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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."
About goddamn time we get a voice of reason and someone "higher up" on our side. Not that it'll make a damn bit of difference. "Protect and Serve" is a joke. Cops don't care and won't care. I imagine the mantra from cops now will be "What photos? I never saw any."
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
The elephant in the room is that they rarely have a good reason to delete the recordings. Why would a police officer not want his work recorded?
(The rare reason: It violates the privacy of a citizen who is involved.)
How about instead, they advise the police if they are caught doing it again, said officers will be arrested by the FBI or similar, and put in federal prison. Seems that would be a good incentive.
...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'
It's a sentence. Just because we have insisted on simplifying everything down to where those who can barely read at a 2nd grade level can "understand" it, that doesn't mean that complex sentences that express a sophisticated set of connected ideas are invalid.
The police harassment of photographers won't really end until either:
1) A settlement over this costs a city a Whole Lot of Money (>$100,000.00 + all lawyer fees).
-or-
2) A police officer goes to jail for at least a year over this.
Until then, threatening letters, especially from this Justice Department, are little more than toilet paper.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If they are doing nothing wrong, then they should not have any problem whatsoever allowing recordings.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's great how when something good actually happens in the US the comments on Slashdot are still mostly negative.
The existence of these letters and their public nature will make it basically impossible for any police department in the country to win a case in which they are accused of illegally destroying a recording. The legal arguments are handed to us here, by the DoJ no less. This creates a huge financial incentive for states and cities to make sure that their officers are not destroying recordings, and as they say, money talks. This seems like a good move which saves the administration from having to arrest police officers while accomplishing basically the same goal.
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
Why? Because there is no gray area here. Nobody has a right NOT to be recorded in public.
The US Justice Department HAD to act because local DAs gave them no choice. Every DA that thought arrests and confiscating/destroying video was an acceptable response to the public recording of LEOs should be disbarred. They are either to incompetent or corrupt to hold office.
Ever heard of Cop Block? Not 24-hour recording, but a similar idea of always keeping the cops on-the-record.
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.
City police are only one of many police forces in the US. There are plenty of others out there, many that offer better jobs in terms of less danger and more pay. For example if you've ever been around non-military federal government buildings, you'll find they are guarded by police, not some mysterious quasi-military force or something. That's right, the security guards at the CIA for example are police, uniformed ones in fact.
Well needless to say, those people have to be good. Not only do they need to be vigilant in their job, but they'd better be good at being respectful to people at well. The CIA is not going to be amused at all if one of their security cops assaults their analysts or case officers or something. However for that there are compensations. Nobody is very likely to actually try anything there, your on the job danger is very low, same as pretty much any other office worker. You get to deal with people who are generally nice to you all the time, not people who are hostile, crazy, on drugs, etc.
So that also is part of it. The best police are able to get better jobs with better agencies. Those agencies can afford to be more selective about who they hire. That leaves less talent for regular city police.
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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