Mobile Justice – ACLU's app for recording police encounters
mobilejusticeca.org
mobilejusticeca.org
> The ACLU may delete the information you send.
What's with the non-answers? This is their FAQ. If you're not going to answer a question you published, why publish it in the first place?
In practice, what's to stop the officer from confiscating and/or damaging/destroying your phone, before it has stopped recording and thus before it has sent anything at all to the ACLU? Worse, their faq seems to indicate that after stopping recording there is a survey that you either have to fill out or cancel before the video is transmitted.
The technology exists to stream the video, as it's recording, in real-time to the ACLU (I think). What is the ACLU thinking by ignoring this obvious flaw?
If storage and bandwidth are the issues, would sending ONLY secure hashes help? It'd be fast and cheap. It'd prove that a video was taken, and stop any tampering. On the same idea, the app could send low-res photos once per second, depending on bandwidth.
Now that I think of it, a P2P system would really be ideal: videos jump to other nearby devices running the app. They could be deleted after the person uploads, or a set period of time.
Defining the problem will vary depending on our individual political and philosophical bent, but in general, we can start discussing broadly when they should be encounters in the first place, the factors that lead to them, and reduction of such encounters.
How many people did the LA police beat before and after Rodney King? But it's that incident that was video-taped and broadcast. It was those officers who got charged, and it was two of those officers who went to prison.
The root problem here isn't the standards of the police for when they can talk with someone. It's that the citizenry doesn't think there's a problem and/or doesn't care to look. Which is not unreasonable; they just aren't experiencing the problems. Making sure they see what actually happens is a great way to fix their ignorance and consequent indifference.
The economic divide is the first place to start in terms of fixing this issue in the long-term; raise the dignity of life of every person in this country and I believe the road to healing can begin.
The whole American experiment is built upon the notion that you basically can't trust people with power. That's why we have a checks-and-balances system. There is a potential for wrongdoing by anybody with power. Power corrupts. Take a look, for example, at David Simon's take on Baltimore. As far as I'm concerned, the Baltimore PD has been corrupted as an organization: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...
That is not to say that the majority of people don't want to do the right thing. But by creating structures of accountability, we are helping them to do the right thing.
Let us suppose three categories of police officers:
a) bad cops
b) cops who generally act good themselves but who will lie and cover for bad cops
c) good cops who will arrest bad cops when they see them doing bad, and testify against them, and otherwise act against them, despite peer pressure not to do so
When people say "most cops are good", they are saying that group a) is small, which for the purposes of argument I will agree with. But the fact is, there are almost no cops in group c), and whenever one is discovered, they are pushed out of the police force as quickly as possible. And I consider group a) and group b) to both be "bad cops". There are lots of cops in group b), who consider themselves good, but who should be considered to be part of the problem.
> assumed potential for wrong-doing in every person with a uniform
Why would a uniform eliminate one's potential for wrong-doing?
As hacktivists and influencers or social change, we should have other means in place to make sure justice is done, and be careful not to participate in reverse racism or painting an institution initially placed for good as the enemy.
What is the right thing? Does it extend to trying to prevent others from doing the wrong thing?
> we need to be careful to not send the impression that we should assume there is an assumed potential for wrong-doing in every person with a uniform
Hasn't history and psychology shown us again and again that wrongdoing in aggregate is almost inevitable when you get a group of humans together? We should absolutely assume that where there's a high chance of a concentration of power there will be abuse somewhere, and proactively head it off.
> send the impression
That's a tricky one. If we actually do presume that there will be wrongdoing in aggregate, how do we avoid demotivating the 'good ones'? There must be a way to encourage the good ones to uphold standards and chuck out the 'bad apples' without feeling like they're under attack.
"Rough Rides" [0] seem to be standard practice. I can't imagine any person with a shred of humanity thinking this is an acceptable way to treat another human, or that it wouldn't end up killing someone. But the fact is that it's commonplace, hasn't been stopped, the people that do it haven't been challenged or punished by the people who should know better.
I've even seen the point of view expressed that this is 'standard procedure' so the driver shouldn't be singled out.
Just saying 'it's only a few bad apples' perpetuates this situation. It's not an American thing, we have it in Europe too, and, I'm sure round the world. It's just down to statistics and innate human behaviour. When we have high-profile cases like this, we have a choice of saying 'it's a shame someone else died at the hands of some police, let's put them on desk duty' or saying 'is this systemic? how many days until it happens again?'.
Unless we tackle that, we're always going to have abuses. Pretending otherwise is condemning another generation of black people / Irish / travellers / indigenous / homosexuals / tomorrow's minority group to more of the same.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_ride_(police_practice)
We should never allow any criminal activity that is performed toward needlessly harming others or that infringes upon their rights maliciously. I'm trying to be careful about how I word that because there are many things in America that are currently considered criminal that I support and feel are necessary because they fight corruption and inequalities that seemingly can not be legally overcome...
My experience is that all police are polite and helpful, because I'm a white, middle-class (in the British not the American sense) male.
My Irish friend's experience has been that all police are racist and will throw you down the stairs given the chance.
Some black people's experience is that police are homicidal maniacs.
Is one person's experience more important than another's?
If that hurts the feelings of a random police officer, I have a difficult time being sympathetic.