How about body cams for criminals, not for cops? Seems like a better idea.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 1, 2014
If we put a camera on Bill here, will we catch the part where he kills a crate full of baby unicorns and drinks their blood in order to keep on with his unholy existence?
Because you know, baby unicorns.
Arclite
Dude, I do NOT want to see all the pr0n that guy watches every night. Probably has tons of latex and pegging. By unicorns.
*gags*
Bobby B.
Put body cams on network station execs who greenlight his constant appearences on the Sunday shows.
Marcion
Cute, Bill. You’d think the wingers would want this kind of thing too for whenever the Obamunist Coup is planned, but IDK how their thought process works these days.
Anyway, I thought if you weren’t doing anything wrong, you didn’t have anything to fear. Clearly Kristol thinks the cops must have something to hide.
GregB
Conservative icon calls for government surveillance of all Americans.
geg6
It’s when I see shit like this that I wonder if the stupid quotient was higher on Bloody Bill’s end or that of Caribou Barbie and Dan Quayle. Hard to say, I think.
aimai
Jesus christ that guy is stupid, or he knows his readers are.
Belafon
I get to decide who the criminals are.
dubo
If I was a cop I’d want a body camera to show what a god damn hero I am, and to cover my ass against accusations. The fact that actual cops resist them tells you everything you need to know about our policing methods and culture
CONGRATULATIONS!
@aimai: Lemme translate that for you:
Make sense now? It already did to anyone who reads him seriously.
Chris
Those baby unicorns were thugs, man. Big, intimidating and scary. They had it coming.
Another Holocene Human
Bill Kristol is an example of that rigid class structure. He can be wrong about everything but never fall.
I actually would call it a caste structure. There is undeniably a racial element to our class system, a race and class (and creed, don’t forget that!) system is (to me) a caste system.
Unless there is a better term. I’m willing to be educated.
Amir Khalid
If Bill Kristol is for it, it can only be a bad idea. Even being on Twitter looks like a bad idea for him: not a single one of his commenters is unambiguously in his favour.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Chris: The New Black Unicorn Party will intimidate anyone that gets in the way of their path to total power.
All..umm…none..of them.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Amir Khalid: The word you’re looking for is “Kakocracy”.
Chris
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothinf to fear,” as we were told for seven years after 9/11.
schrodinger's cat
@Another Holocene Human: The original Sanskrit word for caste is Varna which means skin color, or more accurately complexion.
gene108
I agree. Let’s strap up the Iran-Contra thugs, first and foremost, than any surviving Watergate thugs and Scooter Libby, as he was the only official crook in the GWB gang and have all their conversations with the other elites of this country on tape.
Then strap one one David Vitter, for example, to see what kinky shit he’s into now.
Plus any CEO of a company that has had charges brought against it by the government, because corporations are people and people can wear body cameras.
dubo
As long as we’re riding Kristol’s Idiot Carousel, sure, and whenever cops shoot someone without said camera (like Brown, who had no criminal record and so wouldn’t have had a camera) the cop is then presumed guilty of murder because their victim wasn’t a criminal, right??
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: Eeww there is not enough brain bleach in the world…
CONGRATULATIONS!
@schrodinger’s cat: Never knew that and should have. Shit never changes, does it?
SatanicPanic
It’s a sad commentary on Mr Kristol that this isn’t the dumbest idea I’ve heard him voice.
schrodinger's cat
@CONGRATULATIONS!: No and the caste system in India still exists despite the fact that you can’t really tell someone’s caste just by looking at them.
gene108
@Another Holocene Human:
America does not have a caste system or anything close to it.
If it did some jobs would only be filled by people from certain communities, i.e. the engineer’s kid, who is serving up sundae’s during the summer at the ice cream shop would not exist nor would the ability of someone to go back to college, as an adult, and erase the lack of education in their family.
In a caste system only the shop owners kids or kids from that community would work in the shop. The engineer’s kids would study to become engineers or doctors or accountants or some other type of professional white collar job.
