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Cops To Start CrimeTube To Report Offenses
An anonymous reader writes "UK citizens may soon be able to report crimes by uploading videos taken from their mobile phones. Ian Readhead, director of information for the Association of Chief Police Officers, told silicon.com that forces want to build a video reporting portal to allow the public to upload potential evidence. Checking YouTube is now a routine part of many police investigations, he said, and police want to build on the extra functionality that this gives them."
So as a subscriber, I get to see stories before TFA is slashdotted. The preview stories come with this little question: "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor." I don't think emailing the Slashdot editors is going to fix the problems I see with this one!
TFA gives the example of a white van involved in some crime. Well, I have a neighbor whose dog barks all night, but drives a brown van. No problem, a little Photoshop here and there, and voilá! "Instant Evidence"! The neighbors dog spends 6-8 months in the kennel while his owner does the same thing.
John
Your every action is already videotaped in England.
This is brilliant, but I don't know how well it will work.
I tried it out, to see if I could get results. After spending a full day videotaping the dealings of the CEO of a major US company this week, and posting it, the police responded "Well, I mean, we don't really deal with this kind of stuff. Find me a guy who stole some cigarettes or something"
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Charge them with disseminating material that might be potentially useful to terrorists, of course. Easy enough.
Orwellian much?
If they had this in the US, I would upload video of my ATT phone/wireless/internet bill.
What happens when you upload a video of the police abusing a citizen (assuming you can smuggle your copy out of the situation)? Do they auto-delete or does the spin machine automatically fire up?
Why would the cops care? They have "evidence", someone ends up in the pokey, and they get to be "tough on crime". Everyone is guilty of something so whoever they do throw the book at had it coming anyways.
(Brought to you by the Word of the Day: Quota)
I'm more interested in a mobile phone YouTube to report misdeeds and abuses by police officers.
I say that even though most of my interactions with police officers, even if they haven't been necessarily pleasant due to the circumstances, have been professional. It's just that I've been there and seen enough abuses of authority by bad cops to know that when it does happen, the only thing that's going to help you is video evidence.
I wish those nine out ten good cops wouldn't cover for that one bad cop.
These evil word bastards are perpetuating non-Cubic myth. Only Dr. Gene Ray, wisest human, can possibly understand the depth and importance of this harmonic system with 4 simultaneous days in a single rotation...
Oh, wait; Crime Tube? Um, err, sorry about that. My bad.
Man, that sucks.
I finally have a server that I can store all my snuff films on!
Just like in East Germany (back in the day)... Spy on your neighbors, report back to The State!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So what are they going to do when people start uploading videos en masse of the police breaking the law?
Every keyboard I have ever seen has a "Delete" key. The police will eventually find it on theirs.
Post it on YouTube AND their site. If it doesn't appear on their site, come back to YouTube and say "I sent this to the official crime-reporting site but they pretended it didn't happen" and watch your view counter spin like Orwell in his grave.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...watch your view counter spin like Orwell in his grave.
You may need to gear it down and use a tachometer. I understand he's starting to fly apart in there.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Exactly what bothers me about such schemes. Your neighbour becomes your possible enemy... divide the people so they cannot possibly move against an oppressive gov't, because they all distrust one another too much.
Cue the "in Soviet Russia" jokes... oh, how about this one??
Subject: KGB
Place and time: Somewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
The phone rings at KGB headquarters.
"Hello?"
"Hello, is this KGB?"
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in some fallen trees on his property."
"This will be noted." Next day, the KGB patrol arrives at the Rabinovitz's house. They chop the trees into pieces, but find no diamonds.
Later the phone rings at the Rabinovitz house.
"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes. Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Arguments like yours seem not well thought out to me. Yes you could frame him for a crime. Hell, why not shoot a few people and leave the smoking gun in his garage too?
Well I'll tell you why, because police actually INVESTIGATE a crime. They aren't going to look at one video or piece of evidence, throw him in jail, and call it a day. They are going to look at all the evidence as a body to see what fits...
So what happens when the evidence YOU submitted turns out to be the only information that doesn't mesh with everything else they have collected? They are going to come asking you some tough questions, and if you really tried to frame someone I hope you like sharing rooms with rough men because that's where you are headed.
There's a reason in the past why people generally don't try to make up evidence and video is no exception. Personally I think it's great that people can submit video to help catch criminals if they are too concerned about personal safety to get involved. Wouldn't you rather have user submitted videos of crime submitted by real people than have monitoring cameras everywhere "just in case?". I lean on the side of trusting people in an area to say "hey, there's a problem here".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there a such a thing as a wireless streaming video camera? Then if you happen to film the cops in some sort of dubious behavior, you can hand over the camera like a good little citizen when the cops ask for it, knowing that the video is safe on a server somewhere miles away?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I don't know how we ever got the idea that police work is particularly dangerous. (Wait...yes I do...from the police!). Police work isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous occupations. Death rate for Loggers about 95 per 100,000 per year, pilots about 90, steel workers about 50. Police are about 6 per 100,000. Only about 1/2 of the police deaths are due to encounters with violent criminals, the rest are things like traffic accidents and heart attacks. We don't condone brutality on citizens by garbage collectors, and their job is 5 times as dangerous as the police.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
The resolution to that case was fairly interesting. FOr those not familiar with it you can see the video here. Basically this officer, Patrick Pogan, picked a guy out of a huge group of cyclists riding in a rally and decided to body check him, hard. In the video the cyclist clearly steers away from the cop and the officer charges him. The officer then arrested the cyclist, writing in the police report that he was weaving in and out of traffic, forcing vehicles to swerve or stop, and generally disrupting the normal flow of traffic. He said that he suffered lacerations on his arms because the cyclists steered his bike into him and knocked him down, and that when he tried to arrest him he began flailing, kicking and screaming, "You are pawns in the game!". The cyclist spent the next day in police custody charged with attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.
The charges against the cyclist were dropped. Pogan, after being a police officer for three weeks got put on desk duty during the investigation. Then on Dec 16, 2008 he appeared in court and pleaded not guilty to felony charges of of falsifying business records and filing a false instrument and misdemeanor charges of third-degree assault, second-degree harassment and making a punishable false written statement. After the indictment, he was suspended. Two months later he resigned as the department prepared to fire him.
In a way this cyclist was lucky, the cop was so stupid he did it in front of at least 100 onlookers. His partner saw it all and still went along with it which doesn't say much for him either. Had there not been so many people around the outcome could've been very different.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes