If you see the cops, start recording
theverge.com
theverge.com
The Buffalo incident offers a vivid example of why police records should be considered unreliable. Where are the "good cops" among the 20 or so in the video who had the opportunity to speak up, but in practice chose to maintain the blue wall of silence?
Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake.
What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison.
That's a far cry from this situation. There is no "judgment call" here: don't violently shove elderly people to the ground for no reason. If you accidentally do, help them up. If you pass by an elderly person lying on the ground and bleeding, check on them.
There's no "mistake" here.
I wasn't talking about this specific case though, not sure how you inferred that from my comment that shoving old man was a mistake .
I was talking about a hypothetical case where it was indeed a mistake.
The policemen attitude in the video is revolting
If you're a passenger on a plane whose pilot is doing something unsafe, you'll probably never know, which is different from if you're a victim of abuse by police (because you'll directly experience the consequences individually directed to you). Nonetheless, the pilot's unsafe behavior also has a real potential to harm you, just in a way that doesn't feel intentional or personal, and in a way that's almost always invisible except in case of an after-the-fact investigation.
There are lots of ways that the analogy breaks down, but I see one where I disagree with you: policing does also have "lots of very complex and nuanced situations [...] that require judgment calls" alongside the situations that are best described as willful abuse and crime.
I completely agree, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just meant to point out that this situation was not one of them.
which is something that the aviation regulators created in response to some of the dynamics you mentioned.
(I don't know how ASRS authenticates that people making reports are really pilots or aircrew.)
But self-regulation hasn't worked and isn't likely to work, precisely because those structural factors are so formidable. So instead, we turn to outside auditing in the form of cell phone video — as advocated by this article.
That actually sounds like a pretty good idea, honestly.
No, they should get proper training and be held to professional standards.
Yes, absolutely! Raise police pay, along spending money on police training. Then hold those officers to high standards. This is absolutely the way forward.
This certainly entails raising taxes, which makes better policing difficult to implement when one of the two major political parties is religiously opposed to taxation.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RtnQ2GqBeg
[2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/killing-of-george-fl...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670...
It's a lucrative gig. In NYC, the NYPD runs commercials advertising full benefits, competitive compensation and only having to work for 20 years before being able to retire with a pension.
[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...
You might like some of the mission and stated thinking behind ASAP and ASRS, and that there's interest in encouraging pilots and crew to speak up about mistakes and other safety-related observations, so that everyone can learn and benefit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst...
Also related is FOQA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu...
I don't know enough about law enforcement to say whether and how any of these practices might be helpful to adapt to different and complicated challenges there.
Regarding admitting a mistake in software development/operations work that brings the site down, it helps to have a culture of trust that everyone can admit making mistakes. In that culture, you'll probably still feel sick and humbled by the mistake, but the first priority is for the team to solve the immediate problem. After that, everyone wants to understand the mistake, to try to learn and avoid problems like that in the future. The professional move is to be upfront with all pertinent information; the unprofessional move would be to attempt to hide information, misdirect efforts understanding the cause, etc. The professional move by everyone else is to expect and respect that professionalism, and to act in the same forthright spirit.
When you tell investigators "A fucking bear was on the track!" the investigators don't believe you. Far more likely you screwed up and have made up this excuse about a bear.
When your train has FFCCTV you know the investigators are going to check it and they are going to see the bear. This country doesn't even have bears - what the actual fuck!
And that pays dividends because now staff have every reason to expect investigators will believe them if they tell the truth, and it means investigators spend less time second guessing human recollection of events which means more time to deal with the actual events of the incident.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...
Even if the older guy used language this could have been resolved without the need to escalate the conflict. Using violent force against somebody that does not seem to be posing a threat is a serious problem if your sole job is to keep peace.
i've said it before but here it is again, a workable system for police accountability:
there are tangible ways that laws could be setup and practices adhered to that would make cops more accountable and, while maybe the same level of racist in some parts, help ensure that they get held accountable more often than not.
mandatory body cams rolling at all times unless they are in a bathroom.
turning off or a malfunctioning camera during the act of a police brutality event immediately pierces the qualified immunity defense and they are tried as citizens.
have an outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department investigate any reports of abuse.
have another outside investigative body that has zero ties to the police department randomly sampling police stop footage to see if there are any instances of impropriety.
I am sure this list is non-exhaustive but it's a start. also, while we are here, fix the issue of civil asset forfeiture. the clear "we get to take your money because it looks suspicious and then keep it for the police department" is a huge conflict of interest.
