The real problem is that the cops face no recourse for blatantly defying a law they're suppose to follow - these are people that are, after all, suppose to enforce the law.
It's a similar problem (albeit much less extreme) to what's happening right now in Myanmar with the military. It's so difficult to defuse because the military and the civilians there have such an adversarial relationship due to the long years of dictatorship.
The solution in both cases is to reincorporate the warrior subculture (police or military) into civilian life. I just don't know how you achieve that.
I have friends that believe that the only solution is starting a war just to provide the cultural outlet. Destroying warrior culture altogether is not an answer either (and a foolish idea besides), but I hope we can discover some other answer before the next war. Aliens maybe?
Cut personnel in each branch by half, significantly consolidate bases, and modestly increase pay for the people who remain.
Then, redirect the enormous savings to actually useful jobs programs. Build roads instead of running around in circles in rural Alabama/North Carolina for four years.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733...
Europe's not going to afford to carry out a successful land invasion of Russia anytime soon, but if that's the level of defense spending Trump was looking for, I'm glad he was told to pound sand.
Trump wanted to raise it to 4%.
Not true. The popular comparison is the US spends about as much as the next 10 countries combined. US is ~38% of the world's defense spending.
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
As a percentage of GDP US defense spending is near its post WW II low.
In other words 4% of the world's population and 40% of its defense spending. Fucking jesus these feel like silly numbers to discuss -- the USA's military dumbassery puts Rome to shame. The latter collapsed because of its over-reach (well, unless you attended a conservative seminary, in which case it was clearly the "lack of morality on display in the Roman bath houses" or some such similar Very Serious Sociology/"Church History" That's Definitely Not Just USA Christian Nationalist Ur-Fascism.)
Economy size to defense spending is probably more a relevant ratio than population. 23% of the world economy, 38% of defense spending.
Defense spending is near all time lows. It didn't collapse the country in the 50s when it hit 11.3% of GDP. It didn't collapse the country in the 60s when it hit 8.6%. It didn't collapse the economy in the 80's when it hit 5.7%. We at sitting just over 3% now. If really you are worried that 3.4% going to cause the country to collapse, you can rest easy.
I just think you need to filter out the nut-jobs that think they're Rambo and view the streets as a warzone.
My suspicion is that the kinds of soldiers who become problem police officers are the soldiers who didn't actually face combat abroad. I imagine it's the kind of soldier who fantasized about front-line service but wasn't quite cut out for it for one reason or another and they've directed their disappointment about that into being an abusive police officer.
That said, yea, glory hounds would make really scary police officers.
The archetypical "warrior cop" is a non-veteran who likes military imagery but has no experience with military discipline or subordination.
The problem is every time this is brought up, it's met with talk of how reform is possible, reform is the answer, you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason).
The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.
And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.
Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.
Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff.
After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met.
Moved as far as way as possible.
Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead.
Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma".
This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
> We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service
There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution.
About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
Why should the same logic not apply to police forces?
Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means.
Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.
The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail.
A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment.
Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
Nah. This is completely reasonable. We tend to have punishments that are large multiples of the benefits of committing the crime, because people know they will not likely be caught. So, you face the situation of doing something that you 90% know you'll get away with, but the remaining 10% is really, really inconvenient. And if you keep rolling the dice, you'll get caught eventually. (And in a perfect world, would be rehabilitated).
> Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients
NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins. No mortality benefit, you need to treat 217 to prevent one nonfatal heart attack, and you need to treat 313 people to prevent one nonfatal stroke-- so about 0.5% see a benefit.
We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets, so I think you're engaging in hyperbole to compare this small percentage of our salary that goes to policing to spending 30% of our salary.
I am paying a bunch of money for home insurance and it only rarely helps anyone...
This is another fantasy. It's only true for certain types of people. Are the punishments for crimes committed by police officers scaled based on the likelihood of punishment?
> NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins.
I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
> We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets
All of the money that cities use to purchase police service comes from taxes. The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
No, but they should be.
