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Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

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Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#91

Post by hga »

apu wrote: post #84
pg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most recent time, because they sent me a deluge of junkmail. They seemed to have morphed into a marketing organization that also did some legal work. Maybe the problem was that I gave them more than the normal amount of money; maybe the more you give them the more mail they send you.

Actually this is a huge problem that regularly deters me (and my parents) from donating more. 95% of organizations view a single donation as an all-access pass to send junk mail, emails, and in many cases even phone calls with "updates" and requests for more money. Sometimes I want to be able to say to organizations: "I would love to support your cause, but not if it means I have to deal with all your crap afterwards…

Indeed. I'm on a small, limited fixed budget and I've found that the amount I can afford to donate to most non-profits is smaller than the amount they'll spend soliciting me afterwords before they give up.

I think that's just going to leave me donating money to my alma mater, which actually has to worry about it's overall budget (in a lot of non-profits someone's making serious money sending out all that stuff, e.g. the NRA's PR firm has outright captured it in a weird twist on public choice regulatory capture).

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#92

Post by MartinCron »

hga wrote: post #89
MartinCron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiretapping laws only apply to places and scenarios where one could have a reasonable assumption of privacy. As long as you're not driving through my bedroom, you're all right with me.

Not true in Illinois, where they explicitly made it illegal to tape cops. Although in all fairness the state laws on wiretapping are designed to protect the guilty (e.g. only the Feds can secretly legally wiretap anyone in the state).

I'm operating under the optimistic assumption that the Illinois statues will eventually be found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#93

Post by hga »

tokenadult wrote: post #81

The Maryland law is different from the law in other states. The article text reads, "A dozen states require all parties to consent before a recording is made if there is a 'reasonable expectation of privacy."" First of all, it's very dubious that a state law enforcement officer would consider himself to have an expectation of privacy while interacting with citizens in public places. Fortunately, most states have a mo…

"Hat tip to him." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1371363)

You're welcome; I'm very glad to learn that someone with your background believes it to be good (I don't have any formal legal or law enforcement background).

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#94

Post by hga »

MartinCron wrote: post #92
hga wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true in Illinois, where they explicitly made it illegal to tape cops. Although in all fairness the state laws on wiretapping are designed to protect the guilty (e.g. only the Feds can secretly legally wiretap anyone in the state).

I'm operating under the optimistic assumption that the Illinois statues will eventually be found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

One hopes so, but as you stated it ("Wiretapping laws only apply...") this is demonstrably not true. Case law in Massachusetts is also unambiguous in twisting the "on it's face" potentially reasonable law into a law like that in Illinois (the MA courts are fond of this sort of thing). It remains to be seen what the Maryland courts do, especially since this case happened about the same time as a notable police brutality incident where it was only a citizen's video that allowed the truth to prevail.

And I've seen enough authority friendly atrocities, ones that don't break down neatly along 4-1-4 "conservative"-"Kennedy"-"liberal" lines, that I'm not even close to 100% sure the Supremes will do the right thing, assuming they even deign to hear such a case.

(On the other hand, the two cases I was most thinking of, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Michigan and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London do break down that neatly ... except the sides flip. I would cite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._Federal_Election_C... but I don't even want to start to break down who voted how.)

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#95

Post by a-priori »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all, given a few minutes of reflection, would be glad that we're not judged on a 30 second edited video highlights reel of the worst decisions we've ever made. Particularly not one which stripped the context out of the video. That said, I'm much less concerned about videotaping cops on the street and more concerned with VPI -- videotaped police interrogations. Unlike videotaping cops on the street, they'd…

I hadn't thought about videotaping interrogations. Interesting. Perhaps the question is: what parts of police activity shouldn't be videotaped and published, and why? Undercover busts maybe. You can't spend five years growing a policeman into what looks like a drug dealer only to have him outed on YouTube in ten seconds. Or do we get rid of all undercover police work? Need to think about that some more.

On-going investigations, like on-going military operations and the like, should be kept secret until they're finished. But they should be recorded and documented all the same. (And there should be limits so you can't say that a 50-year-old operation is 'on-going' or some such nonsense.)

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#97

Post by vollmond »

michael_h wrote: post #61
tsally wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work Did you know if you get a Top Secret clearance, you have to have anything related to your work release reviewed for the rest of your life? Being awarded privileges by the government comes with additional responsibility. Videotaping the police is the same as monitoring people who work with classified information; it's just part of the job. If…

> you have to have anything related to your work release reviewed for the rest of your life I'm not sure that this is true.

I can confirm it. Anything you want to release that is even tangentially related to cleared work needs to go through the gov't first to vet it for classified info.

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#99

Post by a-priori »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5
stcredzero wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish all cars came with black boxes and 360-degree video coverage so that we could voluntarily supply this information. People lie when they get into a fender bender. (Note: if you live in a neighborhood where people key cars, either stop parking like a douche or you need to move to a better neighborhood. If people feel free to vandalize in a place, they'll also do other crime.) I'd pay $300 for a device I could ju…

I had a teenage girl rear-end my car and total it back in the 90s. I was pulling out on to a 4-lane road at night in an underpowered car, she was 1/3 mile away. She dropped her cell phone about the time I pulled out, so she never even saw me, even though I was in her lane for ten seconds or more. She slammed into me at about 65. I was doing maybe 30. It was a hell of a wreck. Thank the stars nobody got hurt. At the t…

I honestly think she didn't feel like she was lying. Memory is just a funny thing.

She may not have been, at least as far as she knew. Memory is a funny thing.

Memories are malleable when they're active -- when the event has just happened, and each time it's recalled thereafter. They can be expanded or changed if new information is prevented, especially when it comes authority figures... such as alternate theories from parents in denial that their little girl could be so careless. Each time a memory is recalled is an opportunity for it to change, and surely she remembered it many many times over those three months.

Another thing is that as memories change, they tend to become more ordinary ('schematic', in psychology lingo). Dropping your cell phone and plowing into a car is not a normal thing, but people get cut off all the time. It's easy to imagine something like that happening, so it's natural that the memory would change to fit a scenario like that.

It's not directly related, but to give you an idea of how radically memories can be changed, this is a video talking about a study where they created a memory from scratch. It's called the 'lost in the mall' study, and it's a fairly famous study in memory research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr_IJvYzbA

Re: Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police

#100

Post by sukuriant »

Small thing I was noticing, that at least one of the comments to an article[1] makes reference to. The police officer outside of uniform pulled a gun on a man on a bike. In states where citizens are allowed to have equivalent force against an attacker, that police officer could have been shot because he was, as seen in the video, "some dude that jumps out of a car, pulls a gun and says nothing of his being a cop". He is very fortunate, however unwise in that situation. I do hope he learns from it and is removed if this sort of habit is found again.

[1] http://carlosmiller.com/2010/04/16/maryland-motorcyclist-spe...

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