There’s an egalitarian streak in this country that does not exist in other places, which is one reason, I think raising the minimum wage is so popular and supported by both conservatives and liberals. Even conservatives have done low wage jobs, maybe as teenagers or to pay for college, and understand what it is like to earn minimum wage.
Cacti
Meanwhile, in the real world, police cameras prevented real man from getting railroaded by a trio of brutal, dishonest New Jersey cops…
Marcus Jeter, an African American male, was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest, and assault of an officer. In reality, Jeter was sitting in his car with his hands up after a police stop, when 3 Bloomfield, NJ officers approached with guns drawn, smashed his window in, started beating the crap out of him, then dragged him out of his car without a fight, all while shouting “stop resisting!”.
The Bloomfield PD withheld the dashcam video as long as they could, until a judge finally ordered its release. Prosecution dismissed all charges against Jeter and indicted the 3 crooked cops for assault, falsifying official reports, and evidence tampering.
Prior to their indictments, Bloomfield Internal Affairs found “no evidence of wrongdoing” in the officers’ behavior. Absent a dash cam, Marcus Jeter would be rotting in jail.
Tommy
@dubo: Exactly. If I was a cop I’d demand a body cam. I want it clear I was doing my job and nobody could sue me or say I did something I didn’t do. I saw a segment on HuffpostTV the other day talking about this. At first the police hated the concept of a cam in their cars. Sure there are many terrible videos about what cops did. But most now realize it “saves” them, from police officers that have then on. Total positive. Vindicates them. Those videos don’t go viral. They can basically say, “go to the video” if questioned. There is a reason they say a picture says a thousand words. How many does video say?
They talked to a number of current and former police officers and they outlined how against the dashboard cams police were. They NOW want them. It is their best friend.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Too much of cultural identity is wrapped up in a person’s caste, i.e. what kind of wedding ceremony they will have.
I’m not sure how you abolish it in India, since I think it can be argued that each caste is like a mini-nationality, in the European sense, where though they may have a common language, their customs will be different, i.e. Austrians versus Germans.
When two people from different castes marry, there’s a certain amount of negotiation about what gets observed and what does not.
scav
Jeybes he be dim. On the upside, in his world, “high” crime areas are exactly those where there will be a plethera of cameras, likely trailing each and every move of the boys in badges. Low crime areas will have spotty coverage, When the cameras pointed away, the badges will play. (World being what it is, the white collar chime areas will have already paid for their own, likely fixed-position, camera coverage. Wel, that and suddenly such camera evidence will likely be declared be de jure illegitimate, rather than merely being de facto so when judged inconvenient.)
Ruckus
@SatanicPanic:
That’s because there is no bottom to his stupidity. He works at it. He revels in it. He embraces it as many do a pile of gold. He is striving to be first in his field, proving that stupidity can pay. But at least he comes by it honestly.
shelley
Course, any attempt to film the police will get you threatened/arrested. Oh, I get it. Kristol meant bodycams to document all the mayhem all those ‘thugs’ are committing every day.
Outside Protein
Great idea!
Also, security clearances for foreign agents instead of CIA, FBI agents and weaponeers. It just makes sense.
beltane
@Ruckus: That’s it, Bill Kristol is the maestro of stupidity. Sometimes I wonder if he has made an art of being a parody troll.
danielx
Has there ever been a picture of that blood-gargling psychopath in which he isn’t wearing that disgusting smirk?
trollhattan
@danielx:
I got this.
Frankensteinbeck
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Kristol doesn’t mean blacks. He means people who are likely to commit crimes, and although he would have trouble giving you more than general ideas of what they look like (they often wear hoodies, for example), he could easily point them out to you on the street. Sure, almost all of them would be black, and identically dressed white guys would not be labeled criminal, but if you said that you would be the racist because Kristol said nothing about skin color, right?
