The War on Cameras
reason.com
reason.com
The ability for the courts or police to shutdown any practical oversight by members of the public turns changes the power dynamic completely. Any person is one pissed off cop away from having to deal with being arrested. It becomes a big game of chance. The (vast) majority of the time we don't interact with cops/the courts, the (vast) majority of cops are concerned about the general good and protecting people but even 1% of 1% in a country this big leads to a lot of hardship.
Essentially that is this man's crime. From a judge's perspective, he didn't really say that the law in question was invalid or that he was unjustly persecuted, but that the authority of law was invalid. From the judge's seat he might as well have been a murder arguing that murder was OK by killing someone in the courtroom. In the end, that is the single greatest crime that anyone can commit.
Someone with a little more common sense would have gone to a higher court and argued that he wasn't allowed a court reporter, an act that contradicted the entire point of his argument.
I think that the most important thing about a political system is predictability, not "democracy" or "justice" or some other vague, high minded ideal. The number one job of our elected and appointed officials should be providing this predictability.
This is a particularly stark example of what happens when that duty is shirked. Corruption and incompetence flow into every crevice not solidly plugged with deterministic law.
I'm not so sure, not saying there not might be some cases of this, but usually brutal regimes exercise force arbitrarily.
Predictability implies a set of constraints on the actions of those in power.
I agree that a predictable rule of law isn't enough for a worthwhile society. At the same time, it's worth noting that many repressive regimes are very unpredictable.
Look at Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Stalin's Russia; Unpredictable terror is an important weapon in a dictator's arsenal. It forces people to go beyond the normal call of duty in defense of the state. It produces something like "learned helplessness" in the population. It prevents rivals from acting against the leader.
At their roots, operant conditioning and classical conditioning are both learning mechanisms. Since the time of operant conditioning, spaced repetition[2] has gained a lot of popularity. It's a further refinement that depends on beginning with short intervals, and proceeding to longer ones.
The idea this suggests to me is that speeding tickets happen to many people infrequently enough that the enhanced learning never takes place. Draconian crackdowns, however, happen frequently and with high salience because of media coverage--the only time you know about someone else getting a speeding ticket is when you see them pulled over, and it's hard to feel as personally involved with that as when you hear all the details of someone's arrest and imprisonment on the news.
One piece of evidence for media coverage changing behavior is that people buy lottery tickets; because they've seen lottery winners on the news, the probability of winning has a much higher salience than it deserves.
1. Rare events, like receiving a speeding ticket, are relatively underweighted. Every time you drive without receiving a ticket reinforces speeding behavior.
2. Extremely salient events, like winning the lottery, tend to be overweighted--possibly because they're so important to our cognition, and we tell ourselves plausible stories about winning.
There's also a difference between negative and positive reinforcement and punishment. Receiving a speeding ticket is positive punishment; the lottery is positive reinforcement. Couple that with differential media coverage, like you mentioned, and you get significantly different behavior.
Not exactly; it's more complex than that. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
Underpinning all police states is a system that a citizen can be arrested for just about anything. This is how you keep citizens in check.
I found it interesting (and also saddening) that all the "law enforcement" people automatically line up to oppose the use of cameras. It's as if they live in a different world than the rest of us, who see cameras as ubiquitous and handy. This separation of society into 2 classes, the "law enforcers" and "average citizens", is another harbinger of a police state.
I'm sure many here will say: so what? I'm not bothering anybody, so why should I worry? The problem is, all of this capricious police action weakens society as a whole. We can't move forward if we're governed by 20th century laws applied at whim.
Which is ironic, since that is the core part of his job, to present a hypothetical scenario (an alleged crime) and argue it actually happened.
Not saying that the police are abusive by definition, but when they do act in that manner (or tamper with evidence), there is little an ordinary citizen can do to defend himself.
Surveillance has the great advantage that it doesn't particularly hinder honest officers in the line of duty, it only trips up the abusers.
Ask Shirley Sherrod about that, for instance.
I really can't see any reason to oppose such measures, unless a person wants to make sure police officers have free reign to abuse captives, or lie about what they say.
I think there are very good arguments to hold our public officials accountable, but they stand on their own merit.
