Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Charges
aclu.org
aclu.org
- I just slapped the phone out of their hand / threw them against the pavement / committed some other sort of assault, usually because they somehow affronted my honor (eg, by asking what law they were breaking).
- If I just walk away, it's clear that that was unjustified.
- So I fabricate a resisting arrest / obstructing an investigation / disturbing the peace / assault on an officer claim for them to fight, so it devolves into he said / she said, where I win by virtue of my reputation as a cop & the lack of AV evidence.
That's what the "we have to cover our ass" discussion is about.
Basically I'm wondering what is so bad for the cop afterward that they would rather try to cover up a simple mistake?
You're usually not talking about a "mistake" (although that happens too, eg, cops arresting someone after accidentally hitting them in a crosswalk), you're talking about an intentional on-street retaliation for affronting their honor.
I don't understand how other officers could ever defend colleagues who do this type of activity. It's so anti-justice it should make them crawl in their skin.
I'm not saying what they did was OK. I'm just saying it's easy to understand why it happens.
It's just much easier to rationalize it away than it is to stand up against injustice.
It's dumb....but also an understandable facet of human nature. ;-)
But even if that was it, it'd be like going into an article about a rape and saying "Well, he was horny. Not justifying, just explaining..." Of course the rapist was horny, and of course the police were annoyed at having their authority questioned. But offering these explanations when they aren't needed is explaining-away their crimes.
Certainly it's better than throwing up your hands and saying "I don't understand how anyone could ever commit rape!"
And settled on an illegal way of doing so. When they are law enforcement officers. It's hard to understand that anyone signing up to "protect and serve" would think that they are given the right to do whatever it takes as long as they think they are doing right by the greater good.
If you cannot conduct yourself in a law-abiding manner as a LEO, you deserve to go to jail.
And you deserve to go to jail for longer than a regular citizen should if you do it in the performance of your job. I never agreed to follow any laws, let alone enforce them -- they did.
You obviously do not watch American TV. This is EXACTLY what is popularized.
I do agree with your opinion, unfortunately Andy Griffith is not the norm any more.
so at some point the cause of alot of problems lies at corporate media production creating a positive feedback loop of shitty culture (low quality information).
The longterm solution is clear, its a waste of effort to try and put the tubepaste back into the tube.
Is that true? The story doesn't say that. He was standing out of the way and holding a sign, legally. How that does amount to impeding the officers? How often does seeing a random protestor on the street make you suddenly belligerent with officers, and what evidence did you read that makes you think that happened here? It seems like you're making big assumptions.
If he's impeding police, what is YouTube doing with its thousands of checkpoint videos?
> I'm not saying what they did was OK.
Good? Because it was illegal what they did. Against the law. It was not only not OK, it was bad and wrong. Doubly so because the protestor was being peaceful and legal, and also because the police are charged with representing the law and upholding it's values, and they have a responsibility to not seize property, to not escalate a situation to violence, and to tell the truth about what happened.
It's a shame if this is easy to understand and commonplace, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than this.
It is easy for me to understand that if I have a heart attack then my chances of dying in the next hour go way up. That does not mean I want to have a heart attack.
Understanding why problems happen is the first step in preventing them. Professing ignorance at why a problem could happen is not laudable.
I'm just staying that if you start with "I don't understand why our law enforcement standards are currently so low!" then you're probably not going to be helpful in fixing the problem.
Gotta diagnose first. Diagnoses comes with empathy and understanding.
Yes! Agreed, and the good news is we can do both, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. We can have empathy and high standards at the same time.
The way they sought to prevent his protest was by breaking the law without punishment.
The statement 'the charges were not based in fact' - is a statement by the ACLU, and there's no reason to believe that they are objective about the situation, we don't know what happened.
Maybe they were too aggressive in their laying of charges, if so, hopefully the will be thrown out and authorities will have a closer look, sadly, I doubt anything will come of it.
Also - the 'protestor' was carrying a weapon and acting directly against state authorities. If someone in my neighbourhood had a gun, was standing on the street trying to prod police officers, I would definitely want the police to be checking him out. That said, I don't know if he was actually breaking any laws.
The line between legal/legal and appropriate/inappropriate is really thin. Also, why everyone needs to be carrying guns all the time is beyond me.
That is the basic definition of a "protest": to prod the authorities. It is a basic right in any free society.
> That said, I don't know if he was actually breaking any laws.
Which is the crux of the matter. The cops should just STFU and move along.
NO. Totally false.
Carrying a gun, and trying to arbitrary stop cops from doing their jobs is not 'protest' - by any stretch.
