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App To Hold Police Instantly Accountable In Stop and Search (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A collective of London-based youth clubs and organizations has released an app called Y-Stop to help encourage those involved in unfair police encounters to instantly record and report their experiences. The idea is to 'encourage police accountability' by making it easier for anyone to have a say about what they think may be unjustified or illegal police action. The app allows its user to immediately send audio and video footage of harassment for secure holding with the charities themselves, or with the police directly. It also enables easier communication with lawyers for assistance and advice.
British pigs are much more decent and better educated than American ones.
Great idea.
I was thinking about how to set up quick recording to online storage for this exact purpose, as my girlfriend was having trouble with a crooked sheriff, but I never thought about doing it via app. Kinda wish I had thought of it myself, but so long as it exists, I'm happy.
I guess when government fails so miserably and consistently at doing it's job, some companies are willing to help out.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
And this app will be banned in the name of terrorism in "5...4...3......."
Read the woman's blog about how she was stopped for "Walking While Black", then watch the police dash cam.
Any offsite data storage should go to a country like Russia or China that don't play ball with British law-enforcement requests, in order to assure your rights are preserved.
When it comes to pigs, you should be pointing a gun, not a camera!
We can't blame just "the government" or "the police" for these problems. The youth involved are to blame, too.
Major UK cities, like major American cities, have a severe problem with youth gangs. This gang culture arose over the last two decades, as rap music and hip hop music which glorifies a criminal, degenerate lifestyle became more popular. We end up with these youth continuously committing heinous crimes, including murder, rape, assault, burglary and peddling narcotics to younger children.
An interesting things has happened, though: the rise of this terrible "gangsta" culture happened in parallel with the rise of what's often called "social justice"!
This has meant that while the thugs have been acting extremely criminally, we've simultaneously seen sheltered academics defend the indefensibly harmful activities of these youth. These academics paint the thugs as the "victims", rather than the perpetrators and criminals that they really are. The youth, of course, aren't dumb and use this to their advantage.
All of this puts the police in a very bad position. In the end, they need to keep crime under control, otherwise they face political and economic consequences. Part of this involves interacting with these youth gangs.
When dealing with criminals in the past, where the criminals didn't have (or take advantage of) the sentiment of "victimhood" surrounding them, the police didn't face scrutiny. But now that academics have wrongly deemed these young thugs to be "good kids who didn't do anything wrong", and the thugs and their parents have used these claims to their benefit, the police are treated as being in the wrong.
If crime is to be prevented, the police will need to deal with these youth who choose to engage in criminal activities. If the youth don't want to face the scrutiny of the police, then they just shouldn't act as known criminals typically act. They shouldn't associate themselves with a culture that's known to be criminal in nature.
Yes, this does mean not wearing baggy clothes like are typically worn by criminal thugs. Yes, this does mean not listening to music that glorifies criminal behavior perpetrated by criminal thugs. Yes, this does mean not talking in a broken dialect of gibberish English that's typically used by criminal thugs.
By associating with a culture that's first and foremost known for its criminality, these youth are going out of their way to make themselves targets of the police. By failing in their social responsibilities not to be criminals, these youth should expect to face frequent interactions with the police, who are of course tasked with stopping criminality.
You bring up a very interesting point.
What will happen when the footage and audio captured repeatedly shows that the police were in the right, that they acted reasonably, and that it was in fact the other party/parties who were in the wrong?
Will the non-police parties actually admit that they were wrong? Or will they continue to live in a constant state of denial, even when all of the evidence shows that they were the ones in the wrong?
The Michael Brown incident is a perfect example of this. We have some clear video footage of him mercilessly robbing a store and abusing the cashier just minutes before his encounter with police. Just after this criminal incident, he was disrupting traffic by walking down the middle of the street. Then when confronted by the police, all of the evidence from the grand jury investigation showed that he had repeatedly attacked the police officer physically, including trying to take the officer's gun.
The officer did the only reasonable thing given the circumstances, and defended himself against this violent attacker using force, which ended up resulting in Brown's death. Yet despite all of the evidence available showing the police officer being completely in the right, and the violent thug completely in the wrong, it was still the officer who was mislabeled as having done wrong in this case. Thankfully, the justice system worked properly and brought the truth to light: the officer acted completely in self-defense, and did nothing wrong.
Yet despite all of the clear and indisputable evidence showing how the events unfolded and who was responsible (Brown), Brown's supporters have continued to deny the truth and reality of the situation.
I suspect we would see the same happen when it comes to footage and other evidence in general. The perpetrators in these cases are so convinced that they're "right", even when they're completely wrong, that they just can't accept it when the evidence shows that the police were actually in the right.
Because the first thing you want to do when a cop starts illegally frisking you is quickly shove a hand in one of your pockets to get your phone...