@gene108:
As fucked up as things are right now, it’s worth remembering that America is not even one of the more racist nations in the world, racism and sexism that was considered normal and obvious 30 years ago is causing explosive backlash today, smog used to kill people, crime is way down, the ozone layer is healing, and Ronald Reagan could not get elected president today even if he won the GOP nomination. Up close, we lack perspective and think this is the worst it’s ever been.
Once we’ve remembered all that, it’s time to get mad again, because things ARE fucked up and the rank and file Republicans have declared that they will make us fight every inch to fix even the most obvious problems.
boatboy_srq
@dubo: @Tommy: Ditto.
Kristol doesn’t want the camera footage: he’s just looking for the 21st century equivalent of a brand. And the LOEs who don’t want to wear them – even after hearing their colleagues’ appreciation for the things – need to be asked why (honestly) they do not want the vindication video will give them, if they’re not (as Cacti points out) assaulting blahs for fun and profit.
I’m hardly in favor of the surveillance state: the West has far too many cameras as it is. But there are places where a camera could do a world of good.
schrodinger's cat
@Frankensteinbeck: Agreed, bad as things are here, they are better than almost anywhere else in the world.
Keith G
Re: BK’s dumb camera idea:
Some of you above are commenting as if you do not realize that he is just trolling you and not making a serious proposal.
Look, the guy is a hateful collection of genital puss. Don’t give him any more power by falling for it when he is goofing you.
schrodinger's cat
Is it just me or is there a striking resemblance between Bill Kristol and Bob Woodward? To me they look like brothers.
Mike E
@trollhattan: What did that pie do to deserve that?
Gotta admit, that was some weapons grade trolling on BK’s part…or was that DougJ?!
Citizen_X
I’m 100% for this idea.
Of course, we need to be cost-effective, so we need to implement this where the amounts stolen are largest, and the crooks most concentrated. So Wall Street it is!
FormerSwingVoter
This entire situation has really radicalized me. It’s hard for me to talk about politics now. At all. Hell, you guys have probably noticed my posts becoming more and more unhinged as time goes on, if you remember my username. I’ve been posting less and less… generally trying to get away from politics, but it’s hard when these guys are such absolute monsters.
This is insane. Conservatives literally want us to die in the streets. This is not an exaggeration. And the media keeps telling us that we’re supposed to be okay with that.
trollhattan
@FormerSwingVoter:
Same folks who idolize Cliven Bundy, proud thief, thieving proudly while his little ammosexual army keeps their AR15s trained on federal agents. Law and order pie for everybody.
Mustang Bobby
Seriously? He was the strongest sperm?
Citizen_X
How about heart plugs for the Villagers? I’d be in favor of that.
#NotAllHarkonnens
jl
They don’t make any sense any more. What is the point of that observation? What is Kristol trying to say? Why doesn’t their fan base notice?
D58826
@dubo: (sigh) I’m not sure that body cams will be all that effective. Rodney King beating was filmed and no state conviction. A guy in Philly named Delbert Africa (google MOVE confrontation) was beaten on live TV and no charges. The guy in the Ohio Walmart on the security camera and no charges. Police cars have had dash cams for years and rarely (that SC cop is the exception) are there any charges. I suspect the quality pf the video will be questionable – either to close to make out what is happening or to far to see the details. The audio will be a melange of breathing cursing and the occasional cry for help.
In the past couple of months there have been a number of police shootings where the victim is obviously mentally disturbed. No one disputes that the victim had a knife or in one case an electric drill. The question is why wasn’t there a way to subdue this person without resorting to deadly violence. The body cam won’t help. Even without a body cam someone might ask how is it that the cops in Europe are able to subdue mentally ill individuals without using a gun. Then maybe American cops can use the same trick.
I think we should still deploy the cams but I doubt that it will be the magic key to stopping these types of senseless shootings.
sm*t cl*de
Shirley it is already police policy that anyone they catch filming them is a criminal.
[Update: see also Shelley’s comment #29 ]
JPL
@FormerSwingVoter: Gotta say, that is what Kristol is hoping. He doesn’t want a mob campaigning.
Seanly
So he’s a proponent of Big Brother? When is this asshat going to go away?