101–110 of 240 posts
How about the simple fact, that if you delete data that would be used in a court case, the court will automatically assume the worst case, while cops can do it, and the penalty? Nothing!
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It's curious how these problems are highly correlated with the police doing questionable shit.
Is that an assumption, or based on any particular data set or even just a few data points you've anecdotally read about? The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be bel…
You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks.
Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure.
Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
Adverse inference should be be applied. Seriously.
> is a legal inference, adverse to the concerned party, drawn from silence or absence of requested evidence. [...] According to Lawvibe, "the 'adverse inference' can be quite damning at trial. Essentially, when plaintiffs try to present evidence on a point essential to their case and can't because the document has been destroyed (by the defendant), the jury can infer that the evidence would have been adverse
The first paragraph sounds a lot like "assume the worst in people" (must be a nice way to go through life); the second paragraph specifies it only in the case of intentionally destroyed evidence (that seems reasonable when you can know it was intentional). Interesting concept
But at the same time, it does a poor job of arguing that the two recorded shootings it spends most of its word-length on (Richards and Trawick) were actually wholly unjustified. The author probably should have chosen some different, more egregious cases to make their point.
> And so as policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments [..] with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. I think it's incredibly naive to portray this as a "defaulting" or "failing to grapple with a fundamental question". I am 100% certain "wh…
At the same time, talking to my neighbors (I have about five officers that live on my block), they like the cameras because most of the time they either prove the case, or show that there really was no abuse (yes, the arrestee did punch the cop).
I think where the issues is when something happens that creates a liability. An officer violates the law, or someone's rights while making an arrest. It creates a situation where the incentive is to railroad the accused at all costs so the accused cannot file or have little chance to win a federal civil rights lawsuit. In these cases it's amazing how difficult to get that video can be.
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I agree with this except I think that policing should also be a highly educated position matching the expectations. Social workers and teachers are generally required to have graduate degrees, for example. Police academies are a scant few weeks in America, and these are people who enforce complex law in the most crucial life-or-death circumstances. Cops should be the best of us.
You've never been through police academy, have you? It's like training for a fucking pentathlon. You have to memorize and demonstrate understanding of law, pass an obstacle course, meet marksmanship standards, pass a driving test under extreme conditions, and more. It's no joke. And they have to recertify on a lot of this yearly. Nobody's perfect. None of their critics can actually do that job. Most couldn't clear th…
I don't want my comment to be taken as anti-cop because I'm not, but an office worker being monitored all day and a cop on duty being monitored aren't really equivalent at all. Shit, if lives depended on me & my actions and I worked in a field where big, heavy decisions could fall on me at any point, I sure as shit hope there's someone or something there to document it all.
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> give the police what they want Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?
Let's put this in perspective. Something like that might happen once or twice every few decades . In the country . Meanwhile, the abuses the police are perpetrating, in many cities, are happening on a monthly basis (or more often). Even if we stipulate that we need someone capable of dealing with the looter horde, we don't need that capability to be in the same hands as the people who are handing out traffic tickets…
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> give the police what they want Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?
Let's put this in perspective. Something like that might happen once or twice every few decades . In the country . Meanwhile, the abuses the police are perpetrating, in many cities, are happening on a monthly basis (or more often). Even if we stipulate that we need someone capable of dealing with the looter horde, we don't need that capability to be in the same hands as the people who are handing out traffic tickets…
https://corporate.target.com/press/statement/2023/09/target-...
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Is that an assumption, or based on any particular data set or even just a few data points you've anecdotally read about? The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be bel…
You can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing while an officer was violating someone's rights. You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks. Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure. Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
If you search for "hardware was working fine", yes, you probably won't find much, because that's not something people complain about.