Lying NYPD Narcotics Detective Just Cost Prosecutors Nearly 100 Convictions

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Welcome once again to America's War on Drugs, already in progress.In the name of "protecting" us from the overstated ravages of drug addiction, the government engages in violence, rights violations, overzealous prosecutions, millions of interactions with the criminal justice system, and periodic bouts of performative lawmaking.And what have we gotten in return? Drug users are the real winners here. The more money we throw at the Drug War, the more easily accessible and cheap drugs are. While politicians and government agencies claim they want to save people from violence and corruption, violent and corrupt law enforcement officers are doing all they can to be worse than the problem they're supposed to be solving.When there's not enough drug activity to sustain local Drug Wars, the cops will create it. We saw this happen in Houston, Texas, where a botched drug raid, predicated on multiple levels of bullshit, resulted in cops killing two residents who had never engaged in the drug sales activity cited on the warrant request. Houston cops are, fortunately, feeling the pain. They may still be alive but they're facing a host of criminal charges.If there aren't enough drug war combatants to engage with, cops on drug task forces aren't above creating their own. The botched raid in Houston was predicated on a statement from a nonexistent informant and drugs pulled from a cop's cruiser.In New York City, it's more of the same. And it's going to cost city residents millions of dollars before this is all sorted out.

Over nearly two decades as a police officer and narcotics detective, Joseph E. Franco made thousands of arrests, many for the possession and sale of drugs. Mr. Franco often worked undercover, and his testimony secured convictions for prosecutors around the city.But officials who once relied on Mr. Franco are questioning his accounts. After he was accused of lying about drug sales that videos showed never happened, Mr. Franco was charged with perjury in Manhattan in 2019.Now, the fallout over Mr. Franco’s police work is spreading: As many as 90 convictions that he helped secure in Brooklyn will be thrown out, prosecutors plan to announce Wednesday. Many more cases in other boroughs could follow — a reckoning that lawyers said appears larger than any in the city’s legal system in recent history.

Mr. Franco was charged in 2019 with 26 criminal counts, including perjury and official misconduct, after investigators in the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that he had testified to witnessing several drug buys that video footage showed did not happen or that he could not have seen.

In one episode on the Lower East Side, a man was arrested in February 2017 after Mr. Franco said he witnessed the man selling drugs inside the lobby of a building. But prosecutors said security video showed the transaction never took place — and Mr. Franco had never even entered the building.In a similar arrest four months later, Mr. Franco said he saw a woman selling drugs in a building’s vestibule on Madison Street. He had not gone into the vestibule, however, and was too far from the woman to observe any sale, prosecutors said after reviewing security footage.

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Content Moderation Case Study: Lyft Blocks Users From Using Their Real Names To Sign Up (2019)

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Summary: Users attempting to sign up for a new ride-sharing program ran into a problem from the earliest days of content moderation. The "Scunthorpe problem" dates back to 1996, when AOL refused to let residents of Scunthorpe, England register accounts with the online service. The service's blocklist of "offensive" words picked out four of the first five letters of the town's name and served up a blanket ban to residents.Flash forward twenty-three years and services still aren't much closer to solving this problem.Users attempting to sign up for Lyft found themselves booted from the service for "violating community guidelines" simply for attempting to create accounts using their real names. Some of the users affected were Nicole Cumming, Cara Dick, Dick DeBartolo, and Candace Poon.These users were asked to "update their names," as though such a thing were even possible to do with a service that ties names to payment systems and internal efforts to ensure driver and passenger safety.

• Should names triggering Community Guidelines violations be reviewed by human moderators, rather than automatically rejected?
• Is the cross-verification process enough to deter pranksters and trolls from activating accounts with actually offensive names?

• Considering the identification system is backstopped by credit cards and payment services that require real names, does deploying a blocklist actually serve any useful purpose?
• Given that potential users are likely to abandon a service that generates too much friction at sign up, does a blocklist like this do damage to company growth?
• Does global growth create a larger problem by adding other languages and possible names that will trigger rejections of more potential users? Can this be mitigated by backstopping more automatic processes with human moderators?

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