> There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth.
the other side to this is that the airlines have every single input and the conversation that lead up to the crash along with the meticulous analysis of the wreckage and records of maintenance... the cops investigate themselves and find themselves not guilty of any crimes.
It’s as if they believe that local PD is some unprofessional good old boys or something, but the FBI, those are the professional ones.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Make sure your skepticism of police statements (including those regurgitated verbatim on the news) extends to feds as well. They have a decades-long history of the exact same damage.
Beware anything put in a sworn statement or affidavit by feds, or provided by federal informants or federal undercovers. You’d be astounded how much of it simply isn’t true.
They "resigned" but are still employed? It's not a resignation if you keep getting a paycheque.
> Many of the employees, who said they refused to work in order to show their support for demonstrators across the country, added an automated message to their digital profiles and email responses saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest.
I'm pretty sure Facebook's "virtual walk-out" was virtual because they were all working from home. They still stopped working, en mass, for the day. They still risked being fired, and they still negatively impacted the company's productivity.
They just didn't actually walk out of the office because they never physically went to the office in the first place.
"The union representing Buffalo police officers told its rank and file members Friday that the union would no longer pay for legal fees to defend police officers related to the protests which began Saturday in downtown Buffalo and have continued on and off, according to one source. The union is upset with the treatment of the two officers who were suspended Thursday."
https://buffalonews.com/2020/06/05/57-members-of-buffalo-pol...
The police union should be ordered to pay all legal fees related to excessive force incidents until they are bankrupt. Police unions have been amongst the biggest enablers of police violence in recent times.
If you volunteered to program the Foo system at your job, and your company announced that you would be individually liable for any losses anyone suffered for your further work on Foo system, would you keep volunteering to program Foo or would you look to work on other projects?
Really the issue is one of process. Was shoving the guy to the ground and leaving him there a normal procedure for dealing with the alleged offense? If so, it's the department's fault and the superiors are negligent. If not, they failed to follow process and caused a death, so they should be individually liable for assault charges.
There are no "close-call mistakes" in the situations which have caused outrage. The problem is that the officers involved have excessive support to defend themselves.
If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good. The public has an interest in them not being in that job.
I agree with you on that! As I said, "the clear cut ones pull at our heartstrings because they are so egregious."
The problem as I see it is that it's hard to tailor a bright-line policy that creates increased personal liability for police for their clear abuses of power and brutality, that doesn't also create increased personal liability for their close-call, reasonable mistakes. Some of the "5 demands" I have been seeing seem like reasonable starts [0]; none that I have seen focus on increased personal liability.
>If changing that causes some people to "avoid taking a job", good.
I would guess that you and I have drastically different estimations of how large an exodus from policing the wrong kind of policy change could cause. We need police reform, but we also need police.[1]
[0]For example, https://i.redd.it/e5ka53eb5k251.png
[1]See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23410144 "Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police..."
The point here is that none of those are allowed to operate: the police are extended extensive immunity for criminal actions by the structure of the system, as well as immunity from individual civil liability for those actions.
All government officials should be free from nuisance liability suits for their job-related activities. But if a majority of police require immunity from the consequences of criminal activity, you are going to end up with much more than three million dollars of damage.
Future allegations may or may not be true. Even officers who follow all procedures want legal defense against false or questionable accusations.
Qualified immunity means they effectively have zero liability. In the few cases of extreme incompetence, it's taxpayers that foot the bill. Those police have no liability, beyond being responsible for fulfilling their job in a reasonable, professional way.
What the union is talking about is legal bills fighting the city (if the members are penalized in any way). And these are members that "volunteered" for a special pay role, not because they are benevolent.
Speaking of which, the union, as so many of them do, has the doublespeak terminology "benevolent" in its name (Buffalo Police Benevolent Association), yet the primary purpose of police unions is to ensure that bad cops keep their jobs, and to fight any and all measures that obtain even the slightest measure of accountability.
Unfortunately he didn't have to courage to stand up for his first feeling.
That combination would probably knock most people off their feet.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
Where are the good men and women, and what is the sum of their good acts in the grand scheme of things?
If you find yourself in a situation where you might be detained and thereby unable to control interactions with your device, on iPhone you can disable TouchID and FaceID by holding one of the volume buttons and the sleep/wake button simultaneously for a few seconds. This will require you to enter your passcode the next time you want to unlock iPhone. Anyone have similar instructions for Android?
any one of these still need to automatically stream to a secure location
Note well: I have not actually tried this. IANAL, and this is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary.