> I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
Do you pay 30% of your salary for policing?
> The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
That's an.. ahem.. interesting way to look at it. So if the city wastes twice as much money elsewhere, policing becomes a better deal?
Or if the city gets 30 pennies, and uses 33% of it to stop a fraction of crime, that's a bad deal?
It might be better to look at the services that residents receive in exchange for the amount they pay in taxes, instead of using some ridiculous metric based on fraction of one political entity's tax income.
Otherwise we come up with ridiculous silly comparisons. The sheriff is a tiny proportion of my county's expenditures, and police are a big proportion of my city's expenditures... by your metric, the sheriff is more cost effective, despite costing nearly the exact same amount per capita for the people they're first responders for. (Because the county gets a much bigger share of tax income and spends a bunch on other services that my city doesn't have to pay for).
Or if we're going with the health analogy-- we spend the overwhelming majority of our public health "income" on things with very high NNTs.
"Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
If a city represents the interests of its residents and the residents share an interest in material safety, then the question becomes: which strategies provide the residents as a whole with the most safety for the least expenditure? And which strategies are the most in harmony with the resident's other interests (e.g., equality, human dignity)?
For a given outcome: it's the same deal whether the city spends 33% on policing and it's 100x dollars, or if it spends 33% on policing and it's 1x dollars? Surely the proportion of residents' money spent on policing is what matters.
> "Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
Basically nothing achieves desired outcome. Case clearance rates are hardly a figure of merit for policing: I think it's likely that you believe as such, too. Or do you think the system would be better if it threw more people in jail?
Argue in good faith. There's plenty of an argument for different police policy without going through ridiculous gymnastics ("percentage of income", arguing low case clearance rates makes policing ineffective, etc). Otherwise, you end up losing the people who might mostly agree with you-- maybe on purpose, are you just trolling?
Similarly, most fines don't scale with wealth. So a speeding ticket might be a terrible blow for an impoverished individual, but completely inconsequential for the super rich.
Regarding what United States cities spend on police, Mother Jones has some information here: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-b...
Honestly, the numbers are surprising to me. Example: Normally, New York City is quoted as having the largest police force in the United States. However, NYC only spends 8% of its city budget on police. I lived in Manhattan for a few years, and it was normal to see police on foot/bike/car patrols even in wealthy, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.
Also: In the Mother Jones article pie charts, Oakland spends 44% of its city budget on police. But in the historical graphs below, they spend about 8%. There must be a subtle difference in what they are measuring, but it is unclear to me.
According to that list police budgets make up an average of 30% of overall spending.
But pension obligations are a pretty significant component of the price of policing, so excluding them in these calculations doesn't make a lot of sense.
20%-30% is pretty typical. Almost all cities with lower numbers have enormous transportation budgets (e.g., NYC -- they do spend a ton on police, but they also have transportation budget that's comparable to many states).
If someone picks your pocket, that’s theft. If someone steals something from your house while you’re at work, that’s burglary.
Had my bike stolen DIRECTLY in front of a security camera in Seattle.
The police didn't even bother to look for the plates on the car in the footage identify the person. They also wouldn't let me see the tape. They just showed up and said, "This is a cold case" and then left.
I guess the illusion of them showing up gave me some sense of validation.
People committing property crimes will trip themselves up and get caught eventually, even if the probability of any individual case being solved is low.
Second, as I understand burglary, it is a property crime, like breaking & entering into a home, business, or car. Robbery is person-to-person theft (stick-up by knife, gun, etc.) If we think about burglary for a moment, most burglaries happen when no one is around. Thus, imagine how difficult it is to have enough evidence to even lay a charge against someone. Vanishingly small. I'm not sure that is a good way to judge the effectiveness of police. I lived in an apartment building many years ago where someone got to the roof, then entered an open window and stole some things. The chances of catching this person are incredibly low. The police came to our building to ask questions and look at the inside of various apartments. The effort was made, but it would be nearly impossible to lay charges with so little tangible evidence.
