Second body cam video of Baltimore cops manufacturing evidence discovered
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think we see in a lot of communities that the police and other public worker are no more trusted and I think we will see the raise of alternative actors to fulfill the gap. Such actor could be criminal groups like mafia and terrorist group that then can use this to build up their base.
So I think it is immoral to allow this and I think it's stupid in Machiavellian or realpolitik way.
Isn't this one of the reasons for the huge proliferation of gangs? Certain communities know that the police won't help them, so they establish their own organization.
Although it is obviously not the only motivation of gang members and gangs, protection from violence is part of why people seek these groups out.
More seriously, the episode draws inspiration from the Guardian Angels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels
If the officer can decide what to record, what to to submit in a report, if the lens is dirty or covered, etc... it really is very tempting.
They certainly have helped cops put away very bad people and they certainly have put pressure on cops to follow official protocol but they're not a panacea if not regulated tightly. For example look at the protocol proposals of Campaign Zero here: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/film-the-police
I don't know what various regulatory environments exist for body cameras, but in an ideal world body-camera footage would be operated and held by some neutral external part and only made available as evidence in court. For example, in the UK we have the Independent Police Complaints Commission which is, in theory, independent from the police force.
From what I can tell this isn't the case in the UK, and police forces operate the infrastructure themselves.
> When a police officer returns to a station, the cameras are placed in a docking station, where the footage is automatically uploaded to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
> Officers also decide how to categorise the footage, and whether it will be useful as further evidence. If the officer concludes it is not useful, the footage will be automatically deleted after 31 days – but if it is considered useful as evidence, it can be stored indefinitely, Hutchinson said.
> In practice, the cameras are not always rolling, and it is up to the individual officer when to turn them on or off.
http://www.techworld.com/security/met-police-picks-microsoft...
That seems like a recipe for unaccountability and a real missed opportunity, especially for the Metropolitan Police who have a bit of a track record for abusing technology... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/may/18/police-dna-...
Always on. Always under independent control. The actions of public servants are public record, and the public desires that its servants not be corrupt. That footage should be going to the prosecutor's office, the public defender's office, and the state's records office before anyone else is allowed to touch it.
That little on/off button might still be useful, to mark portions of the video that the police department might like to retrieve from the records office and review after an incident, but the idea that a cop will always act honorably when no one is watching seems to have been a myth ever since ol' Bobby Peel invented the modern cop.
For example, when an officer needs to go to the toilet. Er... if they can't turn off the camera that heads right into weird territory.
Imagine you're in a public toilet area (eg using a urinal), and a cop walks in needing to go as well. Thus your junk is now being filmed.
[etc] ;)
And using a public toilet doesn't give you immunity from being arrested.
I also imagined that the cop didn't wash his hands afterward, and I didn't know what to do about it, or even if I could do anything about it. Employees have to wash their hands at restaurants, right? Cops touch all kinds of stuff with their hands. If I file a complaint, would they even do anything about it? And then if I ever encounter that cop and act sort of weird because I'm thinking about whether he's going to touch me and get his junk-cteria and splashback on me, will he take it as reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, and make it self-fulfilling?
The eye in the center of a cop's chest is just like the eyes in their head, and the eyes in the head of a non-cop. If my junk is filmed, it is because I was acting in such a way that any random passer-by could have seen it. My expectation of privacy is that only people of the same sex will even have the chance, but that's about it. I don't drop my pants without at least a privacy lock. Anyone could walk in to a public toilet, from a cop with an active body cam, to the entire sousaphone section of a marching band (based on a true story).
It is more concerning for instances where a cop is executing a warrant in a place where there is a genuine expectation of privacy, such as a suspect's own bedroom. Those videos would have to be kept under lock and key until some trustworthy individual can determine that the public has an interest in seeing them that outweighs the individual's right to privacy.
In fact, these cameras offer the opportunity to verify the statements of officers, witness and suspect against whatever is captured by the cameras, which is a net positive.
A prosecutor could establish that the suspect's memory of the situation is not completely correct. Meanwhile, the police officer would have a fantastic, (almost photographic!) memory of the scene. The prosecutor could then ask each about something that wasn't captured on camera. The police officer claims he saw the suspect commit the crime, the suspect claims he did not...who is a jury going to believe after that?
In court you be be able to see the tape
Yes they have AFAIK too..
I'm not sure that people (including these orgs) realize that body cams without the oversight may be worse than having no body cams. To pick one example they highlight NJ law A2500 (http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2014/Bills/A2500/2280_I1.HTM) to highlight as a win for their policies but looking at the law's text it basically seems to say police cars used primarily for traffic violations will be equipped with cameras and DUI fees will be increased to help fund them. I have no idea if there is any existing regulation on the officer's use of those cameras.