There are tons of laws and regulations about recording. Wire tapping laws are quite complex and arcane. You could argue this is "wireless taping" so wire-tap laws don't apply. But many police departments claim recording the police violates the law.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What you really need is an app that will geolocate and display your rights in whatever jurisdiction you're in. State by state or even international (languages become a problem here) it tells you what the cops can and can't do to you. It includes a script that says you won't be talking and asks the cop a pointed question. You could even make this run as an mp3, so you wouldn't have to talk at all.
There used to be ads on cable TV for drunk drivers that showed some guy getting pulled over. When the cop came to his window he put a cassette tape into his tape player. A studio announcer's voice came on and said that the driver will not be talking, and rattled off a string of legal arguments in the driver's favor. The driver sat back looking pretty soused and pleased. Now with smartphones you can have that anywhere, and tailored to the jurisdiction. I hope someone chimes in with "dude, they already made that 3 years ago" so I can go download it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
= "black youths" being stopped and searched by the police, because blacks are more likely to be carrying weapons, and commit crimes, than other racial groups...
Why aren't the police stopping and searching Japanese tourists, if they're 'racists'?
In the US, your State's ACLU probably has an App.
The "CA Justice" app is great. Set it to record, and if anyone tries to operate your smartphone, it will immediately upload the recording to an ACLU server, along with date-time-GPS stamp, and later any info you want to add.
Other Apps:
...get people killed? Why do software people think there's an app for ever problem? People are going to get shot reaching for their phone ('he was going for a gun...').
Peace, or Not?
So you need to keep your "hood" clean and have Doughnuts and Coffee ready
(oh and sort out how to hand over the real troublemakers when you need to "Feed Dah Pigs")
Having been privy to what just exactly what goes on in cases on a number of ocassions I have to ask- why is any little nook or cranny of the jurisprudence apparatus not videoed and recorded 24/7? I am talking interviews of witnesses, DAs talking amongst themselves, investigator's notes, prisoners, wardens in fact every utterance of everyone involved in every aspect of every case should be memorialized. Futhermore, talking about cases while OFF the system should be forbidden and punished.
If we're going to have universal and omnipresent surveillance of citizens, and that IS what the NSA et. al. sis bucking for, then the same has to be true of the people who operate society's levers of ultimate power. Failing this, we're barrelling towards an un-usurpable fascism.
What people say and do during their jobs is just what they say and do. Sure, it would be shocking, but we can learn a lot from it and end up in a better society because of it. Moreover, it would restore trust between those in government at any one time and those not in government.
Everything the NSA offcials do or say should be recorded. That's bad for individuals perhaps but good for society since 1) it would inhibit criminality and 2) we can dissect what we're doing wrong when things do go wrong.
Thent he NSA systems would have some use We could troll through every decision making process and see how ti got made. Who bullied who. Who threatened who. Who manipularted who and how. Who fired who and why.
These are the ultimate keys to the kingdom, the REAL most closely guarded secrets people and organizations have. You can bet they'll never give them up willingly, but, uh, looks like maybe societal and technological momentum is on our side for once. Oh, the irony.
They are going to get a mountain of context-free video. They'll probably have to have dedicated officers just to sift through it all, and it could still take months for any of it to become relevant.
The anti police circle jerk on Slashdot is just sad.
Isn't that the very nature of coercive authority? Nothing says "go ahead and abuse your power" like being challenged on your ability to refrain from abusing that power. They aren't intimidated or antagonized; they're angry, and they're going to channel that anger into punishing those who challenge them.
While I will admit that in 98% of the cases the right light cameras are probably working just fine, my issue is that when there is a problem with the camera there is little to no recourse, due to both the distance of time and the lack of a human to argue with if there was some extenuating factor. (I have seen lights with VERY short yellows; somewhere around 1 second, but less than 2 seconds.) There have been numerous news articles about shenanigans either at the private company running the cameras, or at the municipalities, doing such things as short-yellows to increase revenues.
Even worse, in my mind, are the "blocking the box" cameras. More than once I have been pausing before crossing the intersection, to insure that I will not get caught blocking the box by the change in the light, and then right when there is space on the other side and I am part way across the intersection someone turning right-on-red cuts me off, filling the space and leaving me in "the box." Since all the cameras do is take a still photo (you can see the flash), this would not be evident, and it would look like I was in the wrong, when there was really nothing which I could have done to prevent it. Fortunately, none of those times have been at camera intersections.
McFly777
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"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
You can't generalise that the police are always in the right from some cases of the police being in the right. You have to take it on a case by case basis. This app will allow exactly that. If someone is making a frivilous and vexatious complaint, the recordings will show that. If the police are harrassing people for no good reason, the recordings will show that. Every individual policeperson and citizen who has the recording come to light can be judged on their own actions, rather than on the actions of bad seeds in the groups.