The lawsuit faulted Jacksonville Beach Police for hiring and putting O’Connell on a sensitive case despite his own legal history.
“O’Connell is an officer with a documented history of volatility and poor judgment, having previously been terminated from the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office for threatening to ‘blow up’ the agency, later reinstated, then arrested for domestic battery before resigning under the weight of those charges,” the lawsuit said. “Jacksonville Beach PD hired him anyway, assigned him as lead investigator on a sensitive child-luring case, and later promoted him to corporal after his investigation resulted in the wrongful arrest and prosecution of an innocent man.”
So, a shit cop who has no business having a badge and a gun does a shit job. Who’d have figured? In my opinion, all settlements of claims against improper policing should come from police retirement funds, not public funds. Put the liability on those capable of making the changes necessary to correct the situation.
I’ve seen it proposed that cops should have to start carrying essentially malpractice insurance that they pay for out of their own pocket and that would cover payouts in the event that they get sued. This would have the added advantage that all those “bad apples” that somehow always seem to end up transferred to new precincts instead of fired and banned for life wouldn’t be able to get anyone to insure them effectively banning them.
I very much agree. A more just solution would see settlements from cases such as this should come from the police unions funds, or as you suggested - not from taxpayers.
Well hell, I look 93% identical to Frank Zappa.
If that’s all it takes to be somebody else, I might be movin’ to Montana soon…
Aren’t all humans 99.9% similar already?
If 93% is enough you could just take any ape at that point.
Humans do have really low genetic diversity compared to most other organisms. Not as bad cheetahs though!
IIRC there are an estimated roughly 1 Billion different allele combinations that deal with appearance so hypothetically you should have 6-8 doppelgängers somewhere in the world.
I definitely saw a video about this.
That’s DNA, not facial structure
Yes that was the joke
That was a joke?
Sick burn
Yes. You take something out of context to make it look stupid. A 93% DNA match is extremely stupid, just like a 93% AI facial match.
You take something out of context to make it look stupid
TIL that I’m a joke
No. I fully support fartographers and consider them a staple of our society.
There’s no objective measure for quantifying similarity. We can measure relative similarity, though—but that scale will vary depending on what it’s relative to.
We could measure genetic similarity relative to a typical unrelated person, or relative to the nearest non-human animal, or relative to the most distantly-related living organism, or relative to random noise. (And you can do the same for facial similarity.)
Yeah I wonder what a 0% match looks like.
Mark Zuckerberg, probably.
This should be the response in every incidence of false arrest (a lawsuit), especially when involving these dystopian Big Brother surveillance systems.
If the cops are unhappy I will make them an “AI” that only spits out 100% matches.
It may never spit out any results though. Or maybe it’ll always say 100
All the 100% matches are of cops.
Good luck to him
I think this cop can only be condemned if it can be proven that he was knowingly doing something illegal ?
So essentially, he will just say he trusted the recognition software to be accurate and that he isn’t liable for that.
As long as that kind of immunity is there it’s incredibly difficult to sanction cops for stuff like that.
The suspect just doesn’t look like him. I get what you mean but I think it’s expected of the cop to at least review whatever it gives him. He didn’t even give it a glance.
My point is that it’s not about competency of the cop it’s about his intent. Qualified immunity can be brought down if and only if you can prove ill intent which is a very high bar to pass.
I’m no lawyer or prosecutor though so that’s just my understanding of the qualified immunity in the US. It’s an extremely strong shield for even the most incompetent cop that has ever existed.
I love this world where we can be arrested and jailed and have our lives ruined because cops can’t be arsed to verify whether somebody was anywhere else at the time because a machine said ”It’s him…I guess.”
