At least 50 dead in Florida nightclub terrorist attack.

[Timsup2nothin]

God, that's part of one of he automated messages that the Chicago Metra continually bombards you with. So much so (as a daily commuter) that even the mention of it irritates me.

On public transit it is probably a concept that is justifiably mutually beneficial, though the constant repetition is annoying. The attempt to weave it into law and make every citizen an unpaid deputy wherever they go is more than an annoyance though.

 

[plarq]

You understand correctly. Law enforcement is trying to find the ideal case where the crime is so horrific that they can get away with criminalizing refusal to do their jobs for them. Currently, "see something, say something" is just a request, but they are working on making it a legally bound task.

You can't prove they see something, so therefore you can't accuse them of not saying that thing...

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You can't prove they see something, so therefore you can't accuse them of not saying that thing...

That seems reasonable, however reasonable does not always carry the day when it comes to drafting laws. There are plenty of laws on the books right now that are realistically unenforceable but generate guilty pleas and convictions. Something written as "failure to report something a reasonable person would notice and recognize" would have tremendous intimidation value and likely be complied with.

 

[innonimatu]

This also seems to have been a case where the authorities lied. Or rather, coerced the accused into lying and produce false incriminatory evidence.

“The media missed the story,” Charles Swift, one of Salman’s lawyers said, “because they depended on the government to tell it to them.”

Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.

From the start, the evidence against Salman was paper-thin and hinged on a “confession” that an FBI agent hand-wrote for her after an 11-hour interrogation in the immediate aftermath of the massacre that was neither filmed nor recorded. Her lawyers maintain the statement was coerced.

In it, Salman claimed she knew Mateen was headed to Pulse that night, and that they’d scouted the location together. But within a few days of the massacre, the government had reason to believe her statement was false. Based on data from their cell phones, neither Mateen or Salman had ever been in the vicinity of Pulse before. On the night of the attack, Mateen first went to Disney Springs and EVE Orlando ― both of which had heavy, visible security ― before ending up at Pulse after a Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclubs.” Notably, his search did not include the words “gay” or “LGBT.”

The evidence suggested it was a crime of opportunity, the location chosen at random. If Mateen didn’t know where he was going that night, how could his wife have known? How could she, in the words of the June 15, 2016, New York Post cover, “have saved them all”?

Authorities handing "information" to their pet journalists, that later turns out to be lies. And the journalists, who made a circus over it for days or weeks, dismissing the thing with just one small buried piece when it comes out that they lied?

Why am I not surprised? What surprises me is that there are still some people who "trust the media". They even want those very same institutions, those same people, to do "fact-checking" for "fake news".
Yes, there were always rotten eggs in the press. But as the "traditional media" business models collapses and becomes dependent on financing from states and millionaires, its getting worse, much worse. They promote those who'll be pliable, and fire the troublesome journalists who criticize and question.