an agreement to help commit an illegal act it's totally legal
No agreement is necessary under law, only knowledge of an illegal activity and an intent to help it succeed. Agreements just tack on new charges like criminal conspiracy. This is why the peer comment about Waze is interesting. They likely have a fairly strong argument that it's simply sharing publicly available information - which is of course 100% legal, while I think ICEBlock will likely lose a very open and shut case because it's entire purpose is to facilitate the evasion or disruption of law enforcement.
I expect the government is probably thrilled to get sued by ICEBlock precisely because of this. It's probably about as favorable a case as they could ever find, and ICEBlock losing will set a highly useful (from the government's perspective) legal precedent which will then probably be weaponized to go after stuff like Waze.
