I rather wish they were trying to get the bad cops fired.
No, I’m not very concerned by this. Seems pretty natural and obvious to me. If you are seriously concerned and watch to catch them with their fly down or saying a racial slur then feel free to pony up the bucks to make 24/7 video (or from clock in to clock out) available. I’m sure with the literally millions of police events and 10’s of millions of hours of video that happen each day you’ll be able to slog through them to find something amiss in there somewhere.
Like I said, I don’t have a real problem with putting cameras on police…and, by and large, most police that I know either support it (somewhat luke warm in many cases) or at least go along, because they know that for every video where they might be caught doing something suspicious or flat out illegal or wrong there will be a hell of a lot more where their actions on camera and the actions of the suspects are going to show they did the right thing. My own issue is getting the public to pay for it and to understand what this actually entails, but that’s a different issue.
Since almost all of this was was the aftermath, yeah, that’s probably it, but mostly in a ‘don’t make any stupid jokes/comments now, keep them to yourself or wait until later’ kind of way.
Had they said “I’m hot” over and over and over going in that would be different.
Also, as noted, they were acting pretty professionally. It seemed like every time these two cops were saying “I’m hot”, it was to people coming over offering support, seeing if they need something to eat, someone to go pick up their wife/kids, trying to get them to go and sit down for a few minutes, someone trying to get a report started etc…
No one was even starting to make any kind of insensitive remarks, and that very well could have been what they were trying to avoid.
Also, now that I think about it, it could have also been them trying to make sure no one said anything used any personal information of a victim, witness, officer not involved etc. Anything, while not offensive in any way, would have to be cut out and could create issues as people wonder what was being cut.
But, my vote is just that they were making sure that a bunch of already well behaved officers stayed that way, as well as just an all around reminder that everything on the scene is being recorded.
Regarding body cams being used to get bad cops fired, that, I always thought, was the point of them. At least in part.
They show cops shooting for no reason. Or shooting when LTL force could have been used, or any other number of sleazy (or deadly) things are being done. But, naturally, they’re also going to show A)lots of good cops and B)lots of bad bad guys.
They did. The first two officers on the scene did precisely that, at 0:56-0:57 in the video, before the SHTF. They were making each other aware that they were both recording.
And that’s why I wrote what I wrote exactly how I wrote it.
I specifically said “almost all” of it was the aftermath and I specifically said it would be different it they had been saying it “over and over and over” on the way in.
That’s what happened.
We mostly saw the aftermath and almost all of the times they said “I’m hot” was afterwards.
If you’re looking for cops to be bad, then it’s not really worth trying to convince you that they didn’t.
One other thing, I didn’t catch the part of the video when someone (the other one) said the gunshot was self inflicted, however, I did hear him say he didn’t know who shot him. From a legal POV, that’s probably a good idea. If he didn’t actually see his partner pull the trigger, why make a statement (on camera no less) that his partner shot him? What if that turns out to be incorrect? Just for any number of reason, another officer they didn’t know was there, someone in the house, stray bullet from blocks away, who cares, but if it turns out to be wrong, they’re going to have to fight an uphill battle trying to explain it. If he doesn’t know, if he didn’t see it happen, he’s much better just saying ‘I don’t know’. Especially if he heard his partner call out over the radio saying he did it, then it’s moot anyways, so why get himself involved that part of it?
But in the end, if they didn’t act, in your own well poising words, like their normal shitbag selves since they’re was a camera on them, then good for them. Then the cameras served their purposes.
It was @ 16:40 “He has a GSW, self-inflicted”. You are correct that if he didn’t know who fired the shot, it probably would have been a good idea, legally, to not make any particular claim as to who fired the shot.
So it’s only “different” if they repeat it three times while going in? That seems like a rather bizarre standard.
I don’t know. I’m not going to make assumptions based on what I think they were thinking in a video that doesn’t exist and a scenario that you’re probably making up.
