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Letting Foxes Design Chicken Coops [Police Recording]
Posts
Pretty much how I felt from the beginning of this thread. No one has really made a valid case (other than undercover police officers needing anonymity) for preventing citizens from recording their interactions with the police.
Steam Id: Jager2
In that case you aren't recording, you are broadcasting. The recording is happening somewhere else- potentially by someone else. So While I may be holding a camera, the actual recording might be done by someone out of state. IANAL, but seems like a feasible way to get around the law.
Ha, I like this.
"Sir, you need to stop recording this arrest right now."
"I'm not recording you. You're live on Cops 2.0, the new version of the classic favorite. Why don't you wave hi to all the people watching this? Says we've got 600 watching the stream right now."
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this.
I suppose the next question is "is there a signficant difference between making that information publicly available to anyone, compared to giving it to a violence-prone wacko?" Both would seem to be acts where it's forseeable that a violent wacko would get a hold of the information, and if anything making it publicly available makes it more likely the info reaches a greater number of wackos, increasing the chances that someone will act on it.
Wagon-circling, as in providing moral, financial, or legal support against accusations is fine. Everyone deserves their day in court, including cops. Stonewalling investigations, lying, and obstructing justice are not fine, but are all too often included in the thin blue line.
Cops looking the other way, or going along to get along when they know one of their fellow officers is crooked is a complete betrayal of the oaths they've sworn. That's no different than a food inspector watching a meat-packer inject poison into a steak and doing nothing about it, a complete disregard for everything the job entails and represents.
I repeat what I posted on page 1:
While I probably agree this can legally work, do you want to be the guy to try it out? Lemme list some of the fun things involved in doing it:
-Have fun turning this into your full-time job, as you go from court appearance to court appearance.
-Have fun having your name smeared as the guy who "resisted arrest, assaulted a police officer, and engaged in wire-tapping"-- even if the charges are dropped it'll be the top 10 pages of google searches on you forever.
-Have fun trying to get a new job after that.
-Have fun spending your life savings on legal fees.
-And if, for whatever reason, you don't win the case? Have fun going to prison.
Still interested? More importantly, no one cares if you personally are interested. There's far too few people interested in complete martyrdom just to get a law potentially changed. We need to find solutions that don't rely on people sacrificing their whole lives because that generally doesn't occur in sufficient numbers.
Current problems:
1. It's actually illegal in some places to video-tape cops
2. It's a widely held belief by the public that cops can take cameras/memory-cards away from you for recording them and cops know that. Therefore, even if you change the law, this will continue to occur.
A lot of people have been focusing on problem #1, despite that it only involves 3/50 states whereas problem #2 involves 50/50 states. How do we fix the bigger problem? Cops who feel entitled to break the law and a populace too afraid/ignorant to do anything about it.
I'd argue that between the 1st, 4th, 9th, 10th, and 14th amendments, as well as the derived right to testify on one's own behalf, there exists an airtight case for allowing people to generate true and useful recordings for their own defense.
The fact is, that in practice, police enjoy a presumption of truth and authority that works against the presumption of innocence and also against other rights when an officer is actively hostile rather than merely innocently mistaken (say, a beating given without just cause).
Edit: Now, as a disclaimer, I do favor a more broad and individually focused interpretation of the Constitution than the Supreme Court does (though I'd argue that is more in keeping with the meaning of the text and decisions like Kelo show them to be hacks, but anyways), so this comes from this perspective.
I mean it in the sense that it's a conscious choice with a wealth of reasonable alternatives. No one can reasonably argue they had to become a police officer, which gives us more moral leeway in legally regulating their on duty activity, as I see it, particularly as it is a position with considerable legal and social authority.
They are public servants, should politicians not be filmable?
No, i see it as an "anti-bad cop" sentiment. A video of a cop pulling someone over and giving them a ticket for running a red light isn't going to light up the youtubes, a video of a cop pistol whipping someone will though.