As far as I'm concerned this doesn't have to be the case for me to be critical of private prisons and I'm otherwise generally libertarian for most issues. One of the things government should be doing is handling criminal justice and running prisons should be a part of that IMO.
I don't see much utility in letting private organizations run them, there's no real competition and 'success' seems merely a matter of a) political connections or b) offering the lowest price. Prisons should be focused on reforming criminals and treat them well, so a low budget hyper price-conscious system sounds like a negative incentive to me. The cost of criminals on society is high so giving appropriate resources for handling them should be a priority.
If the US want's to reduce their massive prison bills they should reduce their massive number of criminals.
This is not exactly what you describe, but it shows that this kind of corruption is out there-
This just further adds to the larger, more potent, argument against them. That the typical benefits of privatizaton are largely non-existant in this scenario. I really don't see the value of privatizing such a sensitive and serious government responsibility. Simply because it's far from a true marketplace.
I doubt many libertarians are pushing for these prisons either. Even the Koch brothers were awarded by Obama for their justice reform work to reduce incarceration rates.
Removing people from being able to work, taking away kids fathers, hurting their long term employability, and sending them to a 'con-college' doesn't help society at all from a purely economic perspective. It should be the absolute last resort for the worst criminals instead of the standard practice even for non-violent crimes.
It sounds like it's more of the domain of big government republicans who love defence industry style privatization like the countless companies getting rich off of NSA contracts with marginal ROI and limited oversight.
The real underlying problem here is a tough-on-crime prison culture in the US. This should never be a potential 'growth' industry. This can only happen in the US due to their high incarceration rate which far outpaces other countries.
If you kill this obsession with harsh prison sentencing and yearly flood of new laws you'd also stop this industry from being an attractive space for investors to back lobbyists. Likewise killing private prisons seems like it would also help reduce this culture.
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/company-pla...
It always throws up a red flag for me when someone asserts that they know the motivations for another's actions.
I make no bones about the claim that many cops are crooked - I've personally been wronged by them, and witnessed it happening to others, to know that's not the case.
But I think that there's an alternative explanation for the kind of dishonesty we're talking about beyond base greed. It seems likely to me that many of these cops really believe that the people they're framing are in the wrong, but that the system has failed. In their minds, that we let people off on a technicality, or prevent the cops from doing the kind of searching that they believe is necessary, proves that the system is standing in the way of effective policing. So they take it on themselves to fix the bug in the system by circumventing those protections.
It's just one of those inconvenient truths.
As a white male I feel that all I can do is to share this injustice all I can and hope others will become aware (which so far sadly seems not to really happen).
Many times I've seen "public" ID checks in Amsterdam (especially those in subways) targeting just non-white people.
> Excuse for apprehension: I declinded to show my ID for no reason at all
Yep it becomes more and more a "comply or your guilty" culture. Not going well IMO.
If it's sometimes bad for white people, I only try to imagine how horrible it must be for people who are discriminated against (by public authorities) on a daily basis.
Fast forward to all those YouTube public-accountability activist taking photographs or video of the local cop shop from a public sidewalk, to be eventually arrested for failure to identify, or trespassing, or jaywalking, or loitering, or vagrancy, or resisting arrest.
Knowing who you are and where you live is necessary for the criminal justice system, but the same info may also be used to intimidate those who commit no crimes, but become inconvenient to those in power. Even the act of demanding identification may be intimidating.
As such, Netherlands citizens may wish to push back against the state's power to identify anyone at will, for no readily apparent reason. It's bad enough when the law is on your side and the cops overreach anyway; I can't imagine how bad it could be when the cops start to overreach and the law allows them to go even further.
The schizo thing : you are not required to carry ID, but you are required to show it upon request.
The circumstances in which it can be lawfully requested are somewhat limited.
You can be fined for not complying, which I was because I refused to show it.
This happened about 10 years ago in Arizona while I was in high school. As I sat in the back of a police car with my black friend, the officer asked whos pipe it was. Our silence got him automatically assigned blame.
I'll never forget the pudgy officer who took in our silence, looked directly at Josiah and said "well, you will probably be blamed for it." He then closed the door and shortly afterwards I was uncuffed and Josiah was taken away on bullshit charges none of us had the balls to take the rap for.
The deck is stacked. In my new town with new black friends they cannot believe that police don't even look at the car when I'm driving.
Regardless of the occupants or color of the occupants, a car with a handicap plate with a young white man driving is apparently not in the profiling training.
Josiah could have said whos it was as well, but we were both silent. The problem is not that friends aren't tattling over a fucking weed pipe, but that officers deferred blame to the black kid and not the white adult or the two white kids.
No, we didn't stop being friends over that, in fact we became better friends.
Jeez. You guys really think any of us would have told the cops whos pipe it was?
I can't help but read your comments as sarcasm because of their ignorance to basic street code.
You don't point fingers or speak names, even if you take a bullshit charge.
