Cops suck at their job, and they hate it if you explain it to them.
I can't remember a single time in my 40-years-long life when a cop genuinely helped me in any way,
apart from writing a report (full of errors and spelling mistakes) that my insurance demanded.
And I really don't believe they "make the streets safer" either.kids stole my car
cops gave chase
they crashed the car
ran on foot
cops gave chase
they ran into an abandoned house
cops stopped outside
they walked nonchalantly out of the house
cops did not arrest as they could not be sure it was the same people
literal skyrim npc behavior.
They were chasing running people, those had to still be in the house. Probably doing laps in one of the rooms.
In Montreal, I was riding my bike drunk and crashed pretty badly. I broke a tooth and was bleeding out of my mouth. I got up and kept riding home when a cop stopped me who was sitting next to his car monitoring pedestrian traffic. They took out their first aid kit, gave me some gauze, asked if I needed to go to the ER, then let me be on my way.
I feel like that wouldn't happen in the US. I was still very drunk.
And Montreal cops don't have that great a reputation, at least from what I've heard.
Only interaction I had with one was when they were handing out pamphlets about hiding your (white) headphone cords on the metro. I guess people were stealing iphones
In many states it's legal to ride a bicycle while drunk, so they probably would. In my state it counts as a DUI so they might arrest you.
Here's a PDF of the rules per state:
https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/bui_full_chart.pdf
Yeah, it probably would. They would be interested in just how and why you got a bloody face. And even US cops carry basic medical supplies like a band-aid.
US cops aren't the best, but they can and do help with such things.
My family was victimized in a home invasion that went “get therapy” badly and the cops in their defense did get us in touch with resources and gave us the report of insurance, but they also all but accused me of being a drug addict because I have scars on my arms and had a bowl in my apartment (weed is legal here). They also refused to look at the cut window screen or the footprint on the other side of the window insisting that because the front door was unlocked after the burglar left through it we must’ve left it unlocked and that’s how he entered.
We didn’t like the cops before we were victims of violent crime, but it’s much more pronounced of a dislike afterwards. I’ve heard my entire life that “when you’re victimized by criminals you’ll come to appreciate the cops” and I can’t help but laugh at that sentiment.
Hell in a different instance I got robbed by a guy, got his license plate, phone number, and confession (buying something off the internet, guy took both things and ran, then later messaged asking for sex), and want to know what I’ve never seen since? That money. Like I’m not happy with the guy, but unlike my home invader I don’t even think he needs to be kept away from society, I just wanted my fucking money back.
Got rear ended on the highway. Recorded make and model, rough driver description, and plate number with state, and direction they were heading. Told dispatcher and cops on scene everything, they couldn’t have given less of a fuck.
“We’ll keep a lookout, but really there’s nothing we can do.”
So why am I paying taxes for you welfare queens then? My insurance hotline was far more helpful at next steps and what needs to happen vs ‘shit sucks bro, here’s your case number, you gotta smash F5 on our website until the report gets uploaded. lol no, we wolnt reach out to you’
I was pushing a cart full groceries home when two white guys walked right up and started looking in my shopping cart. Exactly at that moment a cop car pulled up beside us.
That's all they had to do. It was pretty good timing.
Probably nothing would have happened either way, but still. It also occurs to me that the presence of anyone else would have likely had the same effect. Like a prof rolling up on a unicycle, or someone walking their cat, or even a lone horse. Perhaps even a bold raccoon.
Excellent point, it's not the presence of a cop that stopped them, it's the presence of another person.
Same here. They show up after you get hurt, not before. They are supposed to make us safer, but we have more cops than any country in the world and we are not safer.
Like the old saying goes, "when seconds matter, the police are only minutes away", except they're actually more like an hour and a half away for me.
out in these streets. cops make the streets more dangerous by far
In the U.S., cops statistically do nothing. They don't prevent crime, they don't solve crimes, they're just a publically funded security firm for local businesses to contract. It would honestly be more surprising if you had a useful interaction with the police.