Third, think about robbery. When I think about robbery, I think about "wrong place, wrong time" -- on a street alone at night. What are the chances the police will be able to gather enough evidence to lay a charge? Again, vanishingly small.
Lastly, about this clearance rate for these two crime categories: How does it compare to other high income countries like Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc.? I'm sure it is also fairly low.
The point is that we should take the massive amount of funding that police receive in the US ($5.1 billion of which has gone towards military vehicles and equipment through the DOD 1033 program) and reallocate it to strategies which extend to people other options beyond a cycle of crime and punishment.
See, e.g. here I'd agree with you totally: almost the entirety of that money spent on the militarization of police is worthless, or, worse, actively harmful. You don't need to make bullshit arguments to support it. Indeed, you weaken people's perceptions of the strength of the case when you give them bullshit arguments.
And the average clearance rate for murder is around 60.
Given that police prioritize some crimes over others, one should be careful in using the stats for things they don't place a priority on as a basis to pass judgement. If the violent crime rate could be lowered for example, say by removing the ability of a violent gang to operate (i.e., arrest and convict them), this frees up time to go after other crimes. We are looking at the current equilibrium achieved as a result of all their efforts, not some law of nature that happens either way (i.e. fixed clearance rates).
> Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists.
And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse.
If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Please provide a source for this. No need to rewrite history. I believe most historians agree that American policing was based off of the London policing system:
“The first police department in the United States was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. Those early departments all used the London Metropolitan Police as a model.”
If anything poor neighborhoods that have high crime need more police not less, there’s a reason Chicago and Detroit have problems and it’s not because of overpolicing.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
From Wikipedia [2]:
For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event.
These aren't the only influences on modern policing in the US, but it's hard to argue that the history of US policing isn't deeply intertwined with slave patrols, union busting efforts, and more generally protecting the interests of the ruling class.
[1] - https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Somewhat independently the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 created an income stream for groups to capture escaped slaves and return them to the south. Critically, southerners needed to fund these activities. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 swapped this by requiring northern states to actively capture escaped slaves. It essentially mandated large scale institutions of government backed policing.
The south had a separate but related system of slave patrols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol Interestingly at the same time the north was required to hunt for escaped slaves a trade patrol was actively suppressing the African slave trade going back to 1891.
Anyway, this stuff is may be relevant in terms of the history of specific institutions, but it’s arguable how relevant this is in a modern context.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...
Nearly ten years ago, Reason posted a comparison of police recruitment videos from Decatur, Georgia, and Newport Beach, California. They illustrate beautifully the two mindsets you describe.
https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-e...
The videos don't play on that page any more, so here are direct links.
Decatur: https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU
Newport Beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk
Most of us do not consider apprehension of violent criminals to be a “blatantly ridiculous reason.”
> The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.
This is true.
> And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
This is false.
> Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
This is a leftist talking point that is designed to avoid recognizing that abuse of authority is not a consequence of a specific country’s troubled history but a consequence of the existence of authority. They do this because they can, not because some oligarch somewhere wants them to.
> And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.
It doesn’t happen because the ability to hold the police accountable is the same as the ability of the police to hold members of society accountable, i.e. coercion. And coercion always begets abuse. So your institution that holds the police accountable becomes the one who is responsible for people getting beat to death, etc, and the cycle continues because we can’t seem to come to terms with the idea that society shouldn’t recognize norms of differential status.
> Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.
You’re never going to make any progress on this because you’re wrong about this being the desired outcome, and so any solution based on this premise is flawed.
That said, if you re-read your post from the perspective of someone living in Scotland, UK, it won't have the same impact. In theory, your thoughts should equally apply in the UK, but UK residents would probably disagree. I don't live in the UK, but I have some friends from various parts of the UK. There is such a different attitude about the police in the UK. Yes, they make mistakes, and there are a few bad apples. However, overall, there is respect. One of the key points is "police by consent". If you don't know about this concept in UK policing, I strongly recommend you Google a bit to read about it. Basically: The attitude of police is that they need to tread lightly in a community because they "police by consent". I know HN has many UK readers, so I would appreciate some comments about this!