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1268588997829410816
"When you are lawfully present in any public space, you have the right to photograph anything in plain view, including federal buildings and the police."
"Police may not confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant, nor may they delete data under any circumstances. Visual records are fully protected, but some states have tried to regulate the audio portion of videos under wiretapping laws."
> Everyone in the United States — citizen or resident — has a constitutional right to record police who are performing their public duties. The police don’t have the right to stop you as long as you’re not disrupting their business, and they aren’t allowed to confiscate your phone or camera just because you were recording them. This is the consistent opinion of federal courts and the Supreme Court, which affirmed in 2014 (in a 9-0 decision) that cops need a warrant if they want to seize and search your cellphone.
> Of course, the nationwide protests are about the police ignoring civil rights. Indeed, the videos we’ve seen in the past week show widespread police lawlessness, with officers arbitrarily violating the rights of peaceful demonstrators in lawful assemblies.
Better advice is to read the situation. Cops can make, and have made, people's lives very difficult, whether through legal harassment, false charges or bodily harm, and it is your word against a cop's when you go before a judge.
Pressing both should go into a mode where you can swipe to call emergency services or show your medical id if you have the feature.
Be very careful taking this advice. If you weren't already aware, the past week should make it crystal clear that police have absolutely no problem arresting or assaulting you for exercising your rights.
So if you're under eminent attack this might be a better option. It's all configurable in setting though, so test it before you go protest.
Arrests are not necessary in the vast majority of situations police are called for, and recording technology is far superior to verbal testimony for serving our courts
EDIT: the ignorant people claiming average police officer does not deal with violent criminals have obviously never worked as a first responder. They deal with rape, suicide, murder, assault, domestic abuse, robbery, every week unless they're some small town cop in a gilded neighborhood.
The cops in St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, NYC, etc, see it every single day.
I hear a lot of suggestions by people have have never done the job. People making spurious claims about what police do and don't deal with on a daily basis.
I would never support female cops without firearms, for example. A grown man can easily overpower any woman, period. Especially when they are tweaked out on drugs.
Cops carry a gun because they have less than 6 seconds to respond to deadly situations that can save lives.
The vast majority of police do not need guns.
edit:
> hey deal with rape, suicide, murder, assault, domestic abuse, robbery, every week unless they're some small town cop in a gilded neighborhood.
Can you back this up? Statistics I've seen do not support your claim, and put violent crimes under 5% of police investigations.
If those cases are extremely rare, and stats I've seen show they are, there is still no need for the weapon in the other cases. We can go ahead and disarm the other officers, and have a small portion maintain arms for potentially violent cases in your given scenario
Of course, I'd argue that you don't need deadly force even to deal with the majority of potentially violent crimes, but that's a separate matter.
To put 5% in more extreme terms: would you play Russian roulette with a 20 chamber revolver and one bullet?
Each interaction for police is like pulling the trigger in that hypothetical game of Russian roulette. This is why the absolute numbers are actually very important.
Well, no. 5% of interactions is frequent, especially for police. They need to be prepared for violent situations. That's a pretty core part of the job.
We can talk about deadly weapons being unnecessary for dealing with violent situations but your quoted numbers just don't support the conclusion you seem to be drawing.
Violent conflict exists everywhere.
Edit: After thinking about it a bit more I can see how the average outcome is deadlier with guns regardless of who "wins"
Compare the rate of gun-related crime in a country like Switzerland (where guns are readily available and many people have been trained to use them) with that in Germany (where guns are as rare as hens teeth among the non-criminal contingent of the population) and you'll notice that Switzerland does not suffer unduly under a wave of gun crime. Why not? What is it in Swiss society which makes it possible for people to have access to firearms, the training to use them yet the wherewithal to know when not to use them? Germany and Switzerland are neighbours, they mostly speak the same language, they're both affluent countries. What would Germany look like were firearms as widely spread as they are in Switzerland? Now compare the Swiss data to those in the USA and a clear difference shows. What is the difference between Swiss and American society which can explain this difference? Is it affluence? Switzerland is a rich country but so is the USA. Is it the fact that the difference between rich and less affluent is bigger in the USA than it is in Switzerland? Is it the amount of cultural diversity? The USA is a diverse country, Switzerland is largely homogeneous. Is is the overarching culture? Is it the difference in trust level? Switzerland is a high-trust country, the USA is not.
The other part on the gun control question is the age-old adage that in countries where guns are outlawed only outlaws have guns. They're not exactly hard to come by after all. It seems to work in a country like Japan but it probably takes Japanese culture as well as the physical lack of firearms on the island nation to pull this off.
