Slashdot Mirror
Seattle Hacker Catches Cops Who Hid Arrest Tapes
An anonymous reader writes "In 2008, the Seattle Police illegally arrested security consultant Eric Rachner for refusing to show ID. After Rachner filed a formal complaint, he was prosecuted for obstructing, and the police claimed that videos of the arrest were unavailable — until Rachner's research uncovered proof that the police had the videos all along." It's an interesting story of how he figured out how the system in use by Seattle police automatically tracks deletion, copying, or other uses of the recorded stream.
Shouldn't the officers in this case be charged with obstruction of justice?
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A few bad apples making the other 1% look bad...
seriously, why do cops always circle the wagons to protect dishonest cops?
Actually, that's not what they said. They said they can no longer be obtained. They didn't say they were destroyed. They didn't say *who* could no longer obtain them. Are they saying "You can't obtain them" (because it's past 90 days and that's our policy) or "We can't obtain them"? (because they were destroyed). The language is intentionally unclear. They *implied* that the recordings had been destroyed, and that the police themselves could no longer obtain them, but that's not what they actually said.
Either way, this is a good lesson for those /.ers who maintain that you don't have to show a cop your ID in the U.S. when asked (that you don't need "papers" in the U.S.). That may *technically* be true, but it can still cost you a weekend in jail and a $3500 legal bill if you actually pull that shit with a real cop.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ANY time the cops, spooks, politicians, corporations-- anybody, really-- claims to have "lost" the evidence, they are lying or they deliberately destroyed it. Like when the CIA, at the behest of Bush, just happened to lose hundreds of torture tapes after they'd been ordered by a court to preserve them. Like they did with much of the Abu Ghraib evidence.
Police in particular can NOT be trusted to police themselves. The few honest cops are often threatened by the rest. Rat on us and good luck when you call for backup...
The more I read the article (yes, some of us do), the more obvious that this is a systemic issue with the Seattle police dept, and this was a bonified SNAFU, (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.)
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Most people don't need to defend their rights because they willingly give them away.
Fixed that for you.
So they spent months, thousands of dollars in defense, thousands in city funds all over the fact that some drunk tool refused to tell the cop who he was?
No, you moron. They spent that money because the police made an arrest under false pretenses, then tried to cover it up by lying about the presence of evidence.
Look at the Hans Reiser case, or the Terry Childs case. On Slashdot we see tons of support for them, claiming they couldn't have done it, are being railroaded, etc, etc. They get consideration that people in other professions don't. A circling of the wagons.
It seems to be human nature.
And pretty soon you have no rights left to give away.
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Smart? Try lazy, cowardly, or more likely just plain apathetic. We need more people like Rachner to push back, to take stands. He uncovered a potentially huge conspiracy to withhold evidence from trials. His stubborn and clever tenacity held the system accountable. People like him make the system wary enough so that it can't deal with all the 'smart' people in too harsh a manner. They have it easy because some people aren't afraid to do the right thing, even it's hard.
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Have any of you posting listened to the audio? Especially the ones claiming they were a group of 'drunken douchebags'?
If you listen to the audio you'll notice that nobody was loud, obnoxious or incredibly rude. Eric sounds a bit curt, but he's defending his rights against an office who clearly is uniformed of the laws or has gotten too used to getting his way because he is a police office.
But honestly, I don't fault the officer either. He was as polite as can be expected and I believe he thought that he was in the right.
The this should have gone down, Eric gets arrested, police realize "Oh crap, you shouldn't have done that." Eric gets compensated for his attorney fees, the police officer gets sent to additional training and a memo is written to the rest of the department reminding them of how the laws ACTUALLY WORK.
That would have been justice, but we live in a society where everyone is out for blood for the most minor injustices and neither side is willing to say "oops, we screwed up."
Everything that happened afterward could have been avoided by simply saying "we were wrong, we're sorry" and then providing the necessary training to the police force so that they understand that citizens DO have the right to refuse to identify themselves.