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A burglary suspect fleeing police dogs and a helicopter in Florida wades into a dark lake and disappears. Three weeks later his remains are found inside an alligator.
Was he killed by police?
It is an extreme example of the difficulty faced with increasing frequency by data scientists working on a new US government count of deaths in interactions with police – a count that appears likely to soar beyond all previous attempts, now that the issue has reached the highest levels of both protest and power.
As esoteric as the task may seem, the objective is deadly serious: to measure the true dimensions of an epidemic of lethal violence committed by police across the country on often unarmed civilians. A majority of the victims, such as Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, die in police gunfire. Others, such as the New York father Eric Garner, may die in a banned chokehold or, like the Baltimore 25-year-old Freddie Gray whose death is currently being prosecuted, from injuries in a police vehicle.
At the start of 2015, the Guardian launched The Counted, a public-service project tallying and shedding light on such cases, which has reached a tally of 1,068 so far. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed plans for a similar counting effort, after grossly misrepresenting the problem in eight previous years with annual figures averaging 423.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 14 2015, @02:19PM
the police unions fight them tooth and nail, and many of the rank-and-file officers do everything they can to ignore the new completely lawful orders
In practice the way it works abstracted away from cops, is monitoring is always sold based on weird worst case stuff like preventing terrorist attacks or stopping master criminals from stealing the crown jewels of England, but in practice its almost exclusively used as a weapon against powerless individuals.
"Ah I see via video evidence you took a fifteen minute and three second work break when you know the rule is exactly fifteen minutes, so sad we have to fire you today and there will be a hole in the schedule, luckily I have a cousin trying to get a job with the force and he can start work in your position tomorrow, besides our force doesn't like (fill in the ethnic group) anyway and you're one of them and my cousin isn't, so..." Time about a hundred.
GPS tends to work the same way. Lots of monday morning quarterbacking about travel routes, punishment over trivial irrelevant stuff, etc.
The issue isn't that the orders are lawful, its that there used to be a mutually acceptable meeting of the minds about the balance of power, and now the employees are going to get whipped badly by a new piece of technology, so naturally they should oppose it in any way possible until a new balance of power is struck.
I guess in summary, whenever anyone says its about safety or crime prevention, traditionally they only say bland inoffensive stuff like that when they're lying, so there's another reason, inherent just in how they present it.
My guess in the long run is the videos will be locked or hidden away or stored by someone else, such that using the video for anything other than judicial evidence would be automatic found in favor of the officer during a grievance, as part of the contract. So if a cop shoots the zillionth unarmed black kid in the back, there won't be a grievance process it'll go criminal court, but if the cops supervisor hates one of his employees if he tries to abuse the video footage to get rid of the employee the grievance process will short circuit. Of course that opens a new field of parallel discovery where cops used to get illegal evidence then "coincidentally" build a case based on the illegal evidence but not documenting the illegal evidence as the initial source, and that'll be done to cops much as they've done to crooks for decades. So the cop who is three seconds late on break times will be found via video but shoved out of the force purely by coincidence.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 14 2015, @02:48PM
Well, that's the key thing, though. Sometimes, monitoring is appropriate and useful - for example, a lot of warehouses have surveillance cams in the hopes of reducing the amount of merchandise that "falls off the back of the truck". Sometimes it's abused, as in the scenarios you're talking about.
In the case of police officers, they are public officials engaged in their official duties whenever they are working, and that means that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Except in this case, it's not a hypothetical. There's all sorts of evidence that some police officers are committing murders (as well as lesser crimes such as rape and armed robbery) and using their official power to hide the evidence [usuncut.com] in order to get away with their crimes. And what's more, that sort of thing is nothing new [wikipedia.org]. What's new is that video surveillance is widespread enough (because anybody with a smartphone can film cops) that they're getting caught.
So are you saying that it's OK when they do it to [alleged] crooks, but not OK when they do it to cops? That's an odd standard.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.