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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."
the cops could have avoided all that trouble, and then it would just be a he-said/she-said scenario. Neat. Clean.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Theft, destruction of private property, destruction of evidence, assault, and I'm probably missing a few.
By the time our porcine "protectors" figure out that smashing up the instrument rarely destroys the recording, we'll all have real-time internet-connected video cameras.
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.
The U.S. is much better than China. We are free.
...and cops wonder why we hate them?
Fucking pigs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Depends on how smashed up the phone was - after a good police trampling I wouldn't be surprised if the battery was already missing and the sd card slot was bent...
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
If there's enough of the phone to recover images, then the cops have made their situation worse. It looks like that's the case, but it's from an SD card, not a SIM card - given how Sprint's phones work.
Another point - how about apps that instantly stream to an offsite location? The cops would still be thwarted, and still have to pay.
Hopefully the cops end up paying tons of cash to replace the phones, along with whatever criminal penalties come from their actions.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Record it online, not on your phone. Although I suppose it won't be long before cops carry cell jammers as a regular thing.
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.
It IS completely legal to video record police officers.
I thought this too. Looking into it though, how do we actually do it? The only way I can think of that's convenient on a Symbian phone is stickam, then viewing it on a computer already running somewhere... which isn't great. You want the whole thing to be as quick as pressing one button
A blog I run for the wealth
...can be found here. Rather chilling.
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.
He probably took out the memory card after they put the smashed phone back in his pocket.
But who knows? If the reporter screwed up facts like 'SIM cards don't store video', who knows what other facts they got wrong in this story.
Once again, news reporting appears to the be the most technically clueless profession. (and if this video actually exists, I guess the police would be the second).
Qik does this quite well.
http://qik.com/
When pigs fly.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Since I was born in this country I have never seen so much lawlessness by financial institutions, politicians and law enforcement.
If this continues the USA will break up. If the USA becomes politically unstable we could see civil war.
There are already indications of this as state legislatures ignore their constituents and yield to the criminals in Washington.
We have states desperate to save the currency Washington is destroying, by declaring new issues of monetary and economic rules in their own states.
Meanwhile you have Federal powers trying to make it illegal to put anything other than Federal Reserve notes and arresting anyone who dares try.
A confrontation is coming between those who have looted and stole everything in this country and those who have been stolen from.
Be sure you pick the correct side when the crap hits the fan, because it is going to get very very ugly.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
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
You're forgetting the police have helicopters.
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.
It's not legal.
The problem is that we have a fascist minority in the populace, and a fascist majority in government, who believe that government employees, police in particular, are above the law. For a shockingly high percentage of the population, the whole concept of law and order is absent or incomprehensible, and instant subservience and obedience to the uniform is substituted instead.
This belief is, unsurprisingly, strongest amongst the police themselves. So they break the law, what are you going to do? Call the police?
You cant even get a prosecutor to file charges against them with clear proof of the crime. I remember one prosecutor that did try to discharge her duties faithfully by prosecuting a cop, and found herself unable to function in her position at all because the entire damn police force made a point to louse up her cases and refuse to work with her. Every time someone says 'it's just a few bad apples' I have to think back to her. It seems closer to the truth, today, to say as Adam Kokesh recently did "it's a few bad apples that give the other 5% of cops a bad name."
Now to be fair, police pay is relatively low, and the ability to kill and/or abuse their fellow citizens with impunity is the only clearly exceptional perk they get. Given that, it shouldnt be a surprise that the bad-apples come to outnumber the good ones over time.
I've known some very good people who were cops - note the past tense. They had a very rough time of it. I also knew a guy that told everyone he was going to join the police so he could kill someone and get away with it when he was in high school. Last I saw him he was wearing a blue uniform and a big smile.
Getting rid of bad cops is probably going to continue to be an intractable problem until and unless we as a nation realise that police should, yes, be held to very high standards - but they should also be paid commensurately for their services. No, poor pay in no way justifies lawlessness in the uniform - but if the police were actually held to the law, most of them would be in prison in short order and the people that we really want to take their place will be somewhere else, making more money and dealing with less stress.