> The other part on the gun control question is the age-old adage that in countries where guns are outlawed only outlaws have guns. They're not exactly hard to come by after all.
That's true, and it's also true that guns aren't the only horrible weapon you can use against someone. But that accepts the premise that a lot of gun violence is one person using a gun maliciously against another. While that does happen, in the US most gun deaths are either suicides or accidents.
And besides, while I'm sure it's not a problem for connected criminal enterprises to get guns, I'm confident we can create a system that would foil a kid amassing weapons for a school shooting. Degrees matter.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/switzerlan...
In Sweden - where I live - there is a specific class of police called 'dialogpolis' (dialogue police). Their task is to use non-violent means to try to defuse situations, especially those around demonstrations and political manifestations. They are unarmed and wear civilian clothes but are recognisable by their yellow vests with the word 'dialogpolis' on the back. This part of the police corps was started after rioters and looters left large parts of the centre of Gothenburg in shambles in 2001 [1]. Dialogue police can only function in the presence of 'monologue police', i.e. the regular, uniformed and armed type. They are the carrot to the normal police's stick. The jury is still out on the effectiveness of this type of policing and they're often mentioned in a derogative way, partly due to the fact that they often seem to go too far in their attempts to ingratiate themselves with criminal gangs - grilling sausages and playing football does not seem to keep the gangs from committing violence.
I’d argue the opposite. There’s negative symbolic value.
You have to solve both sides of the gun equation for a disarm to work in the US, because violent criminals have very easy access to guns here. If you remove guns from the cops without doing so on the otherside, you're going to unleash hell.
This is not the case for people without guns who are killed by cops. It's an acceptable loss that a few more cops are killed because we don't arm every single one of them, if it means that a lot more innocent people aren't killed by cops with an itchy trigger finger.
Sorry, cops. They've had decades of chances, and this past weekend proves that cops can't control themselves even when they're being called out by the thousands who are recording their behavior for all to see. So now they will have to earn the right to carry lethal weaponry.
> According to the FBI, which publishes the data in the Uniform Crime Reports, from 1980–2018, an average of 85 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed per year. Those killed in accidents in the line of duty are not included in that number.
From https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed...:
> In all, there were 1,112 non-suicide-related deaths at the hands of police in 2019
Sure, send armed cops to handle situations that force is likely to needed. But cops don't need guns to take down police reports. Rape victims don't need armed officers to take down police reports. Property crime victims don't need armed officers to take down police reports. Officers do not need to be armed to write speeding tickets or DUIs.
The primary role of police is observation, recording of facts and interacting with the community. 90+% of the time they spend serving society do not require force.
We could spend much less on police and have better trained cops when force is actually needed by not even considering arming the half of cops who respond to situations where force is unnecessary. The unarmed cops can cost less because they don't need firearms training and job would be less mentally taxing so they could be paid less: then, they can call in armed cops for the minority of situations where force is necessary.
Only give guns to the best cops: the bar to become a cop is way too low to continue arming all of them. I'd love to see a tiered system where cops have to be continually tested and trained to prove they should be entrusted with various levels of force: ex. Camera -> Authorization to use force in arrests -> Pepper Spray -> Stun Gun -> Firearms
Watch some episodes of actual police incidents. Drunk people can be armed. Domestically abused people can live in dangerous neighborhoods with gangs present. Sorry, a camera is not going to defend you from the Latin Kings.
Violent criminals do not care about your unicorn ideals. If they sense police are nerfed, they will fill that power vacuum with gang violence and drive out the police.
You tell me why Ciudad Juarez is one of the most dangerous cities in the world but El Paso, directly across the U.S.-Mexico border is relatively safe. That's policing.
Lol, it's not because police are engaging in shoot-outs with the cartel. It's because we have a judicial system that will not stop going after you, and that is all done non-violently.
It sounds like your perspective is formed form viewing the TV show "Cops". This is not representative of reality.
106 police officers died while on duty in 2018 (of all causes, not just violence from public - 55 officers were feloniously killed while 51 died accidentally). 986 citizens were fatally shot by police in the same year.
Situations where police are able to survive only because they were able to quickdraw and shoot a criminal first like some sort of cowboy are vanishingly rare and possibly purely fantasy. Is trading the lives of a few hundred citizens worth saving the 0-2 cops in these rare situations per year?
Call in the cavalry when needed, but most cops do not need to be armed all the time.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/27/police-deaths...
144 died in 2018. 96 already in 2020 and we're not half done.
https://www.odmp.org/search/year
986 citizens, of which 47 were un-armed. Twisting stats to feed your narrative won't change reality.
