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After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence (coloradosun.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20251030114314/https://coloradosun.com/2025/10/28/flock-camera-police-colorado-columbine-valley/

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[–] 91 points 10 months ago (16 children)

She feared the impact a theft charge, though small, would have on her financial career.

Wild that a false accusation, after being proven as false at the court of law, can still impact one's career.

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  • [–] 42 points 10 months ago (12 children)

    because when they run a background check on you they see you were charged. and that's all that matters. you are untouchable to most employers.

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  • [–] 29 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    Yeah, that's something that absolutely has to change. I don't care if "career criminals get out of charges all the time". A false charge should not follow you for the rest of your life.

    Then again, I also believe that if you serve your time in prison and are released, you should not have a publicly searchable record that can be used to deny you opportunities. So take my opinion as you will

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Agreed, and prison should be for rehabilitation.

    Perhaps prisoners could be released in one of two states: completed time or rehabilitated. The latter carries a much lower chance of recidivism. Maybe the first iffense could be hidden regardless, and expunged entirely after some period of time (10 years?), whereas on the second offense, both are searchable.

    IDK, but I do believe in forgiveness.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    My friend in Australia had a judge lie that he pleaded guilty to a previous crime (in reality the chips dropped the charge). That kind of bias can invalidate her decision should he appeal (there were plenty of other errors in the decision too).

    However it is near impossible to find a lawyer who will appeal and point out the judge lied because that lawyer would fear coming up against the corrupt judge in future.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    I do agree on principle but somewhere in the back of my brain it's going "what about repeat violent offenders." But I feel like any solution I can come up with could be pretty easily used by the state as a force of marginalization anyway. So back at square one.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    Even when it's repeat violent offenders - why would you want to prevent them from getting jobs? What do you think will happen if you release them from prison, once they finish serving their sentence, and they can't get jobs?

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago*

    That's good. These ideas of focusing on the potential career criminals are deeply ingrained in our culture, but when we challenge the potential outcomes we can resist giving the government and businesses more power to hurt innocent people

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    "what about repeat violent offenders."

    This is conservative paranoia propaganda at work. People who are violent offenders become repeat violent offenders because of the system that we have in place not in spite of it. And the percentage of violent offenders in our prison system is severely out of proportion to those of the nonviolent variety who make up the bulk of our inmate population.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Wow. In ex-USSR past convictions are a problem, but when you were cleared of charges - that really is wild. I mean, OK, the rate of convictions is not exactly normal in ex-USSR too.

    I mean by this comparison that people here usually think we have it worse with the conviction record.

    Why can't they see the outcome?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    In my country, employers have low trust and expectations on their new hires (and therefore low wages and high turnover) so they ask anyone applying for work to show up with what's called a "police clearance" and a "NBI clearance" (NBI = National Bureau of Investigation, a less-sophisticated developing country equivalent of the FBI) documents to make sure they're not felons.

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