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Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

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Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#101

Post by __jal »

ams6110 wrote: post #39
moomin wrote: post #12

Just to be clear: what we are looking at is a concerted and coordinated criminal conspiracy to cover up a range of activities including murder.

a concerted and coordinated criminal conspiracy Yes. It's Chicago. You've just described city government in six words.

Another poster already alluded to the point, but I'd like to make it explicit: if you believe Chicago is exceptional in this, you are wrong. The NYPD is almost as bad (as far as we know, the NYPD doesn't have an off-the-books torture chamber[1], rather preferring to sodomize arrestees with brooms in the regular jails on a more ad hoc basis).

But just as life-destroying are the things that go on in smaller communities, where talking about conspiracy is just as valid, but the stakes, departments and communities are smaller, so it doesn't get as much attention. I know from personal experience that small town cops can be just as awful, and power structures in small towns don't get the same push back as they do in larger places.

I'm pretty sure we are seeing the beginnings of a sea change here.

Citizen surveillance tech has reached the point that the behavior of police can't be ignored any more, and the disconnect between law, policy preferences and "rough justice" as actually practiced is shocking to people who lived comfortable enough lives to not notice before[2].

Prosecutors and especially judges, always slow to change when change makes their jobs harder, will take longer to get used to the notion that wink-and-nod isn't going to work any more. Police unions are going to lose this fight, especially as activists are starting to become savvy to the tactical advantage of splitting Republicans between law and order fears and union busters.

The result, at least hopefully, will be police that, if not actually part of the community again, are not able to function as the biggest gang around with legal cover.[3]

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chicago-police-abused-detainees-...

[2] Not casting any aspirations there; we all pick and choose where our outrage lands to some extent, I'm just as oblivious to some injustices as other people are to this. It is simply human nature to worry about things closer to one's self.

[3] Not all police, some of them are very good at what they do, etc. At least we can retire the "few bad apples" deflection.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#102

Post by maxerickson »

stonemetal wrote: post #89
maxerickson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the bar for 'at all'? People seem to speak (at least relatively) favorably of the new policing situation in Camden, the old department was disbanded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_Police_Department_%28Ne... That's a large municipality discarding their entire police organization and creating a new one.

I see no mention of systemic checks and balances or corruption investigation further than a couple of bad actors. So yeah cover it up replace it with something hopefully less corrupt, but not what needs to happen to prevent it from happening again.

I'm trying to establish some common ground. When I read something like this:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/year-in-review/20100221_Ca...

I see the "federal investigation" as a systemic action, and I don't really see how disbanding the old department is a cover up, it's a pretty real consequence.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#103

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

ptaipale wrote: post #61
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spin on the other side would be just as intuitive: "Our police officers are more concerned with getting away with abuse of power than following the law they're supposed to enforce, and as a result, tens (to hundreds) of millions in taxpayer money is being spent on lawsuit payouts, essentially a bailout for bad behavior." While I agree that cameras should be required and intentional tampering a crime, I think beha…

> "blue wall of silence" would become a very vocal supporter of police reform to identify and get rid of bad apples that threaten everybody's pension This sounds like collective punishment - don't know about America, but over here, it would be not possible due to human rights treaties and legislation. The trade union or police would challenge this in a court and government would back down from such threats immediatel…

It depends on how you define the law. It could simply be a state or federal resolution that cuts funding to a municipality, regardless of where the money goes. So if money for roads and hospitals goes to pay for the misdeeds of bad cops and the administration takes no action, how will voters respond in the next election cycle?

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#104

Post by edc117 »

braythwayt wrote: post #71
CPLX wrote: post #21

Though I agree that this behavior is reprehensible and probably criminal, the comments here seem to miss at least some of the human dynamic here. I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Saying that this is what cops signed up fo…

> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded. The working life for most hackers is rather privileged, so perhaps most people reading this would not care for such working conditions. However, more and more "blue-collar" jobs are conducted under similar conditions. 100% surv…

If I log into client infrastructure at my job (large corp), my activities are monitored. Audits are always kept of mission-critical data, and access to it closely watched. I wouldn't be surprised if my work machine contained software to monitor various aspects of my work. Frankly, I wouldn't want it any other way - as developers, we can do a lot of very expensive damage, and those logs are a way of proving you conducted yourself like a professional at all times.

