Nothing about this adds up. The video is flawed during both the arrest and around the time of death. Given her activities, saying this warrants further investigation is a gross understatement.
The willingness of police to label death a suicide never ceases to amaze me. I was on the beach down in Florida a few years ago and found a dead girl with her hands tied. Cops showed up and immediately assumed suicide. Turns out she had drug issues and had a history to support the assumption, but no reasonable person would approach a situation like that with such strong priors.
I'm not saying every crime scene is out of a Hollywood movie with a serial killer lurking in the shadows, but I would have really liked to see zero prior beliefs at that point. I'd sleep better knowing the people out there in charge of "serving and protecting" the general public viewed their occupation as a search for truth rather than some perverse version of The Office with guns.
Shows like CSI give the impression of infallible police with perfect tools to solve crimes but that obviously just is not the case. More than half of murders go unsolved (and that doesn't count the ones nobody realizes are murders) and we're seeing lots of evidence that innocent people end up being punished for them often enough.
Based on experience from watching The Wire, I would venture a guess that this is due to politicized statistics such as clearance rates that departments must meet for funding.
Some days, every profession is "some perverse version of The Office with X".
I don't mean to excuse LEOs, but rather to point out that the expectation that they're somehow different from the rest of us, is one of society's problems.
I think there's the expectation that they should view their jobs more seriously than that of, let's say, a porn director or toy designer.
They are different from the rest of us, in the same way that those who are border patrol officers, paramedics and military officers are. Not only does your job greatly influence your persona but you should be expected to take your job more seriously depending on the subject matter you're dealing with.
I think his point was that the fact that we rely on such an expectation (in the face of constant evidence that it is insufficient) is one of society's problems. I think that, in general, people do feel an obligation to meet (what they see as) the societal expectations of (what they see as) their role. But from a statistical perspective, relying on individual people to do so as a mechanism to ensure compliance with the role is foolish.
We do not send airplanes into the skies comfortably secure in the knowledge that airline pilots take their responsibilities very seriously. (Which they do, I am sure.) We do not do that because the airline industry cannot survive a failure rate of 'everyone tries hard'. Instead, there are checklists, redundant safety mechanisms, and the like, all of which greatly improve the airline success rate.
> I don't mean to excuse LEOs, but rather to point out that the expectation that they're somehow different from the rest of us, is one of society's problems.
Can you elaborate a bit? In what way are they "no different"? At the very least they are LEO, unlike all the "rest of society" AKA non-LEO.
And what is the civilian equivalent of the blue shield? How come people snitch on each other all the time for petty things, or even make UP bad things about each other? How come LEO are rather more tribe like when it comes to that stuff, seem to cover up even murder with no problem, and sometimes even threaten the precious few cops who do speak out? How many cases are there of cops blowing the whistle about concrete cops who killed concrete persons? Is that just not being reported on as often?
I don't mean when something or someone ELSE, the non-LEO society if you will, proved without a doubt that a cop did a heinous thing, and the cop is impossible to defend, that some will condemn that cop as well and distance themselves. That one's a given, and if you see a whole lot of cops getting caught horrible things and not very many cops speaking out before anyone got caught, you should be worried IMHO. If you aren't, that just makes me worry about the US public as well. But again, "if" is the operative word here, I'm asking more than claiming this.
But this I will claim: The pre-"super-high-tech" era is the last window of opportunity to solve the problems of power and morality.
We simply have no political consciousness, at all, anywhere in the world; not in the sense of Hannah Arendt, who said politics is not about life, it's about the world, which should be one way or another, which should outlast us one way or another. I would add, so life can prosper in it. Here's an idea, to not think about what offends people who are living right now, but to think about what would offend people who might live in 1000 years, that is, what results of our (in)actions would they like, what would they curse our names for, maybe even in between screams of torture. Yes, this takes courage, which I lack as well, but even realizing one should be able to do something but doesn't dare, is better than rationalizing it. There's at least some measure of hope and dignity there.
I guess you don't believe that with great power comes great responsibility. It seems to me that line of thinking that having control over other peoples lives doesn't require responsibility. That is the real problem here.
Judges, police, politicians all are very different from those of us not giving the power over others lives. You should expect them to behave accordingly or expect that they be locked away in prison or executed. Just like they do to other people often times wrongfully.
With great power comes great injustice. This is a fact of human existence. All the bullshit about "responsibility" is just window-dressing for the arbitrary domination of human beings.
"Control over other people's lives" is the problem. Occasionally those who obtain that control use it only in benign fashion, but such conduct is exceptional.
This expectation is often emphasized and reinforced by LEOs themselves. Witness any time an officer refers to "civilians", as though they themselves are some extraordinary power outside normal society.