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Think the reporter meant that:
The person who recorded it does not want to post it till he gets compensation
but morally the reporter feels the person should release it NOW for everyone to see...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
As long as the police officers in question are appropriately punished, it's not the government but agents of the government acting contrary to their intended purpose. If the government does nothing, then the actions of their agents are condoned and the government becomes responsible. We can't expect our government to be perfect anymore than we can expect those that are a part of government to be perfect. We're all human, and the people in government are just as prone to misbehavior as those outside of government (more so, if you believe the "power corrupts..." theory.) What we can expect from our government is that it will hold those that do misbehave accountable for their actions. Until it fails in that duty, it isn't truly corrupt.
Note that the punishment may be no punishment at all as long as that is determined by a jury of civilians in a court of law.
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.
You sir, are a lemming traitor piece of shit. Its fuckheads like you that empower fuckheads like that.
Take the Red Pill.
"The general misconception is that any statute passed by legislators bearing the appearance of law constitutes the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statue, to be valid, must be in agreement. It is impossible for both the Constitution and a law violating it to be valid; one must prevail. This is succinctly stated as follows: The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed." - Sixteenth American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, Section 177.
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http://www.gandhicam.org/
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
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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Don't think he was.
"Non-electronic", and on a public way.
From http://www.rcfp.org/taping/states/florida.html.
Its events like this that are the reason I have Qik on my phone. I've never used it, but give me 15 seconds to get started and I'll be uploading live video to a remote server. Go ahead and take my phone. Its already in the cloud.
That's what the police said. By the testimony of the police he was also doing 110-115mph in a 1988 Hyundai Excel (top speed 95mph). And was a superman high on PCP (drug tests were negative for PCP)
Reliable statistics would obviously be very difficult to generate, if you can find anything approximating such I would love to see it.
But just to be clear, I am not in any way implying that 95% of cops in this country are actively corrupt as in going out shooting people just because they can or the like. What I *am* saying seems to be true, is that 95% of cops WILL comply with the 'blue line' nonsense and refuse to do their duty and/or actively obstruct justice to defend the bad cops. I have seen how this is deeply encultured in our law enforcement officers, and even though I can understand and even sympathise with those officers, the fact is that it is THOSE officers - not the handful of hard-core bad apples, but the masses of 'thin blue line' believers who may do little or nothing wrong otherwise, that make the problem so intractible.
Think about the story behind this article. From reading both the links, it seems that it was mainly a single policeman who was the active culprit here, committing a number of crimes under color of law (assault, battery, destruction of property, evidence-tampering, just at a glance) and it might be tempting to jump out and claim he is just one bad apple and it doesnt reflect on the rest of the force. But there were a large number of police on the scene to witness his crime!
It was the large number who stood by and did nothing effective to stop the 'bad apple' - who in a true law and order state would have placed HIM under arrest on the spot, but who, in our world, will instead look the other way and claim afterwards not to have seen the incident - without those supposedly good cops to enable him, the bad cop wouldnt last long at all. That was what I was trying to point out.
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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.
Every once in a great while when there is a massive public outcry and there are no other politically viable alternatives, yes, they do. This is far, far less often than it should happen. Of the instances of police overstepping their bounds I have heard of exactly one police officer being fired, and that was for a clear case of murder that was committed on camera and the victim was a homeless person who was well known and liked. The officer's excuse was that the man (who was known as 'the woodcarver' by locals) had a knife, and he did not put it down in the 2.5 seconds between the time the officer told him to and the time he fired. The man made no threatening gesture with the knife.
I have never heard of a police officer going to jail.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Sounds just like every run-in I've ever had with police. I've even videotaped the cops beating the shit out of my friends. The only thing that ever amounted to was my friends not being convicted of Obstruction of Justice, Disobeying a Police Officer, Resisting Arrest, Interfering with an Investigation. And, maybe a couple cops quit the force.
It was funny when they played the video in court and the Judge looks over at the prosecutor and said, "Don't you hate when that happens? Case dismissed."
