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1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 23-Jan-2026 07:14:32 JST Paul Cantrell

   Is that legal, posing as different police? In Minneapolis right now, what is legal and what is illegal is just a sort of amusing abstract question, about as useful as asking “If you could breed a chicken with an octopus, would its eggs have shells?” — except suffused with a kind of grim, exhausted anger.

   The law is something that people argue about on TV and on social media. It has so little relationship to what happens on the ground, it’s just hardly even relevant.

   • Embed this notice
     ben (benjamineskola@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 23-Jan-2026 17:42:40 JST ben

     in reply to

     @inthehands my naive interpretation would be that it’s impersonation of a law enforcement officer, or some similarly-termed crime.

     But of course it would still depend on other law enforcement being willing/able to enforce it — presumably they’d still have the ‘obstructing a federal officer’ issue?

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 00:50:30 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Neither law nor order is anywhere in sight.

     The only things that matter right now are what we can do, and what they think they can get away with. That’s our entire reality.