
Phone video clears man charged with assaulting cop, even after phone disappears - QUFB
http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/09/23/phone-video-clears-man-charged-with-assaulting-cop-even-after-phone-disappears.html?referrer=
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jMyles
Both official perjury and intentional destruction of recording equipment are
vicious, anti-democratic acts. It's puzzling to me that these are not regarded
as serious felonies, disqualifying offenders from public office for life and
subjecting them to substantial criminal penalties.

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blazespin
I'm not going to excuse police for their actions, but I do know as a society
we should value them much more. I say ramp up their salaries significantly but
increase oversight (body cameras, more automation, etc).

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sgk284
A lot of cops make a ton of money, doubly so outside of big cities. In a New
Jersey coastal town where my parents live the cops start at $85k/yr. They
never see any action. A few years back two of them saw a dead body and took
months of paid leave because they were traumatized.

Ultimately we just need to give them all body cameras and dismiss anything
they say or do that isn't recorded.

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lifeisstillgood
Then why have a specialised privileged set of people held to a higher
standard. Why not just slap body cameras on everyone and say "if you see a
robbery, go round and ask some questions, we'll review the tapes later"

Police (and others) are given special privileges but expected to act to a
higher standard than the rest of us. Quite a lot of them do. It's like
accountants and lawyers and doctors. Taking a random sample of doctors and a
random sample of, say, HN readers, the doctors would be ... Better.

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jMyles
> Then why have a specialised privileged set of people held to a higher
> standard.

I know you are being facetious here, but in the internet age, I think this is
an increasingly compelling question.

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jschwartzi
What you're suggesting could be the start of anarchy, which is the absence of
rulers but not necessarily of rules. If it were possible for anyone to gather
evidence of a violation of a rule, then why have a specialist class? In the
same vein, if it were possible to gain consent for a rule without a specialist
class, then why have a government? The only problem with the elimination of
the specialists is that we then must take over their responsibility to act
justly. I often wonder if our society is capable of that yet.

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lifeisstillgood
Rules but no rulers. I like the sound of it.

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dandare
So that brings us to a question what app would you use to

