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Man Ordered At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone For Recording Cops
HungryHobo writes with this excerpt from a story at Pixiq:
"Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets on Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out of the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling, 'you want to be f****** paparazzi?' Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer's back pocket as he was laying down on the ground."
Theft, destruction of private property, destruction of evidence, assault, and I'm probably missing a few.
Yet another example of a government agent stomping on the Constitution. What type of country has this become? One where the government can track, monitor, record, and harass citizens, yet citizens can't even record a public event without being treated as terrorists. Just disgusting.
Now they should sue and we can all pay for it with an ever increasing tax burden.
...and cops wonder why we hate them?
It definitely is and assuming that this is a somewhat accurate description of what happened, the police officers involved could easily find themselves behind bars for witness tampering, destruction of evidence amongst other things. And police officers do get sent to prison from time to time for this sort of behavior.
What we need is a Federal law with two components:
1. Establish that it's perfectly legal to film the police doing their job in a public place.
2. Make it a crime, punishable with serious jail time, for a police officer to intimidate a photographer, confiscate their camera, or return the camera without the images.
This law should have no exception for "accidents" like phones being smashed or evidence being lost --- any more than we tolerate "accidents" involving children being lost or killed. Police should know that the minute they confiscate a private individual's camera they are putting their careers and their freedom in the balance should anything go wrong.
Of course none of this would be workable; if Congress actually passed any kind of law it would almost certainly protect the police and not the citizenry; and half of Slashdot would probably object to this being a Federal law rather than a state law or would propose that we adopt a technological/market solution instead.
When it says he removed the SD card, you know it's not an iPhone.
It's not illegal to film them, so you don't need a law explicitly making it legal. What you need is for these thugs to be charged with assault and more.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When pigs fly.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Have you ever been in a high adrenaline situation that ended in you shooting and killing someone? Have you ever voluntarily ended someones life? Have you had someone film you whilst you do this? Unless the answer to all of the above is "yes", how about you keep your damning judgements to yourself.
If the police officer can't handle these situations, I highly suggest they go for an alternate career. Maybe as a garbageman or something that shouldn't involve weapons. Seriously, it might be an extremely stressfull situation when he's shooting at the alleged drug dealer, who allegedly shot back at them. But when this innocent bystander, only being guilty of having a camera, gets guns shoved up in his face, then you aren't fit to take care of justice. If your job as a public servant can't take the scrutiny of someone video taping you as you perform your job, then you have no business being in the line of duty. Please, let the people be able to weed out the bad cops. We need the good ones. So your arguments are basically not relevant, as criticism isn't dependant of having to be in the persons shoes.
-- Linux user #369862
Strange, I don't see anyone being a dick to the cops in that story.
A guy RECORDING cops ON DUTY during an action ON A PUBLIC STREET ends up with a cop smashing his phone and pointing a gun at him.
Yeah, blame other people for being dicks to the cops. That makes a lot of sense.
We are free, except for the millions of people who are behind bars; in fact, the US imprisons more people than any other country, including China, and the only countries to even imprison more people than the US were the USSR and Nazi Germany. As if that were not shameful enough, we also imprison a higher proportion of our black population than South Africa did during Apartheid.
Shameful.
Palm trees and 8
I didn't ask them to protect me. They took it upon themselves. They coerce their keep from my paycheck. They can damn well be held to the highest standards of conduct in those circumstances.
the cops could have avoided all that trouble
Yes, by not shooting people or threatening witnesses at gunpoint.
the cops could have avoided all that trouble
Yes, by not shooting people or threatening witnesses at gunpoint.
But then why would anyone bother to become a cop?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Here in the US we fought a very bloody and painful war which all the oddsmakers gave us absolutely 0 chance of winning to gain our independence, and one of the major reasons we did that was because of warrantless searches. We have a fourth amendment for a reason. If a law is impossible to enforce without warrantless searches (laws attempting to regulate peaceful private behaviour generally are) then it's a bad law and it shouldnt be enforced anyway.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The real trick is to post everything directly to "The Cloud". Yes, yes, I hate the term as much as the average /.-er, but in this case it's extraordinarily useful. Destroying the device doesn't destroy the data, and you also have a record of the destruction. There's a good reason for decent systems to keep off-site (ideally off-continent) records.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
the cops could have avoided all that trouble
Yes, by not shooting people or threatening witnesses at gunpoint.
But then why would anyone bother to become a cop?
There're still plenty of drug dealers to shake down and prostitutes to extort free sex from.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Obviously the other extreme is when all regulation disappears and the sharks feast on the small fish. The rich get richer and the gap between rich and poor grows enormously. As a student of history you also understand what happens next.....The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and today the Arab Spring....Don't think for a moment that any of those societies ended up better off.
Unfortunately those who want to cut all the social programs which attempt to equalize society, also want to spend the most on big brother technologies to keep the masses in line. I would rather pay my share to make sure people are not hungry, and have at least adequate medical care. Go visit India sometime if you want to see a society that has no social safety net....not a pretty sight seeing kids grow up under underpasses.
See, you were making a pretty good argument, and then you threw in this:
Is anyone willing to *personally* take a good working-over by government thugs in exchange for another social program? (emphasis mine).
