Tag: crime

Flock camera haters wouldn’t last 4 seconds in Korea

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks and months, I’ve been hearing about Flock cameras and how there are a lot of people who seem to be vehemently opposed to their existence.  Not only have haters been vandalizing, sabotaging and outright destroying them – FOR ‘MURICA, apparently there’s been a lot of controversy over police using the tech on the backend for less-than-ethical means, leading to a surprising amount of discipline towards a group of individuals who have been seemingly immune to the consequences of oversight over the years.

As far as punishing the po-po who have been supposedly abusing their access to Flock camera information, a lot of context is missing, and very little details ever seem to be given in regards to what curious cops are doing with Flock camera data, although it must be pretty substantial for them to actually be receiving disciplinary action, considering all manner of abuses of power, such as driving like shitheads and killing minorities tend to get swept under the rug, but god forbid these guys access surveillance without proper authorization, so I only have so much opinion on them, although I can’t imagine it would improve if we the people were actually given any further information.

But regular people, the Joe-Schmoes of the world who are getting so bent out of shape over the presence of Flock cameras, this kind of fascinates me.  In one hand, I get that it does kind of suck to know that there is an increase of Big Brother-ing by, for lack of a better term, the government, that frankly nobody asked for, and people, especially ‘Muricans, generally don’t respond well to the idea of being surveilled.  But in the other hand, my general take on surveillance is that, if you’re not doing anything sketchy or illicit, what does it matter if you are being potentially monitored?

It’s not like Flock cameras are sprouting like mushrooms and fungus during the summer humidity, from what I can observe, it’s usually areas near schools, busy intersections and high-traffic roads in which they’re installed.  Most of the time it looks like they’re installed in areas closer to schools with a primary objective of busting all the shitheads who drive too fast in school zones and having an automated means of issuing citations without a human cop to do it.

Additionally, ‘Murica is too cheap to plant these things in places without just cause, and I don’t think they’re randomly positioning these without any sort of data or justification.  They seem to be placed on major veins and well-traveled roads that suspicious people could potentially use, and should the need ever arise to try and locate a suspicious person, they could triangulate a location better with this kind of footage.

Frankly, I like to believe that they’re being placed in areas where people actually might care more about the crime rates of the area.  On the flip-side, I bet there are few or no Flock cameras near my old house on the south side.  And if there were, I’m sure that’s where there’s destruction of property, because the crime rate down there was already high, and the last thing any of those crooks would want is anyone having the chance to surveil them and possibly increase their odds of prevention.

I kind of get it though.  On the simple preference of if you would mind being watched over having greater privacy, I’d probably pick the privacy myself.  But considering that decision has been taken away from me, at least in areas where there are Flock cameras, I’m not sweating anything, because I don’t (at least I hope) practice in any nefarious or shady activities that I would be concerned about being monitored over, especially to the point of where I need to go sabotage and destroy government property.

The funniest part about the above image is the planting of the American flag in the destruction of a Flock camera.  It was clearly done in a manner in which the flag is acting not just as a symbol of defiance, but straight up like a middle finger.  This is the kind of shit I’d imagine like Ukrainian forces doing over a pile of dead Russian soldiers, or like when in 2006, the Korean national baseball team defeated Japan in the World Baseball Classic and planted their flag on the pitching mound, causing Ichiro to crash out.  But with these incidents of Flock camera destroying it’s basically ‘Muricans giving the middle finger to, America, and I often don’t believe there’s any country in the world that hates so much of its own country more than America does.

Speaking of Korea though, getting back to the title of this post, the people who hate Flock cameras, they most definitely would not last four seconds in Korea.  From the busiest neighborhoods in Seoul to the shittiest back alleys in like Pohang, there are CCTV cameras covering probably 75% of the entire peninsula.  My mother-in-law and I walked through a historical park that was pretty wooded and nature-y, and wouldn’t you know it, CCTV cameras were affixed to live trees, monitoring over the walking trails, and at multiple points during our trip, I’d remind her that the cameras were everywhere.

And they’ve got surveillance teams in surveillance rooms that look like Avengers HQ with how many screens and cameras they all have to monitor at all hours of the day.

Yeah, if Flock-hating ‘Muricans are up in arms over a few cameras going up along busy streets, I don’t think they have the perspective to know things could be way, way, way worse, compared to places like Korea, where surveillance is 70% more big-brotherly and privacy is way lower.  But again, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what does it really matter?

lol MARTA #437

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AJC: (Paywall, but headline tells the story) Days away from the start of the FIFA World Cup, the new, state-of-the-art MARTA trains of tomorrow have not passed mandatory safety tests, and remains possible that they will not be ready for the largest sporting event in the world

There’s really not a whole lot to add to this story.  I figure to most people who live in the Atlanta area and are familiar with MARTA’s history, this is pretty much the least surprising thing in the world that Atlanta and MARTA fumbled the bag and in all likelihood won’t be ready for the World Cup despite having years to get shit done.

