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A veteran police officer in Pennsylvania has been indicted for murder after her taser video camera showed her shooting an unarmed man, laying face-down on the ground, twice in the back:
...an arrest affidavit in Mearkle's case said that the video depicts the officer shooting 59-year-old David Kassick as he was on his stomach.
"At the time officer Mearkle fires both rounds from her pistol, the video clearly depicts Kassick lying on the snow covered lawn with his face toward the ground. Furthermore, at the time the rounds are fired nothing can be seen in either of Kassick's hands, nor does he point or direct anything toward Officer Mearkle," the affidavit said.
The Hummelstown Police Department officer, released on $250,000 bail, said she acted in self-defense on February 2, when she attempted to pull over Kassick for driving allegedly with expired tags. She said that he sped away briefly and then fled his vehicle. With the stun gun in her left hand, she fired it several times in a bid to incapacitate him, she said. As he was on the ground, the authorities say she shot him twice in the back with her pistol.
Video evidence of Eric Garner's homicide by police chokehold did not lead to an indictment of the officers involved, which led many to question the efficacy of body cameras to cut down on police abuses. Mearkle's case, however, seems to present a counter-example.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Monday March 30 2015, @06:22PM
Don't worry about the guy making fun of you for not knowing a word. You're just one of today's lucky 10,000. [xkcd.com]
Bentham is a really interesting figure. If you're unfamiliar with his work, it might be worth looking into. He was a balls-to-the-wall utilitarian who loved poking fun at social norms. Here's what wikipedia says about how he had his body preserved after death (emphasis added):
On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.[18]
Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,[19] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013,[20] it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as "present but not voting".[21]
Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. However, Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulphuric acid and simply drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull.[18] The Auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It is now locked away securely.[22]
Here's a picture of the head. [staticflickr.com]
Back on topic, I thought the use of the term "panopticon" to describe citizens filming/photographing the government was kind of odd. It seems much more applicable to NSA style surveillance, where the government is constantly monitoring a bunch of proles but is (currently) unable to parse the data about each prole in a way that would extract the optimum amount of information from their surveillance feeds. By contrast, citizens filming police seems more like the prisoners watching the guard than the guard watching the prisoners. I still see the parallels to Bentham's panopticon, but I would hesitate to draw the comparison without actually exploring where it breaks down. I could see including it without further mention in a story about centralized surveillance (Big Brother), but not a story about distributed surveillance (Little Brother).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @10:33PM
It is probably because you actually know what it means and you're not trying to sound smarter than you really are, like the article title is trying.