What doesn't add up about the video? She was argumentative from the very beginning, refused to follow an order to get out the vehicle (right or wrong, you have to if stopped in a traffic violation in Texas), and then escalates the situation to the end with physical and verbal combative behavior.
And the story is that because the shitty quality video long after the main event happens has a few frames messed-up - which more than likely originates from technical issues - that this proves that there is something being covered up.
The police officer didn't like that the woman was belligerent and wanted to assert his dominance. He ordered her to put out her cigarette and to get out of the car simply to show her who's boss. A clear abuse of authority.
Sandra Bland -- as a citizen -- has no obligation to be polite and deferential. To suggest that her attitude somehow justifies abuse against her is despicable. The police offer escalated the situation at every opportunity, even though it's his job to deescalate, to serve and protect, and to keep the peace.
When dealing with a suspicious suicide of course the public is going to demand whatever raw footage is available. Not a cropped and edited version. It doesn't matter that the edits are probably innocuous. Denying the public the raw footage by itself speaks of arrogance.
> He ordered her to put out her cigarette and to get out of the car simply to show her who's boss
Or maybe as he was in the traffic lane, and now that she was clearly irate and argumentative, he did not want to stand there waiting to be hit by a car... while trying to explain to her that he was just issuing her a warning with no fine.
> Sandra Bland -- as a citizen -- has no obligation to be polite and deferential.
Except she did have an obligation to comply with the order to get out of the car.
> The police offer escalated the situation at every opportunity
That's a projection of what you want to see.
Once someone disobeys an order, they can arrest you... And when you refuse again, their job is to arrest you.
Being nasty and combative might be your right, but it in no way helps you.
>
Or maybe as he was in the traffic lane, and now that she was clearly irate and argumentative, he did not want to stand there waiting to be hit by a car... while trying to explain to her that he was just issuing her a warning with no fine.
If he had said "this is just a warning, there's no fine or penalty" (as he did with the first woman) the stop would hae been very much shorter.
His own actions prolonged the length of time that he was standing in the road. His own needless power-tripping prolonged the stop.
At 12:59 he says "this right here says a warning", he's clearly exasperated with her for forcing the whole thing. He was writing the ticket out presumably - if she'd made that possible he'd have been happy to leave. She protested way too much.
Around 11:50 she says "scared of a female - I was trying to sign the fucking ticket", suggesting that she considers that some action she performed was something he was scared of. I guess this was the reason he asked her to get out of the car.
She says "I can't wait until we go to court" refuses to stand still, refuses to listen to his responses, refuses to stand in view of the camera where he tries to put her. At 8:58 when he notes explicitly she seems "very irritated" I'm assuming, and with the subsequent search, that he's considering she's hiding something that warrants further investigation (like drug-driving?).
>His own needless power-tripping prolonged the stop. //
It doesn't seem like this to me. Assuming the stop was valid - and in none of the footage did I hear her say it wasn't - then what should he do, just ignore the ticket because she won't comply?
>"In hindsight, [Retired Los Angeles Police Capt.] Meyer said, it may have been better to wait for backup. “The lady seemed committed to her resistance to lawful detention and arrest, so the presence of a backup unit might not have made much difference,” he said.
“This is yet another case of someone who chooses to illegally resist the directions of a police officer, thus escalating the situation, “ he said." //
"Or maybe as he was in the traffic lane, and now that she was clearly irate and argumentative, he did not want to stand there waiting to be hit by a car... while trying to explain to her that he was just issuing her a warning with no fine."
That's a non sequitur. She said "I'm in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette". His immediate reply was "Ok, then I'm telling you to get out of the car", implying cause and effect.
This is a great comment. For all the handwringing about what Ms. Bland should or should not have done, and what an officer is or is not allowed to do, we seem to forget that the officer's job is to protect and to promote public safety.
In all of the recent cases that have made the news, this question seems to go unposed, when it should be a litmus test WRT the overall approach to policing.
Instead, we have a culture that shifts the conversation to one about what the officer and victim each did as the situation escalated.
The problem you have here is you're presuming that the officers suspicions are invalid. If you're lawfully stopped and you act suspiciously shouldn't an LEO investigate further?
If the apparent exaggerated agitation was due to say drug-driving then the officer will have made a potential increase in the "safety and peace for the public". There is no way for them to find the facts without questioning the person and their refusal to comply peaceably makes it impossible.
If you're going to stop people for road-traffic offences, which does appear to increase safety, then do you really want LEO to let people off if they're obnoxious and evasive?
So, an activist dies in Texas and the video is fubar in not one, but two separate situations and that does not impress the potential for foul play on you? Combine with the fact that she was pulled over for a completely minor infraction that two white, Republican cops in my family think is complete bullshit.
Like I said, it warrants further investigation.
