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Police Officers Seek Right Not To Be Recorded
linzeal writes "When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop. Judges, juries, and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue, with only a few cases where those accused of 'shooting' the cops being vindicated through the courts."
and the general apathetic public sleeps soundly.
When teachers didn't want to be tested as they claimed that testing was a poor indicator of someone ability. Go Figure.
Record anyways. Even if it gets to the point where video evidence a flagrant abuse of power becomes inadmissible, it's potential value in stirring public outcry far outstrips any consequences associated with the establishment seeking to restrict the publics use of video recording and their public servants.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
But I thought that people with nothing to hide had no reason to worry about surveillance? Does that mean that this statement is wrong, or does it mean the police have something to hide?
"But this one goes to 11!"
nearby police action. Thanks for your cooperation citizen, now pick up that can!
have the privilege of turning the telescreens off.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents' house (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a violation of wiretapping law.
Bureaucratic mother fuckers.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
And I'm sure getting rid of probable cause makes their jobs easier too. I guess I don't want their jobs to be easy. I want their jobs to be really fucking hard. That's what you get along with a badge and a gun... scrutiny. At least, that's what should happen but rarely does.
After all, if you have nothing to hide Mr. Office Sir, what's the big deal?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Judges, juries and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue
Honestly, why? What possible legitimate reason do the police have for wanting to keep things (at least things outside the station) off camera?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
There's a lot of reasons why you can't point a gun at a cop.
There isn't a lot of drawback for a cop pointing his gun at you. (Filling out some paperwork)
While most people have become fine with that for weapons, the fundamental difference is that a Camera is not lethal. There is absolutely NO reason why Cops shouldn't be under the same scrutiny as the general public, and if they are allowed to use dashboard cameras, security surveilance, and whatever else at their disposal to help convict a criminal - then the populace should have the same ability at their disposal to defend themselves. Think of it as the right to bear arms.
held accountable for "violating" the same laws when they record citizens behavior without their consent for use as evidence. But somehow when it's a cop being taped, it's an illegal "unconsented" recording and people are going to jail.
This will be fair when those doing surveillance recording for law enforcement can also be sent to prison for recording in public places without individual consent. Until then, it's one more example of the way in which cops are increasingly generally subpar people, recruited from the less educated and less successful demographics of society, eager to hold a gun, and drawn to the profession precisely because they feel powerless in other areas of their life as a result of their general lack of merit, and thus need to abuse citizens in order to compensate for this lack.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
While I understand the idea of being made nervous when a camera is pointed at me, I think its hypocritical sp? of them to have cameras on the public but object if the reverse happens. I've seen a few obvious gross abuses of authority on the part of police. Its not all that common but it happens and to outlaw John Q. Victim's only defense against criminals in authority is a crime in itself. If they don't want to be recorded, they may be hiding something.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
And people complain about Miranda rights. Miranda rights exist because of abusive cops.
Most cop cars have dash mounted cameras. It's not the idea that a cop does not want to be recorded, they want a system that the end user does not have the ability to alter. The individual cop can't get to the video, I am sure only internal affairs and their superiors have access.
The problem with these cell videos is they don't capture the whole event. A group of cops beating up a person looks extreme until you find out that person was resisting arrest and put both the cop and civilians in danger.
No doubt power can corrupt but most cops, and I know from personal and familial experience, took the job to "protect and serve".
But don't...
The police and the courts should bear the following in mind when considering the recordings:
"If the police are doing nothing wrong, then they have absolutely nothing to fear from being recorded".
Unfortunately the "recording" of police should not be left entirely to police owned CCTV systems. Because those systems can malfunction at the most inconvenient times, causing the images to disappear right when, for example, someone called Charles de Menezes gets shot in the head for his crime of wearing a jacket on a warm day.