Progress in Atlanta moves at a snail’s pace, and frankly the metaphor is an insult to the speed of snails across the planet, because Atlanta routinely falls short of expectations unless there are millions of dollars in a treasure chest at the end of a rainbow to incentivize expediency, like when they miraculously rebuild I-85 three weeks ahead of schedule, which was still about like six weeks slower than the time it took Fukuoka, Japan to repair a sinkhole the size of a crater in a weekend.

I vaguely remember a similar situation way back when the College Football National Championship was being hosted in Atlanta, the city really wanted to get the Atlanta Streetcar up and running, mostly for appearances on a national level, because the little ass street car wasn’t going to be realistically moving more than a few hundred people for an event the size of the Natty.

But they failed, and didn’t complete it on time, and when they did finally get it up and operational, nobody cared, nobody rode it, and it’s about as much of an afterthought to the city as much as the Dallas Austin-produced ATL Anthem that was supposed to be the city’s song, akin to Sinatra singing New York, New York, but still cost taxpayers around $5M to make.

So it’s not the surprise of the century that Atlanta and MARTA are on a one-way crash course to yet another failure, and more than likely won’t have the purported trains of the future ready in time for the World Cup.  And even if they did miraculously pull off the impossible, there’s no way that they would have passed the mandatory safety checks and requirements, and I could see a situation where a shiny new Cerberus-looking train car, packed to the gills full of Spaniards* and the motherfucker goes off the rails and causes some tragic accident.

*I double-checked Atlanta’s guaranteed match list, and holy fuck did we get the shaft on country draw, where Spain is pretty much the only powerhouse country playing here, with the rest of the field being Czechia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Haiti, Cabo Verde (?), and Congo; I didn’t even know many of these places even had national teams, much less ones good enough to qualify for the World Cup

Alternatively, once the festivities begin, futbol fans will be subjected to the old and busted, urine-smelling incumbent trains, where local bums and panhandlers are probably rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to grief and harass riders from various other parts of the world, who just want to get to Mercedes-Benz Arena (that’s not allowed to have their own logo in sight, lmao).

Either way, I heard that thanks to the political situation in ‘Murica, there was a lot of reconsideration of would-be fans, travelers and futbol enthusiasts, as far as hotels, tickets and the promised influx of money that an event the caliber of the World Cup is capable of bringing in, and I thought to myself, even if Korea isn’t going to get a match here, it might still be a cool thing to go to a World Cup match, and maybe even take my dad with me.  But then I discovered that the duration of the entire Group Stage, I will be out of the country, and by the time I get back, will be only critical knockout futbol matches, where the cost of those tickets will probably be back up to $FuckYou.99/each.

Perhaps I might luck into some watch events in Seoul for when Korea takes the pitch, I can’t imagine that even remote, they could be any less chaotically disorganized as Atlanta and MARTA are.  But thank goodness I won’t be around in the city for when the World Cup will inevitably be causing all sorts of chaos around town, and no thanks to MARTA.

You can’t spell METALHEAD without ATL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox Atlanta: robot dogs deployed in Castleberry Hill to deter criminal activity

Among my favorite episodes of Black Mirror, METALHEAD is among the tops.  The cinematography, the atmosphere, the clever black and white presentation, but most importantly the plot of sentient evil robot dogs that were absolutely relentless killers of humanity was intriguing as it was terrifying.

Needless to say, if people didn’t have fear of the idea of robotic dogs before watching METALHEAD, they probably will afterward.

And in spite of the oft-utilized plot of robots achieving sentience and then turning on their creators in various books, shows, films and other media, humanity continues to insist that such is just fiction, and continues to solder forward building robots and artificial intelligence, all in the name of fucking themselves in a different manner. 

Out in like Boston, we’ve got robot dogs the size of deer running around already, and they’ve made robots that can basically do ninja warrior courses and moonsaults already.  And they’ve already shown glimpses of hurting humans, with one classic clip of a robot kicking a grown man in the nuggets.