a) Secretly record a video on your phone. b) Stream the video to a cloud
(youtube, dropbox, other) while you record, so that even if the phone is
snatched from your hand and crashed by a heavy police boot, as much of the
video as the network allows will be already uploaded.

~~~
takee
If you just record a video with the default video/camera app on your phone,
Google photos (assuming you have the app and have it set to auto backup at
default quality) will back it up on the cloud.

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theGimp
I don't think that's what dandare meant. They were asking for an app that
uploads the video _as it's being recorded_.

If you have to stop recording before having the video backed up, all a bad
actor needs to do is physically destroy your device, and you'll lose your
evidence.

As it happens, such apps seem to already exist. Another comment in this
thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284629)

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danso
I've always wondered if at some law enforcement agencies, there are unofficial
guides on how to make sure a memory card has been wiped. Back in the day of
film cameras, taking the film or damaging the camera to ruin the film might
have been enough. With digital cameras, even forcing the photographer to do a
memory card format was not sure-proof, if the photographer knew how to run
disk-recovery software. I remember at least one story where a police officer
either confiscated a photojournalist's memory card or made the photographer
erase it...but the photojournalist had a dual-card camera in which all the
photos were auto-copied to.

With all those subtleties and complexities about digital camera technology
(SLR or smartphone cameras), it probably does make sense to a malicious cop to
just take and "lose" the camera. But technology continues to be a step
ahead...

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ZanyProgrammer
I've often thought of making a mobile app that securely uploads a video in
real time to a secure server, out of the reach of law enforcement. That way,
physical possession of the phone is irrelevant if law enforcement gets its
hands on it. Alas, almost every online search brings up info for live
streaming to an iOS device, not streaming from one (and I think it'd be quite
a challenge).

TLDR basically Periscope, but in a way that the uploaded video is encrypted
and the cops can't access it.

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ctoth
Luckily this already exists, check out the Police Tape app on iOS and Android
from the ACLU.

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jMyles
Last I checked, Police Tape did not actually upload video in real time, but
stored it and waited until after the video to ask the user to upload it. Is
this still the case?

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jongraehl
Police slapping phones/cameras out of someone's hands need to get control of
their emotions and bear the "I will catch you slipping up" threat with
confident professionalism.

That said, the criminal-record stereo-blaster was probably lying about 'his
uncle' and I don't think you get to 'you have no warrant we're done here' and
shut the door on the police responding to a neighbor noise complaint. If they
want to give you a talking-to or a ticket (depending on local law), they can.

I do believe the guy about his phone being "lost", though (should be easy to
corroborate if they have signatures/records of personal items), and we can
expect real sanction for the phone-slapper if it's clear which cop did it.

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Gracana
> Toronto police confirmed the officers are now being investigated by the
> force’s Professional Standards division.

Of course, the "oversight" comes from within. How can we even begin to believe
that they will act without bias?

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rokhayakebe
We'll have to admit that some cops are just bullies who entered the system to
have a legal way of being who they want to be. They need to tighten the
psychological profile/test required to be and remain an officer of the law.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I've got no experience with psych tests but I can easily imagine most power
abusers would easily pass one, and if not, they soon will because it's now a
test and tests become gameable if they matter with takers knowing exactly what
the desired answer is.

I think the solution rather lies in two other places.

One is obviously transparency. This man was acquitted due to video, so let's
put video on every police officer. Toronto for example is playing with this,
and it makes financial sense. They have about 5.000 police officers on a
police department budget of $1.7 billion. We all know how cheap cameras (just
look at the cameras on $50 smartphones) and storage have become in recent
years, with a per officer budget of about $350k, spending a few thousand a
year (much more than you'd need for a solid camera & storage system) on
cameras would constitute a 1% cost increase, and you can probably offset that
cost immediately due to cost savings in faster trials due to less ambiguous
evidence, fewer complaints, less use of force etc (for example we've seen in
recent months reports of 70% fewer citizen complaints, 30% drop in use of
force incidents in Birmingham). Chicago for example spent $500m over 10 years
on police abuse cases (obviously paid for by citizens, not the police officers
in question themselves)

Second is to stop the bs 'internal investigation'. Police officers aren't
diplomats, they're citizens on duty as civil servants, when they're suspected
of harming the civilians they're supposed to serve, why have them be
investigated by their colleagues and close peers? I mean it's ridiculous. This
is so terrible because we see the old 80/20 rule in police departments, too, I
don't know the exact statistics from the top of my head but the notion that
80% of the complaints and incidents are caused by 20% of the police officers
isn't far from the actual number. A ton of honest and awesome cops go their
entire career without any abuse of power, you can't prevent the others from
getting in, but you can make sure they get out once you catch them. Donald
Sadowy for example has been accused of excessive force 10 times in 2 years in
actual lawsuits, imagine how many times he must've used excessive force if he
was taken to court 10 times, yet he's still on the force. If you actually run
the same 3 strikes and you're permanently fired policy on abuse that you do on
citizens smoking some harmless pot who go to jail for years, and have officers
investigated by an independent court with bodycam evidence, you'd probably
already cut out a lot of abuse from guys like these, let alone if you fire
people after one incident and even send people to jail for abuse of power.
Beyond that, getting fired should mean losing the ability to be a police
officer, period, nationwide. A lawyer for example can lose his license
nationwide in most countries, but police officers too often leave one
department and simply join another.

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pascalmemories
Ah, yes. Toronto police. The guys who gave us Officer Bubbles. And financed
his defamation action against YouTube out the public purse. [0]

I'm sure the Professional Standards division will be all over an assault by
officers on a member of the public.

[0][http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/10/16/officer_bubbles_s...](http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/10/16/officer_bubbles_sues_youtube_and_users_over_cartoons.html)
plus many others.

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rocky1138
Is there a GoPro that auto-uploads to Youtube? Would be really handy for
dashcams or bodycams or whatevercams.

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jMyles
I really want a handheld, in the form factor of a Canon SX50 or thereabouts,
that can upload via wifi or GSM.

Who is making this?

edit: to clarify, I mean upload in real-time, like a live broadcast.

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rocky1138
What's your use-case?

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jMyles
Something like a local news team via a mesh network.

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wahsd
There should be a public intelligence organization, a kind of wiki that crowd
sources public records and profiles on police officers, their departments, and
shootings so officers can't simply move around the country and they have a
record of their own, which departments then can not claim having no
knowledgeof.

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noonespecial
I think copwatch.com is/was trying for something like this.

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jqm
They aren't doing a very good job. Their site is broken.

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cxseven
It'll be nice when it becomes cheap and easy to live stream video from a
cellphone to multiple viewers and secure storage.

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jsprogrammer
It's pretty close. You can setup a system yourself if you want.

