It’s not easy to control police use of tech, even with a law
wired.com
wired.com
Michael Mansfield QC, a barrister wrote about this ages ago with the Birmingham 6, a famous miscarriage of justice that amounted to a beaten confession and prison time for innocent people. In the book he describes the problem that the police see themselves as the only frontline for law-and-order. They are under immense pressure for results from various political forces so they are given leaway to "break a few rules" and get the job done, after all, "We know he did it!"
In France, my limited understanding, is that the police do not generally investigate but the investigation comes under a judge. They will use the police to gather evidence and interview people but the pressure for a result is on the judge and not the police. The judge should ensure that laws are followed because they are part of the judiciary. If the police are then told to use some tech or not, it has already been approved by a judge, otherwise they won't risk it themselves because why should they?
Police investigations in common law countries have judicial oversight, but it seems like a feature rather than a bug to separate judges from investigators. If the judge is in charge of the investigation, who's going to stop the judge from issuing unreasonable search warrants?
You have to put strong legal deterants against it. Personal responsibility. That is actually pretty easy to implement if legislators really wanted to.
I don't think police needs it, but crony authorities under executive control almost certainly do. Russians, Russians, Russians...
I'm not sure if that is politically possible. The police unions start complaining when politicians start to do something (see when they turned their back on DeBlasio in front of news cameras). I'm not sure if it's fixable without repercussions on the offending officers or the union rather than the taxpayers. There is zero or near zero repercussions of the officers, the chain of command or the union for malfeasance. Of course they are going to act how they act, they're humans. The worst part is the bad officers often corrupt the good ones, or make them quit, so over time there's just the bad.
For sure, the criminal justice system had gotten worse, with over-incarceration and criminalization, but I doubt that the police are your friends in the 1950s since much of the structure of police organizations hadn't changed that much.
I do something bad, I get punished and I pay the fine.
John Smith the policeman does something bad, taxpayers pay the fine.
The police generally consider laws to be for little people. In the US, any law that is supposed to apply to police has to not depend on the District Attorney ever filing charges, because they won't, except for certain high-visibility murders, and usually not even then.
Something that has worked sometimes is a state or federal law affecting city police. The law should have provisions to allow citizens to initiate enforcement, and, for egregious offenses, provisions to restrict the convicted officer from working in other police departments.
Too often, departments appear to respond to public pressure by firing the officer. But that actually achieves very little; the officer just goes to work for another city, with a fresh, clean record. There are a lot of cities.
It would be helpful to establish a national registry of police behavior, so that offenses at one department follow them to the next.
Of course, they still have to get caught, but it won't be the DA that has to do something about it, it's the defendant's lawyer who will do it.
Your lawyer maybe sues the department for use of excessive force, and maybe gets a settlement from the taxpayers. Again, with exactly zero effect on the crooked cop.
Maybe lawyers should be suing the police union, too.
But unfortunately, this means that anybody who can't afford a good lawyer, will be an easy target for trampling on their rights
I might have some reservations with this, but proving that cops committed crimes is actually extremely commonplace. It happens in criminal courtrooms on a daily basis, as the primary vector to get evidence thrown out against a defendant. When cops commit crimes while gathering evidence, those criminal actions taint the evidence.
The problem is that nobody ever prosecutes the cops for the crime. The evidence gets thrown out, criminals walk free, and then nothing happens after that. It would be nice if the same defense attorney that proved the cop acted unlawfully could follow up by putting the cop in prison.
There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.
This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.
The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.
Simply add a cost to prosecutions that fail, with it going towards the winner.
The cops will abuse the shit out of that. That gives them a monetary incentive to botch investigations when their buddies are involved.
>There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.
>This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.
>The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.
If the cops botch their investigations... Well there's nothing stopping anyone else from conducting their own. Might as well conduct one into the cops botching of the investigation too.
Ok, so you consider the state to be equivalent to sovereign citizens?
Also, how about investigations that never go to a prosecution? It’s pretty simple to harass someone that way.
I dont see why the state should be considered special. Ultimately it is supposed to work for the people, is it not? It's powers are delegated to it by the people.
I dont see "only the state should have the right to harass people" as a legitimate argument.
If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.
> If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.
Making a broken system worse does increase the need to fix it, but it doesn’t mean it gets fixed, it just means we have a worse need.
And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.
The worst thing that can happen is for an injustice to be prolonged just because it only affects a select group of people that those in power dislike.
No they don’t.
> And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.
When has that ever worked?
Texas also recently took the concept you've described but implemented the inverse with SB-8[2] which allows citizens to do precisely what the government itself is legally barred from doing.
[1]https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=/secur...
So the best that can happen after years of court time (with the government agents being paid the whole time), is a court judgement to stop doing something. There is no personal liability for the offending agents, no liquidated damages for the victims, no conspiracy charges for management's illegal policies, etc.
In general, the state has a massive blindspot towards damages that it itself inflicts. As we can expect from any natural system, it has settled into creating ever more externalities. Cops have been abusing "you might beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" for forever. Now that moral hazard is everywhere.
In a just society, much of the state's activities would be viewed as just another actor on a level playing field, and would therefore be directly liable the damages it itself causes to innocent parties.
The biggest problem is our chickenshit prosecutors, not a lack of criminal laws that apply to the police. We could have more, certainly, but we don't even apply the ones we have.
However, referencing a completely different law kind of makes my point. Straight "kidnapping" and "false imprisonment" would be the appropriate charges. Yet the corrupt cop is still allowed to hide behind their nominal position, despite deliberately acting outside its authority.
When I wrote my comment I was thinking of the TSA, which has done many things that were later slapped down by the court, but with no punishment for having violated the law for so long. Because despite being illegal, their actions were "policy" and thus apparently every crime they already committed is let slide.
If the problem were just corrupt prosecutors, then we would expect to still see plenty of civil suits - individuals can still sue on their own. Yet if you ask an attorney about doing so, they'll just laugh. And even when the situation is serious enough to warrant a civil suit, it's still the city getting sued rather than the person who happens to be employed as an officer. The equivalent in the tech world would be cracking as a hobby, and when caught passing the responsibility off to your employer because you were using your work-provided laptop. But obviously that doesn't fly in the private sector.
FTFY.
And of course a cop can do the same thing, they just cannot automate it. If the city wanted to spend a gazillion dollars they could theoretically hire an army of people to manually record plate numbers and it would be within the law.
It's information leak. The truth is we always took this sort of privacy for granted. The information was there forever--it was just too arduous to process. Nothing fundamental changed from 1980-2020, only the expense and practicality of it.
I don't know what the solution is. I just think we are realizing that we never had privacy to start with, we were just shielded because it was impractical to process the data.
If it hits the police budget, you can expect the Chief to report it