In fact, I'd suggest that he could be charged with a small crime in many reasonable countries. For example, in many places, it's not legal to alert others of a speed trap at a certain spot. (Radio programs have been stopped from doing this).
"It is a basic right in any free society."
Possibly legal, but completely inappropriate the point that I, and most regular people will have little sympathy for this guy if he ends up having to go to court only to get the charges thrown out (though I don't think he should be charged with anything).
So many people fail to grasp the difference between the law, and reasonable behaviour. Running around with guns hassling cops is not reasonable by any stretch - and people shouldn't do it.
If he was holding a sign, in front of the Police building, without weapons, trying to call attention to a specific issue that would be fine. But this guy is just trying to cause problems, and stop police from doing their very important jobs.
There are a lot of ways to constructively protest without carrying weapons and prodding cops.
Except that's not what happened. His friend was holding up a sign that said there was a checkpoint ahead, and to keep silent. He was filming the police from the side of the road. Neither of those is interfering in any way with police activities (and are protected speech). He was carrying a non-concealed gun, for which he had a permit, and which is not illegal. And we 100% know this was legal, as all of the charges were dropped by the prosecutor.
The police aren't 'Appropriate Enforcement', or 'Unlaw Enforcement'. They are Law Enforcement. The enforce the law, and can do so with lethal force. The law says that it's perfectly OK to stand on the side of the road, holding signs warning people of upcoming checkpoints, and recording police while they enforce a checkpoint.
You keep bringing up the gun. He was legally allowed to carry a gun. Connecticut is an "open carry" state.
The difference is that our justice system should only be concerned with enforcing the law. Even if one concedes (I don't) that his behavior was "unreasonable", that's not sufficient for the police to involve themselves.
How do you reconcile this quote?
“Let’s give him something,” one trooper declared. Another suggested, “we can hit him with creating a public disturbance.” “Gotta cover our ass,” remarked a third.
Somehow this kind of thing never happens when it's open carrying NRA members outside abortion clinics.
I take it you missed the part in the video where they said they would say that there were witnesses who didn't want to leave their names/information.
"And then we claim that, um, in backup, we had multiple people, um, they didn't want to stay and give us a statement, so we took our own course of action"
> there's no indication that anyone made up any charges, the cops were deciding what to charge him with given the situation. That's what cops do every day.
Which is a crime. If the police don't believe you've broken a law before they arrest you, they're doing it wrong. They should never need to discuss it at this point.
> That said, I don't know if he was actually breaking any laws.
Right, and you know from this article that the police were breaking the law. They assaulted him and tried to break his camera, even if you don't believe the false-arrest aspect. But you're still trying desperately to make it look like the victims fault.
> The line between legal/legal and appropriate/inappropriate is really thin.
Not really, it's always been massively illegal and massively inappropriate to frame someone and knowingly file false police reports.
Unfortunately people don't become cops out of a love of justice; or, maybe a few do, only to quickly realize they've made a terrible mistake.
That said, I think we're in agreement that this is wrong. I'd just take it further and state that, if police officers file a charge, then I think they're obligated to do all the extra work to see that charge through, maybe within a reasonable window like 30 days. Subjecting someone to arrest, physical injury, and a night in jail only to throw out a charge as unfounded should come at some cost to the officers who caused it. If coders, lawyers and doctors did only a quarter of their jobs, or made a bunch of work for others that ultimately amounted to nothing, they'd be fired.
It's wrong, and a prosecutable offense, if you or I invent a story that leads to charges against someone. It's insanely wrong if police officers do the same.
Crucial point. Whenever a police officer is caught doing something wrong, the "few bad apples" argument is made. Here we had several officers, including a supervisor, colluding to invent charges against someone as casually as they might order their coffee and donuts in the morning. This indicates a problem that is much broader and fundamental than a few bad apples. And from the perspective of the average citizen, unfortunately it means that police do not deserve the automatic benefit of the doubt which they claim a right to.
One bad apple spoils the whole barrel.
There is no such thing as a "few" bad apples.
[https://idiomation.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/one-bad-apple-sp...]
Not that reasoning by proverb is great in the first place.
It is basically the worst partial idiom to uphold the dignity of police officers
Instead of saying the whole org is bad, it expresses that the org 'is going bad'.
So even in the land of "free speech" alot of criticism against their institutions is veiled in various ways.
http://postharvest.tfrec.wsu.edu/pages/N4I1C
Trapping that gas is why confined bananas will ripen faster.
