Via Sullivan, Radley Balko highlights more insanity:
Here’s the thing: It’s all well and good for Mayor DeStefano to state that it is perfectly legal for citizens to record on-duty cops in New Haven. But if New Haven police are permitted to arrest and jail—and if prosecutors are permitted to charge and convict—citizens for doing precisely that, it pretty clearly isn’t legal, by any definition of the word.
It’s also about damned time that cops who delete citizen-shot video that may incriminate them or their colleagues get the same punishment a citizen would get for doing the same thing. They can’t play dumb with the “Gosh, if the videos aren’t there, you must have never taken them” excuse this time. The police report clearly states that Luna was arrested for “taking pictures” and “filming”. The bumbling cops then inadvertently provided photo evidence of their tampering with Luna’s phone. Luna should take the phone in to see if the videos can be recovered, and if it can be discerned when they were deleted.
As it stands, the only person to suffer any consequences in Luna’s case is Luna, the one party who, according to the mayor and chief of police, didn’t do anything wrong.
WTF is going on in this country? Seriously, people.
cleek
cop deletes something from your camera?
1. take the card out immediately
2. when you get it home, use something like Recuva to see if you can recover anything from it.
Hunter Gathers
It’s the triumph of the perpetually aggrieved. And no group is perpetually aggrieved more than law enforcement. I mean, they were forced to become cops, don’t ya know?
Bob Loblaw
These posts are flying fast and furious right now.
And the simple answer is that technology has advanced more rapidly than the authoritarian mindset is prepared to handle right now, and we’re all feeling the pinch for it. It’s a feeling out period for our new century of latent oppression.
Zifnab
Wait till they break out the dogs and the water hoses.
Just another day in the ongoing War on Young People.
Ugh
The country is the same as it’s always been, these things just are easier to pinpoint and spotlight than they used to be (I mean, IIRC torture induced false confessions were a staple of local police forces throughout the early 20th century in the United States, and likely continue to this day).
Doesn’t mean this isn’t wrong, but it’s hardly surprising (I have to imagine that people are convicted on a daily basis in this country in violation of Supreme Court precedent directly on point).
But, hey, didn’t Prince William get engaged today?
Short Bus Bully
Just because you did nothing wrong doesn’t mean that you didn’t do anything wrong.
Wait, wut?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash.
General Stuck
If mankind was meant to fly, gawd woulda given us angel wings and a compass.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I suggest reading up on the clown empire of Napoleon III. Things in the US today will make a lot more sense after that. Be sure not to skip over the prints of Daumier; the dude was the 19th cen. Matt Taibbi with a lithographic crayon.
jack
Abbie Hoffman –
‘Hitch-hiking is legal in most states, but remember you always can get a “say-so” bust. A “say-so” arrest is to police what Catch-22 is to the Army. When you ask why you’re under arrest, the pig answers, “cause I say-so.”‘
Catsy
@cleek:
As usual, listen to the cleek, for he is wise.
The following advice won’t help you if you don’t use a camera with a memory card–e.g. your iPhone or some other device made by a pack of control-freak assclowns who have something against removable storage–or if you format your memory cards for MacOS, a file system of which I know little.
That said, keep in mind that unless you a) overwrite it with new data or b) use a utility specifically designed to securely wipe data, no file or data is ever actually deleted from the Windows file system when you delete it. All that happens is that the pointer on the card that tells Windows (or your camera) where to find the file is wiped.
Imagine that the file system is like an old-style library catalog, with a card telling where every book can be found. If you get rid of a book’s card, nobody looking in the system will have any idea where the book is, or even that it exists. But it’s still there and can be found if you know where to look.
That’s what undelete utilities do. If anything you want to keep is ever erased, immediately stop doing anything that will write new data to the same disk/card. Then get an undelete utility like the one cleek recommended. Chances are good that you can recover the entire file as if it had never been gone.
David Hunt
Seriously? We lost our minds with fear after 9/11 and let the guys in charge, who happened to be the worst people in the world to be in charge during such a time, and let them have almost anything their dark shriveled hearts desired. We are now in the portion where we’re discovering how hard it is to walk back that shit once you let it out.
Keith G
We really are, bit by bit, constructing the elements necessary for one hell of a security state. Shutting down civilian observation of the elements of force is just one of the dangerous things going down. Getting civilians used to massively invasive security checks is yet another.
Cheney may croak soon, but we will be living in his world for a long, long time.
Fun Times.
GregB
The culmination of the decades long war on crime, war on drugs, war on terror along with the militarization of domestic law enforcement and the cult of military worship mindset that developed after Vietnam and was embraced by most in the media and the political classes.
It’s a bad brew.
Svensker
This goes along with the TSA fine for the guy who got out of the line. Citizens must obey, or face the consequences. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide, remember?
David Hunt
digby’s got a post up right now about the police state and how it’s being unreasonable/insane is a self-enforcing part of it.
