It's curious how these problems are highly correlated with the police doing questionable shit.
The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be believable for me. Maybe in low-income/low-justice countries that's an assumption one can make, but not where I live at least.
You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks.
Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure.
Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
> Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
If you're trying to be fair by including the former sentence, then that should also include a "many, many" before "exceptions" unless you have the data I was asking after. As it stands, this adds no further information
> You can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing while an officer was violating someone's rights.
If you think the cops are so bad, what about the criminals? I'd also claim the cop was violating my rights if I did something wrong and it's my word against theirs. How are you ever going to know what happened there? You can assume the cop was corrupt and the citizen innocent in all those cases, but if it were knowable then the citizen would have brought it to court rather than to the media, so I'm assuming it's unknowable who was right in most of those cases
There has to be a fraction of cases where their rights were not being violated as claimed and footage is still unavailable. Whether that is 1/10 or 9/10, neither of us apparently has the information to make such a claim, but you're making extraordinary assumptions without extraordinary evidence
The criminals don't have the power of the state behind them. We're supposed to hold police to a higher standard than criminals.
> but if it were knowable then the citizen would have brought it to court rather than to the media,
Why would you think that? Do you think that courts and lawyers are free? Most people in the US have to work to survive and live paycheck to paycheck. Missed work means they can lose their homes. Even if someone had the time and the money to fight against the police in court the courts are heavily biased in favor of the police and they would have to live in fear of retaliation for the rest of their lives.
Even when police are caught on camera clearly committing crimes there is no guarantee that anything will be done about it. Evidence doesn't always mean much when the police can investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong.
If police are supposed to have body cam footage and don't, they shouldn't be believed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're mixing up two mechanisms of law here:
In criminal law, the police investigates and the public prosecutor brings the case to court. The police often has a discretion to not bring a case if they don't want to, or to indeed frame a case in their favor if they aren't granted that liberty by the lawmaker
In civil law, you can sue for damages (such as lost time off work) or for other things that are made illegal (such as an organisation not following warranty legislation). The police is not involved here and bringing such a case is at your discretion
The latter system is what I had in mind when I said you could bring the evidence to court. Though it might also apply in the former case, in a situation where evidence is inadmissible if obtained illegally (this is not always the case)
> Even as the proliferation of police body cameras and bystander cellphone video has turned a national spotlight on extreme police tactics, qualified immunity, under the careful stewardship of the Supreme Court, is making it easier for officers to kill or injure civilians with impunity. The Supreme Court’s role is evident in how the federal appeals courts, which take their cue from the high court, treat qualified immunity. In an unprecedented analysis of appellate court records, Reuters found that since 2005, the courts have shown an increasing tendency to grant immunity in excessive force cases – rulings that the district courts below them must follow. The trend has accelerated in recent years. (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...)
The difference between cops and criminals is criminals aren't public servants, granted powers beyond the norm, so they can do their jobs. That being a literal fact, yes.. they are held to a higher standard or should be. You're arguing a false equivalence.
As far as knowing "what happened there", that's literally the point of bodycams.
There is a fraction of the cases where someone's rights weren't violated. A fraction, a lesser amount, a smaller subset, a number lower in value, etc. etc.
And you apparently didn't even try to look at the web, so...ok!
if only there was a recording device to record what actually happened....
>>You can assume the cop was corrupt and the citizen innocent in all those cases,
yes that is exactly how it should work, that is how the system is setup to work. We have some how flipped that in recent years. At all times you should assume the government is abusing you, unless they can prove they are not.
No video, I side with the people not the government
>>There has to be a fraction of cases where their rights were not being violated as claimed and footage is still unavailable. Whether that is 1/10 or 9/10
It would be an error rate far far far far far less than that, and when you factor in most calls have more than one officers, plus patrol cars that have their own recording devices, plus citizen witnesses, plus business surveillance I think we get to such an unlikely circumstance to be statically impossible
If you search for "hardware was working fine", yes, you probably won't find much, because that's not something people complain about.
I'm talking about numerous court cases, where bodycam footage was magically unavailable, when all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to crimes committed.
I'm not after hunting all cops, or any of that horse shit.
I'm referring to accountability beyond the current 6 week paid vacation, qualified immunity slapped on pretty much everything, being able to simply quit a job after committing literal crimes and get a job in an adjacent city doing the same thing, and stupid -isms, like "Yeah, that guy died not because we choked him until he couldn't breathe, but because of "excited delirium".