
California agency blocks release of police use of force, surveillance training - glitcher
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/california-agency-blocks-release-police-use-force-and-surveillance-training
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Shivetya
I would go further. I would suggest demanding that all training of police
officers be subject to auditing similar to how a college course can.

Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots
to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the
course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically
distributed material.

Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include
no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and
demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class
not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.

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loceng
I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's
record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the
cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad
role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if
there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly.

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soledades
What's already public is pretty harrowing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM)

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yeetawayhn
Can you be more specific about what is harrowing?

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soledades
It presumes before the fact that all police killings are justified (Obviously
there was a clear and present danger to others!), and holds up remorselessness
about killing as a sort of quasi-enlightened state.

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yeetawayhn
You misconstrue the content to describe it like that. The justification is
predicated on the a clear and present danger to others.

What reasoning do you have to support being remorseful for saving others from
a clear and present danger?

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deathgrips
Normal people have nightmares for years after killing someone, even in the
most perfectly justified cases of self defense. You don't easily recover. If
you can kill someone and be more or less OK after that, you probably have
antisocial personality disorder or you've had a lot of training to desensitize
you to killing. Neither of those are good qualities in public service.

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yeetawayhn
> Normal people have nightmares for years after killing someone, even in the
> most perfectly justified cases of self defense.

This isn't an answer to the question. It is in fact a non-answer that endorses
the irrational as an enlightened state.

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deathgrips
Do you think people need a justification to have feelings?

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spaetzleesser
It’s funny how copyright and privacy are often used to block inconvenient
disclosure. Same in medical. They sell data back and forth but as soon as you
request something that’s inconvenient, they use patient privacy as excuse to
not disclose.

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thelock85
Making the association to K-12 public education, taxpaying parents cannot
easily access all of the curriculum their student has/is/will engage with in a
K-12 public school. The legislation (if any) and auditing process varies by
state, but from a business perspective, K-12 publishers do not want to be on
the hook for any real-life outcomes. Their customer is the school/school
district, not their constituents. Being able to see everything would open the
cultural (relevance) and academic (rigor) floodgates of advocacy.

In addition to protecting the business model, I imagine these training
companies do not want their educative materials associated with real-world
police misconduct, or subject to any standards around what should or should
not be taught.

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stx
I would argue freedom of information is more important than copyright claims.
If you do work for the government it needs to be able to be pretty open what
is done. I can see that there might be some exceptions but I would not think
copyright is one of them.

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throwaway_USD
If you want to claim a copyright, then good luck with the in the private
market, but if you want that big, fat juicy government contract (i.e. taxpayer
dollars) there should be concessions.

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gentleman11
Puts the company in a weird position where they want to charge for access to
their material, but laws are requiring them to release it publicly. Assuming
good intent, it would make their business model challenging

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heavyset_go
I don't really see how this is any different than books. Anyone can pick a
book up and read it for free at the library, and intellectual property laws
guide most entities to either lawfully borrow, rent or purchase a copy, and
not bootleg it.

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gentleman11
It’s like the musician challenge where piracy and streaming made it harder to
charge for the music itself, so bands began relying on live performance out of
necessity

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heavyset_go
Shaking down some kid for violating copyright or trademark law doesn't scale
and is bad PR. Lawyers would have a field day if municipalities started
bootlegging their clients' intellectual property en masse.

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Melting_Harps
Well, all the more reason to applaud hacker groups like DDoSecrets for file
dumps like Blueleaks that are revealing how much utter BS and how much
institutionalized corruption exists in Law Enforcement. Moreover, I'm pretty
disappointed Jack Dorsey let someone at his company just ban their account
[1].

A lot of good was done in having them publicly advertise what they had
released. Hopefully this has a Streisan effect instead.

1: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-
accoun...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-account-over-
blueleaks-police-data-dump/)

I'm gla

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acheron9383
While I don't disagree with the California law, it is reasonable for a company
to hold copyright over it's materials and products. I'm not sure a California
state law can just hand wave away a federal statue and break the copyright,
presumably violating the contract the police agencies made in the past with
these companies. If they do so, the companies will probably sue the state, and
they may win a bunch of taxpayer money.

To me, it seems like the California agency is the one in the wrong here, they
need to be using training courses that are able to comply with the above law,
rather than just slapping up a "we cant comply sorry" message.

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annoyingnoob
Sorry the police and government generally do not have free reign over us. In
an era of so much police brutality its perfectly reasonable to ask how they
were trained and what the training materials consist of. Lots of things at the
library are under copyright but I can check them out and read them for free.
Why should police training materials be different?

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soledades
A sample of what this kind of training can look like:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM)