If they deferred blame to me, I'd have quietly gone as well.
Why did you pick race instead of gender? The justice system is far more sexist than racist, and if our society won't come to terms with how far the legal system is stacked against men, why would it ever come to terms with how far it is stacked against minorities?
And I use 'group' loosely since it is really more of a sub-culture than a defined organization.
Look at it this way, a black man that is unjustly shot by police is more likely to be shot because he is a man than because he is black. If we want to stop unjust shootings, we should focus on the factors leading most to them, or which racism is second behind sexism (and maybe third behind classism, though since class is less apparent in short interactions than race and gender, it may end up not being as big an influence until we get to the court room).
"The justice system is far more sexist than racist" - what evidence do you have for this statement?
"a black man that is unjustly shot by police is more likely to be shot because he is a man than because he is black" What about this one?
For the black man, passers by rushed him, knocked him down by force, and called the police.
For the white man, people pointed, talking loudly about "what is he doing", and one person called the police.
For the black woman, people ignored, regardless what she did to the lock.
For the white woman, people went to help her break the lock.
If random people have this sense of justice in regard to a fairly common crime like bike theft, then why should we be surprised if the criminal system have similar bias?
Police, in my experience, are rarely better than your next random street thug. US cops routinely shoot people (especially PoCs are walking targets), German cops love racial profiling (Hamburg, Hafenstraße - look on Twitter), beating up left-wing people (last seen at the police riots in Hamburg, G20) or cooperating with neo-Nazis (e.g. Freital terror group, but also the NSU terrorists had their "helpers"). Yes there are good cops, but they are rare. Most eventually succumb to the authoritarian system and what's called "Korpsgeist".
I'm a socialist myself, but if you want to do anything good for the left, make sure you get your stories very straight.
Certainly, some events at G20 were exaggerated. I agree with you that this is bad - the problem is that there's so much material about cop misbehaviors that it cannot all be faked/exaggerated.
I have seen police attacking clearly visible, free standing journalists with a water cannon. Police attempting to shoot a cameraman down a roof with a watercannon. Police attacking a medic convoy transporting an injured person with watercannons. Police illegally using rubber ammo (it's not allowed by Hamburg police law).
And this is "just" what I have seen at G20. What I have seen and personally experienced at other demonstrations, especially in Berlin and Munich, I could literally write a book about.
German police don't carry name tags, only some carry number tags (in NRW, the requirement got dropped just short after G20, actually!), and next to no carry body cams. Bavarian and Federal police at least carry the number of their group on the backpatch but numerous other countries don't carry any "individual" mark. They are not investigated by independents, but by other cops - and even if they are investigated, only the really high media profile cases actually end up in front of a court. They are above the law and act like so.
Officers, regardless of how many witnesses there are or how much footage there is, get away with so much that it's ridiculous.
We see this in so many different facets of life: police cars crashing into others while driving without a siren on and then blaming the crash on the victim (https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/zidek-cpd-police-cycli... this also happened to my uncle); civil forfeiture, which I consider to be blatant robbery; near-literal executions, both witnessed and caught on video, of people, pets, children, etc. during traffic stops or raids; trigger-happy police officers shooting randomly at people, and facing no consequences for this (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-lapd-... and now this case where they're planting drugs to get someone arrested. You have to ask, how many times have officers done this and gotten away with it? Of the 2.2+ MILLION people in prison/jail, how many are there for false reasons?
My opinion is that the public holds police officers to such a high esteem that the police are basically able to get away with whatever they want. That whole image of "they're protecting us and putting their lives on the line" needs to go away so we can finally start prosecuting these criminals.
I understand that there are a lot of good people on the police force, but enough's enough. Start jailing police officers. No more "administrative duty," no more suspensions.
We work in a society where the government authority is always right. doesn't really matter your color, even I was military we were told if brought up for even a traffic offense to never imply the arresting officer was wrong, just explain why we were not at fault.
So with regards to camera. In a one vs one encounter the camera must be active and recording unless damaged by the perpetrator and even then the record should be easily destroyed. So while a camera could possibly be damaged during a scuffle it should so this event.
Hence, if no video then no crime unless it can be proven that all available recording devices were disabled through an act of god. No officer should be permitted out of station without having another party verify all recording gear is in working order, same for the cars. Simply put, we force them to never enter the public unless their recording gear is function and soon as a fault is detected it must be remedied then.
Then make it a federal offense for disabling or even turning off any recording device. It has to be federal. we back it up not with fines but termination and jail time. We can give the cops a three strikes and your out.
last note (did not have time to write a short reply) is that we must prevent law enforcement officers fired in one locale from simply getting hired in another
Sigh.
Shouldn't they face possession charges? Unless they are transporting newly acquired evidence that is associated with a documented investigation to the police station for storage they shouldn't be allowed to carry drugs around.
If anything, they only made these issues better known through their work.