Per the legal system, arrested is probably safe course of action until they could verify the authenticity of the letter. It's really the ensuing events after that were abysmally stupid.
They did verify the authenticity. The police won't launch a full investigation for every single possibility and doing so would be a colossal waste of resources. They are, in fact, allowed to make some calls and be satisfied at that point that the letter is authentic without investigating every single fraudulent possibility.
> I think that arrest was warranted until thy could independently confirm the phone numbers…
Your premise is correct, you conclusion is stupid. "hey jon, pull out your phone, is this the same number listed on the county webpage for this office?" - "yeah jack sure is" - "hey thanks for your patience guys, and thanks for your help protecting the court house from the baddies"
Even if you couldn't do that, and couldn't hold them on site. Sure, transport them back to hold while you have the person on the phone drive down to the police station with id. There was NO reason to charge and arraign them.
> After a deputy called one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter and got confirmation it was legit, the deputies said they were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building.
Doesn't say they called the "numbers on the letter" anywhere?
Also that wasn't even the point the sheriff made:
> He said the Dallas County Courthouse was under his jurisdiction and he hadn’t authorized any such intrusion.
He was upset at the idea of higher authority overriding his authority, he was power tripping. Seems so arbitrary to decide for you to bootlick his authority in particular, just because he is a cop?
> arrested is probably safe course of action until they could verify the authenticity of the letter
How would that even work? How could you possibly establish probable cause in that situation? It's certainly not credible that there'd be an above 50% chance someone presenting such a letter is a criminal.
What airtags need is a theft mode, where anyone carrying the airtag is not alerted, but the location can be retrieved by an approved local authority after being voluntarily surrendered by the owner.
Whitelisting law enforcement so when the owner of the air tag declares it stolen nobody other than a whitelisted law enforcement org could view its location and when they did that creates an audit log?
And since the user has the original key, it'd have to be voluntary surrender. After you turn your key in, you lose access.
The best part is the whole thing could be reviewable and added to a public immutable ledger, encrypted, to make the whole process, transition, and access transparent for courts later. Wouldn't it be great if more investigations happened that way?
And if you don't trust law enforcement, thats your prerogative, no need to use the feature.
They have access to guns, stingrays and flock cameras. They tap every email, message and phone call you make. You wouldn't even know if you are subject to warrantless surveillance as it might be illegal to tell you under the patriot act.
I'm pretty sure being able to access an Airtag that was put into stolen mode by the owner is the least of your concern. I'm not even sure what failure mode you are worried about because you didn't elaborate.
Please don't think I'm trying to be all high and mighty because I live in the UK and am surveilled even worse than you are (although at least our police are very rarely armed).
It would be nice if this could tie in to actively altering enforcement when it's turned on, maybe even require sharing with authorities for it to be enabled: the stalker would have to collaborate with police in order to stalk the victim.
Learned something new today. I knew what FOR UPDATE did, but somehow I've never RTFM'd hard enough to know about the SKIP LOCKED directive. Thats pretty cool.
Yes, SKIP LOCKED is great. In practice you nearly always want LIMIT, which the article did not mention. Be careful if your selection spans multiple tables: only the relations you explicitly lock are protected (see SELECT … FOR UPDATE OF t1, t2). ORDER BY matters because it controls fairness and retry behaviour. Also watch ANALYZE: autoanalyze only runs once the dead to live tuple threshold is crossed, and on large or append heavy tables with lots of old rows this can lag, leading to poor plans and bad SKIP LOCKED performance. Finally, think about deletion and lifecycle: deleting on success, scheduled cleanup (consider pg_cron), or partitioning old data all help keep it efficient.
> A Republican attempt to cut off federal funding tied to vehicle “kill switch” enforcement failed in the House this week, leaving intact a law directing the Department of Transportation to develop mandatory impaired-driving prevention systems in new vehicles.
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