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If you see the cops, start recording

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Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#191

Post by craftinator »

chrisco255 wrote: post #21
cwkoss wrote: post #6

I think half of the police force should be 'armed' with nothing more than cameras. Arrests are not necessary in the vast majority of situations police are called for, and recording technology is far superior to verbal testimony for serving our courts

Cops carry guns because the situation can always get out of hand. Violent criminals still exist in society. EDIT: the ignorant people claiming average police officer does not deal with violent criminals have obviously never worked as a first responder. They deal with rape, suicide, murder, assault, domestic abuse, robbery, every week unless they're some small town cop in a gilded neighborhood. The cops in St. Louis,…

So should we carry guns for when cops get out of hand, and start acting like criminals? Your statement seems to suggest that the lives of cops are worth more than the lives of everyone else...

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#192

Post by cwkoss »

logfromblammo wrote: post #156
cwkoss wrote: post #6

I think half of the police force should be 'armed' with nothing more than cameras. Arrests are not necessary in the vast majority of situations police are called for, and recording technology is far superior to verbal testimony for serving our courts

How about a body cam system that automatically switches to RECORD whenever a weapon or tool is removed from the belt, and cannot be switched back to STANDBY until everything is back in its place?

Important to consider privacy around record retention, but I'd love if cops badges were like taxicabs: they are only on duty and supported by the force of law when the light is on and recording is in progress. Ideally, there would be 3+ cameras on the cops body to get a more complete perspective of situations.

Needs systems to limit access to any footage that is not concerning a criminal complaint, but existing cryptographic technology can make it so only the courts have access to the encryption keys if implemented with the right process and key management systems.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#193

Post by deleted_account »

thelean12 wrote: post #144
deleted_account wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it this way, what would you think of a development team that shipped bugs to production and had...no code reviews...no unit tests...no bug tracking system? And every time they shipped a bug someone died? You might be inclined to improve the process, right? I won't belabor the analogy. Campaign Zero has a great summary of the policy changes that can help: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions

Why do so many people need to be so extreme? Zero is impossible. If you want to make the development argument, then you should know that bugs are unavoidable. Even from the best developers in the world. No amount of code reviews, tests, or processes will change that. Can you reduce? Of course. By a really large amount? Probably. But "zero" is an impossible goal. The statement "We can live in a world where the police…

Stop. Think. You're making a "perfect is the enemy of the good" argument which ultimately supports police brutality and systemic racism.

(I'll also point out that 8cantwait.org is a Campaign Zero project. Thank you for linking it.)

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#194

Post by drewbug01 »

kgraves wrote: post #87
drewbug01 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ample public video evidence, available practically in real-time, that disproves this point. I think a slight effort on your part to look at the evidence would dissuade you. There has been looting, but to imply that protestors are "causing chaos" is a dishonest comparison given all evidence publicly available.

footnipple never said that protesters are "causing chaos", there is a difference between looters and protesters, and there is A LOT of evidence online of looters taking advantage of the protesting.

When you take in the context that footnipple was replying to, my read is that they were implying a logical connection between the police arresting non-violent protestors and the looting / "insurgen[cy]" that is occurring.

Of course we can't really say either of us is right or wrong, because their statement inherently relied on bystanders inferring most of the meaning from context.

edit: footnipple replied in additional contexts that they've seen "a lot of destruction at the hands of some very bad people" when asked if they'd been in the protests, so I feel a little more confident that my read of the context was correct.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#195

Post by Ididntdothis »

craftinator wrote: post #187
Ididntdothis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s what’s needed to attract reasonable people into the police then so be it. If we aren’t willing to pay for proper training and supervision then we have the police force we deserve.

