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Once Again, Baltimore Police Arrest a Person For Recording Them
MobyDisk writes: A lawsuit was filed yesterday over a case in which a woman was arrested for recording the police from her car while stopped in traffic. Ars Technica writes, "Police erased the 135-second recording from the woman's phone, but it was recovered from her cloud account according to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City lawsuit, which seeks $7 million."
Baltimore police lost a similar case against Anthony Graber in 2010 and another against Christopher Sharp in 2014. The is happening so often in Baltimore that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to the police reminding them that they cannot stop recordings, and most certainly cannot delete them.
Local awareness of this issue is high since the the Mayor and the City Council support requiring police body cameras. The city council just passed a bill requiring them, but the mayor is delaying implementation until a task force determines how best to go about it. The country is also focused on police behavior in light of the recent cases in Ferguson and New York, the latter of which involved a citizen recording.
So the mayor, city council, police department policies, courts, and federal government are all telling police officers to stop doing this. Yet it continues to happen, and in a rather violent matter. What can people do to curb this problem?
Baltimore police lost a similar case against Anthony Graber in 2010 and another against Christopher Sharp in 2014. The is happening so often in Baltimore that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to the police reminding them that they cannot stop recordings, and most certainly cannot delete them.
Local awareness of this issue is high since the the Mayor and the City Council support requiring police body cameras. The city council just passed a bill requiring them, but the mayor is delaying implementation until a task force determines how best to go about it. The country is also focused on police behavior in light of the recent cases in Ferguson and New York, the latter of which involved a citizen recording.
So the mayor, city council, police department policies, courts, and federal government are all telling police officers to stop doing this. Yet it continues to happen, and in a rather violent matter. What can people do to curb this problem?
Arrest the cops for violating your rights?
Someone needs to organize a flash mob of people just showing up and recording police in public all over the city.
Force those thugs they call police to behave.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It should be legal for, when any cop trying to do this, to assault and detain them. They're breaking the law, violating the constitution, destroying evidence, and committing fraud, all in one and what the hell are you supposed to do, call the police? I'd knock him the fuck out and make him prove in court that I didn't need to. Surprise, I needed to in order to preserve evidence of him committing a crime. You know, a citizen using force to prevent a crime from being committed...that thing that's completely legal in 50 states. OH THAT'S RIGHT police officers are magic and immune to the law and can go around making up their own laws. I forgot.
The mentality and intelligence level of the officers is screened to fit a certain profile. Perhaps that profile is the issue.
Link: http://thefreethoughtproject.c...
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
I disagree. There should be an elevation of discipline that should start with a written warning and ending with suspension and/or loss of their job should the issue be repeated. The loss of their pension and benefits will be intensive enough to keep it from happening.
And get new ones. What's so difficult about that?
In general I agree with this, but first the officers should be given additional mandatory training to be completed within a short period of time.
If an officer fails to complete the training, they should be suspended until they do. If an officer does it after being trained appropriately about the new directive, then they should be penalized.
Thing is, this is really the status quo. A few years back when that Henry Louis Gates arrest happened here. There was all this racial outrage at what happened but, one thing people totally missed was....the police actually had no reason at all to arrest him.
The very charge he was arrested on, there are cases, right here in our state, of FAR more egrgious actions where the courts ruled did not meet the criteria for disorderly conduct. 20 years prior to that arrest, a the courts had ruled that a person who had refused orders to leave the scene of an arrest and yelled at police, and even approached them flailing his arms wildly.... he did not meet the criteria for arrest.
So if this has been known for 20 years...how are people still today being arrested on this charge? Quite simply because they face absolutely no penalty for getting it wrong. They can search illegally, they can arrest with little to no reason, they face absolutely nothing but a pat on the back for doing the best they could.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If they really wanted to stop the behavior, you'd sue the police chief for not punishing them, sue the DA for not prosecuting them, and sue the union for impeding the ability to fire the bad apples. And none of that would come out of the tax payers coffers.
Move to a malpractice system, like doctors have. Make individual officers personally liable for their own behavior. They carry professional liability insurance, and can be sued if they do something egregiously stupid. Screw up enough, and no insurance company will cover them. Changing jurisdictions won't help, because the insurance companies will be sure to trade information.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Tampering with evidence, for example by deleting a recording, is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. While in this case the consequences were negligible, I suggest prosecuting these cops for tampering with evidence.
0x or or snor perron?!
I have friends who are cops. It's a shitty, thankless job where you get to enjoy the worst of human behavior. Oh, and occasionally your life is on the line; risking widowing your wife and leaving your kids without a father. Many of them were soldiers who enlisted, had a gun put in their hand at 18 years old, and taught to kill other people. It's easy to see how cops can become jaded and not give a crap about rights. A lot of them are pretty nice work-a-day randos just trying to get through life like the rest of us.
That said, I think in this instance the best way to police cops is to let them police themselves by hitting them where it really hurts: personal finances. So for example, the resulting remuneration from a lawsuit where cop takes your phone and erases a video is paid for from the police pension fund. Further, that officer's personal pension is reset to zero, or halved or some other appropriate consequence. That's a pretty powerful motivator, and there will be huge pressure from within the ranks to keep their shit wired tight. I also think it would need to be very narrowly defined. The last thing we want is officers afraid to do anything for fear of losing their pension.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
that's one way to look at it. Another is, if I made a $7 million mistake in my job, would I get fired? I will not tell you my job, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not a CEO so the answer will always be Yes.
Yeah, the police feel they are under assault. Yet there is almost a live-stream of police abusing the moral privilege they are given, even though the job is far safer than many other jobs. I've seen a good friend enter the police, and adopt the cultural talking points. There are real systemic problems with how police do their jobs, and how interrogations and prosecutions are done -- and at no point do police seem willing to accept any criticism or feedback at all. If there is video evidence, then the problem is that there is video evidence.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
See the article, below, for more evidence of the problem:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Yeah, the police feel they are under assault.
The police are under assault. That's what happens when your job is violence and you don't have public support. It's one of the reasons why the principles of a republic are so important: if a bunch of self righteous crusaders in 27 states get marijuana outlawed across all 50 states, then in 23 states you end up with a police force enforcing laws that the local people do not want enforced. And so you get LA gangs and and no one defending their local police and they do indeed "come under assault". But they should be under assault. They should be very afraid to enforce laws that will make them unpopular.
That is very true that most first time offenders could get off with a warning, but we are talking about on the job offenses.
You LITERALLY cannot find a workplace in this country that you can assault, batter and steal from someone and not expect to be thrown in jail and lose your job.
Except for being an officer, apparently.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
If you want a more industry standard source for the relative danger of different jobs, the National Council of Compensation Insurers is a good source to look at. They are the source of information on occupational hazard for workers compensation insurers, so they have an extremely strong incentive to rate work related hazards correctly.
NCCI rates occupations by their Expected Loss Rate - the average number of dollars that an employee will receive in workers compensation payments in a year, per $100 of salary. This tends to be a pretty good indicator of relative occupational hazard for just about everyone except clergy and active duty military, because of the extreme uniformity of claims handling procedures within each state.
Looking at Maryland, where the police in question live, law enforcement officers have an ELR of $1.28. That's compared to, say, rock excavators and stone crushers, who have an ELR of $7.20. So, by that metric, the guys you see on the side of the road in the front wheeled rock crusher have a job that's about 5 and a half times as dangerous as law enforcement work, at least in terms of economic harm.