A deeper question to ask might be: Why have some US police forces descended so much (so little public trust) versus other police forces in the UK? In particular, from my non-resident view, it seems Scotland police have a very strong, if imperfect, relationship with their communities. What could US police forces learn from their UK counterparts? A few years ago, a New York Times journalist followed some US police who traveled to Scotland. They observed how the local police were trained and how they behaved during patrols and arrests. In short: Very differently!
On a positive note: It is also worth looking at the Los Angeles police department. In the 1990s, it was one of the worst in the United States for community trust and police violence. After the Rodney King incident and riots that followed, there was a huge effort to "clean-up" the police force. The police leaders actively sought to rebuild ties with community and religious leaders. I have read multiple news and magazine articles about this relationship. When something bad happens in LA that might trigger inter-ethnic/religious tension, the LA police immediately reach-out to community leaders. They have public and private meetings to discuss the issue. My point: The community has a voice and feels heard. Yes, it is not perfect, but it demonstrates that real change is possible.
Some police officers want to maintain a safe and secure neighborhood, others just like having power and want to engage in military cosplay but real.
The police departments that maintain an effective community rapport are also going to be the ones that actively spend budgeted time and money weeding out the second class of cop. If you aren't vigilant about it, your PD will be chock full of the military cosplay types. Why? Well, a lot of the latter types are... well, I'm not going to say the nickname, since it's quite offensive in the UK (less so in the US). But they will often bounce from PD to PD. Once they wind up getting on the wrong end of an internal affairs investigation, they'll usually just resign to avoid punishment, move to another town, and sign up there. There's plenty of underfunded PDs that really aren't going to stick their nose up at bad cops.
My experience showed me some of the horrendous things they have to deal with. There’s some genuinely dangerous people out there - I can’t imagine living somewhere without armed resistance to deal with it.
With that said it’s critical officers form a relationship with the community they’re policing. That’s what good policing is and unfortunately the drug war has made it difficult.
This separation of police and civilian is the core of the problem. The citizens of a country need to be able to perceive members of the police force as "one of us", rather than "one of them". In some countries the only real obstacle to reaching that point is that some people won't strictly adhere to a policy of de-escalation. In other countries there are of course far bigger, institutional, issues at play.
Disbanding the Iraqi military was a very interesting event but the militia-like groups coming out of that action is more an issue of ceasing pay to folks with no other options in a pretty dysfunctional economy than anything else.
In this situation there would be more armed citizens than disgruntled ex-cops so the problem should take care of itself in short order.
The issue isn't that the police are radicalized and disgruntled. It's that they have the budgetary and legal resources to operate with impunity. Take that away and they're just a gang. Other gangs will eat them for lunch.
I’ll just admire it for a minute then adjust accordingly.
It is obnoxious though, we are expected to act in good faith with the ocifers, but they don't do the same.
Playing music to make a public space unrecordable seems like a flaw in how the public space works
Steps toward the generic nearly always lower discussion quality [1], because the larger the topic becomes, the harder it is to say anything new about it. Therefore the conversations tend to repeat the same points over and over, same as the last N times the topic came up (and this has been one of the most-argued, if not most burnt-out, topics in the last year). They also to get nastier as they proceed. My semi-serious theory is that the mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information [2].
The generic topics are like massive planets that exert a strong pull on passing discussions—there's always a strong tendency to hop to the nearest generic orbit, because that's what our pre-existing mental associations connect to [3]. The trouble with this is that points away from curiosity, which is interested in new and specific information more than in familiar and general arguments. Curiosity wants the diffs—those are what's interesting [4]. Generally we're not aware of these competing directions in ourselves, but the effects show up unmistakeably at scale.
