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Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
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Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#52are we watching those who watch the watchers.
Subscribe to this channel and you can add your own attention to the effort:
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#53I’m not sure I understand the point of Copwatching and documenting police abuses. Everyone knows about police abuses—the police even document their own abuses themselves with bodycams. It doesn’t matter to them because there are never consequences. It’s pointless to do all this documenting without a way to turn it into accountability.
The point is:
> documenting police abuses.
Whats not to understand? The police do not do a good job of policing themselves.
Citizens have a responsibility to ensure their police forces do not become tyrants.
>It’s pointless to do all this documenting without a way to turn it into accountability.
The light of public attention is the first step to accountability. Copwatchers gather the evidence that will eventually result in a conviction of those who abuse their position as police officers.
That is the point. How is this so hard to understand?
> there are never consequences
This is false. There are many, many cases of bad cops going to jail because a concerned citizen got them on camera, violating their position.
Unless you go looking for these cases, though, you won't see any. Policing in America has gotten too powerful. The only effective thing to do about it, is for citizens to turn their cameras on and start documenting the abuses, far and wide.
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
the very concept of the police is a form of political ideology.
what an insane take. police has existed in every form of society and it is necessary for a civilized society to function. its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation. the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.
Our modern system of policing traces its roots to slave patrols and is a few hundred years old, at most. For the overwhelming majority of human history it was an ad-hoc community organization more akin to a watch. We get police from the Greek polis (city or polity) by way of the Latin politia (citizenship). The US idea of a civil force salaried and charged with deterring crime is something we inherited from England with the idea of "keeping the king's peace". We have slave patrols to thank for marrying the watch to the militia. [0]
Your last sentence ignores the possibility that the LAPD, a department downright infamous for its police gangs, could be a contributing or even causative factor for LA crime being, as you put it, "out of control".
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#55Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there will be suspicions that this is an anti-police (rather than anti-police-surveillance-abuse) measure intended to intimidate and obstruct police work. Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a…
I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better.
Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#56This reminds of the Watchmen series. The policemen there wore masks (similar to superheroes) to avoid retribution by citizens.
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#57are we watching those who watch the watchers.
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
LA isn’t “out of control” because of a lack of police, certainly. Do you think cops prevent crime?
Well... To a certain extent they do. You're not gonna rob a store if there's a cop standing outside
I love that the American solution to fire is... fire? We tried putting grown-ups with guns in schools after Columbine, and somehow more guns hasn't solved the violence problem. I don't think putting a cop outside each store will stop theft, especially when wage theft alone represents a larger loss than all larcenies, burglaries, and auto theft combined. [0]
> in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1]
[0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#59Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there will be suspicions that this is an anti-police (rather than anti-police-surveillance-abuse) measure intended to intimidate and obstruct police work. Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a…
Police forces in many other nations can more or less be trusted to provide somewhat accurate data. When they don't, it often becomes a scandal. In the US them not providing accurate data seems more or less the rule. I once wanted to compare the numbers of bullets fired during service between different nations. There are nations where every single bullet that has been fired during service is accounted for and categori…
> If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this
I 100% believe you, and if I was an LAPD official I would feel the same way. However police themselves probably won’t react like this. I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it (take a more lenient position of hidden/obscured badge numbers, slow roll FOIA requests, idk), try to shut it down legally or harass the people behind it.
Don’t get me wrong it’s a good tool to have at your disposal and I think it’ll probably still help some LA residents with cases against the LAPD somehow.
disclaimer: I don't live in LA, have never interacted with the LAPD, have never even been there. This comment is purely based on the impression I get that some police in the USA are quite hostile towards their population and that the LAPD are one of the more notorious departments.
Re: Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
#60Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there will be suspicions that this is an anti-police (rather than anti-police-surveillance-abuse) measure intended to intimidate and obstruct police work. Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a…
I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better. Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power ba…
So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes.
Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?