I refer you to the Knapp Commission Report of 1972.
Page 1 (the very first words):
"We found corruption to be widespread".
Page 10:
"Commissioner Murphy in his early statements about corruption regularly included a pointed statement indicating that the corruption in the Department was limited to a few officers. On one occasion he went so far as to imply that there were no more than about 300 corrupt police officers in the entire Department. After Patrolman Phillips had completed two of his three days of testimony at our public hearings, Commissioner Murphy found it necessary to discount his testimony of widespread corruption, referring to him as a 'rogue cop.'"
"Smith defined it [the rotten apple doctrine] as standing for the proposition that 'police departments are essentially free of corruption except for the presence of a few corrupt officers who have managed to slip into police service and also into key assignments such as gambling investigations, despite rigorously applied screening procedures designed to keep them out.'"
"the Department now rejected this approach 'not just on principle, but because as a way of controlling corruption it had utterly failed.'"
Page 7:
"The Commission examined and rejected the premises upon which the rotten-apple doctrine rested"
Page 11:
". . . they [the public] are sick of ‘bobbing for rotten apples"
Page 5:
"investigations have occurred on the average of once in twenty years since before the turn of the century, and yet conditions exposed by one investigation seem substantially unchanged when the next one makes its report. This doesn’t mean that the police have a monopoly on corruption. On the contrary, in every area where police corruption exists it is paralleled by corruption in other agencies of government, in industry and labor, and in the professions."
Page 61:
"The Commission’s findings were hardly new. As long ago as 1844, when the state legislature created the New York police force as the first municipal police department in the country, historians record an immediate problem"
(This was followed by a brief summary of every previous scandal and Commission dating back to 1844).
This is frustratingly close to amazing. Obviously you went through all the trouble of pulling all the data from all the trains and displaying them in 3d, but then lock our view on to just one train or one station while all that interesting information zips around in the periphery. The view port needs to be more free form...less on rails.
As a non-attorney that has also used PACER, I don't think of it in quite these terms. Sure maybe there's some level of public subsidy by making it free, but like you say, relative to the legal profession that subsidy per lawyer is at the noise floor. On the other hand, the value of making it free to people outside the legal profession is well worth the degree to which we'd be subsidizing the people in it.
For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).
Right, but I fixate on the fact that we could easily solve the journalism problem without making it free. Just raise the free tier cap.
Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)
If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend the Knapp Commission Report. Its about police corruption in New York City in 1972, but its lessons on systemic and institutionalized corruption are highly transferable to other contexts.
Probably the most common naive mistake I see is people thinking their subfield is special and they are the first to really notice / understand fraud within it. I've certainly seen people in the "sleuth community" (scientific fraud whistle blowers) reinvent the wheel a few times.
All fraud is basically the same. Financial, scientific, police corruption...it almost doesn't matter. I'm not even the first to say this. A really good summary can be found in Ashforth 2003 ("The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations").
So, with the caveat that I haven't read your work yet and maybe you already know, I'd say look at past corruption far outside your area of interest / expertise. There's a lot you can learn there. Police corruption reports are usually great because of how accessible they are in several senses (more numerous, usually simple to understand), but I have no police related agenda to push here and it really doesn't matter where you decide to look. Just pick any Commission and read their findings.
In the opening words of the Knapp Commission "We found corruption to be widespread".
I don't understand what's wrong with someone suggesting a book to an author? Do you think all authors have read all other books?
If you had pointed out the original commenter's patronizing comment, as if they with 100% certainty know better than the author who has just written a book about said topic (at least the commenter thinks so), then I'd have agreed with you.
Gotta love HN. A commenter does literally nothing other than recommend a book and the top reply is "don't recommend books to him - he's written books, don't you know that?"
I upvoted it - because I loved those two suggestions and have already have them open in another tab. I believe a bunch of others would have done the same.
Hold up. you can't just have the train take the parenthesis off screen and hand wave away what happens to those cars. What happens when your forced to keep the garbage of a computation because you can't delete anything?
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