All Cops Are Bastards

Where does this site get data from? In San Francisco, the SFMTA is the government authority tasked with giving out parking tickets. On average, they issue 1 parking ticket every 24 seconds. They employ about 300 officers who drive these tiny single-seat vehicles around, looking for violations:

I thought it would be interesting to visualize parking ticket data. I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation. But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don't have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently. >

This is gold! I can see everything: the make, color, location, the reason for the ticket, license plate, and even the initials of the officer who wrote the ticket. I would really love to be able to see EVERY ticket. But I don't know the IDs of every ticket. BUT WAIT. These numbers look like they go sort of in order. Current IDs are somewhere around 992,000,000. And tickets issued a couple months ago were around 988,000,000.

I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. That makes sense, there definitely aren't close to a billion tickets issued. Well, how are these IDs generated? There must be some logic to it.

After digging for a while, I'm pretty sure I know how. It seems each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6. So no ticket can end in 7, 8, or 9. So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610, and after that is 984,946,621. Only God knows why, but I assume this is a remnant of an old system.

I also discovered the devices that parking cops use probably claim IDs in batches of 100. So if an officer just wrote a ticket, I know with certainty the ID after that one will be the next ticket the same officer writes. AND, immediately after a ticket is written, it becomes available to be viewed on the city's website.

With all of this knowledge, I wrote a scraper that works extremely efficiently and stores parking tickets almost immediately after they are written. Because there are about 300 parking cops, there are about 300 incomplete batches of 100 tickets. All I have to do is check the first ticket in each batch I don't have in my database. This approach means I only have to make a request to the city's website every few seconds. Great!

A Wiradjuri woman has been injured during an arrest involving a NSW Police officer.

Footage of the incident was posted to social media and quickly went viral.

Jaleenah Collins can be seen in the video involved in a verbal altercation with another woman when a male NSW Police officer enters the frame and forcefully pushes Ms Collins from her side. She is pushed head first into a metal bollard and collapses to the ground.

Ms Collins later posted to Facebook saying she was knocked unconscious and suffered a severe concussion, a fractured rib, and a cut to her ear that required gluing.

"Thank you to all my family who have reached out and supported me through this and who continues to do so," she wrote.

More than three months after Kumanjayi White died after being restrained by police on the white linoleum floor of a Coles supermarket in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, his cause of death is still officially unknown.

Trevis Williams is eight inches taller than a man accused of flashing a woman in Union Square in February. The police arrested him anyway.

Source.

(Sorry for the reddit link, if you can find it on https://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/ then I'll edit the post, I just couldn't find it.)

Article discussing alternatives to the current policing system. I think this is super important because people often (rightfully) get hung up on what we would do as a society to prevent crime, especially violent crime.

ICE stopped a man right after he dropped off his child at school, because he’s Brown, because maybe he looked like he worked a minimum-wage job, and then shot him to death,” says Congressmember Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Illinois, who is calling for a full investigation into Villegas Gonzales’s death and for ICE to be defunded. “The footage, the witnesses we have talked to do not match what the ICE reports show,” she says, calling ICE a “terror organization” with “no guardrails.”

After Camp Sovereignty was attacked on the 31st August, no charges of hate crimes nor terrorism have been brought by the police against those involved. Perpetrators include known neo-Nazis such as Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network.

The National Socialist Network is a highly politicised group. Their crime was undoubtedly motivated by white supremacist beliefs, including some sort of a reclaiming of a white Australia, which is a fallacy in this settler colonial country. But this does not change the fact that advancing their political cause was the reason for the violence, which does fall within the Australian definition of terrorism.

As well, eyewitnesses report watching police escort the neo-Nazi group away from the site of the attack and onto trams, rather than arresting them.

On his 3CR radio show Black Block last Monday, Uncle Robbie had Palestinian Syrian activist Nathalie Farah on to speak about her experience of the attack. She recalled that during the day there had been two incidents of neo-Nazis wandering around the site, and after the actual attack, they’d seen footage of the police escorting Nazis away from the camp to the tram stop but not arresting them.

Tara Barnett, the Greens candidate for Cooper at this past election, talking about violence directed at protestors during weekly pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne. The protest was crashed by alt-right protestors, but the police focused most of their violence against the original group.