It's not the social programs that empower the goon squads. The US government currently has 17 civilian agencies that have agents empowered to carry fully automatic weapons. There is a line item in the federal budget equal to about half the overall FBI budget, and it goes just to pay for the FBI running rifle, grenade launcher, and even rocket launcher training ranges for all the other security related agencies. Those are not the social services agencies that have the police like powers. A person from the department of health and human resources may be able to take one of your kids away, but at least he or she can't shoot you in the head to stop you from getting a lawyer and fighting it. The BATF, DEA, and 15 other police/security related agencies most definitely can.
Right now, you can take the amount that goes to Israel out of the foreign aid budget, and half the rest is directed by the DEA. For example, we give multiple squadrons of assault helicopters to Columbia to 'help stamp out Cocaine trafficking, add attack helicopters and air to ground Hellfire missiles to protect them, current elite grade scrambling to keep the drug lords from overhearing their communications, and many other forms of support, and then all their neighbors worry about what happens if Columbia uses all those neat toys for something besides the war on drugs, so we have to give the rest of Central America weapons too. If they don't have enough Cocaine growers to justify putting it in the DEA budget, we put it in foreign aid, earmarked to be spent only buying weapons from US based corporations. Then we have right wing radio show hosts frequently stress how foreign aid is all a liberal waste of money. (Yeah, because the Liberals are the ones who support a huge war on drugs.). Many of us strongly suspect there's still funding for covert ops hidden in the social services side of the budget, but it's a pretty safe bet nobody in, say, the National Endowment for the Arts is hiding money in the Military/Security part of the budget. The reverse however, is false - it has now been openly admitted that the CIA funneled money through the Nat. Endowment for the Arts for covert ops in the 1950s and 60s.
Please don't fall for the idea that we have to cut social services to control the government - the power and arrogance they contribute to the whole is so trivial compared to the effects of all those agencies grouped under homeland security that eliminating all social spending would probably have less effect on the nation's slide into fascism than finding out why anyone else in the Treasury department, besides the Secret Service, needs full auto weapons training. (I'm willing to grant we need something like a Secret Service to protect various officials from nutcases - but why does a guy who's full time job description is to investigate insider trading, a guy who is required to be a CPA before qualifying for the job, but need have absolutely no military or law enforcement background, need to qualify on a M16-A4 assault rifle with under-mounted M203 grenade launcher?). Multiply that by all the agents for BATF that are not investigating firearms or even the few remaining old fashioned stills in the Kentucky hills, but need them for all those cases where someone is smuggling cigarettes without tax stamps - surely a few pistols or assistance from a federal marshall or two would be enough to handle such cases. Multiply by all the small towns that now have used federal grants for SWAT teams even if the most serious crime in a typical year there is likely to be a bar fight.
Who is John Cabal?
Any government big enough to have local police forces is big enough to do this. There's a reason we talk about "police states" rather than "bureaucrat states" or "social worker states". This has nothing to do with big government or little government--police brutality would still be a problem in a minarchist state.
No, you misunderstand.
Yes, he was driving a weapon. But you clearly misunderstand the narrative that makes this not make sense unless he drew a weapon or made some other overt threatening action.
Here is the video:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ef7_1306812064
The video sucks though, so let me explain what I see blow by blow. I may be wrong, about some of this as it's hard to see.
The video starts, and I can't even see the car.
At about 3 seconds shots ring out. The source of them is unclear, but there is on report of shots coming from anywhere other than the officers.
At about 5 seconds the car halts near the intersection on the right.
Men approach the car cautiously with guns drawn. Presumably they are the police.
The officers surround the car which is now stopped. There is no additional sign of activity. The car doesn't move any further.
Then at 1:13ish many, many shots ring out. Far more than the number of shots that rang out before. Definitely multiple officers discharging lots of rounds.
The question is why? What were they reacting to?
Reiterating what I said before: If what the suspect supposedly did is true, and the cops are telling the truth that he fled and tried to run them over and refused to stop one can make the argument that the shots at 0:03 could have been justified.
But no shots were fired again until 1:13, and then they unloaded. What changed? If he didn't draw a weapon or make an overt threat, there's no reason. He had been stopped. The shots at 0:03 either hit him, or scared him into stopping.
I have no idea what the first half of your second paragraph is talking about. Sadly, I suspect that there have been too many journalists killed in war zones recently to know which "Reuters guy" you are referring to.
That said, I suspect your analysis of why this happened may be pretty close to the mark. Something along the lines of:
Stressed cops from this big, hard to control event get confronted with a real threat: an officer is nearly run down in a motor vehicle stop. Everyone's on edge, and the suspect is trying to get away. A gunfight ensues. Everyone is keyed up. And bad calls get made.
Further evidence of this is that there was another shooting later in the same night. A female officer who claims a different suspect was trying to run her over too.
It's not an excuse, or a defense. But I think this didn't just happen. These cops were driven to an edge. They did what they thought they had to do, but then they took things too far. I suspect a lot of these things happen in similar ways.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Just wondering, you said in your first comment that a cop came in over a noise complaint, and you also said:
I ran into the kitchen where there was like 20 people.
So the kitchen had 20 people already - were you partying? How late was it?
What I'm trying to get at, was the noise complaint, by any chance, justified?
Even well intentioned cops will do a lot of weird shit if they think they are rightfully protecting others from you .