Even though this is all colloquially known and accepted, don't think of arguing to lower the police budget in any way. Gotta make sure those buffoons have their surplus army equipment so they can feel safe while they rob and oppress citizens.
Depends on the country. Aussie cops are a lot nicer and more useful than many American cops.
"I have determined by thinking really hard that the victim is responsible for the theft of their possessions. Deny all insurance claims".
I sold a trailer to a cop once. It wasn't related to his police activities but I needed to get rid of it and he didn't haggle.
are you white
It's not that the cops don't know how to search a video, they simply don't want to, because theft of property from you, a working-class nobody, is nothing to them.
It can also be both.
(Source: I have talked to cops before)
And also that - depending on the format of the video and software involved - doing a "binary search" might not be that simple
With my own NVR system, it takes great quality video and I can pull files of it, but the actual interface is pretty janky to say the least, and accessing stuff like the fisheye cameras only really works well within the vendor's app.
They don’t pay cops to think. In fact, I don’t think they even pay cops to recover stolen bikes.
No they don't care. It's why bike thieves are such assholes, there's barely any money to be made off it at massive inconvenience for the bike owner but they do it because they know 99% no one comes after them.
i bet a bike thief could steal a bile in front of a cop and the cop would simply look the other way
If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.
In america at least cops can’t have an IQ that’s too high or they won’t get the job. They want people smart enough to do the capitalist class’s bidding but dumb enough not to question anything.
The official reason is that if you're too smart, the menial repetitive nature of most police work will get boring and you'll quit. The rationale being they didn't want to invest in training if you aren't going to stick around.
This is a fun fact considering you need to be a cop before you can be a detective.
They actually screen for people who do think, and disqualify them from being police officers.
I had a bike stolen from a convenience store once. I talked the clerk into letting me review the footage. I found the guy stealing the bike on tape, along with the licence plate of the car that dropped him off. Through a bunch of sleuthing I found out his name and exactly where he lived. I called the cops with all of this information and evidence and told them I want to press charges. Then basically said "lol, fuck off". So I kept trying to find out where the bike was. It was an expensive bike and I wanted it back. While looking for the bike I found out the thief had sold it for money that he spent on meth, and then got caught with the meth, so he was actually in jail. I called the cops back and told them I have one of their inmates on video stealing my bike, I have the license plate number of his collaborator, and I have witnesses. I want to press charges, and they already have the guy in custody. Again, their answer was basically "lol, get fucked. We don't help people". Fuck the police.
ACAB
Wait couldn't you have filed a lawsuit? I mean yeah, the cops didn't do their job (I guess they could be sued for that too). But you would need proof in text form so just ask them again in a mail or letter. If they don't do their job and you have proof then they're screwed
Against who? A meth addict bike thief definitely doesn't have any money. Do you mean against the police? Possibly? Idk. I lived in a conservative town where the Chief of Police was basically idolized. I definitely didn't want to paint a target on my own head. This was 20 years ago, so if I had other options, they're gone now.
If they don't do their job and you have proof then they're screwed
Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.
The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.
The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.
Honestly, this was the comment that exposed me (regular office rube) to binary search as a concept and it is so. fucking. helpful.
In what ways do you use it in your daily life? Genuinely curious.
not the commenter you asked but i use a binary search when i'm playing a modded game that is having issues to pinpoint which mod(s) cause the issue. beats launching the game over and over to test each mod by a long shot.
a recent example: i put together a mod list for risk of rain 2 to play with some friends, but the game crashed on launch when all the mods were installed. so i disabled half the mods (in order, alphabetically or other) and tried to launch the game again - still crashing. disabled half the remaining enabled mods, test, repeated as necessary. with only a few cycles of booting the game, i was able to determine the specific mod causing a crash on startup out of my list of 50 something mods.
