Again, as I said before, the only way it can really hurt a good cop is if you film him doing cop stuff while he's plainclothes and undercover and then post it to the internet. And if that happens, well, his cover was already fucking blown.
Also, I find it odd that they are allowed to record private citizens during traffic stops and other interactions but citizens are not accorded an equal protection. Fuck that shit.
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.
So going back to discussions from page 1- would livestreaming be an acceptable loophole to the 3 states that ban recording?
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.
So going back to discussions from page 1- would livestreaming be an acceptable loophole to the 3 states that ban recording?
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."
Former - What if I'm some Matthew Broderick in War Games-level hacker and break into some database of undercover CIA assignments? Obviously the hacking itself wouldn't be protected by free speech, but should the public dissemination of whatever I find be?
Yes.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this.
Latter - Why is giving the info of an abortion doctor to someone that might harm them intimidation/incitement but giving the info of a cop to someone that might harm them not?
It could be. And if you specifically collected this information for that purpose, that would make you an accomplice, conspiracy charge, etc. All of which are tools that can be used without infringing on civil liberties.
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.
"Hivemind" is only slightly hyperbolic. Someone earlier referenced the culture of Police 'circling the wagons' to protect against inquiry into alleged misconduct. This is entirely accurate and showcases the importance of allowing civilian oversight.
Given that many people salivate at the thought of hanging even innocent cops out to dry and always assume their guilt this is understandable.
I mean fuck, when you are in a job that many would gladly see dead for, and hate you for, it's natural to draw into a group and protect each other no matter what.
I'd say their wagon circling is the only reasonable response given how some of the public acts.
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.
So going back to discussions from page 1- would livestreaming be an acceptable loophole to the 3 states that ban recording?
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 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 would like to know in what way, exactly, this law is unconstitutional. That could be interesting to talk about. Simply asserting that it is doesn't make it so.
edit: don't get me wrong, I think the law is terrible. But that doesn't make it unconstitutional.
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.
programjunkie, this is a minor point but I wouldn't personally classify the police as volunteers. They do a job and get paid for it, just like everybody else.
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.
I don't think it's a particular "anti-cop" sentiment to believe on duty officers should be filmable in public doing their jobs.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
programjunkie, this is a minor point but I wouldn't personally classify the police as volunteers. They do a job and get paid for it, just like everybody else.
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.
My bad. I guess I'm just used to seeing it in the sense of, "They are so selfless!"
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
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.
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
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 didn't have time to read the whole thread, but if this hasn't been brought up yet it should be.
I heard it first on This American Life and was completely enthralled and appalled.
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 always thought fines should go on free parking, or you know municipal bonds and education. Basically anything but where the fine originates from.
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?
Void Slayer on
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
I've always maintained that it seems as if police officers have quotas. Looks like I wasn't too far off the mark.
We need more detectives, fewer cops.
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.
I think Schoolcraft's story-if you listen to the NPR episode anyway-is more important to me when you look at HOW he went about trying to fix the policeforce and then ultimately just try to keep his job and his sanity. This guy was a police officer recording his coworkers, other police. They harassed him at work (for not complying with the quotas), they harassed him at his home, they stuck him in a mental institution, and now, even though he's been completely cleared of any wrongdoing and is suing for damages (as he well should) he is STILL being harassed on a weekly basis at his home by the very cops he used to work with. This guy is/was a cop, and his life is a living hell. God help any civilian trying to do anything similar, which scares the fuck out of me.
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
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.
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).
I think Schoolcraft's story-if you listen to the NPR episode anyway-is more important to me when you look at HOW he went about trying to fix the policeforce and then ultimately just try to keep his job and his sanity. This guy was a police officer recording his coworkers, other police. They harassed him at work (for not complying with the quotas), they harassed him at his home, they stuck him in a mental institution, and now, even though he's been completely cleared of any wrongdoing and is suing for damages (as he well should) he is STILL being harassed on a weekly basis at his home by the very cops he used to work with. This guy is/was a cop, and his life is a living hell. God help any civilian trying to do anything similar, which scares the fuck out of me.
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.
Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?
For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do. For example, downgrading real crimes into lesser ones, so they wouldn't show up in the crime statistics and make their precinct look bad. Adrian's story first appeared as a five part series in the Village Voice, written by Graham Rayman. Schoolcraft's website looking for other cops to come forward is here. (41 minutes)
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.
The Law Office of Jon L. Norinsberg and Cohen & Fitch, LLP recently filed a lawsuit against the City of New York and high ranking members of the NYPD on behalf of Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. This lawsuit details PO Schoolcraft’s harrowing experience at the hands of NYPD chiefs and commanders, who plotted a coordinated and concentrated scheme to silence, intimidate, threaten, and retaliate against him for his documentation and disclosure of corruption within the NYPD. Specifically, the NYPD established an illegal quota policy for the issuance of summonses and arrests and instructed police officers to lie on police reports in order to distort COMPSTAT statistics.
Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?
For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do. For example, downgrading real crimes into lesser ones, so they wouldn't show up in the crime statistics and make their precinct look bad. Adrian's story first appeared as a five part series in the Village Voice, written by Graham Rayman. Schoolcraft's website looking for other cops to come forward is here. (41 minutes)
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.
The Law Office of Jon L. Norinsberg and Cohen & Fitch, LLP recently filed a lawsuit against the City of New York and high ranking members of the NYPD on behalf of Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. This lawsuit details PO Schoolcraft’s harrowing experience at the hands of NYPD chiefs and commanders, who plotted a coordinated and concentrated scheme to silence, intimidate, threaten, and retaliate against him for his documentation and disclosure of corruption within the NYPD. Specifically, the NYPD established an illegal quota policy for the issuance of summonses and arrests and instructed police officers to lie on police reports in order to distort COMPSTAT statistics.
o_O
That's like the plot of a movie or something. Damn.
I'd just like to mention--as I often do--that I'm in favor of a publicly accessible surveillance state. There should be cameras everywhere in public, with feeds and recordings accessible by anyone.
I want a public panopticon.
I'm also in favor of non-anonymity on the internet.
Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?
For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do. For example, downgrading real crimes into lesser ones, so they wouldn't show up in the crime statistics and make their precinct look bad. Adrian's story first appeared as a five part series in the Village Voice, written by Graham Rayman. Schoolcraft's website looking for other cops to come forward is here. (41 minutes)
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.
The Law Office of Jon L. Norinsberg and Cohen & Fitch, LLP recently filed a lawsuit against the City of New York and high ranking members of the NYPD on behalf of Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft. This lawsuit details PO Schoolcraft’s harrowing experience at the hands of NYPD chiefs and commanders, who plotted a coordinated and concentrated scheme to silence, intimidate, threaten, and retaliate against him for his documentation and disclosure of corruption within the NYPD. Specifically, the NYPD established an illegal quota policy for the issuance of summonses and arrests and instructed police officers to lie on police reports in order to distort COMPSTAT statistics.
o_O
That's like the plot of a movie or something. Damn.
Throw in some Russians and some kind of doomsday weapon it's a tom clancy novel
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
hitting hot metal with hammers
Later, gonna get drunk now. Consider everything I say between now and fourteen hours from now to be suspect.
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