Cops are allowed to break the law constantly and get off easy because politicians argue "no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions."
It's the dumbest thought process one could have. Wouldn't you want GOOD cops that follow laws instead of just people who know how to yell and shoot?
No, politicians make shit up to cover the fact what they really want are cops that obey them regardless of the law. Because they know if cops enforced the law equally, they'd be arrested for corruption.
Richard Pinheiro was found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of fabricating evidence in 2018 and received a three-year suspended sentence and two years of supervised probation, according to the Baltimore Sun.
How in the hell is malicious fraud that results in destroying someone's livelihood, reputation, and freedom with years of jailtime only a misdemeanor with a suspended sentence and probation. This kind of egregious action is waaaaay more damaging to the public welfare and safety than an individual possessing drugs for personal use, and yet the former gets you a "shame a on you", and the latter rips you from your family, your job, your life. This is some backwards shit.
Yeah, police falsifying evidence should carry the same penalties as the crime they falsified evidence for and a guaranteed firing. This country treats cops with a bizarre level of leniency
Certainly if they falsified a federal crime, the penalty shouldn't be any less than wire fraud, which is up to 20 years in prison.
People keep proposing naive solutions without realizing cops only use bodycams because they see them as net benefit for them. The technology was around for a long time but only became popular when it was sold as surveillance tool, not accountability tool. If police loses control of the footage they will simply stop using them. If you force them they will protest. Guess who the politicians will support in this fight?
There are only two ways to fix this that I see:
Neither of which the US is going to do, because here, the cops and law enforcement are a civic religion. Therefore the best most Americans can do is keep their heads down and avoid the bastards as best you can manage.
In Spain when cops fuck up you simply take away their ability to work in law enforcement. It's really that simple. In US they will just get hired by another city. The problem in US is not that this is hard to solve and requires some clever, hard to write legislation. The problem is that law enforcement always worked for the elites, not the masses and no one in power wants to change it.
It's also that cops have put an amount of investment into pr that is unique among government employees (and that includes pushing you to not think of them as just more government employees) except maybe the military. They're bleeding your local budget dry, but if the news reports on stuff like that or their misconduct they lose access to crime leads. There's a massive push to make you think highly of them. Here's a video I recently watched on the topic that points to true crime as a possible in to get ordinary people to see the cops as as flawed as they are
Very interesting. I assumed that police always held privileged status in US but this could be simply because they are always portrayed like that in movies, even historical ones. The PR is definitely there. In pretty much every movie caps break the laws and ignore rights of everyone and it's shown as something necessary and even 'cool'. Bad guys don't deserve rights...
This is one of the reasons I refused to watch "24". I wasn't going to support a show whose entire premise was "we ignore due process because we're too incompetent to stop the criminals sooner."
The technical solution is: body cam footage is automatically, frequently, uploaded to cloud servers that the department does not control. The department gets read-only access, nobody gets the ability to delete footage for 7 years, and defense attorneys get automatic access to everything remotely related to their case.
Also: planting evidence and sending the falsely accused to prison for 6 months is a misdemeanor punished with suspended sentences and probation? That department owes the falsely accused damages for lost wages and damage to their ability to obtain future employment. That's actually a "superpower" cops know all too well: if you've never been arrested they can seriously screw up your life with absolute impunity just by arresting you - charges never have to be filed, that arrest on your record - however baseless it may be - can hurt you in all sorts of ways, especially employability, for the rest of your life.
The easiest way to get this accomplished politically is to create insurance for them. Have the departments cover the base insurance rate and premium increases from settlements increase that officers insurance which (s)he has to pay out of their pay. If the insurance is unaffordable then you can no longer be a police.
Exactly, that is not a cure all but it's a doable fix that could be implemented even in today's political environment with a little work. Every cop gets the amount of their liability insurance it would cost if they weren't a prick, and they pay the premium.
Every cop gets a score already by liability insurance that departments carry, so it would just be shifting those costs, and would involve renegotiating their union contracts.
I'd love that, but I don't think (at least here in the US) that there will ever be a meaningful change to how killer cops are managed legally, especially after there was zero accountability for Uvalde.
Single events do not define a whole country. We get the changes we fight (vote) for.
Well hey, I have a few questions:
Any police testimony not accompanied by some kind of recording should be inadmissible in court. Likewise any evidence collected while a camera isn't recording should also be inadmissible. Police have shown again and again that they can't be trusted and they're almost always a less reliable witness than some random bystander. It's about time we actually started treating them that way.
I took a speeding ticket to court, had the officer sitting behind me pre-trial talkin' smack with a colleague "why are you here? Speeding, ha, how hard is that?" Yeah, so he gets on the stand and "reads from his notes" every single thing he said was fabricated, only my location was accurate, his location was a lie: in reality he "witnessed" me from a side street 3 blocks back from the intersection he crossed but in his testimony he "observed me passing a line of five cars" - yeah, except that never happened, what I was passing was a single gardening truck doing 10mph for the past 3 blocks, the other 4 cars were stacked up behind me.
Maybe he really thought that's what he saw, which is all the more reason his dashcam should have been the evidence, not his notebook. https://www.restonyc.com/can-you-not-be-a-police-officer-with-a-high-iq/
The cameras worked by constantly recording even before the “record” button was pressed, periodically deleting any footage that hadn’t been intentionally recorded. Once the “record” button was pressed by the officer, it would capture the 30 seconds before the button had been pressed, thanks to this method of constantly being on standby.
