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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 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.