It's not that you or the other commenters did anything wrong! it's perfectly natural for conversation to drift in this way, and a balance of familiarity and curiosity makes for good conversation. But from a moderation perspective, it's our job to look out for the site globally, and try to dampen the sequences where each step makes sense locally but the sequence still ends up in a much less curious place.
That's a longer explanation than you probably expected, but since it's not possible to explain every individual move (it would be too much work, and also too noisy), I try to make up for it by periodically giving longer ones.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] And the hottest controversies are even stronger—those are like black holes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Excerpts from: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/you-have-first-amendme....
> You have a First Amendment right to record the police. Federal courts and the Justice Department have recognized the right of individuals to record the police. Although the Supreme Court has not squarely ruled on the issue, there is a long line of First Amendment case law from the high court that supports the right to record the police. And federal appellate courts in the First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have directly upheld this right. EFF has advocated for this right in many amicus briefs.
> The right to record the police unequivocally includes the right to take pictures and record video. There is an added legal wrinkle when recording audio—whether with or without video. Some police officers have argued that recording audio without their consent violates wiretap laws. Courts have generally rejected this argument. The Seventh Circuit, for example, held that the Illinois wiretap statute violated the First Amendment as applied to audio recording on-duty police officers.
> There are two kinds of wiretaps laws: those that require “all parties” to a conversation to consent to audio recording (12 states), and those that only require “one party” to consent (38 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal statute). Thus, if you’re in a one-party consent state, and you’re involved in an incident with the police (that is, you’re a party to the conversation) and you want to record audio of that interaction, you are the one party consenting to the recording and you don’t also need the officer’s consent. If you’re in an all-party consent state, and your cell phone or recording device is in plain view, your open audio recording puts the officer on notice and thus their consent might be implied.
> Additionally, wiretap laws in both all-party consent states and one-party consent states typically only prohibit audio recording of private conversations—that is, when the parties to the conversation have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Police officers exercising their official duties in public do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Neither do civilians in public places who speak to police officers in a manner audible to passersby. Thus, if you’re a bystander and want to audio record an officer’s interaction with another person in a public space, regardless of whether you’re in a state with an all-party or one-party consent wiretap statute, you may audio record the encounter.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/11.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Enforcement varies.
If you're broadcasting it electronically, like radio, it's OK as long as you have a blanket broadcast license.
Given the cop specifically asked and confirmed that there were people listening, he probably should have had a license.
Play a copyrighted track in your business lobby and see how long it takes ASCAP to track you down.
If the officer is playing the music incidentally as they go about their day, would that be fair use?
I wonder if a de-music service would be feasible so that the copyrighted audio within a video would be detected and suppressed without suppressing the video and other noises.
Obviously, it's not.
Maybe uploading a video containing such music is.
If you are playing music to yourself, and someone films you - you are not infringing - the person filming and uploading is - possibly, though that's more questionable.
That cases are not pursed is incidental.
I imagine it's hard to build a case against the guy blasting his car radio without a recording, and the affected people aren't particularly unhappy with it.
If copyright was more like trademarks, and they had to protect it to keep it, you'd see more cases of people playing their music too loud.
We'll see the same happen with streaming services as smart TVs get popular. You'll have to pay per viewer as licenses change
If there is some random person filming you - then they are infringing - not you.
- Section 101 of the 1976 Copyright Act
Anyone playing the music to themselves is not playing it where 'a substantial number of persons' can hear it, nor are they projecting in such a manner.
If this were the case, then anyone playing music, anywhere would be in violation, which is obviously ridiculous and no, it's not about some odd technicality of the law.
It is straight up, 100% legal to play music to yourself.
Given that there are millions of instances of people doing this every day, and zero cases of infringement in these scenarios, it would seem both the letter of the law, and case history quite handily demonstrate how crazy the claim is.
HN threads descend into a weird distortion field when dealing with hot-button issues such as DRM, policing, NIMBYism, blockchain, privacy etc.
-> Someone playing music to themselves (and not filming themselves and putting said video in public) is not infringing on anything.
