cops, pictures, legal questions...

Fuck cops.

crosspost

"The general rule in the United States
is that anyone may take photographs
of whatever they want when they are
in a public place or places where they
have permission to take photographs.
Absent a specific legal prohibition
such as a statute or ordinance, you are
legally entitled to take photographs.
Examples of places that are traditionally
considered public are streets..."

thank you google.

check google

then again the guy the cops were kicking the shit out of may have totally deserved it. you do have a moral obligation not to present these two specific undercover cops as wanton assholes who simply enjoy kicking the shit out of people, because you have no idea what the situation was.

Er, even if they're apprehending a criminal, I don't think cops have the right to use unnecesarry violence, even on someone who might (in their opinion, at least) "deserve" it.

crosspost

xxpost

I read Anthony's story and jumped to the conclusion that the beaters weren't cops at all.

http://www.tvacres.com/images/shield-mackey.jpg

this "cops are violent assholes LOL" in the abstract annoys the hell out of me. cops have to be violent on a routine basis because they deal with violent people on a routine basis and it's maybe not ideal but it's understandable that seeing someone a) beat the shit out of his wife b) crack your partner across the jaw c) whatever, might provoke something more than a miranda warning and a request for the suspect to extend his wrists towards the cuffs

I never said anything about cops being violent assholes in the abstract. I never said I had any idea what constitutes appropriate force in any particular situation. I'm saying that there are, however, guidelines and ideals concerning the issue -- for very important reasons -- and one of those guidelines is that cops are specifically NOT in the business of handing out beatings based on what they judge people to "deserve." That's not their job, and we have very good reasons for being firm about keeping them in particular -- even more than average citizens -- from making it their job.

What annoys the hell out of me is the "it's understandable" line. Of course it's understandable. Lots of things are understandable and yet nevertheless wrong. The use of inappropriate force (whether or not it's what Anthony saw here; I have no idea what he saw!) is understandable but wrong, in a lot of grand and systematic ways, and it strikes me as kinda bullshit to instinctively shrug at it and give it a free pass. It's understandable but not acceptable, and the fact that it's understandable doesn't mean that we should take it any less seriously.

Mind you 9.99999999999999 times out of ten that's completely not what is going on and yeah there's really no need to maul a guy anyway even if he does have a knife, I mean taking sides shooting a dude in the thigh versus beating him half to death even in an extreme circumstance like the one I outlined above to try to help ya out!

xpost

you are allowed to take pictures of anything occurring in a public space. that's the law.
Fuck cops.

-- Shakey Mo Collier (audiobo...), Today. (Shakey Mo Collier)

Tracer I totally JUST SAID that I have no idea what Anthony did or didn't see -- he described it in like two sentences, so I don't exactly have an opinion on whether it was inappropriate or not.

If he's thought about it and thinks it was inappropriate, it'd be reasonable for him to send the photos along to whoever regulates this stuff for his local police -- it's their job, as cops, to identify and deal with other cops who do inappropriate shit. And if he doesn't think they were really cops, it'd be reasonable for him to send the photos to the cops, because he'd have witnessed a crime they'd probably like to solve.

when you say things like "The use of inappropriate force ... is understandable but wrong" it's kinda hard for me to argue with you there

And well, yeah -- I don't know why you'd want to argue with that in the first place! That's just basic. Cops do really tough work in really tough situations, and in lots of circumstances it's not surprising that they'd break their own guidelines. In lots of cases I don't exactly find it morally reprehensible that they'd fuck up. But when they do fuck up, we shouldn't shrug it off -- we should hold them to the standards laid out for them!

If you think the standards are unreasonable and that current police procedure isn't well-designed, that's a whole other issue. But as it stands, those guidelines and standards have been set up to protect people (including those who will not listen to reason, those who feel they have nothing to lose, and those who are mentally ill), and police who don't follow them should not be given a free pass and an "it's tough out there." Their job is important, and it's important that they do it right. And I'd like to think that smart, tough, funny cops like you're talking about would believe in that, too.

that is so unlike him.

-- anthony easton (anthonyeasto...), April 26th, 2006 6:05 PM. (anthony)

ysi?;]

I am going to continue to disagree with you on this point, as does (if I read him correctly) the bogged out person.