Man, if only there was a group (or groups!) of people out there who fought for American's civil liberties on a daily basis. Man, maybe even...maybe even a union of some type. That'd be good.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with the laws (And I honestly cannot believe that I have to state that or else I'll get jumped on as being a brainless authoritarian fascist), but you are making this out to be significantly more one sided than it is. There are people out there whose entire job is to help defend those who come under the umbrella of 'help, certain bad police officers are attempting to subdue my rights'.
This, minus the 'every police is clearly out to get you' sentiment, seems to be the real problem. There is little knowledge of regarding what your rights are and aren't, so you get things like....well, like this thread where people argue back and forth over positions they only have a passing knowledge in. I'd say taking what I believe jossofalltrades solution (Make it a mandatory course in High School) is perhaps the best solution, but that's still not a great solution. I actually got something of that lecture in High School (the schools resource officer, essentially a police officer who was on loan to the school, came and gave us a lecture on our rights as well as a defense attorney), but little of that knowledge has stuck with me. Perhaps make a generic civil rights/basics of statistics/civil duties course a requirement in high school, and then force state funded universities to offer a higher level one as part of your general education requirement in college?
-edit- Override, I don't think the anti-cop sentiment is being directed at those who old the opinion (like myself) that the filming law is a particular brand of silly goosery, but rather towards those was seem to think that a certain few bad police not doing their job is a clear reason to hate the police in general and anyone and everyone who attempts to even remotely defend the good ones.
Discussing loopholes does not equal trying loopholes...
But I think the answer to your second point actually lies in the loopholes. The way you fix the bigger problem is by changing the belief of the individuals that break the law. How do you do that? By making it clear that confiscating the device will do nothing to prevent the video/audio evidence from seeing the light of day.
If law enforcement is essentially using a technicality (by really stretching the wiretapping laws in ways they were never designed to be used) then it would make sense to use a technicality to circumvent that. And I would think there are ways to do so without needing a martyr- or an existing case that could be championed to test the legality of livestreaming.
As someone who has a friend with neurological damage because a cop busted in because he had the wrong address and tasered him in the head, I wish the ACLU was powerful enough to defend every case of police abuse.
It isn't, he lost the lawsuit by the way
My bad. I guess I'm just used to seeing it in the sense of, "They are so selfless!"
Oh, yeah, I'm not saying the ACLU and other civil liberties groups are the answer to every problem, or that we should just throw our hands up and say 'welp, others will take care of it', just that it's not as one sided was it was being made out to be.
Thing is, if what happened to my friend had been caught on video tape he probably would have won.
When you have a clean cut cop and a grumpy looking fat teenager, and its one's word versus the other, the court's mind is pretty much made up before a word is spoken.
In a sane world the police department would have defaulted to a settlement and apology for breaking into a house that was the wrong one, but Chicago is like magical unicorn land or something.
I heard it first on This American Life and was completely enthralled and appalled.
We need more detectives, fewer cops.
Steam Id: Jager2
I've still said the ticket issue is easily solveable. Take all ticket revenue, put it into a pot at the national level, and distribute it on a county level per capita (or optionally per mile of road). This removes the financial incentive to enforce traffic violations, so only legitimately dangerous violations will be enforced.
Now, I'm sure there is some area somewhere that has disproportionately bad violations per whatever metric is chosen, but it's still be a net improvement.
When you give police departments financial incentives to abuse their power, they will, even sometimes accidentally, abuse their power. That's simply human nature. It is imperative that we structure our systems of rewards and punishments to encourage wise actions.
You could slam it through on highway funding just like the 21 drinking age, which is a shitty way to set policy, but preferable to police being used for revenue generation.
Moreover, I'd argue between laying roads being an explicit Congressional power and a few other arguments, it could probably pass muster on its own merits.
I don't know it just seems to me that cops should have their privacy protected all the time. I mean when you look at a cop, you should be arrested for violating his privacy, after all you might be a gang member trying to track him down. And his children and spouse should be arrested when they look at him, I mean they might be gang members and they tracked him down to his house! And when a cop is undercover everyone who looks at him should be arrested or else they might blow his cover! Police should be given extra protection all the time and never subject to scrutiny otherwise how will they ever get their job done?
