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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."
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!!
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.
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