Florida police raid Covid data whistleblower’s house with guns drawn(sun-sentinel.com)
sun-sentinel.com
Florida police raid Covid data whistleblower’s house with guns drawn
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower-search-warrant-20201207-rapzkgm7fnbujlhwzadunciigu-story.html
13 comments
Discussion yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25339510
Regardless of the merits of the underlying charge, the means of serving this warrant is a pretty blatant intimidation tactic.
We’re heading into a pretty dark place where pissing off the governor gets a literal gun pointed at you for no other reason.
We’re heading into a pretty dark place where pissing off the governor gets a literal gun pointed at you for no other reason.
Not to condone unnecessary escalation, but I think the guns were drawn because of her not opening the door for a search warrant for 20 minutes. I think it's reasonable for LE to assume the environment might be unsafe after a display of non-compliance like that.
> Not to condone unnecessary escalation
Good start.
> but
Ah.
> I think the guns were drawn because of her not opening the door for a search warrant for 20 minutes.
Good to know that failing to open the door justifies cops getting to point guns at whoever. I'm sure you wouldn't mind having a gun shoved in your face because you had headphones on, or because you're out getting groceries and you left your kid alone, right?
Fun fact, in many states pointing a gun at someone is considered lethal force, because it's very easy to kill someone once you've done that. But apparently not answering your door makes it okay for cops to be a few pounds of trigger force from killing you, try not to sneeze!
And that's before we begin going down the "cops lie about the circumstances of arrests all of the damn time" road.
> I think it's reasonable for LE to assume
No, it is not. They are serving a warrant for a non-violent crime to someone with no criminal past. It is not reasonable to assume that violence was a likely outcome. They're also serving a warrant to someone who has politically inconvenienced the governor, the fact that she got a gun pointed at her should worry the hell out of you, not the fact that she didn't open her door.
Furthermore, we've built up our police state one "it's reasonable to assume that" at a time. In fact we should go the other way and demand that cops show that they needed to apply the force they did, not answering your door is not punishable by having a gun shoved in your face. Citizens have rights, you know.
> a display of non-compliance like that.
"Comply, citizen" is something they say in dystopian fiction, it's not something you're supposed to actually express on your own.
Good start.
> but
Ah.
> I think the guns were drawn because of her not opening the door for a search warrant for 20 minutes.
Good to know that failing to open the door justifies cops getting to point guns at whoever. I'm sure you wouldn't mind having a gun shoved in your face because you had headphones on, or because you're out getting groceries and you left your kid alone, right?
Fun fact, in many states pointing a gun at someone is considered lethal force, because it's very easy to kill someone once you've done that. But apparently not answering your door makes it okay for cops to be a few pounds of trigger force from killing you, try not to sneeze!
And that's before we begin going down the "cops lie about the circumstances of arrests all of the damn time" road.
> I think it's reasonable for LE to assume
No, it is not. They are serving a warrant for a non-violent crime to someone with no criminal past. It is not reasonable to assume that violence was a likely outcome. They're also serving a warrant to someone who has politically inconvenienced the governor, the fact that she got a gun pointed at her should worry the hell out of you, not the fact that she didn't open her door.
Furthermore, we've built up our police state one "it's reasonable to assume that" at a time. In fact we should go the other way and demand that cops show that they needed to apply the force they did, not answering your door is not punishable by having a gun shoved in your face. Citizens have rights, you know.
> a display of non-compliance like that.
"Comply, citizen" is something they say in dystopian fiction, it's not something you're supposed to actually express on your own.
I'm not LE, but if I were raiding a scientist's home, I'd be ok keeping firearms at a low-ready position instead of actively aiming them at children.
[deleted]
@PoliticalMath on twitter has been running one hell of substack on the covid statistics. He finds fault with both the left and the right in the response to covid. One thing that has been clear from the beginning is that Rebekah Jones is not an honest broker and is only out for herself.
He goes into detail here: https://polimath.substack.com/p/the-rebekah-jones-raid
If you have dug into the data from the covid tracking project (as I have), Florida has been doing an awesome job releasing their data and the tracking project gives the florida covid data operation a much deserved A rating.
He goes into detail here: https://polimath.substack.com/p/the-rebekah-jones-raid
If you have dug into the data from the covid tracking project (as I have), Florida has been doing an awesome job releasing their data and the tracking project gives the florida covid data operation a much deserved A rating.
He says "I don’t trust Rebekah Jones to be an honest data broker but that is not a violent crime and we should not treat her like a violent criminal."
But he doesn't support that claim about her not being an honest data broker with any evidence here. Not in this piece, at least. Maybe there's some other one. So for that to be your takeaway from THIS piece, I find odd.
But he doesn't support that claim about her not being an honest data broker with any evidence here. Not in this piece, at least. Maybe there's some other one. So for that to be your takeaway from THIS piece, I find odd.
Wasn't one of the claims of insubordination because she refused to comply with a request to make the data less accessible? If she hadn't been fired, and if everyone around the issue just kept quite, then Florida might not have been doing such an awesome job.
For readers in Europe:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201208201329/https://www.sun-s...
(It's archived so well that it even has the modal overlay for being in private mode... But cancelling the page load earlier works around that.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20201208201329/https://www.sun-s...
(It's archived so well that it even has the modal overlay for being in private mode... But cancelling the page load earlier works around that.)
I don't know why they call her a whistleblower. The data on her covid dashboard is the same as the data on the official state dashboard, and while the state doesn't ask for money on their dashboard, she's taking donations to present the exact same data on her dashboard.