While the police have a job to do, and most of them do a damned good one at that; they are still human beings. And as such not infallible and not immune to all sorts of temptation - from wrongly kicking someone in the face who probably deserved it (but deserving has no place in law), to covering one's or one's buddy's ass in an ugly situation, these things can and DO happen. People should not be punished for recording something that is happening - especially in a public place or in the privacy of the recorder's own home. The Romans coined the saying: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The government cannot be trusted blindly. There lies the path to tyranny.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But if only selected portions are shown with the intention of embarrassing someone, it seems like a either libel or harassment
If this were the case we could yank all mainstream news off of the air.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
All states with heavy Democratic majorities in both Executive and Legislative branches. Still more Hope and Change...
Eventually such laws will end up before the supreme court in a first amendment (freedom of speech) test.
Then (hopefully) it will fail the constitutionality test.
If they don't want to be recorded, they may be hiding something.
Now now, be careful with that sword, it's double-edged.
This over the ear video unit is being used by some San Jose, CA cops after they beat the living crap out of a Vietnamese foreign exchange student who is suing for 6 million dollars now.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If it's okay for them to videotape me in public, then it's okay for me to videotape them.
(Please dont mod me down, I am just a messenger)
When you point a camera, it is not just a passive device recording events. Instead, it can actually influence the events that it is recording. A witness at a crime scene may be hesitant to say exactly what he or she thinks because he knows the neighbors may see it. People may run away or refuse to come forward because they are afraid that they will be identified later on television and thus could become the victims of a crime. A lot of things happen in police encounters and sometimes a camera can have a chilling effect on the proceedings. Sometimes the influence of camera presence can benefit society by keeping police abuses in check. Sometimes it can be a harm.
Personally, I think the police officers only have their own benefit in mind when they ask for a ban on cameras.
The ACLU has taken at least two cases in that area.
The Maryland motorcycle case: "This prosecution by the Maryland State Police and Harford County State's Attorney is profoundly dangerous, and seems meant to intimidate people from making a record of what public officials do," said David Rocah, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Maryland. "It is hard to imagine anything more antithetical to a democracy than for the government to tell its citizens that they do not have the right to record what government officials say or do or how they behave."
The video is on YouTube.
Right. That's why cops have video recorders in their cars. That's why cops have flashlights with video recording capability.
Sauce, goose, gander.
Part of the issue is that police officers rely on their intimidation as a tool, and being filmed makes that a lot harder to use.
Police regularly deal with unsavory characters who lie easily, sometimes know the relevant law, or have nothing to lose, and the threatening presence of a police officer (physically imposing, assertive, suspicious and armed) is a useful tool to put the people they're talking to at a disadvantage.
If police are filmed routinely (e.g. we all carry a Schneier Life Recorder) - setting aside outright murder, corruption and cover-ups, even standard practice becomes potentially embarrassing ("YouTube: Cops harass my 17 year-old daughter!"), and anything borderline could easily turn into a career-limiting stink.
No doubt this would make police uncomfortable.
No sir.. Those in positions of authority deserve no such protections... The Sword of Damocles hangs over their heads, where it belongs.
The reaction is because of the Code of silence. Lying for your fellow officer is a lot more dangerous when there might be video showing that you're all lying.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
If you're out in public where anyone can point a camera at you, it's the truth. There's a difference between what you do behind closed curtains being private and what you do on a public street being private. If a cop loses his shit and decides to beat your ass down for talking back to him in the middle of a public place, why should he think he should be immune from being recorded?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You don’t subdue someone with impact forces, dumbass. You subdue them with restraining forces.
Get some fucking rope or something. I don’t know.
Clubbing them until they yield is nothing short of barbaric.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Do you know how many suspects are arrested each year that are on PCP? Very few. Do you know how many times the police uses questionable force to detain/arrest a subject? Me neither, but I would suspect it is much higher than the percentage of suspects on PCP at the time of their arrest. This is a scenario where a taser should and would be used. Batons do not subdue an enraged subject anyway.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Especially when the tapes are mysteriously destroyed.
If you want to get good video quality in most lighting conditions and to be able to zoom in and catch cops doing their thing from a distance that makes it obvious who they are then you need to buy a good video camera.
