I mean come on.
Sure, it won't hold up in court if they take you to jail, but it could possibly make your life hell for 24 hours at the very least.
You could lose your job being detained, for example. IIRC they can hold you that long with no justification or reason required, but I'm not a laywer so take that with a grain of salt.
Or weeks, if they really wanted to fuck with you. Just leaving a patrol car around your house for awhile is pretty unsettling.
Maybe I'm overthinking this. I certainly don't want to get on the wrong side of my local PD. I don't even want them to know my name, much less stop me every time they see me or otherwise retaliate against me because I whipped out a cell phone.
It's almost like a chilling effect, if I have that concept right. I might be mixing that up with another term. Thinking of police retaliation makes me not want to record the police at all, out of fear of retaliation.
I have a similar story of inept police and injustice:
I have an uncle who is a real piece of work. A druggie who my great-grandparents adopted, raised and supported until they both died.
One night he was at my great-grandparents house, harrassing them for money and threatening them. My poor great-grandfather, a 71 year old man at the time, called 911. The operator heard my uncle scream something about killing my grand-grandmother. I guess he was coming off of drugs.
By the time the local sheriff's office responded to the call, my uncle Tim was long gone. The only male present was my 71 year old great-grandfather, so the two deputies incompetently assumed he was the perpetrator.
They didn't even let him put on shoes.
They manhandled my poor grandfather. They took him to jail and he slept on the floor of a cell. He was extremely injured, my mother was furious and encouraged him to press charges. But he was a stubborn old man who spent most of his life as a fire-and-brimstone pastor of a church, in other words he was too polite to take them to court.
The pictures of his injuries are burned into my brain. Massive scrapes, his thin skin peeled back. Bruises all over his face and body. The idea of him sleeping on the floor of a cell...absolutely sickening.
He died a few years later, stomach cancer. He was a great man. I miss him.
p.s. I also have a story of that same department doing me great justice, so keep in mind that it was the two assholes who responded, not the entire sheriff's office that was to blame.
Some of those deputies were good people who saved my ass a few times, let me off the hook a few times, etc. I will say that I'm glad to have moved, though.
The Culture of Make Believe is a very difficult book to get through. The author talks about hate crimes and power, and how we've developed these very odd cultural norms around violence. It's pretty depressing.
For a bit more perspective: During the difficult transition period 1990 - 1994, security forces (police) caused 518 deaths[1]. Compare that with 2013 US police caused 930 - 1240 deaths and South African police caused 409 deaths[2]. Keep in mind that during this transitional period there was basically a civil war of sorts going on, with 14000 political murders between ANC and other freedom factions during this time (1990 - 1994).
And even today under a free and democratic government it is reported that police behavior is a least just as bad as under apartheid[3]. Currently the police death rate, taking into account population differences is twice as bad as the USA police death rate and four times as bad as during the worst years of police brutality during apartheid.
Fact is South Africa is a deeply divided country and single sentence statements such as the one of the parent poster does no justice to the complexities that is the continually worsening South African situation.
[1]https://www.censorbugbear.org/genocide/how-many-people-died-...
[2]http://mg.co.za/article/2015-06-10-fdf
[3]http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/africainvestigates/2015/...
2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense, because it's a non-trivial number (likely the majority are in fact self-defense). [1] Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-americans-do-cops-kill-each...
1)The US has six times the population of South Africa.
Absolutely, thats why I said South Africa currently has about twice the police killings rate the US has. So the math is: South Africa police killings = 409 to be comparable on a per capita basis with the US rate of between 900 - 1200 divide by 6 = 150 to 200 death per year if the US had the same population as South Africa, which is a rate your linked article also supports. Compare that with the apartheid rate of 518 deaths over 4 years, so about 130 deaths per year. (But ok I have not taken 20 years of population growth into account).
2) A police officer killing someone, is not necessarily murder. You're going to have to break out how many of those are acts of self-defense,
Absolutely, but that is a very difficult thing to do, especially only armed with google. Furthermore police statistics these days in South Africa is renowned to be of especially poor quality, so I have to work with what I have.
2) Some of America's inner cities are wildly violent, with murder rates on par with the worst areas of Latin America (ie some of the worst areas on earth for murder). Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
Your joking right. South Africa has an average murder rate of 34 / 100 000 [1], seven times worse than the USA. And if you want to compare the worst with the worst (Detroit), compare it with our farm murder rate of around 300 / 100 000 [2] which is actually worse than most war zones.
So in summary, police killings during the worst years of apartheid was less than or at least on par with police killings in the US currently and police killings in current day South Africa is about twice as bad as both.
>>Try policing a perpetual war zone that has been raging for 40 years.
Yup...South Africa :D
[1] https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-2...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks
My point being, I disagreed that in your very first point you mentioned that police killings were a very common occurrence during apartheid ("some of the most chilling stories from South Africa during Apartheid"), and I argued that it was less common than current day USA and much less common than current day South Africa.