Any European from England and Germany to France and Spain and Greece knows this kind of thing has been going on all the time -- and was especially hot during the cold war, late 60s student protests, etc, but all the way up to now. Because of more militant opposition parliament parties we've also had several documented cases and even some getting to court (usually for a slap on the wrist). No reason to think the US would be better in this regard.
The problem here isn't that abuse happens--it's that even when there is hard evidence of it it can't be successfully addressed and the offenders punished. What keeps abuse of the system to acceptable levels is the social norms and deterrent effect created by the law. Both are eviscerated when clear-cut abuses go unpunished.
I'm a big fan of checks and balances. Alas, I can't (yet) imagine what that'd look like here.
Also, for any such public cases, they should immediately fire the policemen responsible, no questions asked, not even a trial. In the same way a company owner would fire an employee that doesn't make the company look good and there would be no trials, ifs and buts about it.
Policemen fired in such a way should be prohibited to seek work in any private law enforcing, security, etc capacity too.
"Missing" hours of recording should also be regarded the same as a lost gun, and punished accordingly, including with firing the person for a repeat offense, or when the missing hours are related to a case that was brought to court.
That's not abuse. It's systemic -- the police system works as people in power (governments, private interests, rich lobbies) intend it to when that happens.
Other stuff, that they don't allow, doesn't not happen, or is seriously stomped down when it does -- not just as a slap on the wrist.
So you're right, they don't want unarmed black people getting shot, they just want them to make them money by being incarcerated.
Edit: Holy shit you're a lawyer and that's your opinion of what's going on. Maybe I need to re-evaluate how I think the system works since it's really just property owners convincing the police to murder people.
A lot of the measures that fill the prisons today (mandatory minimums, three strikes, aggressive prosecution, no parole), started back before the private prison industry even existed. So why on earth should I believe that "for-profit prison lobbyists" have anything to do with these issues? It's a totally nonsense explanation.
I don't know why there is this need to believe that ordinary voters aren't the ones ultimately culpable for the state of the justice system in the U.S. It's soccer moms and dads, shop owners, etc., that have been the backbone of "tough on crime" and "just say no" for decades.
[1] Getting rid of for-profit prisons was part of former Maryland governor O'Malley's presidential platform.
I wonder the same thing. It seems to me to be a major obstacle, perhaps the major obstacle, to improvement. We refuse to take responsibility for the natural consequences of the policies we support and the incentives we give politicians.
Of course, since our representatives (congressman, state attorneys and their offices [while some positions are appointed, they're appointed by elected officials], judges, etc.) are the people making the decisions and we vote on them, the ordinary voters are the ones ultimately culpable. Though, I believe the issues we're discussing need faster solutions than "make America less racist." If the PIC were to fall or we, via policy, were to deincentivize targeting the black population with disproportionate enforcement policies and punishment within police departments, do you really think the public would force the policies back into place?
>police are abusive because ordinary people want it that way
What?? How am i getting a benefit from unarmed black people getting shot anymore than a senator?
No if anything it comes down to misguided incentives (broken window policing, drug policies, police and attorneys wanting to forward their political aspirations, etc) This is all controlled by the government (which is of course controlled by moneyed interests.
I grew up in the 1990s. When kids would be called to assembly on a regular basis and teachers would shriek at them "just say no!" Drugs and were destroying our children, in their opinion, and no measures were too extreme to stop that. Those same people voted for mandatory minimums, three strikes laws', elimination of parole, etc. California's unjust three strikes law, which imposed life sentences for a third non-violent felony, was a ballot initiative. Trump and Romney didn't give us the justice system we have. My third-grade teacher did.
Well, in michigan we had a petition to allow voting on legalization recreational marijuana. It received far in excess of the required signatures, and then weeks later a very old rule was applied to the petition by discretion of the government to invalidate the entire petition and leaving not enough time to have it redone before the election deadline. (as in the rule did not legally have to be applied, but government officials decided to apply it anyways)
So this is an example of the government acting opposite of the interests of the people it claims to represent.
> Because from where I'm standing, it sure looks like my third-grade teacher is responsible.
And what gave your third grade teacher that idea? did she watch a movie called reefer madness?
The problem is this back and forth can go all day.
You say that people elected those politicians, and passed those policies, and i would say the reason they held those beliefs is a result of someone else influencing them through half truths, propaganda, etc.