Canon GL-1 and GL-2 are really good for this and are rather cheap in the used market for a near broadcast quality DV camera. you do not want HD because HD is not good in low light, and you want optical image stabilization with a long zoom. keep a tape recorded with junk on it in your pocket, and if you are chased by police, press eject, swap tapes, and ditch the good tape in a nearby bush or other items. If recording from a few hundred feet away, you will have a lot of time to do this and can plausibly act like you did not hear the cop.
If your video is good enough for TV broadcast, lots of tv stations will play it. plus when put on youtube it helps incriminate the officer as more details can be seen.
Stay a few hundred feet from the cops and you have not only time to ditch them, but they cant identify you. dress dark if at night, dress in drab colors if daytime... dont stand out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But they also have the double-standard backward. We, the public are entitled to privacy, while the government should be transparent. It is a double standard, by design, and they have it completely backward.
A lot of things happen in police encounters and sometimes a camera can have a chilling effect on the proceedings.
Funny, coming from a cop. A camera's "chilling effect on proceedings" pales in comparison to a police officer's.
How about the recent story about the police saying that their patrol car tape was erased, and a citizen managing to prove that they were hiding it from him.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.html
Why should we trust the police? We give them the right to carry guns and use them on citizens!
YouTube link to the irate caller who didn't like them to interrupt the season finale with a tornado warning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJdhmsfbPg&feature=player_embedded/
Hello, is that you, Dr. Heisenberg?
why should he think he should be immune from being recorded?
Because he's a cop silly. The whole reason he became a cop is to have special privileges.
I have been reading recently about what seems to me to be a disturbing trend by police agencies, prosecutors and legislatures to criminalize the ability of a citizen to record a police interaction. This is but one example: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/
While I strongly support the Sherriff and the other police agencies in Arizona, corrupt officers are not unheard of, and I strongly reject the notion that a citizen recording any interaction with any official of the state should be criminal.
What is your position on this issue and what can we do to prevent such onerous laws, such as they have in Massachusetts for example, from becoming law here?
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
I don't think the situation is symmetrical. The whole point of our post-Enlightenment traditions in the West has been the understanding that Authority, if left unchecked, will naturally tend towards abuse. The Police, in all their forms throughout the ages, have always been the most visible aspect of abusive Authority. The ability of the citizen to make his fellow citizens aware of abuses by Authority is key to the preservation of liberal democratic values. If you give the Authorities any sort of free pass on this, you simply invite them to do their worst. If you catch them doing their worst (ie. we just had the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State Shootings), then there is some capacity to assure some degree of justice, and more importantly for the Authorities to moderate their own behaviors.
I'm not saying all cops beat perps, in fact I'm fairly certain that most cops are decent men and women who become police officers out of a sense of duty and a desire to protect society. But even the best cops can fall victim to the us-vs-them that inevitably occurs in such an organization. Once you have that, then they start to view a much broader swathe of society than just bad guys as being the "them".
Of course the police don't want to be recorded. In some respects it can interfere, because they may spend as much time worrying about whether swinging that baton may be seen as they do about public safety and even their own safety. But what's the alternative? If we first agree that society has a vested interest in assuring the good and proper conduct of the police, then it strikes me that bans on recording them are utterly incompatible with that notion. Liberty requires constant vigilance and what they're asking is that a tool of the vigilant be removed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Isn't the response of the law-and-order types to privacy complaints "If you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about"? So if the police have nothing to hide they have nothing to complain about. In fact they could be helped in case someone makes a false claim against them.
The only real motivation they have is that they want to hide their actions. They are public employees and the public has a right to watch them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If you ride the Amtrak Southwest Chief from LA to Chicago, and are a white/hispanic male in coach, you will be stopped in Albuquerque, and your belongings searched (because you're obviously smuggling meth).
I had recently, just before my trip, read a bit on slashdot about people being stopped in Amtrak terminals for taking pictures, and being an artist, was duely pissed at that.
At Albuquerque, there were a couple of rail cops who stopped all of the above mentioned groups coming off the train, I was respectful, addressed him as sir, kept my hands in plain sight...
so when the officer asked if I had any weapons, I jokingly said "just a camera"...
Spent the next 15 minutes handcuffed, sitting on a rail with his partner looking like he was ready to kick me in the teeth while the first officer meticulously went through my baggage.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a vid of that should have been worth a few million dollars.
