alt Hacker Newshmm, what did they wipe?
> [information] relevant to a possible civil lawsuit against the West Bend Police Department.”
No, the cops should not get to wipe data that could be used in court against them. Is this.... not obvious?
Replies
paimapi • today at 8:14 PM
Not in America, no - https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/
We need our slave catchers and Pinkertons as immune as possible from accountability. How else will they protect the interests of capital?
To be fair, it's not that simple, and having read the article you should know as much instead of painting this false argument.
What ELSE did they wipe?
>the phone was rife with “numerous sexually explicit messages and images” sent to the victim as well as “significant personally identifying information about her” is not clear error. The record reveals that these conversations occurred over multiple apps on the phone and that Stathas also received explicit photos of the minor. The court did not clearly err by crediting the government’s assertion that “no procedure short of digitally wiping” the phone would eliminate all criminal or harmful material.
So a convicted child molester used multiple phone apps to contact his victim, and instead of going into every app on the phone to see if it had child sex abuse evidence the police just wiped his phone. The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals' phones of criminal evidence".
Now is there a larger question here? Sure ... but lets not pretend police clearing evidence of child sex abuse from a phone (which the convicted child sex abuser claimed contained evidence ... for a lawsuit that very likely would never happen) is as simple as "police deleting evidence of their wrongdoing".