Imagine you work at a company that sells cookies. The company offers a variety of cookies at different price points to different customers. The company sets up contracts offering a customer a set variety of cookies at various prices, with a clause stating that if the customer wants a different type of cookie the company makes later on, it will be priced and added to their list. This should be in the form of regular contract amendments/addendums, but it isn't.
Several years go by, and in the course of that several different varieties of cookies have been added by the customer. The price given to them at the time may not account for the cost of materials and labor today, or how many of those cookies not mentioned in the contract are being ordered v. how many were expected, the fact that you outsourced some of those cookies, or brought some of those cookies in-house, etc. The cookie executive asks you "When did we offer customer x cookie y at price point z?"
Now, the company has a perfectly good database of cookies and price points for customers, but it's very old tech and requires certain access privileges, which are very hard to give people outside of the accounting department. Accounting is never able to help with this, and the cookie executives try poorly and fail to get people like you access. But you do have years and years of cookie addition request forms, which are kept in chronological order by customer and contain a list of all types of cookies requested up to that point in time.This is where binary search helps - you can pretty quickly find the one where the cookie y was added even though there are hundreds of these forms.
It's not a situation that should exist - we have a god damn cookie database where you can just pop in customer x and cookie y to get price z, with an effective date - but in my crazy cookie factory it helps a ton.
There's other examples but they're all pretty much variants of this thinly veiled analogy.
My dad once told me that he had to find the circuit breaker that corresponded to a particular wire and because we have around 60 circuit breakers in our house, he had to flick one off, run down and check the wire, run back up, flick the next circuit breaker off, and do that quite a lot of times.
In that moment, I got to explain binary search to him and he was genuinely interested. 🙃
I think the old school method was to plug in a stereo and turn the volume up. When you couldn't hear it then you got the right breaker.
I hook a cheap webcam up to a USB battery pack and load it up on my phone. Then I plug in a light and point the camera at that. It makes it a single trip and doesn't bother the neighbors.
My friend has some upcoming electrical work in his house, can you explain how to use binary search in this instance so I can tell him?
Turn off half the breakers. See if you still have power where you need to go. That will tell you which half it's on. Turn off half of those breakers, repeat.
Oh, well, you switch off half the fuses, then you go check the wire.
Let's say the wire still has power on it, so now you know that none of the fuses in that half affected it (which you can turn back on now).Then you do the same thing again with the other half of the fuses, i.e. you switch off half of the fuses in that half and go check the wire.
Now, let's say the wire is dead, so now you know that the fuse you want is in this quarter.So, then you flick off half of the fuses in that quarter and check the wire again, and so on.
With every step, you eliminate half of the remaining fuses, so for 60 fuses, you need at most 6 steps (which is the logarithm for base 2 of 60).
Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.
For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.
So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.
So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.
Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.
Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.
Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.
We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.
Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.
Binary search only works if the fuses were correctly sorted in the same order as the houses though.
You know, after posting that comment, I really doubted myself, if it really is binary search, because Wikipedia also tells me it needs to be a sorted array.
But yeah, I think that's only relevant, if your method of checking whether it's in one half or the other uses
>and<. As far as I can tell, so long as you can individually identify the fuses, a.k.a. they're countable, then you can apply binary search.
My bike was stolen, and I live in a small enough town that the cops actually did go through the footage to find the thief.
He called back 15 minutes later for more details and mentioned he was 15 minutes into the footage.
It sounds dumb, but if the footage was on tape and not easily seekable, then I can see that happening.
It should still at least have a fast-forward option. You go at the highest speed possible until the bike disappears. Then you rewind at a slower speed until it shows up again. Then you can play the tape from there.
Man, as someone who worked surveillance for years, I can’t believe that anyone would have a hard time with this.
It was so, so, so, so easy to find when something vanished.
Now, did so and so walk in the building? Yeah, kiss my ass. Not happening.
I worked at a major outdoors retailer with a "gun library" of high-end firearms.