In any case, you called them shitbags right out of the gate so I can’t imagine there’s a rational discussion to be had here with you.
Wait, let me be clear, you pretended that they were calling each other shitbags, again, you’re taking a real incident, with multiple real life officers but then you twisted around some aspects and asked us to judge the others…you probably also think that’s fair, right?
But for the record, specifically said " It’s the “I’m hot” comments to practically everything wearing a badge that approached either of them afterwards that I’m concerned about.", so it IS the aftermath you’re concerned about.
Not ETA:
But for the record, you specifically said " It’s the “I’m hot” comments to practically everything wearing a badge that approached either of them afterwards that I’m concerned about."
So you’re concerned about the comments after the shooting, I was focused on the comments after the shooting, then there’s no point on worrying about what would happen if things had played out differently beforehand. But go nuts, keeping changing things around. Like I said, I don’t see a rational discussion here.
Well, if they are “bad” cops, and warning each other to be on good behavior since the cams are running, then it seems the cams are serving a useful purpose. Even if they’re bad off-camera.
And if they are “good” cops, they are just reminding each other.
I wonder if airline pilots avoid saying what’s really on their mind while in the flight deck, knowing that the black boxes are recording.
People behave differently when they’re being watched. It’s kind of the whole point of body cams.
It is not a comfortable feeling to be recorded, by the way. Wouldn’t you be very self-conscious if you knew your every word and action during a moment of stress and adrenaline were going to be reviewed by completely dispassionate people with the benefit of hindsight, specifically looking for anything you screwed up on? It would be like sitting in front of a job interviewer, all the time.
In fact, being upset at the cop reminding everyone he’s recording is exactly as wrong-headed as the people who say “only guilty people have something to hide” to justify expanded police powers. Simply reminding everyone they’re being recorded and encouraging them to be on their best behavior is not reason enough in itself to suspect them of wrongdoing.
Hi-fives
That sounds like a problem to me. If it’s that hard to keep them in line, maybe they should find a different job, one where fucking up has slightly less life-and-death consequences, and where corruption doesn’t mean “I can rape and murder with impunity” but rather “I can steal a company pen if I’m careful”.
If this were a world where we had to constantly worry about innocent, “good” police officers losing their jobs or getting charged with crimes because someone combed through their footage and saw some minor violation, I would have some sympathy for this viewpoint. If tone policing, or someone’s fly being undone pushing good cops out was the big police problem du jour, then yeah, you’d have a point.
Instead, we live in a world where Michael Slager can murder someone in cold blood, attempt to frame them for their own murder, have the whole thing captured on video, and a jury still fails to convict him, because he’s a cop and the person he murdered was a “suspect” fleeing the scene. Where it is absurdly hard to call cops to any justice even when there’s video evidence of their wrongdoing. Where we give the police the presumption of truth above and beyond the presumption of innocence we should be giving citizens, even when the officer in question has been known to lie, and even in cases where the trial may mean putting an innocent person to death. We live in a world where “police sics dog on unarmed civilian he mistook for suspect (despite suspect sharing exactly one similarity with civilian: skin color)” is not a shocking, “Wow, what the fuck is wrong with the police, and what can we do to fix it” moment, but rather a “sigh here we go again” moment.
When we give someone the presumption of truth, a deadly weapon, and separate rules which essentially give them a license to brutalize, abuse, or even murder people within the bounds of the law with close to zero accountability, if the most they have to put up with is people picking apart videos of their actions to make sure they’re not abusing that incredible power, then they should count themselves lucky. In a more reasonable world, every time a cop shot a civilian, they would have to face the same questions as anyone else who shot a civilian. They would have to prove, to the same degree of certainty as a civilian would, that their lives were in danger, and that they had acted in justified self-defense. Instead, all they have to do is justify that they thought their lives were in danger - and even so flimsy a justification as, “He told me he had a gun, then followed my instruction to go for his license” is good enough.