You could say, well people choose the media they consume, but i would say the conglomeration of media companies, and the methods through which information has historically been distributed have always been controlled by moneyed interests. (reefer madness being a perfect example of a propaganda movie that influenced nearly an entire generation)
There are quotes from the nixon era from aides saying that the war on drugs was designing explicitly to fight racial minorities and 'hippies'[1]
Obviously the nature of all of these things is so interconnected, thats its impossible to unravel and reach an objective conclusion. In my opinion its pessimistic to believe that people are so inherently against other people - there is usually some more learned reason that someone would believe things like 'black people are dangerous' or 'all mind altering substances are bad (wait, except caffeine alcohol prescription medications etc.)'
I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat and saying george soros or whoever is controlling the world, just that people's relationship to the truth and their perceptions of things outside of their lived experiences are heavily influenced by the information they consume, which has been controlled by companies since the printing press
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...
Ordinary people didn't came up with the "broken window theory" etc. Some guys with PhDs did, and some rich politicians pushed them...
The benefit the people in power get from internal racial or ethnic distrust is that is that whenever non-elites of the dominant ethnicity are scared of an oppressed ethnicity and blaming them for problems, they aren't questioning the economic elite and the existing power structure; this is why elites in many countries have stoked such distrust many times, in many places, in the past.
Police abuses can be both an effect of such tension, and -- when encouraged by the elites, whether directly through policies commanding abuses or indirectly through an absence of effective accountability -- a means of stoking it (especially since sustained abuses will inevitably produce a reaction which can be leveraged to further the fear of the oppressed group by the dominant group.)
The idea that elites in power get "no conceivable benefit" from internal ethnic strife is simply not accurate (now, it may be that the benefit is short-term and overwhelmed by a long-term costs, but even if so elites being myopic enough to chose that short-term benefit despite the long-term cost is hardly uncommon historically.)
By keeping whole minorities, blacks, immigrants, etc, down, they also keep manual labor wages down, create a scary underclass for the middle class to be afraid to fall to, justify all sorts of abuses of power (for safety, the "war on drugs" etc), play classes against each other, and many more benefits.
Historically, they've always hated those "n...." anyway (private rich clubs, until forced to, would rather accept a leper than even a rich black), Jim Crow laws, redlining, etc.
It's not like we don't know what rich republicans (which is the sort to support the police) say about black people, black mothers in welfare, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Sev...
http://cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/new-york-city/ny...
I don't see unions getting dismantled happening, it's the same wishful thinking as making guns illegal.
Only if we ignore the fact that the police unions either condone or vigorously defend the "police brutality and police corruption" every single time. Not once[1] have they censured a member for violating rights.
1. To my knowledge. I'd be happy (well, more like moderately surprised) to be informed otherwise.
Police become and stay corrupt because they know they are protected. "Thin Blue Line" and "Blue Wall of Silence" type stuff. Police unions really perpetuate this type of behavior by discouraging actual scrutiny of charges brought against officers. Police unions take a "we'll get you out of this, here's what you say and do" attitude taken towards charges all charges. And if they can't get all the charges outright dropped, the punishment is usually a slap on the wrist.
And don't get me started about "administrative paid leave".
Case in point: in the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, the police had failed to serve search warrants for the officers’ personal cellphones.
And if they had been Wal-Mart greeters instead of union employees, they would've been fired on the spot.
And they hinder prosecution in a way that essentially amounts to blackmail. They threaten that the police force will become less cooperative with the prosecutors office. An office that depends of the force to do it's job. A prosecutor should be able to look into charges against a police force without fear of retribution by said force. But they can't. And police unions are the spokespersons/ringleaders of the entire scheme.
AKA 6th Amendment right to counsel?
So no, not your 6th amendment right.
I concur with the point about how there's a general problem with police not doing their part to stamp out corruption, but that criticism should never extend to, "they get advice on how to beat charges? Outrageous!"
Edit: Also, IMHO, the general "right to counsel" extends to a defendant's general ability to educate themselves on the appropriate legal defense, even if it's not from their attorney.
This "insanity" continues just as well in countries without police unions, or where unions are not allowed at all.
It's the police, the organization, and/or the government in charge, that does that to save face, not the policemen's union.
I'm all for law enforcement having better weapons, armor, and information networks than any terrorist or criminal, but that doesn't mean they can use it as they wish. The law must apply to the lawmen.
Only special units responding to special calls (like Swat teams) have weaponry.
How about that?
They're still using force where appropriate...
In any case I misinterpreted the parent comment, so the discussion is moot.
Yes, but the US police also uses it when it's NOT appropriate, which is the problem.