-> Someone filming someone else else playing music, may be infringing by virtue of the fact they are posting the content 'in public'.
I don't think it's a matter of 'a difficult case to make' against a person being filed while listening to music to themselves, there is no case.
The videographer, yes.
Twitch / Youtubers know this as they cannot stream DRM'd music in their streams, but of course, they are directly making said music public, in which case it's a legal problem.
Playing music to yourself, your friends etc. is 100% legal in all cases.
The cop doesn't need to make any arguments whatsoever about who it's being played for.
The person doing the filming and distributing is the person infringing.
It's completely obvious, there is no ambiguity.
The only approach, however hairbrained and ridiculous - would be for the IP owner to go after both the content video/distributor - and then somehow also rope the cop in as though they were somehow 'part of the preformative act' of making the video. But that's beyond a stretch.
In reality there are no hairs to split. If there is infringement, it's the person making the video.
[1] IANAL, etc, etc.
If you’re just turning up a broadcast radio station, I don’t think that is public performance.
Now that I think about it, if we could get ASCAP to go after the kids with their rattling cars... Hmmm!
Now on one hand, every day people will find this absurd. However, I am pretty sure it is not a defense that it’s not enforced evenly in all circumstances. A lot of people go 5mph over the speed limit without consequences; means nothing if you’re in court for it.
However, if you are acting in bad faith, you can expect people to become more creative with their use of the law against you. The police do this all the time.
And I really, really don’t think we need to argue that the police officer here just really wanted to share his taste in music while being uncooperative and has no idea what’s going on.
P.S.: IANAL.
I do know lots of small businesses (pop-ups) use streamed media -so do company picnics and so on. It’s a thing. Officially I’m sure ASCAP frowns on this. On the other hand it’s a fruitless pursuit.
However, it might possibly become a different story in this case. Here is a pretty objectionable use of copyrighted music on a small scale. It makes copyright holders look bad because the system they lobbied for could now possibly be used to help corrupt or abusive police officers escape accountability and censor opposition. Ordinarily, a copyright holder taking action against a small scale case like this would seem like a David and Goliath situation, but in this case the “little guy” is not the person playing the music.
Acting in bad faith is, of course, one thing, when you are an individual and you are acting against a large conglomerate. It doesn’t justify the action, but the optics of enforcement are not great. Just remember issues like Mike Rowe Soft for example. (P.S.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...)
This case is more complicated because the perceived wrong is not exactly the use of copyrighted music but how copyright systems are being used against a citizen exercising their rights.
It remains to be seen what happens, but if this sort of behavior continues I can at least bet on musicians not being very happy to hear when their music is used for this purpose.
It's ridiculously obvious, otherwise, literally anything with a speaker would practically be banned.
The person making a video with the music as part of the content, may be technically subjected to DRM, or rather, when they upload it they will be.
> But every now and then, a business makes the decision to ignore the legal rights of the music creators that help them make money. We only pursue lawsuits as a last resort after multiple attempts to negotiate with the licensee in question.
https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing/why-ascap-license...
Oh as I mentioned in a different comment I think this should be illegal and might already be illegal - but pulling some rando law out of the aether to force the charge isn't a great tactic.
Edit: Just to clarify, one of the other reasons I'm skeptical of using copyright law for this is because the intent doesn't match what the officer's intent would be allowing for officers to have a pretty good chance of avoiding any repercussions and because the penalties of sentencing are inappropriate. There are existing legal recourses in most instances for restricting the ability for civilians to record police incidents - if an officer is abusing copyright law to accomplish this silencing then they are likely running afoul of those laws and should be sentenced with breaking those laws since the penalties are more appropriate.
1. I'm going to guess it has happened sometime because racism, but it really shouldn't be. And thankfully a quick googling didn't turn up a litany of results.
No more or less terrible than automatically removing the video of the officer is. It's the same law! If it's unethical to prevent an officer from playing music it's equally unethical to exploit someone else's enforcement of that law for reasons that have nothing to do with playing music.