Instead I'm left with a funny story to tell people one of the reasons when they ask, why I don't explicitly trust cops.
(I do know some good cops, lots of them, but there's always "that guy" that fucks it up for them).
Because in a court of law, the cop's word is more likely to win. Being recorded takes away the possibility of getting away with abuse by just saying it ain't so. That's *a lot* to lose (for the cops).
So now they are working on making it illegal to prove that they lied by recording their actions.
Just imagine what the police report would've looked like for the BART shootings if there was no video capturing the event. Or the countless beatings, using tazers to torture etc.
Some police brutality on the tube for your viewing pleasure.
In all fairness, are you in one of the states mentioned? The article mentions that this is illegal in only a handful of states.
Mine's not listed, and I personally have taken to rolling a tape whenever I'm pulled over. That specifically was prompted by a police officer accusing me of "not stopping at the red light for long enough". I asked him if I had come to a complete stop, and he admitted then that I had, but it hadn't been for "long enough" (and he accused me of "cutting him off", apparently because I had turned left before he got to the opposing side and stopped himself. my guess is this was the real reason I was stopped).
When we got into court and I clarified with the judge that I only had to come to a complete stop at the sign, and that there was no stopped time requirement, the officer claimed that I never came to a complete stop at all, contradicting what he himself had said during the actual traffic stop.
Luckily the judge dropped the ticket anyhow, but that one incident has made me overly cautious about the police. Sure, they're good to have around when the shit hits the fan, but the shit just doesn't hit that fan too often. The other 95% of the time they're basically just harassing the public for fines to support their salaries.
Then there was the other time that my brother and I had a (very nervous and panicky) police officer pull his gun on us at a traffic stop because he saw gun cases in the back seat of the truck. We'd been duck hunting. We're pulling a jon-boat with a duck-blind obviously attached to it. We're both obviously dressed in full camo. To anyone with half a brain, you know there's going to be guns in this truck before you even get to it - and this idiot totally freaks out like someone is going to kill him because he spots gun cases in the back seat (which were being legally transported, cased, and unloaded, as per the law). No ticket there, but I don't like having a gun waved in my face because the rookie deputy is jittery either.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The first category are clearly a tiny minority, or the second wouldn't be tolerated.
As for the third, they're closer to the second than they'd like to think.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They monitor us, we monitor them. That's fair.
They monitor us, we can't monitor them. That's unfair.
They don't monitor us, we monitor them. That would also be fair, because WE PAY THEIR FUCKING SALARIES.
If they don't like it, they're more than welcome to forgo their special extra-legal privileges in exchange for less surveillance.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Sadly though, there are a lot more 30-100 year olds out voting for more police power based on media brainwashing than 18-29 year olds who know about the abuses of power, thus those who care about removing abuses of power always get outvoted."
Are you seriously claiming that 18-29 year olds are somehow more in tune to what's "real" in terms of abuse of power than those over 30?
Oh you sad little boy.
I know it must not seem that way from your perspective - that of somebody who only recently got big boy pants and tie shoes - but lots of us over-30 "seniors" are plenty networked.
Besides, some of the greatest abuses of power are perpetrated by gray haired old men.
Probably didn't occur to you that there are plenty of people who were teens in the 60's who can show you actual scars from police brutality. So get on your tricycle and go away. Come back when you've got some experience of the world that doesn't come out of a rectangle on your monitor.
As long as they aren't doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about. Right? Right? Isn't that the argument used by all the people that support the patriot act bullshit? The only cops that don't want to be recorded are obviously the ones that are doing wrong.
Casca
If the police are not doing anything wrong, what do they have to be afraid of?
The terrible abuses in the Camden PD would never have come to light had it not been for video surveillance.
Do we really want to condone criminal behavior by the police? Can a "good" cop justify hiding or ignoring criminal behavior on the part of police officers? Can any elected official? Any judge? If they do, they are just co-conspirators.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
There were a huge number of scumbags in Rampart- a lot were wearing gang colors, others police uniforms.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"