What sort of police conduct American juries will convict ought to be obviously irrelevant to the question of what police officers should do (in terms of ethics and morals, but/and also efficacy). Any professional (doctor, lawyer, cop, architect, plumber) knows that when things get too personal, you can't do you job correctly -- this is the theory behind police officers going around in at least pairs, even if the practice sometimes looks more like a street gang.

Andrew: we cool.

Colin I totally agree with you about the efficacy of not letting the job get personal. I think the cops who are good at their jobs do too.

tracer says man the fuck up, canucks.

The Rodney King situation is interesting, Tracer, because it gets at your "hard to hold back" line. So far as I can tell, it seems like King resisted and fought back just enough to put the police into a fight mode, which they stuck in even after King wasn't resisting in any very meaningful way. That's a little bit psychologically natural, maybe even biologically natural -- you enter into a fight with someone, you're angry and you're hitting him, and it does become retributive. But even if it's psychologically difficult, it's a pretty big part of the policeman's job to not do that: they're meant to lay off the physical force exactly as soon as it's possible. They're meant to have ethical concerns for the proper treatment of suspects who often have zero ethical concerns for the safety and proper treatment of the police themselves.

So right. If we accept that there are gray areas and areas where slipping up might be "natural," or hard to hold back from, then it probably follows that we shouldn't be uniformly knee-jerk disgusted with cops for going overboard. And I don't know that I am, necessarily; I'm disgusted when they do it purposefully or from positions of safety (like post-arrest), but I can certainly understand why it happens during actual arrest-resisting struggles. Thing is, I'm pretty comfortable "understanding" something and still disapproving of it and expecting consequences and all that. (Partly because it can be less about being disgusted with the individual cops and more about overarching systemic checks-and-balances stuff.) It's like any position of authority -- the same way we can disapprove of a presidential decision without thinking too much about whether it's hard being president. We expect perfection even though nobody will ever offer it, because there's something important and useful about just having the expectation itself.

We could perhaps use the Japanese distinction between omote (public face on the avenue) and ura (realpolitik in the backstreets) and say that photography, or even just the possibility of photography, tends to drag everyone out onto the avenue, onto Respectable Street. That means the criminals (surveillance cameras etc) and the police (Anthony with his camera) alike.

"Strathclyde police in Scotland recently claimed a 75 per cent drop in crime following the installation of a £130,000 closed circuit TV system in Airdrie. Not only are people delighted because they are no longer afraid to go out shopping, say local police, but even criminals welcome the chance to prove their innocence by calling on evidence from the cameras." (source).

The thing is, this photography must be reciprocal. If I can be on CCTV all the time in public places, I must have a reciprocal right to photograph what occurs around me for my own purposes.

i think it's called innate human curiosity, maybe verging on voyeurism. also i just really love photographs. if someone's talking about them, i want to see them.

is this legitimate?

uh yes?

W/r/t cops being observed though, it's true: the knowledge of an overseeing eye is bound to hold them closer to their standards; it's easier to behave when someone's watching. The funny part, though, is that I don't think that's entirely due to repercussions or fear of punishment. Surely part of it is that most cops believe in their own guidelines (strongly, if inconsistently or imperfectly in action), and they value their self-conception as good cops and noble followers of a noble code. And when we know we're being viewed, we're more likely to live up to our own self-image, even to take pleasure in being observed living up to it.

Hey so just for the record, also, I don't think issues of police brutality are really about any-individual-cop and any-individual-suspect. It tends to be an issue is much more systematic ways -- say, in crime-ridden neighborhoods where police have ongoing bad relationships with some of the residents. The brutality emerges when the police -- and the people they're after -- both begin to think of the process as an ongoing us-against-them battle. (Tracer's line that "we don't know what happened before" is interesting, because I think in lots of brutality cases the "thing that just happened before" is about a whole other suspect on a whole other night, the new arrestee conceived as part of a whole ongoing string.)

The main other police-power issue I've ever seen is more about smaller towns where police can feel their position of control, and it's less about brutality than just police doing whatever they feel like doing because, well, they're the police. (Hence problems with small-town police tending to involve off-duty policemen, getting in fights and drunken shootings and just generally acting a little too much like they run things.)