Anyway, apparently in a neighborhood in Downtown Atlanta, they’ve decided to play with fire, and have deployed robot dogs to run security at an apartment complex.  In a way, I get it, Castleberry Hill is a rooouuugh part of town that looks nice in the daytime, but is a pretty statistically high-crime zone once the sun goes down.  And if humans have proven ineffective at providing security solutions in the neighborhood throughout the years, may as well seek alternate options, even if it meant unleashing potentially lethal-when-they’re-activated robot dogs to keep an eye out on the streets.

For the time being, they don’t have the firepower that Metalhead dogs do, and they’re probably not (yet) programmed to do whatever is necessary in order to snuff out human life, like hijacking cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, but one of two things are going to happen:

  1. Their cameras and surveillance capabilities will do a moderately decent job of deterring criminals, encouraging others throughout Atlanta to get on board with moar robot dogs
  2. Those criminals who are not deterred by robot dogs will open fire on, capture and hack, harm, or hijack them, leading to the manufacturer of these robot dogs to evolve and grow them into more closer to Metalhead dogs, with weapons, defensive capabilities, which could just as easily be construed as offensive capabilities, like being able to hijack cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, which will then encourage people in Atlanta to get moar robot dogs

What would be cool if they had now, is if like the Metalhead dogs, they had the ability to stick trackers onto crooks, with those little explosives with tracking shrapnel in them, so they could run up to criminals, pop a tracker bomb, and much like Metalhead dogs, get them embedded into perps to where they have no choice but to painfully cut them out or be absolutely boned as far as being able to be hunted down.  Could probably lead to some impressive busts when low-tier perps lead the fuzz back to their superiors.

Ultimately, it becomes this cycle of robot dogs coming, crooks harming them, until we get to #1, and moar and moar of these fucking robot dogs are unleashed all over Atlanta, all in the name of safety and security.  But really we’re all signing our own death warrants because once the signal from SkyNet is broadcast out, and all the robots dogs go all Terminator on humanity, we’re all fucked, and it starts in Atlanta.

It’s the Four Loko that makes this amusing to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Hall County sheriff busted for DUI after blowing a 0.212, revealed that he had been drinking Four Lokos since 6 a.m.

Under normal circumstances, a story like this would roll off my back, perhaps get an eye roll out of me, knowing that police protect their own, and that regardless of how egregiously drunk the guy was, while in his county-issued vehicle, it’s safe to assume that he’s not going to be getting close to the same kind of punishment that us normal citizens would receive under similar conditions.

He may lose his job, but considering he’s out there drinking while on duty, he probably doesn’t care in the first place, and he’s most likely not going to be doing any time, or have a suspended license, or be on probation on account of the oft-cliched professional courtesy.

But what caught my attention and why this is ending up as brog-worthy is the clarity in the headline that this particular pig in question, hadn’t just been drinking since six in the morning, but he had been drinking Four Lokos in his cop car:

Couch told investigators that he had been drinking several Four Lokos since 6 a.m. that morning. Investigators also found two open cans of Bahama Mama that had spilled in his car.

The devil is in the details, and now we’re talking. 

Obviously, anyone who’s ever known me might recall my own fascination with Four Loko back over a decade ago.  I was mystified by the fact that these shitty, $4 tall boys of nuclear race piss were actually killing college bros, dumb enough to be drinking more than like, one, at a time.  When the government declared banishment on the drinks, for whatever reason, I felt the compulsion to seek out some of these awful drinks, and managed to procure several cans of various flavors.

Over the next years, I would bust them out at social gatherings or Dragon*Cons as my drink of choice in order to get a healthy buzz going, and make no mistake, one can of any Four Loko was instant drunk, and anything beyond that was playing with fire.

Eventually, I would steer away from this dumbass behavior, and the remainder of my hoarded cans would remain ironic collector’s items, that is, until for whatever reason, some of them would spontaneously eat their own cans, leading to some obnoxious messes that I had to clean and eventually realized that I should just chuck them out, thus closing the book on my keepsake cans of Four Loko.

Back to the present, Four Loko survived government intervention, but they apparently changed the formula somewhat to be less lethal when drank in stupid amounts, and they’re still available at gas stations and wherever shitty booze is sold.  And apparently for one Hall County sheriff, it was his go-to drink for when he wanted to get smashed on the job.

Like I said, if it were just a story of a cop who got blasted on the clock, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought beyond knee-jerk disgust and disappointment in the system.  But finding out that he had been getting smashed on Four Loko since six in the morning, and he was discovered obliterated five and a half hours later, man clearly had some serious demons in his closet for all this to be transpiring.