Cops in general hate quotas. In my former home town the police "union" (was not actually a union, but I don't know the technical term) fought the ticket quotas tooth and nail for years and years. Pretty much the only people who like ticket quotas are city councilmen and mayors.
I have lived in towns with shitty police forces (where I currently live) and good police forces (where I used to live).
Where I currently live a police officer kidnapped a kid from elementary school for fighting with his son and almost half the city defended him.
But it is still that one-sided.
So, if you knew nothing about the ACLU, you knew it would be very foolish of you to 'test the law' by recording a police officer and then seeing where it goes in court. It would essentially become your job, it would tarnish your name forever, you'd use up your life savings, and you could go to prison.
Great, so now you learn there is such a thing as the ACLU. What does that change? If the ACLU is interested in pursuing your case you won't lose your life savings but your time, reputation and risk of prison? This still is a losing proposition to attempt.
We currently have a legal system that doesn't fulfill its role well enough to handle situations like these. It's incredibly difficult for the little guy to stand up to the big corporations/government, and speaking from a game theory perspective, it's a terrible idea to attempt it.
People see how their friends/relatives go bankrupt trying to make a corporation/government pay for their ridiculously obvious wrongdoings and fail in the process, and they learn that this isn't a legal system they can trust to provide justice in these situations. Police officers know that the people have learned that, and as a result some bad cops feel confident in their ability to abuse the law because they are the big guy that the little guy can't stand up to in court effectively.
Something in that chain needs to be fixed. We can start a misinformation campaign to deceive people into thinking entering lawsuits against police forces works well, but that doesn't seem like a good idea. Alternatively, we can make bad police officers unwilling to abuse the law even if 99% of the time they won't get caught (make the 1% time punishment very severe-- years in prison), or we can change the legal system to be more accessible to the little guy challenging the big guy (no clue how).
Thoughts?
Stick cameras all over the station, with feeds to the department's internal affairs division, the department's independent civilian oversight committee (if one doesn't exist, create one), the local US attorney's office, and the local ACLU office. Reviewing tapes would carry a confidentiality requirement similar to attorney-client, but with the privilege detaching upon any observed behavior that violates the law and/or department policy (the latter being of interest mainly to IA and the civilian oversight).
That way you can out the undercover cop who destroys evidence while still protecting the one who's a good cop, and you can catch the cops engaging in policy-violating retaliation without turning the whole roster into The Nuremberg Files: Cop Edition.
Steam Id: Jager2
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent
Summary: NYC police officer refuses to write people up to meet quotas, corruption runs really high up in the chain, eventually his fellow police officers try to label him as mentally unstable, including the chief of police and the director of the burrough.
This all gets recorded - and at one point, he has two recordings going, one gets found, and the chief tries to get rid of it.
How so? Is there an expectation of privacy in a police station (excepting the bathroom)?
Hell, TSA can see my wang every time I get on an airplane with their x-ray cams.
That's not a very nice thing to say about his wang.
Wow, a middle-aged, middle class white man doesn't get hassled by the police.
I'm shocked.
Shocked.
o_O
That's like the plot of a movie or something. Damn.
Steam Id: Jager2
I want a public panopticon.
I'm also in favor of non-anonymity on the internet.
can you give me a cliff's notes version of why you think it'd be a good idea? i'm intrigued now
YOU KNOWWWWW
DEM BILLS, DEY WAS GREAS'D
AND SO LOW, ON DOWN
LOW, I DID FELL
Later, gonna get drunk now. Consider everything I say between now and fourteen hours from now to be suspect.
Steam Id: Jager2
This was a lesson from my parents since I was a child.
Throw in some Russians and some kind of doomsday weapon it's a tom clancy novel
Obligatory, since this should honestly just be put in the OP of every thread involving cops
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik