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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

This law will be abused by officers and abused hard. Also, how long before this gets picked up by other states?

Just because laws might be broken or abused, that's not a good enough reason not to have laws. This law is meant to lower the temperature in situations that are already stressful enough without someone getting in the cop's face with their phone. If you can video an arrest from 10 feet away, that's good enough. Also, any cops abusing this law will still be recorded doing it.

One problem is that voices obey the inverse square law; the received power of the audio will be inversely proportional to the square of distance. The new minimum distance will often be enough to prevent capturing their words, with the direct consequence that recordings will not be able to capture what is said. They become less accountable.

The law is meant to give police a pretense to arrest people recording them and give them plausible deniability; eg "looks like I misjudged the distance". Meanwhile people were still arrested which is a punishment with consequences in of itself. That's in the best case where the charges are dropped, worst case is they have prove it in court with all the associated burdens and costs. Even if they get off, that's still a punishment. And for what? This law isn't needed for any other reason, police already have the authority to clear an area they are working in.

> This law will be abused by officers and abused hard.

How, if they are recorded from further away?

How far away was the Floyd recording?

Five, ten feet.

How would you envision this abused (worse than what we have now?)?

Far as I look at it, codifies where you CAN be. Presently, you couldn’t get that close up for an arrest for a variety of reasons in practice.

Seeing as I, a mere coder, don’t want people “over my shoulder” it is only reasonable and fair for a similar affordance.

I'll ask the opposite, how could you NOT see this being abused?

As YouTube shows, there are plenty of police officers who hate when bystanders film, and retaliate at every chance.

Now all they have to do is run up on you and arrest you for being within a 8 foot proximity? They are going to love it.

The police officer is also capable of moving. If I'm filming 20 feet away, he only has to take a few steps and suddenly I'm violating the law and he can arrest me.

There are plenty of cases where filming a police officer was used to show that the police officer was breaking the law and not the citizen. This includes some of the high profile cases where police brutality killed innocent people.

If you are out in a position of power, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, especially when there’s a history of that power being abused.

the police will walk towards the person filming to threaten and arrest them, it’s already fairly common for police to get uncomfortably close to someone to encourage pushing

Do you, a mere coder, have both the means and the history of killing innocent people?

Yes, many developers write shitty software that has results in human fatalities. For example: the vertical over correction written into the Boeing 737 that resulted in two aircraft crashes killing hundreds of people.

Then perhaps, there should be someone looking over your shoulder.

Don't forget the steady stream of ransomware infestations and credit card dumps. We know how to write safe software, NASA and Dr Richard Hipp have proved that it can be done, but we choose not to because there are no consequences. Consequently, all continues as before.

Mere coders do not embody the state monopoly on violence. So your comparison is nonsense.

This is a case of 'who watches the watchers', not 'who watches the coders'.

The coding equivalent is saying that auditors cannot look at the code nor the server settings, that they need to trust you.

The new law has legalized an existing abuse - police threatening concerned observers who are recording - so I suppose you could say it's no longer abuse. Compelling stuff!

1. Cops are not immovable objects, they can move closer to someone who is recording and arrest them.

2. You are not an agent of the state exercising a monopoly on violence when you’re writing code.

As a mere coder, your not granted extraordinary power to stop, arrest, and kill with little risk of legal repercussions. Anyone granted such power should be on camera the entire time they are working and any laws they break, on the job or off, should require maximum sentence be served. They should be held to a much higher standard then anyone else. They’re not even held to the standard of mere coders, who absolutely can be monitored legally, regardless of any courtesy they may expect.

The police are granted tremendous power by the state. They have the authority to use their sole judgement to kill citizens on US soil. This is a power granted to virtually no other group. As such, it is absolutely critical that this power not be abused and we should therefore have strong systems of state and citizen oversight over police behavior. That's the bargain. We give the police guns and let them kill people but the cost is that we get to watch them like hawks.

I agree with your characterization. It's often described as a monopoly on force. States, counties, and cities all have the right to use force to injure or kill you. "With great power comes great responsibility." Civilized societies need police forces (not everyone is a rational actor) but we should nearly always err on the side of mistrusting the police when it comes to policies and laws. People should become police understanding that they will be under the microscope at all times. That's the price they should pay for wielding firearms, forcing compliance, and the ability to arrest people.

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