Public performance isn't really some random law pulled out of the aether. It's one of the basic tenets of copyright and serves as the basis for the majority of copyright licensing in the U.S. Even the take-down process that the officer is looking to exploit exists because of the the rights holder's right to public performance (an Instagram video is a public performance).
That it is illegal (criminal) to willfully perform a copyrighted work in public is well established law and not the least bit random.
The point being that no rights holder, in their right mind would prospect someone for this, in the same way that they don't go after people walking around with boomboxes.
There might be a crazy example if this happening once. But mostly nobody gets prosecuted for walking around playing music on their phone.
As in, maybe there has been 1 or 2 times, in history, where a court has ever punished anyone, for merely walking around, playing music on their phone, if it has ever happened at all.
> there are plenty of bands that would be happy
And the band would waste a lot of money and lose in court doing that.
I am truly curious as to how far you actually think this goes. As in, do you truly believe, that, to give a more extreme example, if someone was walking around, and had headsets in, and was listen to music but someone walking next to them could hear it, that any court ever would call this a public performance?
I mean someone can hear it right? That makes it a public performance? No. That is ridiculous. This would never happen.
Because that is only a slightly more extreme situation.
Copywrite law would be completely meaningless, if you are willing to bit the bullet on these kinds of extreme hypotheticals.
In your headphone example, I'd say it's pretty clear that this would not be a public performance. Let's approach the problem from the other direction. If you have a store and play music over speakers in the store then this does count and stores pay licensing fees for this. What about if an employee regularly plays music with a bluetooth speaker while they're working at the cash register? This is a representative of the company playing music where customers can hear it so you could argue it still counts. What if they don't use the speaker and play the music directly over their phone's speakers? Does the quality of the speakers matter? What if instead of a store it's a government employee working somewhere like the DMV? Is the government exempt from copyright laws? What's the difference between the DMV employee and a cop? They both work for the government, doing a job where they interact with the public, and are playing music over speakers where the public around them can hear it.
At what point in that series does it stop being a public performance? Where exactly does the law draw the line? Is there even a clear line in established case law? Does that precedent vary depending on your location in the US? I would be surprised if there is relevant precedent for this example. There wouldn't normally be any incentive for anyone in the music industry to claim this type of scenario is a public performance. However, I think that changes when the police start doing this to as a way to avoid criticism.
I mean, if I were a business open to the public, playing music without paying the fees, I'd get in trouble. Here we have police business, open to the public, playing music, pressumably without paying the fees. Especially, if the officer is doing it when they know a recording is being made, that's an intentional act of public performance, or facilitating copying or somesuch prohibited conduct with copyrighted materials.
Also, depending on the volume, could be violating a noise ordinance.
The license to share tends not to be transitive.
They might be doing this improperly for now, but it's not hard to fix.
The exclusive license could be found unconstitutional though?
Because it gives the impression that the cops have something to hide when they are triggering the Facebook copyright filter, seemingly on purpose. Caesar's wife must be above reproach.
Motives aside isn't a valid reduction of their action, the motives you have when you take an action are very much a part of whether that action is illegal. This is why both murder and manslaughter charges exist as separate crimes in most legal jurisdictions.
I don't know if this would be strictly illegal - it'll depend on what, precisely, police officers are required to do w.r.t. civilian oversight and it might require specific legislation to resolve. However, the intent of the police officers is to prevent people from filming, if they are attempting to accomplish this through playing music because more direct actions have been restricted then a court is probably not going to look kindly on their actions. As a parallel if you are barred from dumping hazardous materials on state park land and instead dump that on an interstate that passes through state park land a court will likely find you in violation.
If the cops are dumb enough to have put this in writing (most cops generally forget that text messages are admissable in court), it would seem that the government is intentionally restricting free speech.
You can film them all you want, but they aren't forced to stand there. They can go away if they like.
I hope the RIAA comes down hard on this. Just as hard as they came down on Napster, tbh.