ETA: and I’ m still incompetant and adding links. It’s her 10 AM post titled, “Welcome to the Police State.”
Martin
@Bob Loblaw: Yeah, this sounds right to me. In a lot of areas, technology is seriously outstripping the ability of society and government to keep pace.
That’s always been a problem, but never on this scale, which is sad because government could do a fuckton of good work if they put some not-70-year-olds in charge of legislation and the judiciary and put this technology to good use.
Brazilian Rascal
It will never get better while the ‘comfortable’ go on believing this is happening mostly to the undesirables; hipsters, punks, brown people, darkies and people who shouldn’t be sharing their lebensraum in the first place. As richly described in Nixonland, there are few limits to the pain social suthoritarians will bear as long as they believe the people they hate have it 0.00002% worse.
Here in Brazil, the military police had divisions that were death squads against the poor inhabitants of the favelas. That was literally their job description; keep them penned, beat and kill pot dealers and muggers (and most importantly, those who -look- like pot dealers and muggers). Everyone loved it; they were the guardians of inequality. It took a few cases of the police ‘accidentally’ murdering and torturing people who just looked poor (mixed race wealthy boys going to parties in poor neighborhoods, for instance) to get people to clear their throats and start frowning on the practice.
Meaning that they just felt bad that the thugs were too dumb to keep a good thing going.
Amanda in the South Bay
I think the moral is, if you’re gonna take a pic of cops breaking the law, you need to use some sort of smartphone, so you can instantly send it to an e-mail (preferably cc’d to several) so that its irrelevant if the cops nab your phone.
BR
Um, this has been the way the country has been for centuries. There has always been a hierarchy, and if you’re on the bottom you get stomped on.
Think about what happened to Native Americans and Black Americans for the first couple of centuries and then to Chinese railroad workers and women who wanted rights and on and on.
It was easier then for the majority to turn a blind eye to it because it wasn’t them being affected by the abuse of power. But as each group finally – through blood, sweat, and tears – won some modicum of rights, the powerful had to turn their sights on a broader swath of the population.
Jason In the Peg
@Svensker: No one ever says
“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.”
to the cops do they?
Funny that.
BGinCHI
Wait, which William Gibson novel are we living in?
Did we just skip over Neuromancer or what?
MattR
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I haven’t done any formal research, but I am pretty sure that is the most often quoted movie line among my friends.
morzer
A friend of mine used to terrify me when we were driving around together as young men. Every time we passed a parked cop car, he would roll down his window, lean out and bellow as loudly as he could: “Donut fuckers”. After seeing this latest exhibition of incompetence and general thuggery by the New Haven cops, I feel more sympathetic to his gesture than ever before.
Having lived in New Haven for a good few years, I can testify that the cops there are a long way from being the brightest and the best.
El Tiburon
We have finally reached the tipping point.
I have not seen polling lately, but I am fairly certain that a majority of Americans are for:
1. Tazing
2. Warrantless wiretap
3. Nude scanners
4. Unfettered police actions against citizens
Factor in the nation-wide outrage over mosques and Mexicans. Then add on top we just put Republicans back in charge; that many Americans think Obama is not American and so on.
And of course the media merrily skips along whistling zippidy-do-da out of their assholes.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
A fish rots from the head.
.
.
BGinCHI
Does James O’Keeffe know that cops have unions?
I assume he’s getting ready to make a film where he seduces a cop and gets to the bottom of all the racism and violence.
BR
In thinking about this more, this is where well-meaning white liberalism has a serious blindspot. As I mentioned above, it’s been this way for centuries.
But just as an example, I might point out that when I have flown for the last decade, I’ve gotten “randomly screened” – sent through the various special screening machines, patted down, etc. whenever I forgot to shave that day. Because I must look like one of “them” to the undertrained TSA agents on duty. Nobody seemed to mind that I went through that; I just learned to deal with it. While I dislike the new procedures as much as everyone here, I find the sudden shock and horror at it all a bit disheartening, because it means folks didn’t realize that was how the system worked before.
Joseph Nobles
Glenn Beck says just let people carry guns on the planes. Let Al Qaeda pull out their little boxcutters then, says Glenn Beck, not considering that if guns are allowed on planes, Al Qaeda might consider an upgrade on weaponry. Yeesh.
Lee
Real time uploads
Qik
UStream
That way they are uploaded as you video.
The downside is that they can be deleted from your phone. The upside is the cops have to know how to do it.
MikeJ
@BGinCHI:
He said, The future is here, it’s just not even distributed.
Sounds right to me.
Kryptik
@MattR:
I honestly prefer ‘And Leon is getting LARRRRRGER!’ and ‘I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.’
The latter feels more and more relevant these days than ever.
Moonbatman
The guy plead guilt to a crime just like James O’keefe.
He is a convicted criminal and using the James O’keefe standard nothing he says should be believed.
