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US Justice Dept Defends Right To Record Police
Fluffeh writes "In recent times, it seems many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers, destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it. But in a surprising twist, the U.S. Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra. The letter contains an awful lot of lawyer babble and lists many court cases and the like, although some sections are surprisingly clear: 'Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.' There is a lot more and it certainly seems like a firm foothold in the right direction."
...is that you can take pictures, and it won't matter if the cops take or even if they destroy your device. As technology improves, and the service gets faster, it expect it may even become possible to upload video in real time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"That wouldn't be a federal crime. " And as an aside, it would also be a violation of the 4th, another civil rights violation. Happy to educate you again.
Have you ever been involved in government at the city level? They most certainly do care--even about very little citizen participation and news coverage.
You get someone to stir up shit about something like that at a City Council meeting and have several news outlets there and a packed room and I guarantee you that the City Council will not make the typical stupid moves it normally does.
What do you do when the answer is "YOU'RE RESISTING ARREST!!!" and they beat the shit out of you, taze you, then 'lose your phone down the sewer in the struggle'?
And don't count on any dashcam footage to help you. Here's an example where nine independent dashcams mysteriously "failed" to record an incident where a reporter, who was coincidentally (of course it's just a coincidence, am I right?) covering a series of corruption scandals within the local government, was pulled out of her car by a dozen officers, along with her cameraman, and roughed up on the side of the road.
Here's a nice passage:
Although I was the first journalist in the United States known to be subjected to a felony traffic stop while on the job, some officers said I was "lucky it wasn't a real one." Had it been, they claimed, I would have been "eating the pavement." One police official told Washingtonian magazine, "McCarren should quit her whining. She wasn't shot."
America! Fuck Yeah!!
but when you get to seventh or eighth grade, you'll find that your teachers call this a "run-on sentence", and penalize you for writing such sentences yourself.
No they wouldn't. because the schools i went to had english teachers who understood the language. hint:just because a sentence is long does not make it a run-on sentence.
They'll also point out that "US Justice Department has sent letter" is missing an article.
what would you call that word before it.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Yup. This was always the excuse they'd bring up when we in New Hampshire were fighting this issue legislatively. Domestic violence cases, child victims, whatever emotional bullshit they could throw up to keep the wiretapping law here usable as a weapon to prevent people from recording police abuse---which is how they always use it here.
Fortunately there was recently a very positive U.S. District Court ruling, Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011), which overrules all of this and makes legislative attempts to fix the problem a moot point.
Liberty in your lifetime
Individual police officers (and other government agents) who violate a person's civil rights may be sued under federal law and/or state law. The main federal civil rights law is 42 U.S.C. 1983, which authorizes suits against state and local officials who violate a person's constitutional rights. Federal officials may be sued under an analogous judge-made law called the "Bivens doctrine". In addition, state and local officials, but not federal officials, may be sued under state law.
When a police officer loses his house, his car and a lot of his future income maybe he will pay attention to the law next time. Maybe his fellow officers will learn something, too.
How's $170,000 sound? :)
See Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011). Glik got a $170,000 settlement out of the Boston police. In New Hampshire, there are several people who were similarly abused by police and now have similar lawsuits underway. The First Circuit covers New Hampshire, so I think you can guess how these cases will go.
Liberty in your lifetime
I don't think law enforcement-in general-is prone to fascism. Fascism is a political/social ideology of extreme patriotism, such that nothing the nation does can be wrong.
I would say that law enforcement is prone to totalitarianism, wherein the populace is strictly controlled in every single aspect of their lives.
This may or may not be a predisposed condition of law enforcement, as in "they were always like that"? Rather, I suspect it is a product of the environment that most law enforcement exists.
Law enforcement is not a 90-10 job, where 90% of the time you're bored out of your skull, and 10% crapping your pants in fear. It's more of a 60--20-40 job, where 60% of the time you're not in danger, but busy as Hell, 20% in actual danger, and 40% trying to catch up on paperwork. Yes, that's 120%, which means most law enforcement is running on a 20% deficit of time. Your finest days are when you can actually go home, on time, with no paperwork hanging over your head.
This cultivates a very dangerous mentality of "Leave me the fuck alone, OR ELSE!". And because all of the other officers are in the same boat, this can foment a culture of totalitarianism, not out of a desire for convenience, but out of the struggle to merely keep one's head above water.
That politicians and the public do not want to provide sufficient warm bodies to reduce the workload on the overall force, only makes the situation worse. You get a feedback loop that only gets worse and worse, until you have officers who have gone beyond thinking "Hitler may have had a good idea," to "This is how I am going to do it!"
Is this acceptable? No.
Is this excusable? No.
But it is an explanation of a problem, and that means it can be fixed.
[End Of Line]
When the parent says the sentence is missing an article, he is correct. It should read "the US Justice Department has sent a letter." The word before the quotation, "the," is also an article but it modifies "US Justice Department" not "letter," which itself needs an article.
Additionally, missed by all of you, "Police Departments" should not be capitalized as it is not a proper noun. You would capitalize "Boston Police Department," because it is a specific named department but "Police Departments" should instead read as "police departments," as it not referring to any named department specifically.
Yet, the thrust of your argument is correct in my opinion. The general sentence structure of the original statement is sound and the sentence does not represent a run-on. Some ill-informed teachers may wrongly mark such sentences as run-ons, but if that is the case they themselves are incorrect in doing so.
Still, sometimes teachers request a sentence be simplified so the reading of it is smoother, rather than any actual infractions against the laws of grammar having been committed — and that case may very well apply to the sentence in question. For example, the above sentence would read better if "(PDF)" was omitted or if the same information was stated in a less jarring form, such as "the US Justice Department has sent a letter in the form of a PDF" or ""the US Justice Department has sent a PDF letter," rather then placing "PDF" inside a parenthetic expression.
Thus, we could say that the sentence could be improved in some ways, but is not technically a run-on, even though other grammatical errors are present.
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