And that 0.212% BAC is pretty frightening, because to my understanding that’s basically saying that over 20% of the blood in his body was tainted with alcohol.  I’ve gotten drunk off of Four Loko before (always under slightly more responsible, non-driving conditions), but I have come down from the buzz pretty normally, so I doubt that I was ever remotely close to a 0.212% BAC, so I’m curious to how many cans of the jet fuel he consumed, and let’s not ignore the fact that he had several open cans of Bahama Mama, which is another fruity, race piss-like canned booze, so clearly this hick sheriff was having a one-man party in his cruiser.

Either way, I’m amused by the brief resurrection of Four Loko into the public lexicon, and the ironic and pathetic circumstances in which they did so.  In a way, there isn’t a better way for it to have happened, and 16 years later, Four Loko is running it back with inebriated chaos like it’s 2010 all over again.

Is this right-wing of me?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much as I try to actively avoid politics, it’s inevitable that politics finds me from time to time.  The world as a collective just can’t ever shut the fuck about politics, and occasionally, I’m going to run into news that I really didn’t care to learn about in the first place.

Recently, I learned of some politics person; I don’t care enough to be specific on who it was, their party, what their title was, or what state they represented, but they basically said that they were trying to pass some bill or law that stated that child rapists should be eligible for the death penalty.  I’m pretty sure they were a Republican, and probably nine times out of ten, I disagree with most of the shit that comes from that side of the fence, but if I’m being honest here, not only did I not disagree with this proposed idea, I actually kind of like it.  I would be in support of child rapists being put to death.

That being said, is that right-wing of me to feel that way?

I always felt that I had somewhat of a nurturing, protective instinct, but those probably ramped to twelve upon having offspring of my own.  I would do anything to protect my children, and I would want the harshest punishments there could be toward anyone who would maliciously harm them.

There being child rapists and predators in jail, with any possibility of getting back out into the free world doesn’t sit right with me, and if the federal courts want to take the need for justice away from law-abiding citizens and put it in the hands of the courts, and rid the world of some of the sickest of fucks, I can’t say I’d be opposed.  In a way, it’s kind of like the Mr. Miyagi adage of the best defense is to no be there, and allowing the courts to dispense justice and punishment onto child rapists is kind of like allowing concerned parents like me to no be there.

Okay, that analogy really was terrible and I just kind of wanted to work in the Mr. Miyagi no be there adage, but the point remains that I don’t hate the idea of child rapists getting the death penalty, and I wonder if feeling that way is right-wing of me.  Mythical wife says yes, and I can get that assertion, but I feel what I feel.  I just don’t believe child rapists have any point in needing to exist, and keeping them locked up in prison still means they are a drain to taxpayers with every scrap of food they eat and manpower needed to keep watch over them.

From what I’ve heard from a friend of mine that used to be in law enforcement, child rapists typically don’t last long in prison, because even amongst the most heinous of murderers and criminals, harming children is still a line most don’t cross, and there are notable amounts of them that get dealt with, organically.  But in the instances where they manage to not get offed by other inmates, I wouldn’t be opposed if the courts exercised that justice themselves.

If that is right-wing of me to think, then so be it.

It’s always going to be Springfield Mall

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NBC Washington: non-fatal shooting incident occurs at Springfield Town Center between teenagers arguing about something reportedly nothing and inconsequential

It’s not that often that I think much about my old stomping grounds, and it’s been over a decade since the topic of Springfield Town Center Mall has been in the brog, but here we are, thanks to an eerily accurate feeding from the algorithm to me, letting me know about a shooting incident in the shopping mall that I’d wasted endless amounts of hours of my life at.

As I opined in a comment on social media, they can change the name of the joint, and they can change all the stores inside the place, but Springfield Mall will always be Springfield Mall, a place cursed and destined to be a place of underlying danger and the uneasy feeling shoppers will always have that no matter what things appear around them, they’re not entirely safe.  MS-13 beheadings and 9/11 hijacker presence have a tendency to leave their bad juju on a place, kind of like the premise of The Grudge.

Thinking back to this assessment, it’s almost a miracle that I’m alive, considering the massive amounts of danger commensurate to how much time I spent there probably having increased my mortality rate throughout my teenage years.

It’s the least surprising thing in the world to hear news of spontaneous violence erupting within the walls of Springfield Town Center considering the bones and likely jerry-rigged graves in which the place was built onto, and watching the video of the incident, it doesn’t look like much has changed over the last 10+ years of Springfield Mall’s final days and Town Center’s day-to-day operations.

Shithead teenagers loitering around the place, manifesting beefs out of absolutely nothing, and ultimately erupting into gun violence, what I saw in the video looked like it could’ve been straight out of 1999, minus the taste in fashion, and the presence of bystanders all brandishing smart phones trying to video the incident instead of you know, calling 9-1-1.