Being a police officer is a very high paying job for someone without an education. With overtime, the average pay in many departments is over $100k. For people without an education, who get a massive amount of job perks. The problem is that the job has too much power, which attracts violent, power hungry individuals. Take away their power, and you'll have a police force that desires to make their community a better p…

So we don’t even need to to pay more. Just better management, training and accountability.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#196

Post by dominotw »

tialaramex wrote: post #119
dominotw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is parallel with pilots and airplane crashes. There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. Unfortunately the 'anti cop' sentiment would have the same effect. Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake. What happens if a cop makes a mistake and cau…

One of the key things the airline industry did to fix this was record everything. Same on the railways. Cockpit voice recorders on planes, Forward Facing CCTV on trains (there's only one driver usually so recording what they say is unlikely to present useful evidence). When you tell investigators "A fucking bear was on the track!" the investigators don't believe you. Far more likely you screwed up and have made up th…

recording helps but its not always enough though. most recent example

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/23/boeing-737-...

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#197

Post by standardUser »

smogcutter wrote: post #173

Semi off topic, but one thing that really bugs me about the dialogue around police is when people (especially authority figures) call non-police “civilians”. I get that you need a word for it, but “civilians” is a particularly poor choice. The police ARE civilians. They are not military, nor are they subject to military justice or discipline, and their training and function in society is (whether they like it or not)…

Strongly agree. This is just one example of how police culture is toxic and likely un-fixable without dramatic changes to the entire concept of policing.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#198

Post by mcguire »

adventured wrote: post #64
tbabb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of departments in other countries do not carry guns and do their jobs just fine.

Plenty of departments in other countries do routinely carry guns, including in Italy, Spain, France and Germany. The first time I ever saw a submachine gun was at a train station in Germany, it was shocking to see cops walking around as routine so heavily armed like it was no big deal, despite an obvious lack of threat anywhere. You have to solve both sides of the gun equation for a disarm to work in the US, because…

Amsterdam, Schiphol airport, 1998. I did not see any more until after 2001.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#199

Post by Yetanfou »

camgunz wrote: post #75
Yetanfou wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. The US is saturated with firearms so it would be foolish for the police not to carry. In the UK the situation used to be different and to a certain extent still is, the police used to be unarmed (are they still?). It should be noted however that the number of knife crimes there is high - people tend to use the weapons at hand. This has led to a call for a ban on pointy kitchen kniv…

This is an argument activists have made for years in favor of gun control. The prevalence of guns in US society has made us objectively far less safe.

There are two things to this:

Compare the rate of gun-related crime in a country like Switzerland (where guns are readily available and many people have been trained to use them) with that in Germany (where guns are as rare as hens teeth among the non-criminal contingent of the population) and you'll notice that Switzerland does not suffer unduly under a wave of gun crime. Why not? What is it in Swiss society which makes it possible for people to have access to firearms, the training to use them yet the wherewithal to know when not to use them? Germany and Switzerland are neighbours, they mostly speak the same language, they're both affluent countries. What would Germany look like were firearms as widely spread as they are in Switzerland? Now compare the Swiss data to those in the USA and a clear difference shows. What is the difference between Swiss and American society which can explain this difference? Is it affluence? Switzerland is a rich country but so is the USA. Is it the fact that the difference between rich and less affluent is bigger in the USA than it is in Switzerland? Is it the amount of cultural diversity? The USA is a diverse country, Switzerland is largely homogeneous. Is is the overarching culture? Is it the difference in trust level? Switzerland is a high-trust country, the USA is not.

The other part on the gun control question is the age-old adage that in countries where guns are outlawed only outlaws have guns. They're not exactly hard to come by after all. It seems to work in a country like Japan but it probably takes Japanese culture as well as the physical lack of firearms on the island nation to pull this off.

Re: If you see the cops, start recording

#200

Post by mulmen »

staticassertion wrote: post #150
mulmen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many interactions do police have in a week? If the number is 20 or more then 5% becomes a common occurrence.

OK? That doesn't matter. If the vast majority of crimes are not violent, it's not really important what the absolute numbers are. It could be 1,000 or 10, the point is that the majority of responders don't need deadly weapons.

95% is not “the vast majority”.

To put 5% in more extreme terms: would you play Russian roulette with a 20 chamber revolver and one bullet?

Each interaction for police is like pulling the trigger in that hypothetical game of Russian roulette. This is why the absolute numbers are actually very important.

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