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/13/maryland.police.beating/index.html?hpt=T1

this seemed to be the most reasonable thread to put this on since we don't have a rolling "cops acting like assholes" thread

we do it's called fuck tha police

That'll teach him, take your stupid celebratory dance elsewhere!

just cops, doing cop stuff, nothing to see here!

just some cops, doin cop stuff

I hate to get all libertarian on a Friday afternoon, but maybe if we didn't try to make every fucking thing illegal and actually, you know, policed our cops a little, shit like this would happen less. That thing on Sullivan about the drug raids on people holding minor amounts of weed a shit where they shoot their dogs as a matter of routine has been seriously bumming me out.

wait waht

the video of the swat raid where they shot the dogs infuriated me

http://gawker.com/5532226/swat-team-raids-house-shoots-dogs-over-small-amount-of-marijuana

The they charged the parents with child endangerment after they'd gunned down the family pets in front of them. I remain completely boggled by the sheer shitbaggery of it all.

jesus christ

so weird to me that that happened where i live

SHOT A CORGI WHO THE HELL WOULD DO THAT

btw in case u all were wondering the us drug czar thinks the war on drugs is "not successful"! dont worry though we will continue to prosecute it, $1 trillion, 40 years, and hundreds of thousands of dead people later

looking forward to legalizing weed I must say

was watching eric holder on c-span answering questions for judiciary committee and i think he still really likes the war on drugs a lot

at least it keeps lawyers in business ; )

eric holder is a weird dude

considering how much the war on drugs does for the mexican cartels i wonder if violence spilling across the border will help spur any change in drug policy?

of course no amount of dead mexicans could ever make it harder for ppl to buy assault rifles so probably not

probably we will just get more awesome immigration policies

important ppl sometimes say we have to reduce our demand to help stop violence but they never suggest really doing anything. need something that allows them to change their minds without admitting they were ever wrong, it's gonna be a long time

From a page here:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Cheye Calvo and Trinity Tomsic

July 29, 2008—MD

Policemen posing as delivery drivers delivered a package containing nearly four pounds of marijuana to the home of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic. After Mr. Calvo brought the package addressed to his wife into the home, the Prince George's County SWAT team initiated a raid into the home using no-knock entry.

Upon entering the home, the officers shot and killed Calvo's two black Labrador retrievers. Calvo, dressed only in his underwear and socks, and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours-a short distance from the dogs' corpses.

The SWAT team had been issued a standard warrant-not a "no-knock" or "dynamic" warrant that allows for the initial tactics used in the raid.

Subsequently, on August 6, 2008, the Prince George's County police announced that they arrested two men in connection with a delivery scheme to deliver drugs to homes of unsuspecting recipients. The package addressed to Tomsic was among those tied to the men.

A review by the Prince George's County Sheriff's Office concluded that the killings of the couple's dogs were justified.

Neither Calvo nor Tomsic were arrested or charged in the case.

Source:

Rosalind S. Helderman, "Pr. George's Officers Lacked 'Knock' Warrant in Raid," Washington Post, August 6, 2008.

Rosalind S. Helderman and Aaron C. Davis "Killing of Mayor's 2 Dogs Justified, Pr. George's Finds," Washington Post, September 5, 2008.

Rosalind S. Helderman and Aaron C. Davis, "Pr. George's Police Arrest 2 In Marijuana-Shipping Plot," Washington Post, August 7, 2008.

Aaron C. Davis, Police Raid Berwyn Heights Mayor's Home, Kill His 2 Dogs, Washington Post, July 31, 2008.

...Am I reading this right? Undercover cops come to your house posinga as delivery men, and deliver a package containing drugs. Then the SWAT bust in, and arrest you for drugs...that the cops themselves delivered? Uh?

dont forget, they shoot your dogs

the point, i guess, is to get someone who has ordered drugs to accept them rather than to deliver them to the mayor, who never asked for them, and shoot his pets

I suppose? I don't know. even if the person they arrested had actually ordered drugs, it still seems like entrapment to me.

not in america :(
note it's the same police dept as the maryland police beating mentioned above

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/crime/2010/05/25/am.costello.recording.cops.cnn

Maryland's in the news again.