They're only vanishingly rare in the least dangerous neighborhoods, which incidentally need less policing than the most dangerous ones such as St. Louis, Memphis, and Baltimore.
Yes, armed people threatening innocent lives deserve to be shot and killed. You can't wait for the cavalry when someone is armed and dangerous. If you're police you are the cavalry.
This argument baffles me. Do the Second and Fifth Amendments not exist? Possessing a firearm is not grounds for summary execution.
Today I received an email from Coursera advocating for a black transgender man who was "executed". Or, as it turned out, he killed a person and then pointed a gun at the police. Before that, he also posted his intentions on Facebook. Is that your hero?
Second amendment allows you to carry a weapon. You will be shot immediately when you point a gun at the police. Both statements are true and are not going to change. They do not contradict each other.
Which part of that do you disagree with?
By black trans man, I assume you’re referring to Tony McDade. The only account of his killing so far has come from the police themselves, who avoid accountability like the plague, so let’s begin by taking that with a massive shaker of salt.
But even if their account is true, the ideal outcome would have been for him to be arrested alive. Why is it too much to ask police to attempt to deescalate the situation before resorting to lethal force?
That's a poor and unnecessary assumption. Just in the last handful of years there has been a proliferation of good quality bodycam footage that gives unprecedented insight into police encounters. It would be more charitable to ask where the commenter's perspective is coming from.
"Situations where police are able to survive only because they were able to quickdraw and shoot a criminal first like some sort of cowboy are vanishingly rare and possibly purely fantasy."
It sounds like you may be the one who needs some experience watching body cam footage and reading about incidents. Just off the top, here is a quick refutation of your "fantasy" statement (and there are many more like it):
But, not even I would send cops out without guns with the prevalence of guns in America.
Right now, cops are legal bullies that we have to suffer under.
Is this supposed to be a violent crime now? Cops should not even deal with the police.
Sorry, I meant that this should not be something that the police deals with.
Uhhhhh, damn dude. Words kinda fail me here. As a male Marine, with several years practice in BJJ, I find your comment either offensive, or just plain stupid. I've had my ass kicked many, many times by female Marines. I had several MCMAP (Marine Corps Martial Art Program) trainers who were female. For that job, you are required to win at full contact hand to hand combat with people bigger and stronger than you. Your comment is sexist for one, and ignorant for another. I have a few female friends who've read your comment, and would like to have a friendly roll with you, if you are game.
Needs systems to limit access to any footage that is not concerning a criminal complaint, but existing cryptographic technology can make it so only the courts have access to the encryption keys if implemented with the right process and key management systems.
It will cost more but what if we pair cops with non cop observers or participants? Like someone trained to talk with people and asses rather than just bust heads. Maybe it could even be volunteer sign a waiver and be a community observer? Or jury duty style even.
Then, if head busting is actually needed (and sadly occasionally it is, please don't be naive) the head buster is on hand. But it should be much rarer.
Something like balance of power in government to prevent one party from doing whatever it wants. That is what seems to be what is missing in police work. It's all one sided and few checks and balances.
This idea that beating people is acceptable law enforcement procedure is ludicrous and part of the problem.
"Use of force" would be a more appropriate term.
Considering how much is spent on weapons training, this would likely be a net cost reduction. "Camera cops" could probably be paid less because they would have less risk of being in violent situations, don't have mental anguish of making life or death decisions daily, and less animosity from the community.
The police ARE civilians. They are not military, nor are they subject to military justice or discipline, and their training and function in society is (whether they like it or not) entirely different. They are members of the community, not an occupying army.
This might seem like pedantry but it’s not: using the word civilian for non-police takes the militarization of the police as an unquestioned assumption.
I have to be honest, I am not sure what the solution is here. On the whole, I think they need better training, but what that would look like.. I am afraid to say that topic is over my head.
You never know when they might come in handy.
Anyone have any general advice for building them yourself with a Pi or Arduino?
He uses ifttt and their motion detection feature to text him when the cameras sense changes when he'e not in his home (well when his phone isn't at home anyway..).
I recommend buying commercial IP cameras for outdoors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...
However it's interesting how flipping that argument around would cause all sorts of discomfort by the very people who advocated it in the other direction. (Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that was in fact the point you were making.)
Regent Law Professor James Duane gives us startling reasons why we should always exercise our 5th Amendment rights when questioned by government officials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
http://www.olddominionbarassociation.com/Resources/Documents...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nyclu.stop...