Now there is one very interesting conclusion that you might have missed from my point, and that is that in terms of police killings, either currently the USA is as bad as apartheid South Africa was, or that apartheid South Africa wasn't as bad as you remember.
I bring up Apartheid because they were notorious for covering up some truly horrific things that police did and the modus operandi was suppressing opposition. When I see similarities in the kind of things they try to pass off to explain deaths in custody, I think that connection needs to be made.
What I take issue with is your dismissal of my negative remark about "big, bad Apartheid." Yeah, Apartheid was bad.
Truth be told, I've got no beef with you or an axe to grind on the subject, I just try to provide some perspective to the situation.
For interests sake, do you have a link to the story about suspects getting murdered and then the police report indicating the suspect "fell against a chair". That's certainly the first I've heard about it. There certainly were some atrocities committed by both sides (whites and blacks or goverment and ANC), so I am not denying it is possible. For a good account if you want, there is an excellent book written by the police commissioner Johan van der Merwe: Trou tot die dood toe. I am not sure if it is available in english, and you might question the integrity / truthfulness of the book, but in my opinion it gives a fairly even account of the events of that time from the perspective of the police commissioner, and the commissioner himself is highly regarded, even by Nelson Mandela so that counts for something...
It's akin to someone mentioning flying and then going into gruesome detail about all of the terrible airline accidents over the years to suggest that flying is unsafe.
The real issue is, how did the system react to this? How does it self-correct? This is where so much of government falls down as they close ranks around themselves, identifying with the role they have first instead of identifying with their fellow citizens.
This is a natural way to be (tribal), but it is also extremely problematic.
Though I think this is a little tangential to the recording issue. It's just the more universal problem of police misconduct. Hopefully, body cams and little brother recording of police can change this.
I interface with my local police at least once a month, not for recalcitrant reasons; they are good people.
Is this an anecdote? Yes.
Do I like seeing police as a whole cast as evil? No.
I know police as a whole are not evil. I've been let off the hook by police quite a few times, had an officer give me a ride home when I was stranded after walking several miles as a teenager, etc.
Police retaliation happens, though. Corruption exists, etc. It's not a huge stretch to imagine local police retaliating against someone who whips out a cell phone.
Even if the courts won't convict that person of a crime, police can very much exact revenge just by paying more attention to you than they might have otherwise.
Stopping you without cause, searching you without cause, detaining you without reason. There are plenty of ways I could imagine retaliating against a citizen if I was corrupted/otherwise morally compromised, empowered as a police officer, and had a grudge.
tl;dr: I'm not casting all cops as evil, I'm stupid, but not that stupid.
I'm only speculating that this court decision might not stop an officer with a grudge from retaliating against a civilian.
It's perfectly logical, and wasn't intended as a generalization against police. I'm not a cop-hater.
In police / court land, bad apple pruning isn't good enough. On top of that the stakes are high and their are legal malincentives that encourage the government to do the wrong things. It's harder to do bad apple pruning with police because of the risk category and their job responsibilities.
I do not think "How will this look in the paper?" calculates into whether or not an officer issues me a ticket for speeding or lets me go with a warning or attempts to search my car. I don't think it is considered at any point by individual officers, including during the use of force.
I think the decision is based more on behavior such as if I am evasive or cooperative. I am far more likely to get a warning if I am polite rather than argumentative.
This is the nature of criminals, as well. They're fine for the most part, until they break a law. The real problem is that we're allowing a parallel "judicial system" to exist in the first place. One that selectively applies certain rules to certain groups, which is in this case, the police.
The idea that a cop will lose his job for harassing someone is wishful thinking.
I'd bet it happens very infrequently, and is very newsworthy when it happens. Still not remotely ok though…
They'll start caring a lot more when they lose their jobs and suffer penalties, and it's not hard for it to happen when they do that.
I truly do not understand how you took this away from reading my comment. I even went out of my way to say that it's more complicated than individual honest cops being to blame. You may want to work on your reading comprehension.
This implies to me like you think this culture is prevalent in most police departments. Yet you base this of the events a tiny minority of police departments.
>You may want to work on your reading comprehension.
Try to keep insults off of HN. If I misunderstood you, you should take that as a reflection of your own communication skills and clarify in another comment. Don't just waste everyone's time by just expressing your state of bewilderment.
Depends on the department. My local precinct is across from the subway and parks nearly 100% of their vehicles on the sidewalk. It's on both sides of the street and so bad two people can't pass at the same time.
They've actually even spray painted ranks onto the street, which have now almost faded since they've been doing it for so long. The sidewalk is crumbling under the weight of the cars. At town halls they shrug when asked about it.
Despite being a high density area complete with multiple subway lines and a low crime rate, they do all patrols by car. No foot patrols whatsoever.
Meanwhile other NYPD precincts have different behavior.
