Unbelievable! Like a Sci Fiction Horror Conspiracy Theory

[_DoubtingThomas]

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The War on Sex | Duke University Press
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Is all this s*** really happening? Or am I falling for a stupid conspiracy theory nonsensical book? If all this s*** is real what a shame my tax dollars are being wasted. Now I am scared to use dating sites. I won't use them ever again. Anyways, I thought bribery was illegal.

Chapter One

"In Florida, police detective in some jurisdictions go further. They troll adult online dating sites, where they meet men who are looking for other adults. After baiting and grooming the men, sometimes over the course of days, and after steering the conversation to sex, the decoys then switch the age they claim to be, indicating that their "real" age is fourteen or fifteen - and try to convince the sting targets to continue the conversation anyway. Alternatively, the undercover detective introduces the idea that the man on the hook might have sex with the decoy's underage "child" or "sister". Men who say no to this latter proposition are arrested anyway just for talking to the detective. Even men who cut off such conversations and report them to authorities are keep nonetheless under "active investigation""

"Cell phones put the tools for serious lawbreaking—“sexting” among underage teens, which violates child pornography laws—in everyone's hands. (A recent survey finds that nearly 20 percent of teens under the age of eighteen have sent a sexually explicit picture of themselves via cell phone; nearly 40 percent had received"

"Police registries of “known homosexuals” and those arrested for engaging in acts such as “outraging public decency” were inaugurated in the 1940s"

Certainly, policies of mass incarceration, disproportionately directed against racial minorities, begin to resemble fascist techniques of coercion. In the past, we would have referred to the resulting form of government as “authoritarian” or called it a “police state.”

[_MeDotOrg]

One sobering thing to think about as governments try to find new revenue streams in the wake of shrinking tax bases, is that certain types of crimes can become profit centers for police departments.

[_subgenius]

One sobering thing to think about as governments try to find new revenue streams in the wake of shrinking tax bases, is that certain types of crimes can become profit centers for police departments.

I think your perpetuating a myth here. First that PDs are tantamount to corporations when they are truly more akin to being a department themselves, as in they are profit centers for their government....which, I might remind you, is a representative government.
Second, for example, if you get a traffic citation there are 2 costs typically associated with that citation - the fine and the court costs. Usually the fine being X amount of dollars and the court costs being 5X amount of dollars. So, when a person goes to traffic court and successfully has a citation "forgiven" they don't have to pay the fine but they will still pay the court costs.
This is just a simple example for how PDs are not the ones seeking profit centers.

[_Gadianton]

really sub? You're right, court costs exceed LE costs, but they're two separate departments. Also, society bears most of those court costs. For a traffic ticket, no, you don't pay court costs to fight it. Unbeknownst to dupes who seriously believe in right and wrong, the so-called Rule of Law works by supply and demand for criminality. Red light cameras in California are a perfect example. They have nothing to do with keeping the roads safe, but to generate easy dollars by screwing people on technicalities. The problem is, when everyone is guilty, it's really costly to punish them all, but punished they should be for people of principle, right? So the way out is to not be guilty, by means of otherwise silly counter technicalities. When people start winning, then it becomes too costly to try hundreds of red light cases an hour when a large percentage get off and so the cameras go down. But why should they go down? Justice should be served, even if it costs the government money.

I'm not sure DTs example quite fits direct revenue generation per se, but it does broadly fit economic self-justification. LE in every area of law primarily goes after low hanging fruit. Sting operations lower the costs of what the self-righteous call "enforcing the law." Let's say you have somebody who is really guilty at large. The problem is, you need the right kind of evidence and that's hard to get, in part because there are lots of technicality defenses out there to consider. These defenses exist (see above example) because in order to get easier convictions, dumber and dumber laws are made to lower the bar for what constitutes a crime, and so technicality defenses are necessary to get around codified laws that are primarily technicalities themselves. LE has case experience on their side and knows what technicalities they are coming short on, and so, let's say, you have the choice between going after that somebody who is really guilty, and you have the choice of setting up innocent people and coaxing them into crossing the right line in the sand to fit the technicalities your department is coming short on in real crime fighting, then which are you going to chose? You'll go with the least costly solution.