When was the last time you read a journalistic exposé, that caused you to literally drop your jaw, & audibly say, “HOLY SHIT!

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Literally something you would expect to read about happening in China or the Philippines or a full on Communist or Totalitarian state.

Fucking heartbreaking and infuriating.

This sounds like a hugely expanded version of the LE approach to reducing crime by targeting the relatively few chronic repeat offenders in their jurisdiction and zeroing in on them. Find any reason to arrest them them and get them off the streets, thus lowering the crime rate.

In this case, seems like their approach is to include the targeted offenders' families, too, and harass the families with the goal of getting them to leave town.

And since they get to decide who's the nuisance offender, we get this kind of official harassment.

I am aghast, WTF is happening to our country.

Didn't Tom Cruise do this in the movie? Part of the pre-crime division

All the recent Johnny Depp stuff.

Excellent investigative reporting by the Tampa Bay Times. I've been watching a lot of Netflix docuseries this week and I swear every other one is about or largely involves the misconduct of police and prosecutors -- and, of course, their targets are always people of color, or like in this story, poor people or people of limited intellectual capacity. Anyone they can take advantage of.

Just one of the hundreds of stories that show why defund the police, while a terrible slogan, is a worthwhile policy goal.

Read the epic culmination of multiple investigative reports of James Brown, Family & Co. that CNN recently published.

SICK, DARK SHIT.

I'll read the story OP, thank you.

For my part I read a story a few years ago about a rape victim who was young and disadvantaged and charged with a crime (lying to police? something like that) when she reported someone broke into her house and raped her. Her life was ruined iirc. In the end it turned out it all actually happened. I need to find that again it was 100% mind blowing. The kind of shit that turns you cynical and hard just from reading about it (i.e. not even close to experiencing it yourself).

There's nothing shocking about the story. I would hope that the police would always try to prevent crime instead of just respond to it. It's also not surprising that the Tampa Bay Times would try to make it seem sinister.

[quote]Rio Wojtecki, 15, became a target in September 2019, almost a year after he was arrested for sneaking into carports with a friend and stealing motorized bicycles.

Are other police departments not doing this? We need the police to follow up with criminals.

Found it.

R1 you are wrong, China only harasses the dissidents, for petty criminals, they are very lenient, and they rarely use physical force, it's all about intimidation and threat.

r10, I saw a movie about that.

^ It's called "Unbelievable" and is on Netflix.

He’s kind of a dilf to be honest.

r9 - Not surprising coming from your ilk. Do tell us how writing people tickets for smoking or letting their grass get too long is preventative. Their stated mission is to run these people out of town. When the police complain about having to wear too many hats, it is curious that they would want to add social worker to their job description.

[quote]When was the last time you read a journalistic exposé, that caused you to literally drop your jaw, & audibly say, “HOLY SHIT!

I would have to say, really, when an investigation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed that deserving nominees were not named SEVEN times for nefarious reasons while an obvious placeholder was inserted. I never dreamed such corruption existed. Luckily, in one case (a win for "Iron Lady") at least the deserving person won despite this outrage of manipulation.

If it would not hurt so many people, I would perhaps consider returning my membership card (with SASE) in symbolic solidarity with these cruelly denied actresses.

It makes me so livid sometimes I must use a little extra foundation.

Great thread OP.

R8 wasn’t that made into a series with Toni Collette?

It's not a recent story but I just came to read it a few days ago. Two British boys, one, precocious but often bullied, tried to get close to another, a popular jock he had been crushing on at school. The former created hundreds of fake accounts in the chatroom, catfishing the latter into an Internet romance, a real-life friendship, and most surreally, a murder of himself.

It happened at the dawn of online chat and most people then saw it as a warning of how teens could get lost in the virtual world, but deep down, I think it's a very sad gay love story.

The rights to the original Vanity Fair story was bought by Bryan Singer (Mary! I know), and he had it made into a movie called "uwantme2killhim?", a real quote from the two boys' chat history.