Culture of Truth
“Ever since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers he’s been completely senile.”
suzanne
@MattR:
In my friend group, it’s “Pam’s insides were a barren and rocky place, where my seed could find no purchase.”
EDIT: Pam is a friend of ours. In the movie, it’s of course “Ed’s”.
IrishGirl
Not to get all lawyerly on y’all…..but John is right, of course. Just because a practice is not “de jure” doesn’t mean it isn’t “de facto” and resulting in the same outcomes. Of course, if SCOTUS gets ahold of the case I’m sure all the precedence of something being wrong regardless of it’s being de facto will just be ignored.
daveNYC
It’s just another case of religious fundamentalism. Specifically cop worship.
It’s the only job in the world that you can totally fuck up at, and ‘but it’s hard’ is an accepted excuse.
Ruckus
WTF is going on in this country? Seriously, people
The Chicken Little gene has gone viral.
Roger Moore
@BGinCHI:
Spook Country. SATSQ.
kdaug
@daveNYC: That, along with Mammon.
BGinCHI
@suzanne: Healthy white baby? I said, what else you got?
Zifnab
@El Tiburon:
Man. I wish.
The media is front and center, waving a big flag that reads “OMG! TAKE A LOOK AT THIS TOTALLY NECESSARY STUFF!” and screaming about balloon boys and terror babies.
It’s been 9/11 every day for the last nine years for those guys.
Punchy
@Kryptik: I can make a hat, or a broche, or a terridactyl….
NonyNony
Here’s the thing, John. A good-sized chunk of the population is incapable of empathy for anyone they don’t personally know or who’s situation is exactly like theirs. And I mean a really significant good-sized chunk of the country.
I used to think being unable to extend your personal empathy out to people who were not related to you – or at least not like you – was a deficiency in some human beings. I’ve become convinced over the years that it’s the norm, and that the folks who actually can project themselves into someone else’s situation are actually the mutants and not the other way around. I could make some evo-psych bullshit argument about why that might work, but it would be bullshit so I won’t. Just speaking empirically, the lack of empathy I’ve seen in people as I’ve grown older has been astounding. And it only seems to get worse the more multicultural the country becomes. The less similar people are, the less empathy they seem to show for each other, the worse things get.
morzer
@Punchy:
Ah, but can you make a terror-dactyl?
kdaug
Anyone hear that the prince of England is going to get married??? Sometime next year???
Ohmygod! I can’t wait to hear who’s making her dress! This is sooo exciting!
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@NonyNony: Hear, hear.
It’s no coincidence that dismantling the New Deal became a popular idea right about the same time the black population was allowed to benefit from it.
Americans are largely cruel, stupid, selfish people.
BGinCHI
@kdaug: Bravo interrupts its regularly scheduled programming…..
celticdragonchick
@NonyNony:
I think you are onto something with that. I remember reading some study not that long ago about increasing dysfunction in multic-cultural societies. Majority populations become increasingly resentful (and violent, albeit it may bear the imprinteur of the state) and loss of empathy happens correspondingly.
celticdragonchick
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
AmericansHumans are largely cruel, stupid, selfish people.We are not the only ones.
kdaug
@BGinCHI: I wonder what the next shiny object will be – shark attack? Balloon Boy II? Missing blonde white girl? Bristol Palin’s “Dancing With The Stars” performance? Celebrity not wearing underwear?
Remember, kids: they hate us for our freedoms.
BGinCHI
@kdaug: I predict someone from the secular progressives fucks up Christmas.
Or something Charlie Sheen related.
kdaug
@BGinCHI: Ah, yes, I’d forgotten about the War On Christmas. It’s getting to be that season, isn’t it. Always will do in a pinch.
RAM
@David Hunt: David Hunt speaks the truth. We’ve handed over control of our lives to the worst aspects of government, allowing our civil rights to be stolen and we didn’t even make a peep because, you know, better safe than sorry and, hey, I don’t have anything to hide and if the government wants to follow me around or tap my phone or read my e-mails, so what?
Ben Franklin had it exactly right: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We are now basically screwed, because the guy we hired to fix the justice system, reintroduce the rule of law, and enforce civil rights doesn’t see any problem with what’s going on.
danimal
@celticdragonchick
I see you don’t believe in American exceptionalism. Liberal bias raises its ugly head again.
JWL
Cole: Are you kidding about what’s happening?
Let’ start with the (ahem), ‘Patriot Act’.
In fact, for the time being, let’s finish there, too.
Mike G
@daveNYC:
Also the US Presidency, 2001-2009
Sean
@Lee:
Its a good idea but its a technical fix which won’t work in many places ( Eg: The Subway, The Boondocks, etc )
A better idea would be to prosecute, convict and imprison any “peace” officer who seizes and/or destroys video evidence of a crime.
Failing that, I would settle for the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of police officers who just make laws up off the top of their heads.
-S