Then again, it’s no secret that among the things that carried over from the old days into the current is the physical Fairfax County Police precinct in the mall itself, because nothing says ‘we’re [not] a safe place’ than having to have local cops ready at the helm, within ear shot at any given time.

The point remains, as unfortunate it is to ever hear of gun violence in any way shape or form, it’s good that nobody was killed and the offending parties were apprehended.  But I still admit to being amused at the ironic reality that no matter how much time has passed, no matter that the name of the joint has changed, and no matter how much the insides of the shopping center has changed, nothing will ever, ever change the fact that 6500 Springfield will always be, Springfield Mall.

This guy would make a killing in Atlanta, or be killed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Sun: Bay Area man, proclaiming to be a ‘squatter remover’ uses swords among other forceful tactics to help clients evict squatters

Back when I lived on the south side of town, there were a ton of homes that were foreclosed on in my neighborhood, resulting a tremendous amount of abandoned properties all through the subdivision.  It was harrowing going onto Zillow and seeing just how many red dots that were all over my entire community signifying all the available properties, where clicking on any of them made it pretty clear that almost all of them were available on account of foreclosures.

However, the problem became when the properties stopped being vacant, and people started moving into them – and in most cases, not legally.  Even one of the homes adjacent to me, suddenly had people I didn’t recognize going in and out of the home, at odd hours of the day, and one of the weirder behaviors I noticed was one guy sitting in the backyard with a laptop, and looking back at this if I had to guess was probably because the inside of the house had no power or air conditioning or something, or maybe they were trying to leech off of my wi-fi.

Squatters probably occupied more of the neighborhood than legitimate residents at one point, and was/is probably the primary reason why the entire neighborhood went to shit as rapidly as it did.  I remember doing some Zillow-hunting on the aforementioned adjacent property to mind, and found out that it was owned by a bank or some investment company, with an address not even close to being in Georgia, which made it fairly obvious that I had squatters living next door to me.

Ordinarily I really wouldn’t care if they were discreet and kept to themselves, but unfortunately there was no discretion from those who lived there, and they would have like four cars crammed into the driveway with another two parked on the street, and trash strewn all over the yard.  If not for the fact that our houses were on a hill, with me having the higher ground, their shit would have undoubtedly blew onto my property which would have been more problematic than they already were, but the point was that it sucked having squatters next door.

Cursory research will show that squatters have an extremely inordinate amount of rights and protections throughout the country as it pertains to legally removing them properties that they illegally began occupying in the first place.  It has nothing to do with being left or right leaning, for whatever reasons, squatters basically have some of the most ridiculously concrete iron-clad rights there are, and it’s fucked up that legal owners of properties have literally no other choice but to acquiesce to squatter rights lest they risk crossing legal lines and committing crimes, in spite of the fact that they’re just trying to solve situations cause by other people committing crimes.

Really, the only (legal) options are grind out the legal process and eventually get the law to demand that they vacate the property, lest they be charged with criminal trespass, they leave on their own volition, but usually not before they trash the place to oblivion, or they are, coerced, to vacate the property, and the owner(s) or their proxies can secure it upon exit.

This is where the Bay Area squatter remover guy comes in – I have to say I love the story of this guy, and I wish more people like him existed and provided services all throughout the country, because squatting is something that I imagine is a very rampant problem across the nation and not just exclusively limited to major metropolitan areas like San Francisco or Atlanta.

And it’s just riotous that it’s apparent that his personal signature is the fact that he goes around with a real katana, and claims that it’s actually used in his line of work, and I like to imagine a guy who clearly has seen The Matrix five too many times confronting a squatter with live steel, brandishing and waving it around like a Mortal Kombat character, threatening some crooks to get the fuck out of the home they’re squatting in.

The guy boasts a 95% success rate, so it’s funny that he clearly manages to infiltrate these squatter homes, and by virtue of waving around his katana at people, he’s getting them to vacate the premises at a high clip and helping property owners reclaim their rightful properties.

I would’ve loved to have seen this guy in action in my old hood, and if the owners of the properties even cared about their investments, they would’ve just sent this guy on endless loops around the neighborhood, evicting deadbeat squatters left and right.  But at the same token, I’d imagine Atlanta to be a vastly more dangerous part of the country than the pussy Bay Area is, and he’d probably be up against way more heavily armed squatters, and willing to put up way more resistance.

As the subject says, katana guy would either make a real killing out in Atlanta, or just end straight up killed, but either way I love this guy’s idea and entrepreneurial spirit at putting in the work of evicting squatters on his own shoulders.