I’m reminded of this post on Popehat, about a frankly absurd statement given by the Portland Police Union president:
“What is most discouraging is that when police officers respond to a call, those officers must now be concerned that someone sitting in hindsight, from the safety of a courtroom, will not only question their actions, but also their credibility.”
He’s talking about a judge disbelieving police testimony because there was video proof that the cops lied.
Good luck staffing a police force with people of that superhuman standard.
If you can’t find decent people to staff your police force, then the solution is not “lower standards until Michael Slager, Jeronimo Yanez, and Timothy Loehmann are acceptable recruits”. If you can’t keep standards higher than that, you shouldn’t have a police force, or you shouldn’t give the police force anywhere near the privileges it has.
If I abuse my privileges at my job, I could screw with productivity, destroy some files that could be recovered, steal some hardware, and hurt the company. I would immediately and without question be fired and face legal consequences for my actions. It would suck for me to be a power-tripping asshole, but it wouldn’t ruin or end anyone’s life. If Paul Ice of the Podunk PD abuses his privileges at his job, he can go on a power trip that brutalizes and traumatizes many of the local residents. He can murder people and trivially claim self-defense with the flimsiest of justifications. He can rape people more or less with impunity - after all, people trust the cops, and rape is basically impossible to prosecute anyways. All of this is predicated on the trust and legal privileges we grant to police officers, which simultaneously make it really, really hard to nail down cops that do happen to be corrupt.
“People who don’t have a hard time not doing things they know are the wrong thing to do while on camera” is not some high, lofty, impossible standard. Especially not when lives are on the line. I have no idea where you get the idea that we couldn’t have a police force better than this, but keep in mind that the USA is both an exception and a laughingstock compared to the rest of the world. The soft bigotry of low expectations should not apply to people with the legal right to open fire with deadly force the moment they feel threatened.
I actually wonder about people who think the standards we’re asking for are hard. Do they not hold themselves to personal standards? Nothing anyone is asking the police to do is remotely unreasonable, or something I wouldn’t expect myself to have to do if I were entrusted with their level of power.
I stopped at a friend’s house last weekend, fed their cats, scooped the litter, etc.
We met for drinks Wednesday night (he paid!) and he showed me stills from his motion detecting cameras. He gets a phone alert when they are activated. I looked skeevy; baseball cap pulled low, sunglasses, furtive posture.
I take it you’ve never been on camera, then.
Cops in “the rest of the world” don’t generally have to deal with a reality where any civilian they encounter could instantly produce a legally-acquired firearm and murder them in a fraction of a second.
I have not, no. Then again, I’ve never had enough power to kill, assault, harass, and imprison with close to impunity. And I find it hard to believe that if you kept me on camera for a week at my workplace, I couldn’t pull myself together and not do things that would cost me my job. I find it hard to believe that you couldn’t do that.
This is not a high standard.
“Don’t do things that make you worth firing on camera” is not a high standard, it is the bare fucking minimum of being able to do a job. Countless convenience store clerks, security guards, and other people who work in places with CCTV and video surveillance do it every day. It should not be hard, even in the slightest, for the cops - people to whom we grant incredible power and trust - to do the same. It should be second fucking nature.
We have given these men the right to kill someone for the reason of seeming threatening to them, and expanded what is justifiable to absurd degrees. We have given these men the trust that, barring solid, hard evidence, their word will be taken as the truth in court. And they seem to be warning each other that they have active body cameras on. Assuming that that’s what’s going on, one question.
Why?
Why is that warning necessary?
A lot of us—retail clerks, security guards, tech workers, ordinary office workers—are under constant video surveillance by our employers. And the vast majority of us don’t have the license to use deadly force on behalf of the state with almost zero accountability. So, no sympathy from me.
The standard is that the police must never do anything that appears wrong in the eyes of those who assume that everything the police do is wrong.
Regards,
Shodan