Unfortunately, even when dash cams are mandated, the footage is often corrupted or lost[0]
[0]"80% of CPD dash cam videos are missing audio" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/01/29/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZlxJqT6wgE
They also have a trend of faking entire conversations to make it seem like suspect is resisting enough to deserve a beating. I had, but lost, a bookmark where police submitted audio to court, defense requested video, and it showed non-resisting black guy being jerked through a window and beat by the cops who were faking fight commentary. Here's a recent one that's just verbal testimony:
https://hdp.press/to-the-4-white-male-policemen-who-beat-me-...
That doesn't sound like it's the first time they've had that type of discussion. I wonder how many innocent citizens are in jail right now because of those cops.
They were in an incident and were deciding what charges to lay.
It's a tricky thing laying charges.
Laying charges is not abuse of power.
Now - if the cops were inventing or fabricating evidence - saying the person did something he did not do - then this would be definitely abuse, but it's not clear that happened.
But if someone standing in the street with a gun is doing something a cop can feasibly consider 'public nuisance' - and it's within their right to charge someone with 'public nuisance' - then the issue here is not the cops, it's the loose definition of 'public nuisance' and the cops ability to arbitrarily apply it.
The article is mostly quotes from the ACLU, so it's only one side of the story and selected information, it would be interesting to know more.
Yeah, especially when the charges are being made up.
Who's the judge going to believe? Three cops, or one "trouble maker"?
Set a course for confrontation with the police union; it's necessary. Liquidate police by firing and prosecuting as necessary to effect a clean department that won't brutalize the public. There will always be more people to sign up to join the police, so we may as well get rid of the shitty ones. Cleaning house is long overdue, and we need to start realistically expecting to have to fire significant proportions of a lot of different police departments. Believe me, law and order won't simply break down overnight if we start holding the police accountable.
The only way we as the public are going to render comeuppance to the police is if we get political momentum going for harsh legal/criminal consequences when they abuse the public.
You mean, other than the fact that they did?
From the article:
In the end they decide on two criminal infractions [...] The tickets they gave him started a criminal prosecution in the Connecticut superior court
They didn't like what he was doing, so they gave him bogus tickets. They weren't "some guys talking tough" they were police abusing their power.
I am no longer shocked or surprised when I read stories about US cops like this: it seems a massive stain on the USA internationally. I'm sad (but not surprised) that no politicians in the presidential election are making a big deal of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
edit: thank you for the link, it was an interesting article. Although, I think many of the comparisons with the US are inherently flawed. It's still interesting to see the stats.
This is the kind of thing that could 'wake up' another small slice of the population that i.e. has 'nothing to hide' wrt NSA data collection etc.
Illegal or legal - someone carrying a gun in public trying to prod cops is creating problems, not solving them.
If this guy was holding a sign out of a nuclear plant saying 'no more nukes' and was unarmed, then it would be a different story I think.
In terms of public perception, I don't think this guy is going to win any points among regular people.
Corrected: The fact he was exercising his 2nd amendment rights, and trying to inform citizens that their 4th amendment rights were about to be violated, is not going to engender him any sympathy in the public at large.
This in turn leads to one person being able to cause 100+ casualties in a club with over 300 people in it - without being neutralized by a responsible carry citizen (Pulse)
if even 5% of the population carried I imagine the casualties would have been MUCH lower
You would think the ACLU knows that this is not true at all. Police regularly confiscate property on a daily basis with no cause. They have laws that allow them to do this. It's usually cash but they have been known to take whatever isn't nailed down. Some police departments apparently plan their budgets around it.
> Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.
And also:
> A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.
I understand both of you. So, you could say that it is practiced, sure. However you cannot say that they are wrong, their approach and wording in their article is very much correct. As I said in another comment, they did their due diligence.
Civil forfeiture doesn't have to be ruled legal. If it is the law it is legal until the law is struck down by the courts.
But I understand your point the ACLU wouldn't want to admit to that, but that doesn't excuse obviously incorrect wording of their legal claims in this case.
The facts clearly demonstrate that the police can in fact confiscate property on a whim. They may not, under the Constitution. But who cares about the Constitution? It's just a scrap of paper standing in the wave of our Brave New World.
That assumes that the Supreme Court will judge according to the Constitution, which I think isn't borne out by case history.
It was the Supreme Court which said a black man couldn't be a citizen; that wheat grown in one state and fed to cattle in the same state is involved in interstate commerce; that the death penalty referred to in the Constitution is unconstitutional; that taking property for private gain is a public taking; and on, and on, and on.
The sad part is: if you try to do away with these silly laws, the police unions will be up in arms about it.
Lesson 1: smarter cops don't get caught.
Lesson 2: record the cops straight to the cloud.
ADDENDUM: For those in the US, consider installing your state's edition of the ACLU Mobile Justice app on your smartphone.