But it was a hard concept for cops to understand. They weren’t being properly trained on the fact that their own cameras didn’t start recording once they pressed record. Hitting that button saved the 30 seconds prior as well, a neat feature that really bit them in the ass.
Maybe bodycams should randomly record even when the RECORD button isn't pressed by an officer; and the pre-record time should be random from say 2 minutes to 30 seconds before. And the recording should stop a random 30-60 seconds AFTER they hit 'STOP'. So they never know when they're being recorded. If they're not pulling illegal shit, they shouldn't have any problem with that, right?
In fact, with storage capabilities nowadays, bodycams should ALWAYS be recording, period. Gotta go to the bathroom? Too damn bad. You're a public servant. Trust the auditors to redact that if it comes to a court subpoena. You signed up for it. Extraordinary powers come with extraordinary sacrifices.
Jeebus Chripes. No wonder so many people say ACAB.
Gotta go to the bathroom? Too damn bad. You're a public servant.
you lost me here, this is an insane statement. a camera always on even when youre in the bathroom?
if i was in a public restroom with a police officer, I now have to worry about being on camera in the one place where cameras are illegal? come on..
If a cop walks into the bathroom now, how do you know the body cam isn't on?
I think we just need to revise the laws to say that a cop's testimony doesn't have any more weight than anyone else's testimony unless it's backed up by their bodycam.
Taking cops at their word made sense when we didn't have this technology. It doesn't make sense anymore.
I keep getting left off jury duty by honestly answering the question about whether I would give less weight to a cops testimony because they're a cop.
I suppose if there's ever a civil jury trial that doesn't involve a police testimony, I might serve in a jury.
A bit of a shame because I don't mind being on a jury. I'm not trying to get out of it. I'm just being honest.
I would even go a step further and say that cops' testimony should not even be accepted if they don't have bodycam footage to back it up. When you have a camera that's able to verify anything you need it to, the absence of that verification should be viewed through the lens that you specifically did not want whatever was happening during that time to be recorded.
Can you say: "conflict of interest"? We're at trial, the cop(s) who performed the arrest made a judgement call in the field - of course they're going to double down. What would it do for the career of a cop on the stand to say "you know, I think we made a mistake that day..."? The fact that the case has gone to trial basically makes the cop's testimony redundant, what they're going to say is basically a foregone conclusion, why waste time making them say it again?
When we fly we are forced to let some stranger see our junk with the full body scanner
Gotta make sure no one is smuggling a full sized tube of tooth paste up their ass
Seems reasonable given that
Hobesrly with the angles of the body cams I doubt anything would be visible. 100% be audible though.
I assure you
When you step into a full body scanner SOMEBODY gets a look at your shrinky-dink!
I was talking about the body cams, I know what the scanners can see xD
Pretty sure they're talking about the body cams, not the scanner.
Maybe bodycams should randomly record
For what memory chips cost these days, they should record continuously anytime the camera (accelerometer in the camera) detects motion within the previous 10 minutes. If they're on-body, or in a moving car, they should be recording.
The "save" button could work the same: mark 30 seconds before until "save" is deactivated to be "do not delete this for rotation" - but otherwise, save everything anyway, only rotate out after 2TB of memory card is full, and download at the end of every shift.
Better still, download continuously to the car and 5G it to a cloud server where the department can't delete it.
People say ACAB because police are class traitors. They violently protect and serve the interest of capital.
¿Por que no los dos?
They absolutely should always be recording - and frequently backing up data to a server outside their control. Although it probably needs to have judicial oversight for access to days files?
But yeah, what's the damn point if it's controlled by the very people the technology is intended to provide oversight for?
Make the record button a pause button. Let it stop for five minutes if you're not moving. Once you walk away, it automatically resumes, independent of time. If you pressed pause while not in front of the shitter, you're investigated.
Unless you're going to the bathroom in front of a mirror why does it need to be paused at all?
I don't want to fart and shit and groan in front of a camera or a microphone.
Body cams film people being shot. Body cams film people being dragged out of their beds in their underwear and detained. And we're clutching our pearls at some farts and groans that no one is going to watch? If you can't handle someone possibly hearing you fart you shouldn't be a cop.
But fine, allow cops to mute the audio. Problem solved.
If they mute the audio anytime they are not in the bathroom it is assumed they are trying to hide something and the missing audio is assumed to be damaging to the cops testimony.
Yes, I'm not willing to become as bad as them.
Mute is fine for me.
The company that sells the cameras and the police buying them don't want that. The guy who owns the company that makes most body cams advertises that the cameras don't record more accurately than the human eye. This enables cops to show a blurry 16fps 720p video and go "it looked like he was pulling out a gun".
That might indeed be the result sometimes :). Doesn't matter. Since the US seems OK with Amazon making their drivers pee in a bottle and docking them points for gazing away while driving, why not make police submit to full recording like this?
Because the police aren't the slaves, they're the overseers.
I get the nuance in these replies and not trying to go off topic but general theme is not only do the overseers not care but it’s by design at all levels, from the officer, the equipment supplier, to the courts.
You have had an execution In the street and the authorities will not acknowledge it never mind apologise or make steps to make it right.
Same same. Corruption, submission, fascism.
In the same sense, there recently was a disclosure of footages of this kind of camera during a massive protest in france, with thousands on each side. It was very violent, with two protesters into coma if i'm right. Turns out, police forces were told beforehand to "record to prove we've done nothing wrong". The result is hours of footages of insults, illegal use of their gear, call to use lethal weapons, and pleasure of sending people to hospital, because those morons forgot to turn the cameras off when those happened.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
