Phone video clears man charged with assaulting cop, even after phone disappears
thestar.com
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I think it's reasonable, from the video of the police officer slapping the phone away, to conclude that the police officer slapped the phone away.
> All criminals deserve proper investigation.
The point of "innocent until proven guilty" is that the burden of proof is on the state. It's reasonable to ask that conduct undertaken by state actors, on the other hand, be accompanied by proof that it was within the law.
I surmise that GP's comment is partly read to mean that overtime (ie, working 60+ hours a week sometimes!) is part of the way we don't treat police officers very well.
It seems pretty clear to me that a police officer working a 24 hour shift is a liability.
If you go to publicpay.ca.gov, you'll find the state wide databases of city and state employees. Police officers make up nearly all of the top non-executive positions. Second, police officers want overtime. If you've watched The Wire, there are more than a few scenes/threads in which eliminating overtime is seen as punishment to officers. This is also chronicled in David Simon's non-fiction book, "Homicide", which The Wire is heavily based off of.
This is not to say that we shouldn't staff departments in a way that overtime isn't excessive. But I doubt you'll find much political support from the officers or their leaders on that.
In fact, the use of overtimes is one of the best way for police officers to ensure a huge pension...Pensions are often calculated on based on the last year of a retiring officer's salary. So an officer who makes $64K base salary in his career can retire with $82K in annual retirement, by working $120,000 worth of overtime in his final year:
http://www.nola.com/crime/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2015/05/how_...
I think think of three departments off the top of my head, all in upstate NY, that have 24-hour shifts.
> Second, police officers want overtime.
Well, but that's only because of the financial incentive structure. It doesn't need to be this way.
Just curious, but who?
> Well, but that's only because of the financial incentive structure. It doesn't need to be this way.
Yes, but it's unlikely that you will be able to change the incentive mindset and system for the entire government (this affects teachers and firefighters, too), at least in a meaningful time frame compared to all the other things you could change about police practices.
I'm all for outfitting officers with more monitoring/surveillance gear, but what problem would an increased salary solve?
[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Police_Officer/Salar...
[2] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
[3] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/-aei-economic...
Ultimately we just need to give them all body cameras and dismiss anything they say or do that isn't recorded.
Police (and others) are given special privileges but expected to act to a higher standard than the rest of us. Quite a lot of them do. It's like accountants and lawyers and doctors. Taking a random sample of doctors and a random sample of, say, HN readers, the doctors would be ... Better.
I know you are being facetious here, but in the internet age, I think this is an increasingly compelling question.
a) Secretly record a video on your phone. b) Stream the video to a cloud (youtube, dropbox, other) while you record, so that even if the phone is snatched from your hand and crashed by a heavy police boot, as much of the video as the network allows will be already uploaded.
If you have to stop recording before having the video backed up, all a bad actor needs to do is physically destroy your device, and you'll lose your evidence.
As it happens, such apps seem to already exist. Another comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284629
With all those subtleties and complexities about digital camera technology (SLR or smartphone cameras), it probably does make sense to a malicious cop to just take and "lose" the camera. But technology continues to be a step ahead...
TLDR basically Periscope, but in a way that the uploaded video is encrypted and the cops can't access it.
That said, the criminal-record stereo-blaster was probably lying about 'his uncle' and I don't think you get to 'you have no warrant we're done here' and shut the door on the police responding to a neighbor noise complaint. If they want to give you a talking-to or a ticket (depending on local law), they can.
I do believe the guy about his phone being "lost", though (should be easy to corroborate if they have signatures/records of personal items), and we can expect real sanction for the phone-slapper if it's clear which cop did it.
Of course, the "oversight" comes from within. How can we even begin to believe that they will act without bias?
I think the solution rather lies in two other places.
One is obviously transparency. This man was acquitted due to video, so let's put video on every police officer. Toronto for example is playing with this, and it makes financial sense. They have about 5.000 police officers on a police department budget of $1.7 billion. We all know how cheap cameras (just look at the cameras on $50 smartphones) and storage have become in recent years, with a per officer budget of about $350k, spending a few thousand a year (much more than you'd need for a solid camera & storage system) on cameras would constitute a 1% cost increase, and you can probably offset that cost immediately due to cost savings in faster trials due to less ambiguous evidence, fewer complaints, less use of force etc (for example we've seen in recent months reports of 70% fewer citizen complaints, 30% drop in use of force incidents in Birmingham). Chicago for example spent $500m over 10 years on police abuse cases (obviously paid for by citizens, not the police officers in question themselves)
Second is to stop the bs 'internal investigation'. Police officers aren't diplomats, they're citizens on duty as civil servants, when they're suspected of harming the civilians they're supposed to serve, why have them be investigated by their colleagues and close peers? I mean it's ridiculous. This is so terrible because we see the old 80/20 rule in police departments, too, I don't know the exact statistics from the top of my head but the notion that 80% of the complaints and incidents are caused by 20% of the police officers isn't far from the actual number. A ton of honest and awesome cops go their entire career without any abuse of power, you can't prevent the others from getting in, but you can make sure they get out once you catch them. Donald Sadowy for example has been accused of excessive force 10 times in 2 years in actual lawsuits, imagine how many times he must've used excessive force if he was taken to court 10 times, yet he's still on the force. If you actually run the same 3 strikes and you're permanently fired policy on abuse that you do on citizens smoking some harmless pot who go to jail for years, and have officers investigated by an independent court with bodycam evidence, you'd probably already cut out a lot of abuse from guys like these, let alone if you fire people after one incident and even send people to jail for abuse of power. Beyond that, getting fired should mean losing the ability to be a police officer, period, nationwide. A lawyer for example can lose his license nationwide in most countries, but police officers too often leave one department and simply join another.
I'm sure the Professional Standards division will be all over an assault by officers on a member of the public.
[0]http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/10/16/officer_bubbles_s... plus many others.
Who is making this?
edit: to clarify, I mean upload in real-time, like a live broadcast.