A representative streetview link:
https://goo.gl/maps/e2FRX9K56GE2
Keep in mind this is an older streetview image; the parking lot on 50th Avenue next to the precinct no longer exists. There are also usually more police vehicles, though most of them shown in this streetview link are the personal vehicles of officers or the security shop (they are friendly with the police and don't get ticketed or perhaps the cops feel bad about parking this way and writing tickets for others on the same block - either way, no tickets)
https://mobile.twitter.com/jooltman/status/65433607376670720...
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Second, considering that we know there are instances of it, we're faced with a question. Which is more likely?
1. The officer(s) in question suddenly and for no discernible reason completely snapped and committed actions they knew were immoral and illegal and which they had been trained and conditioned by the culture of their department never to do under any circumstances, or
2. The officer(s) in question were trained and worked their entire careers in a culture in which abuse of authority was routine, accepted and unquestioned, to such a degree that they felt it was the natural course of things and that no significant consequences would fall on them.
Time and again, investigation of corrupt and abusive police departments has turned up evidence for case (2) and not for case (1). We should be assuming case (2) unless and until we see significant evidence otherwise.
http://www.theroot.com/nyc-man-who-recorded-eric-garner-s-ch...
No, they cannot (lawfully) hold you for 24 hours with no reason.
Quick lesson (note: everything I say below is about what is legal, not what might happen -- people (including cops) can do illegal things after all):
Reasonable Articulable Suspicion (RAS) -- A set of specific facts that would cause a reasonable person to believe a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed. You may be detained if a cop has RAS on you. But RAS is a pretty low bar.
If a cop has RAS and is detaining you, he's trying to get Probable Cause (PC) to arrest you. Talking will likely help him get it. I suggest you use your right to remain silent.
If a cop has PC, you can be arrested. In that case, you might spend the weekend in jail before having an opportunity to get bail, or they might just release you.
If you have been unlawfully detained or arrested, you can sue. It won't be easy to win, but you can sue. In many cases, police officers have what is called Qualified Immunity (QI). This means they literally cannot be sued.
But now, in the Fifth Circuit, it's a clearly established right to record. This means that the officers would lose QI and could be sued for their actions.
I used the term preferential treatment to mean that in some cases the police may let a person go with just a warning but if that person has a camera they may come down on the person harder. In the case where the person believes the police will not act favorably to the individual or even illegally then filming would be in the person's favor. In that case filming would result in what I would call preferable treatment because it's still not "better" than treatment someone else would receive.
Privilege is a huge component in deciding if filming the police would actually be favorable to an individual. When I say preferential I am referring to the treatment certain groups receive from the police in general relative to other demographics.
As for what you can see, there are definitely some protected circumstances you should not be able to record. Imagine sitting outside an abortion or AIDS clinic and then posting online videos of everyone who visits these places. Sure you can see from a public street who accesses these services but should you be able to advertise a person's health concerns to the general public? No.
Are there laws against that? I always assumed the crazy loons that sit out there all day were already doing it.
Imagine someone records police violence and posts it online. Only they cut off the first half where the suspect did not comply and was aggressive.
Now there's an angry Internet mob which crowdsources the address, phone and a lot more, just from the recording of the police officer's face.
Sadly, in our time and age, it's the first one to report that has the patent to "truth".
E. g. your significant other sees you somewhere you should have not been.
I honestly don't have the answer. Hopefully, the police can keep them stashed for when they're needed.
I'd like to get the media outlets and public more educated. To get the story confirmed or denied (by the police).
Maybe a few "police cameras (again) prove wrong accusations" with wide coverage would go a long way to discourage fabricated stories.
Now about the access and publishing. That one is the hardest to get right considering presumption of innocence and privacy.
The only idea for now "here is the recording, faces blurred. If it's not enough, we'll gladly see you in court. What? No court? We didn't think so either." Hopefully I can come up with a better one.
I'm almost asleep, but there probably is some sort of solution that would prove the authenticity of the recording.
It actually depends on what state you live in. Search for "one-party vs two-party consent states".
Only 11 states (including California) require both parties in a conversation to consent. Federal law and the remaining majority of states do not.
Actually, that's not true.
Federal law only requires "one-party consent" - that is, it's legal to record a phone call as long as one person on the call knows it's being recorded.
Only 12 states have laws requiring that everyone on the call must know it's being recorded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#Unite...
So there is no more "off the record"? No moral argument against "revenge porn" or broadcasting what you see in the changing rooms at the gym? Privacy is completely torn away - if someone can see it in any setting, it become fodder for the public?
Yes, you should be able to record police conduct in public, just like anything else, but the way you framed your argument is dangerous.
the police will shine flashlights into your eyes/camera. problem solved from their end.
But even if you don't agree here, we're talking about events in public, involving public servants, recorded by people who are in no way bound by any sort of state secret framework. This is a million miles from the line.