to quote a line ive often been delivered by police -
“if you didnt do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
It's back to the public not actually knowing what really happened, except in situations where its recorded by a 3rd party or there is a whistleblower from their own ranks. And we have to hope these people are brave enough to step forward and handle the pressure placed on them because they did, in order for justice to prevail.
These are solved problems. Hundreds of agencies use body cams now, and this has been dealt with.
you smoking a cig in an alley on your 15 minute break? you should have every right and privilege on earth.
you running 10,000 person strong group of people with the legal right to use force against your fellow man fighting to deny people their personal liberties with a long history of corruption? i don't care if there's cameras in the bathrooms.
I think a good starting point for squaring this is to examine it in the context of what else the administration is doing (or not doing) to protect the privacy of citizens. This move has an enormous deleterious effect on police accountability in exchange for a fairly small increase in citizen privacy, so if the administration is ignoring more effective ways to improve the citizenry's privacy you can safely infer what really motivated their decision to back away from body cams.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...
We’re arresting and irrevocably detaining folks not only without a warrant, but in violation of court orders.
Which doesn’t really happen, I mean cops murder innocent people and it’s a struggle to get meaningful consequences for _that_.
This is part of what ACAB means - the justice system is woefully against the interest of the public. If we hadn’t seen time and again cops get away with literal murder, if there were actually consequences, and if police unions didn’t have the ability to hold a community hostage, maybe fewer people would be ACAB. The fact that we even had to have a Supreme Court case about whether cops have a duty to protect civilians (surprise, it was ruled that they don’t) should be evidence that the system is rotten.
if you define ACAB in this way and competence defined as protecting the public from crime and maintaining the common good, then yea probably a lot if not ACAB.
I’ll share a story because this one moment in my life I was certain I was milliseconds from death and probably is the closest I ever came to it and it would have been at the hands of a cop “doing their job” with no bad intentions, just doing it poorly.
I worked in public transportation in a small, extremely wealthy community with a police force I’d describe as well funded and is considered highly trained. Part of my job required me to work very late hours into 2-4am. I took public transportation to work and bicycled home.
Unbeknownst to me, there had been some type of home invasion in the area as I was leaving work at 3am, and they shut the area down with roadblocks and set heavily armed officers up at every street intersection. I was riding my bike through the side alleys like I usually did to get home, unaware of the situation.
It’s pitch black except for some street lights nearby. Suddenly I get lit up by half a dozen bright lights in my face with armed officers pointing their weapons and screaming at me to get off my bike and on the ground. i did but had my backpack still on, they screamed to take it off as I did on my knees i saw an officer walk straight forward to me quickly with his hands on his gun aiming directly at my skull. I will never forget the look in his eyes, i felt i was toast. luckily i didnt panic and slowly put the backpack on the ground. then they realized i was a transportation worker and let me go and told me there had been a robbery. I was rattled but left.
The thing that really chapped my ass though and made the situation worse was at the next intersection, almost the exact same thing happened, because the bozos at the first one didnt radio their idiot friends and tell them not to shoot me. so twice in the space of like 5 mins i get guns drawn on me - they figured it out quicker the second time, but i stupidly popped off a little “are you gonna point your guns at me a third time or tell the next guys not to shoot me,” which didnt help the tension and got my bag searched for my trouble.
Experiencing something like that and knowing what a razors edge it could have been to dying for essentially no reason at the hands of a moron that makes more than i ever will with a pension irks me and always probably will.