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Comment by adamsmith | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty surprised the police department thought they could ever win this. The best interests of the public seem pretty clear cut here.

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They didn't have anything to lose. And if they somehow managed to win, all the better for them.

Just bringing the case is intimidating enough. Even if it's legal, the fact that you might have to go to court to defend yourself will deter some people from filming them.

It is a personal hobby of mine to record cops in the off-chance anything happens. Usually it's stuff like driving on the median to get around a traffic jam (ugh) or parking in front of fire hydrants.

With the proliferation of camera phones, I think the world would be a better place if everyone pulled out cameras and started shooting as a matter of principal. I don't sympathize much with Rodney King, but the LAPD is more civilized (at least in public) since then.

Make sure you're prepared to lose your camera and get roughed up a bit if you decide to do this (which is admirable). In my experience, cops have no patience for people who assert their rights as citizens.

Many police cars nowadays are fitted with front-facing video cameras. One sage piece of advice from a friend of mine is to:

    * be extremely polite and cordial; "How may I help you officer?"
    * respond requests to be searched with, "Sir, I don't consent to 
      any searches"
    * When you step out of a vehicle, assume the position: legs 
      apart, hands behind your head.
    * Politely ask, "Am I free to go officer, or am I under arrest?"
      (repeatedly if necessary)

The point of this is to ensure that nothing you do can be possibly interpreted as an act of aggression by the officer, while asserting your rights. The police camera will show you in a pose of total submission, and any aggression on the part of the police officer will be unjustifiable.

The cop will be annoyed, but he won't touch you, and if he does, you will be vindicated. Your camera footage, OTOH, isn't guaranteed to survive a run-in with the cops (this happened to a friend of mine), and any natural reaction you might have to your camera getting snatched from your hands can be used as an excuse to whip out the tazer.

Remember HNers, the job of contemporary police is to arrest you, not to "serve and protect".

This American Life had a great show on this recently:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...

What you said is true, and that is my perspective on cop visits, too.

But for those life or death situations, Justin.tv offers smartphone apps that record directly to the web.

I wouldn't personally rely on the police camera to not get edited or lost before an important trial.

Your fears have been realized recently: http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Milford-cop-suspended-for...

I originally said "is known to" but I couldn't find the citation. Thanks for that.

> I don't sympathize much with Rodney King

Why not? He was beaten far beyond what was necessary to restrain and arrest him. I sympathize with him for what happened to him. It was a brutal assault.

He was drunk driving at over 100 miles per hour, didn't pull over for the cops, then he resisted arrest. No one deserves to be beaten up by the police unnecessarily, but he's not innocent in this.

If a criminally violent asshole beats up a criminally reckless asshole, I don't have sympathy for either one. The police were in the wrong, and Rodney King was also in the wrong. There's no sympathy to be had in the entire incident, not from me.

There's a huge difference here. Rodney King is one foolish idiot. The police are a massive, well funded (with our money) organization, with extraordinary powers. If Rodney King had continued to act is his idiotic manner, the consequences are vastly less than if the police continue to act outside the law, doing whatever they please.

This isn't a question of what's more disastrous for society. We're agreed on that. It's a question of sympathy, which is fundamentally a subjective question. I'm just giving my perspective.

Whether or not he was innocent has nothing to do with whether he deserves sympathy for being beaten within an inch of his life. There is no excuse for that kind of behavior from police.

You can be against police brutality without sympathizing with drunk driving morons like Rodney King just like you can be against the death penalty without sympathizing with murderous madmen like Charles Manson, or against political censorship without sympathizing with the Ku Klux Klan.

That's the essence of civil liberties--you don't have to be an object of sympathy or respect in order to have rights. You can be a common criminal, a mass murderer, or even a racist and you still have your rights, as well as plenty of people (you and me included) standing up for your rights even if on a personal level we wouldn't give you the time of day.

This sounds like a semantic issue demanding clarity; does one "not sympathise" with Rodney King specifically, particularly on account of the behaviour that triggered his arrest, or as a victim of a police beating?

It's, to me, a matter of justice versus the right to administer it. King certainly wasn't innocent and certainly deserved punishment, but democracy breaks down if punishment is ad-hoc. The LAPD has no right to beat down anyone who is submitting to arrest, or administer any sort of punishment to anyone except incarceration pending arraignment. "Rodney King was not innocent" is very different from "A jury has found Rodney King guilty by the same laws that apply to the rest of us, and may now be legally punished by the CDCR, in a manner proscribed by a judge."

That I don't sympathize is subjective on my part, in other words.

He may have actually been going faster. He was reported to be going 117mph. The LAPD's policy is to cut off chases at 120mph, as pursuit at that speed is considered more dangerous. I would not put it past the pursuing officers to fudge the numbers a bit here in order to continue the pursuit.

Incidentally, that's a large part of the reason I don't sympathize. It was unquestionably an abuse by the police to beat him, and I'm glad they caught hell, but I'm not going to shed a tear for the man. It's a travesty the way their trial went.

If this interests you, maybe you should see if there's a local Copwatch, or start one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copwatch

Well if they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear ...

Or if they have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear.

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