In one of our quarterly steel audits (where we pull all 10,000 guns put hands on them, verify the serials, etc) we discovered a $10,000 rifle was missing.
The thing is, the case it was in obscured the gun itself from the security cameras. It was behind like 6 other guns in a glass case any customer could item and pull the guns out to look at them (guns themselves were trigger-locked of course).
So we had to have the gun library manager sit there and watch 3 month's of surveillance video of a specific case that was proclaimed opened 20 times an hour in a highly-trafficked area of the store. Because of all the activity, the video had to be watched in real time, and we were open 13 hours a day.
The manager ended up quitting over the boredom combined with stress.
Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.
My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.
Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.
And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.
Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.
The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.
Oh god, yeah I’d be out. I would not do that.
Watching surveillance is truly like watching paint dry. Realtime? Yeah, just shoot me.
The only time I ever struggled was when cash went missing and I had to watch sale for sale. Even then, I could fast forward.
I always went for voids and “nosales” first. Nine times out of ten that’s where I’d find the theft. More clever thieves made my life hell though.
Story time: I'm in Taiwan and I have a white female friend who is here for college.
She went on a "date" with someone she met on an app and they met at some coffee shop. The dude turned out to be SUPER creepy and she cut the date short and left. The dude proceeds to online stalk her for months. She barely speaks Chinese and was scared to go to the police due to the language barrier and the stalking was all online. Also she doesn't know the guy's name and he had since deleted his profile from the dating app.
My wife and I convinced her to go to the police. She left with some print outs of the stalking emails and DMs just to file a report, not expecting much.
The police tried their hardest to communicate with her and spent the next 4 hours helping her. They found the guy using traffic light footage on the day of the date and was able to use CCTV footage and using his metro card at the subway. Within the day, they found him, visited him and gave him a warning.
Well, did that warning stop him?
Ya, it was pretty instant.
This is an innate skill in the days of the internet for anytime you are looking for just the right moment in a video of any kind. 🤔
Well if you're looking for a moment with consequences on the video.
Some sorting algorithms shorten this process by only scanning the last 10%.
He was never interested in finding the bike, he just wanted to "take notes" and go back to his donuts.
Aaaaaaagh, why cant you talk this way to people?! Life would be so much easier! Why didnt the argument go down well?! Is the cop stupid?! Binary search works! The guy was correct! God damnit, why must people be so unaccommodating, even when proven their accommodation would not take long?
Cops are only useful if you need someone to get to the scene two hours late, and then shoot your dog.
it could take 5 minutes, sure, but it's still 5 minutes of work and that's not why we signed up for the job. so unless you give us the exact minute the bike was stolen we can't help you. if you do, we probably still won't help you. call us if you have some dark-skinned people to shoot, but otherwise stop bothering us.
Police are so f***ing worthless and useless
Expecting feral hogs to be capable of reason was a mistake.
Drag has been in exactly this same situation. Stupid pigs.
Also binary search isn't a sorting algorithm. It's a search algorithm. It only works on a data set that has already been sorted.
I'm a quality director and I did this the other day to identify the exact range of bad laminate in a number of film rolls!
In electronics testing, it's called the half split method. Not getting the correct voltage. Halfway through the circuit. Go back halfway. If you are reading the correct voltage, go forward halfway.
I remember marveling at how simple and obvious binary search was when I first learned about it in programming.
There's a similar logic applied to fault finding, start at the middle of the circuit.
If the fault is before that point, start at the quarter point, if it's after, three quarters, and keep splitting until you find it.
Not just similar, it's the exact same thing.
When I read this originally, it was a nice example how programmer brain can be applied IRL. Also works when trying to find something and I see the listing is someway sorted, like time tables and eshop product categories.
The cops don't like when you point out how intelligent they are (or aren't really)?
I am shocked
/s
Pigs are threatened by anyone that's even slightly intelligent
git bisectlol
Not a meme
