
‘Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over’: Records police interaction, sends location - miles
https://www.fox29.com/news/hey-siri-im-getting-pulled-over-iphone-feature-will-record-police-interaction-send-location
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gkoberger
This title makes it feel like it's an Apple feature, but really it's just a
Shortcut someone put together.

It basically just turns down the volume, texts your location to an emergency
contact, and opens your camera. It doesn't upload the footage in realtime to a
central server as other apps do.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
It does push it to iCloud or Dropbox though.

~~~
hnarn
Can you clarify this, does iCloud or Dropbox actually receive video in real
time as it's being recorded, or does it only start uploading after the
recording is done? Because in the latter case, I doubt it will do much good --
unless perhaps sleeping an iPhone during a recording saves what has been
recorded so far and uploads it in the background, which I'm also not sure of.

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bb123
This is cool - I think smartphones are are best defence against violent police
oversteps. Now everyone has a camera with them and we are seeing the results.
Democratisation of surveillance.

~~~
rvz
> This is cool

Indeed it is. Why install CCTV cameras when everyone is their own camera-
person. Solves the low quality camera problem and multi-angle footage.
However...

> Democratisation of surveillance.

Mixed with social media, it's now more like self-surveillance. This is just
the start and Nextdoor neighbourhoods take this to dystopian levels. But one
clever man once compared this to 'Stalin's Dream'. If that's his dream, then
it will soon be everyone's nightmare.

~~~
sansnomme
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529921)

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bananamerica
I am black. If I was in the United States I’d have a dashcam and would wear a
bodycam if possible.

~~~
chrisjs96
The data doesn't seem to back up your claim.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_the_United_States)

~~~
sidlls
Deadly force isn't the only way police commit violence against impoverished
Americans, or against Americans who aren't white (regardless of economic
class). You don't have to be murdered by the police for your life to be
effectively ended when they make up BS about assaulting an officer, resisting
arrest, etc.

~~~
chrisjs96
Completely agree. Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed
at a higher rate(in fact it shows the opposite) it does show that they are
discriminated against at a higher rate. Pulled over more, etc.

~~~
danShumway
> Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher
> rate

Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial
Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.

When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are
disputing the _causes_ of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the
disparity itself.

I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and
you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers
for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white
communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than
white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning _why_ that is and
whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.

~~~
chrisjs96
Did you read the `Racial patterns` section and look at the data from the FBI?

~~~
danShumway
Yes. You're going to have to direct me to a quote, I don't know what you're
referring to. What I see is:

2015:

> A 2015 study found that unarmed blacks were 3.49 times more likely to be
> shot by police than were unarmed whites. [...] Another 2015 study concluded
> that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than
> whites.

2016:

> According to The Guardian's database, in 2016 the rate of fatal police
> shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people,
> 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. [...] Another
> study published in 2016 concluded that the mortality rate of legal
> interventions among black and Hispanic people was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher
> than that among white people.

2018:

> A 2018 study found that minorities are disproportionately killed by police
> but that white officers are not more likely to use lethal force on blacks
> than minority officers.

2019:

> A 2019 study in the Journal of Politics found that police officers were more
> likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this was "most likely driven
> by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial
> differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the
> application of lethal force." A 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the
> National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that blacks and American
> Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be killed by police than whites and
> that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.

\----

I see exactly one study in this section that disputes the disparity itself,
and that study was widely criticized and ended up issuing a correction:

> A 2019 study in PNAS concluded from a dataset of fatal shootings that white
> officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white
> officers [...] The study was widely criticized by other academics, who
> stated that the study's conclusion could not be supported by the data. [...]
> PNAS issued a correction to the original article.

I don't see data from the FBI mentioned in the racial disparity section. Maybe
I'm missing what you're referring to.

Again though, you don't need to do a complicated study to find the disparity
itself. You can literally just add up the number of deaths for each race and
then divide by population numbers in the US for black/white communities.
You'll get higher per-million numbers for black communities than for white
ones. I'm not sure how someone could dispute that, unless you're arguing that
the Guardian is under-reporting white deaths or something[0]. If you want to
debate the causes behind that disparity, then that's a separate conversation.

[0]: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database)

~~~
chrisjs96
You can't look at percentage of population but percentage of who commit
crimes.

[https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf)

> Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and off
> enders. Th e victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times
> higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). Th e off ending rate for
> blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites
> (4.5 per 100,000) (table 1)

From the article

> A 2015 study by Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that there was
> no racial bias in the use of lethal police force between black and white
> suspects in similar situations. The study did, however, find that blacks and
> Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of
> force.

> A 2016 study published in the journal Injury Prevention concluded that
> African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos were more likely to be
> stopped by police compared to Asians and whites, but found that there was no
> racial bias in the likelihood of being killed or injured after being stopped

~~~
danShumway
See my other comment[0], you're making two separate claims here. _Why_ blacks
are disproportionately killed by police is a conversation that might be worth
having, but it doesn't change the fact that they are disproportionately
killed.

As an analogy, a truck driver might be less likely to crash or be killed on
any specific drive than I am. However, a truck driver also drives a _lot more_
than I do, so a truck driver is still more likely overall to die in a vehicle
crash than I am.

In the same way, even if we lived in a world where blacks were less likely to
be killed in an individual police interaction, that doesn't change the fact
that a black person is still more likely overall to be killed by a police
officer than I am.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23547106)

~~~
JungleGymSam
Then the problem is the truck driver is driving too much. He should drive
less.

~~~
danShumway
Which is why we're seeing calls by protestors to reduce overall police
presence in cities and to instead migrate various police responsibilities onto
social workers with more directly applicable training.

Naming issues aside, reducing the amount of time the 'truck driver' spends on
the road is one of the biggest goals of the "defund the police" movement. But
again, that's a separate discussion.

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LeifCarrotson
It records it if you have the Siri Shortcuts app installed and download that
user script.

The article points out the Siri command is only for iPhones, but it could also
be a Google Routine or an Alexa skill, or there are standalone apps for all
three platforms that do the same thing.

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Gaelan
@mods can we get this headline changed? as other comments have pointed out,
it's pretty misleading.

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livecodestream
It is a very strange world where we need technology to protect us from those
who protect us.

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downerending
I think this is an outstanding idea. But if it's to be credible, the
recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user, and immediately
available to law enforcement.

Heads I win, tails you lose is not credible. It's just riot bait.

~~~
thekevan
>the recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user and
immediately available to law enforcement.

That would be a 5th Amendment violation, and possibly a privacy matter.

~~~
downerending
That's probably true, from a legal perspective.

As a practical matter, though, being able to pick and choose only the most
inflammatory and out-of-context audio/video pretty much ruins this as a real
source of truth.