[1] http://www.gab.ro/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nothing-to-hide...
Since anyone can report on anything that is said to them, with "expectation of privacy" or not, all requiring permission to record from the other person a conversation you are party to is to make it easy for liars. If A says B said X, and B says he didn't, then all a recording could do is determine who's lying. The existence of a recording doesn't constitute a betrayal, the reporting of private conversation does, whether or not there is a recording.
I think if I say something to you, you should be able to hold me accountable for it. I don't have a problem with that. Does anyone here understand why these laws prohibit recording of one's own conversations???
It looks to me that if you are an undercover policeman, you cannot participate in any police work aside from your undercover duties. Likewise, if you have ever been a "public" officer, you then can't cross over and become an undercover agent -- not with facial recognition software. There are also considerations for domestic violence, juvenile, and rape cases. No longer can you meet or converse with victims in any sort of public forum (interesting question: can victims of crime also tape their own interviews? How about suspects?)
All of this means we have a bunch of retraining and re-organizing to do of the national police force. This is going to be a major change and effects everything from seniority to career tracks, manpower needs, and court appearances. Just guessing, I'm betting that it adds a lot more cops than we had before. Not sure who is going to pay for those cops or if, in the end, we don't end up in a worse spot from where we started.
Having said that, because of the severity and broad scale of the problem, this will probably end up being settled at the national level. Probably after some crisis occurs. Wonder what that crisis would be?
I'd also note that it is the edge cases that are driving the change. There are probably dozens of cops taped everyday without incident. And probably dozens that illegally prevent taping. We just don't know. The only things we know are those things which are publicized effectively.
The point being that it's easy to think in terms of what the perfect world is or should be. The interesting part comes when real people and systems are bounced up against necessary changes.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/NewYork/ny3%28b%29.htm...
What they're trying to do is still wrong. Were I a legislator, I would immediately do one or more of the following:
-change the wiretapping laws to set explicit "No Record" areas or situations, allowing recording of public officials and servants in almost all cases. (Best)
-Allow public servants to be recorded, and citizens must inform servants they are being legally recorded. (Better than current, but not so great)
-require cops to inform citizens that recording is prohibited (bad for soooo many reasons)
Do you think they take advantage of the defendants "dire" situations to get them to sign release forms in order to subsidize their court defense? How is filming them prior to having their consent not the exact same thing?
I'm tempted to go so far as to say that a public official (especially in law enforcement) acting in her official capacity should have no expectation of privacy from recording, though I'm willing to admit that there might be some case I'm not thinking of.
1. Secrecy in matters like, well, diplomacy.
2. Protection from reprisal.
3. Confidentiality of people other than the public servants. A lot of government work deals with heavily stigmatized things other than crime – poverty, disease, etc. It’s hard to record a social worker without bringing unjustly harmful attention to the people they work with.
I strongly agree with your general principle. I just don’t think it would work without some compromises.
As to the other points, I should clarify my statement above: I only meant that they should have no expectation of privacy from the person they're dealing with. Planting a bug in the police station or eavesdropping on a conversation to which you aren't a party seem reasonable to leave as illegal. I'm tempted to agree with other commenters that recording any conversation to which you are a party should be okay, but I haven't given it enough thought.
For diplomacy, it seems like the people who would be doing the recording would most likely be other diplomats, and therefore immune from US law anyways.
Case 3, it's easy enough to just say that while the social worker has no expectation of privacy, their clients do. If someone is having an interaction with the social worker where someone else's confidential information is disclosed, the social worker is the one who has messed up here, with the person recording it being, at most, auxiliary.
On point 2 specifically: as hard as it might be to imagine in the US at the moment, in many times and places people doing legitimate law enforcement are intimidated by gangs. This ends up being bad for everyone. While it’s rarely a problem here and now, it ought to be protected against.
But what about the privacy of the suspects that the COPS voiceover reminds us are 'innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.'
Did they have any say in a film crew marching in after the police, filming the inside of their house and whatever interactions occur for broadcast? This seems like a far greater violation of privacy that the recording of public officials doing official business in public locations.
As a society we are going to have to figure out how to deal with this end of privacy. It's bigger than just law enforcement.