But the cops were never convicted of anything. Not even the local lawyers in my town want to take on the cops.
p.s. I remember the time a cop, with his foot stuck in my door over a noise complaint, grabbed my arm and said, "That's it, you're under arrest." I yanked my hand back and said, "Fuck you, get off my property, you're trespassing." Oh there was also the time that same cop just busted into my house (also a noise complaint) with his arm extended pointing a can of pepper spray at me... I ran into the kitchen where there was like 20 people. The cop eventually put away the pepper spray and walked away... knowing he would have sprayed everyone. Oh there's also the time a cop said I did a 360 on my motorcycle going 50mph, and when I stopped put my hands on my head, and sat down Indian-style, he beat me repeatedly with his baton.. so obviously I got a resisting arrest charge... dismissed, thankfully. Oh and a few months ago when I got a ticket for driving on a learner's permit with no licensed driver... though there was a licensed driver in the car, and I haven't had a learners permit for 15 years... I appealed that and.... inexplicably, lost. I could go on and on.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
The wood carver was also partially deaf.
The officer in that case wasn't fired if I remember: he resigned.
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.
No, poor pay in no way justifies lawlessness in the uniform - but if the police were actually held to the law, most of them would be in prison in short order and the people that we really want to take their place will be somewhere else, making more money and dealing with less stress.
Poor pay?? I will never understand why this misconception cannot be stamped out. That concept was true decades ago, but not today. Many Miami Police Beach Patrol Officers make well over $100K.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
When the only people you interact with on a daily basis are scumbags and your fellow officers, you are going to start believing that the world only consists of scumbags and police officers. Especially when you are trained to "not get killed" on a constant basis, and your trainers, pals and cop-only internet message boards constantly publish real and phoney stories about any cop in the world that gets killed. When your pals, the media and the law reinforces the idea that your life is worth more than other people's.
Policing can be dangerous, but it isn't even in the top 10 of dangerous occupations. But, when a logger, truck driver, fisherman, etc., gets killed in the line of duty, you don't see every one of them in the city stuff themselves into their dress uniforms and engage in a mile long funeral procession. Nor do they get to blame scumbags for their loss.
It is easy to see how it happens.
The real trick is to post everything directly to "The Cloud". ... Destroying the device doesn't destroy the data, and you also have a record of the destruction.
This is what happened at the Democratic Convention protests in Chicago in 1968.
Chicago was a machine-run city and the police were able to keep pictures of their misdeeds out of the newspapers by seizing and/or smashing the photographers' cameras. In preparation for the convention (and the pre-announced protests) the machine's unions had prevented the stringing of video cabling to likely protest sites.
But this was the first serious deployment of the "minicam" by the three networks' news operations. It was a massive shoulder-mounted camera, feeding a backpack full of electronics and batteries, radio-linked to a truck full of equipment within a block or two that relayed it to the studio. But it worked. And Chicago was a main switching/mixing/studio center for all three networks' transcontinental feeds.
So the police, with orders to keep things out of the media, did their standard smash-the-camera number (like they did when the local newsies got ouf-of-line and tried to report on them). And when the police batons smashed a camera lens the image, from the lens' viewpoint, was already out of the camera and into living rooms nationwide.
With the improvements in video camera technology - first the personal portable video camera, then the inclusion of cameras and video-record functionaltiy in most modern cellphones - the bulk of the population has been in a position to play Chicago News Cameraman. "Who watches the watchmen?" can now be answered "All of us!" Since the Rodney King incident the police have been hunting for ways to suppress this coverage. And this bunch seems to have settled on the pre-minicam Chicago Police approach. In this case the camara man managed to extract and protect the "film". But the real solution is the same as it was in '68: Real time upload to external archive and/or live publication. You hit it dead-on.
Fortunately the pieces of that are now available as stock products (minor assembly required). Smartphone plus applet for live streaming to archive and/or social-network/video publication. The readers' letters attached to TFA name at least two such applets: QIK (and QIK Plus) and Ustream.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way