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Obama Offers Funding For 50,000 Police Body Cameras
An anonymous reader writes: Today President Obama announced $263 million worth of funding for law enforcement agencies around the country to outfit officers with body cameras and improve training. The money requires matching funds from state and local authorities, and the $75 million dedicated to body-cams should buy about 50,000 of them. This is in response to the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. "Obama also plans to overhaul how the federal government disperses military equipment to local police departments, the White House said Monday. ... The Ferguson police department deployed officers wearing gas masks, military fatigues, stun guns and rubber bullets during the initial protests. Studies show the procurement of military equipment by police departments has been on the rise as law enforcement has been allowed to cheaply purchase gear originally deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan."
we already have it in the form of everyone with a cell phone camera. if anything remotely interesting in public happens, 5 or 6 people are filming it and its uploaded within the hour and mirrored forever beyond any possible take back within a few hours
if loss of privacy bothers you, the concept of little brother should bother you more than the concept of big brother. you can hold government accountable and force it to abide by rules and sue it. you can't do that with every random anonymous yahoo around you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The respect issue goes both ways. A lot of cops don't work in the neighborhoods that they live in. They either can't afford to live there, like in Boston, or don't want to live there, like [insert ghetto / slum of your choice here]. There is very often an "us versus them" mentality where everyone is treated like a terrorist or felon. Really hard to show respect to authority when it seems to be stepping on your neck all of the time. A lot of cops are professional in these instances, but a lot of cops also feel that they are going on combat patrol in a foreign country and act accordingly. Where do you see good police / citizen interactions? Places where the police actually live where they patrol and patrol where they live.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Good article on Bloomberg View about this. It's not the panacea some think it is.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
The Circle: Meanwhile, the Circle continues to develop a range of sophisticated technologies, including SeeChange, light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal efforts. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times.
Not quite as clear cut as you claim http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a.... What is interesting is that police officers are buying there own cameras to protect themselves because the courts seem to be unbiased toward police testimony and police must prove the validity of the actions against citizens.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The judge can order production, or hold the police in contempt.
In many cases where it isn't a matter of the police testimony vrs the accuesed, and in just about all cases in civil court, judges will instruct the jury that they should put the worst reasonable interpretation on one side 'losing' evidence. Losing cases from that is generally going to correct police departments faster than individual contempt citations, and can be used in more situations (Just who gets the contempt citation when a judge suspects the guy running the evidence room was involved, but he's not been called as a witness ? Yes in theory, making the prosecution prove chain of evidence is part of the rights of the accused, but what if the accused's lawyer hasn't even thought of putting that person on the list of witnesses to call? Does the judge have to first order that cop to come to the court and testify on a matter relating to the trial, get him sworn in and get him to say something for the record, so he can be included in the contempt citation?)
Telling the jury to regard missing evidence in the light most favorable to the opposition lets a good judge cut through a lot of BS. I saw a judge use it once when a prosecutor was trying to convince the jury they needed to unravel one of those situations where a subordinate was saying they were just following orders and their surpervisor was claiming that their orders had been misinterpreted before they could go any further. The judge told the jury they didn't have to worry about where the problem had originated, they just had to treat ALL the related claims as unreliable, and listed what those were. Pushing judges to use this tool as they would in so many other cases looks like a pretty safe way of fixing a social problem to me, but I wouild be interested in hearing how treating cops the standard way (when it comes to losing evidence) can be abused, if people have some counter-examples.
Who is John Cabal?
There was very little looting to begin with. It's the same media amplification that allowed 200 Teabaggers hanging outside a congressional office to get more coverage than 200,000 people protesting the invasion of Iraq.