Maybe this isn't common in SV, but if you work for a large organization who needs to be able to answer a client when they ask 'what happened at x on y', you better believe things are in place to make it happen.

I don't believe it's unreasonable to expect the same from police.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#105

Post by sosuke »

grandalf wrote: post #86
sosuke wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment brings up the old and terrible response "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide" Is that irony? I never can tell if I use that word right.

As the other person who replied points out, it's very different for a trusted government official and a private citizen. The official gives up his/her right to privacy when acting in the role of public enforcer of laws...

You're both quite right and so I can only imagine that isn't impressed enough on newly minted government officials.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#106

Post by callinyouin »

bbarn wrote: post #74

Let's see.. in the 20 odd years here in Chicago, the sum of my police interactions are: Hit by a white shirt (supervisor) who came out of an alley on clark st while in a bike lane - somehow my fault, detained. Hit on foot, by a car with no lights on in a residential neighborhood while crossing at a crosswalk - somehow my fault for being outside while there was "a suspect being hunted" Watching officers on foot in 7-1…

I'm moving to Chicago in a few months. Are there certain neighborhoods that should be avoided on the basis of corrupt police activity? I wonder because I could see neighborhoods that are relatively safe in terms of civilian crime, but cops posted in that area might have nothing better to do than mess with its inhabitants.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#107

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #96
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I argued elsewhere here, I believe a stronger incentive would be to come after pay and pensions for police units whose officers have cost the municipality millions in lawsuits. Instead of friends and coworkers trying to protect each other for abuses of power, they will instead take on the role of protecting their families' livelihood. You would be less likely to abuse your authority if your entire department and t…

While this might provide incentive to comply, making individual occurrences more rare, I think it would also provide greater incentive to cover up abuse once it has already occurred.

It depends on who gets punished. If nobody but crooked cops can be proven to have covered up a crime, then only they are punished. But like murder and possession of child pornography, knowledge of someone's criminal act legally complies the observer to turn that person in or they will be charged with conspiracy.

You can cover up one or two crimes but not all of them. Eventually things get found out. You could help someone get away with something once, but if it's ever found out, you could potentially be charged with everything your buddy is up for, go to prison, and come out broke and jobless.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#108

Post by DannyBee »

" “How they determine that it’s purposely caused damages, I’d like to know,” Angelo said last month. “How they can figure out what is mechanical or what is human error, I’d like to know.”"

Yeah, i mean how could you possibly tell whether it was human error for things like "wires cut with diagonal cutters".

If the officers are so worried, they could do something fairly simple. They could take a cell phone video of what's going on when they try to turn on the audio!

Crazy, i know

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#109

Post by cglace »

beedogs wrote: post #84
CPLX wrote: post #21

Though I agree that this behavior is reprehensible and probably criminal, the comments here seem to miss at least some of the human dynamic here. I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Saying that this is what cops signed up fo…

> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Taxi cab driver? Truck driver? Pilot? Train engineer? And none of them even get guns.

Though the train engineer and pilot have the ability to kill a lot more people if they mess up on the job.

Re: Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams to Block Audio, Records Show

#110

Post by goda90 »

MCRed wrote: post #80
bbarn wrote: post #74

Let's see.. in the 20 odd years here in Chicago, the sum of my police interactions are: Hit by a white shirt (supervisor) who came out of an alley on clark st while in a bike lane - somehow my fault, detained. Hit on foot, by a car with no lights on in a residential neighborhood while crossing at a crosswalk - somehow my fault for being outside while there was "a suspect being hunted" Watching officers on foot in 7-1…

Unfortunately, where to move? The situation is like that all over the USA. The increasing militarization of the police in the past 20 years (one thing about being "old" is you can see these things happen before your eyes) have produced a very bad scene. I spent a couple years in Chile. They cops there walk around with machine guns (they're called "carabineros") but are professional, uncorrupt and trustworthy. The dif…

I lived in Chile for a couple years too, and while I knew cool carabineros and didn't have much trouble with them myself I've seen points of view that are way different. I think every system has good and bad eggs, but sometimes the organization and system established can either discourage or encourage poor behavior to some degree.

Funny anecdote I heard in a poor part of Santiago. A guy stabbed another guy during a futbol match. When the carabineros arrived they got the victim to a hospital and everything, but then they pinned the guy to the fence and let every other player in the game give him a good punch.

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