Personally, I think it was a hit, but that is besides the point of my earlier comment.
If someone edited the video, why did they choose to make their cuts at times where cars or people are in scene? They would have gone unnoticed had they occurred a few seconds earlier. Who would be so stupid?
I use the Rising Sun hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(novel) -
release a nearly hour long video that is for the very large part boring. Continuous audio so someone can zone out and not hear anything odd - it's a lot easier to hear abrupt audio changes with low concentration than to notice a video 'flicker'.
In Rising Sun there's a slightly different polemic. A security video from a murder is edited before being given to the police (albeit more sophisticated in editing), and the detective takes offense to the assumption that it wouldn't be noticed, because of a (stereotype) Japanese attention to detail and an American indifference.
We can't really say until/unless someone can find the unedited footage. Without knowing what's contained in the missing parts of the video it's all speculation. A number of people have speculated that the parts that got clipped are when the officer is conferring on the radio to try to fabricate a plausible series of events that would justify his arresting her since up until he gives her the order to step out of the car (presumably to arrest her) he has no actual justification for arresting her (cart before the horse). You can't be arrested solely for resisting arrest, so he had to come up with some sort of charge that he could claim that occurs prior to his asking her to get out of the car. In his arrest report apparently he claimed she kicked him, which in light of the video evidence is clearly BS, but whoever edited the video was probably worried that if too much of the video goes missing some very pointed questions would be asked. A small blip is more likely to be excused as a "technical glitch" particularly if the majority of the stop was captured.
I'm not asking why they might want to tamper with evidence. The motive for doing so is obvious. I'm asking why, if they did decide to tamper with evidence, did they do such a bad job of it? If they were already editing the video, why didn't they make their edits at times where they wouldn't be obvious?
That's obvious right? Perhaps the frames that needed to be edited out weren't conveniently conducive to a seamless end product. And, editing out too much wasn't an option for obvious reasons.
But, as another commenter stated, we can't know the answer until we know what the original video holds.
Interestingly, if they then release the full video which shows nothing, then suspicions around the overall case will presumably be calmed. That would make me wonder if it was an intentional red herring to engender more trust and reduce suspicion around her eventual death. After all, why else release obviously edited video that would raise suspicion only to later quell it with unedited footage that was always available?
> Interestingly, if they then release the full video which shows nothing, then suspicion's around the overall case will presumably be calmed.
Sadly their actions have created suspicion. Further releases of video will be doubted by a wide range of people, from calm but cautious scrutineers to rabid conspiracy theorists.
Absolutely. OTOH, the far weightier suspicion is around the eventual death of Ms. Bland. An effective PR strategy might be to do something relatively ancillary that heightens the overall degree of suspicion. You then unequivocally address the ancillary issue (i.e. by rleasing the full video), which has the effect of reducing suspicion overall, including on the far weightier issue. That is, people think "Hey, maybe these guys aren't so bad. Maybe we are just jumping the gun".
Not saying this is happening. But, if the full video suddenly comes out and is "all-clear", then the police department will certainly receive that benefit, whether intentional or not.
Sorry I'm late to the conversation. You know that video is made out a series of frames so maybe you can't put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't.
Maybe the editing was accomplished via an interface that just had a time slider.
Maybe the minimum resolution was 1 second, or five seconds...
Hell, maybe the best tech they had was the "use two VCRs, push play on one and push record on the other, push pause at the beginning and end of the segment you want to remove" method. ;)
While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case.
What this is, is an ultra-common case of yet another cop "escalating everything always" because there is no downside for them to do so. They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force.
She should have never have been ordered to get out of the car, so this was a false arrest.
Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people. There should be no incentive for arrest in a situation like this, no power struggle, but instead they should be proud and rewarded for having deescalated any non-violent situation. Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back.
In this case, the woman was irritated because she was being penalised for a really, really minor infraction. And then she was defensive because persisting with the cigarette request and the demand to leave the car seemed unfair. And then she was rude because he was abusing his authority and he was too embarrassed to acquiesce to a member of the public (giving him the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't because she was a woman and a black woman). The police should accept in the first, explain in the second and then deescalate in the third stage of a case like this.
"Police should be trained, and it should be a point of pride for them, to be ultra-cool in the face of upset or rude people."
They are trained in de-escalation techniques. The issue is that in so many of these videos, it's not the person they've stopped or arrested, but the police themselves being the ones _actively_ escalating a situation until a use of force is near inevitable.
Of course. Obviously their training is not enough (or not on-going), their culture is poor, or the wrong sorts of people are being recruited.
I can appreciate that police would develop a strong us-vs-them reaction when dealing with organised crime for example, but there's little excuse for extending that a woman pulled over for not indicating when changing lanes. That was a real opportunity to give her a reminder, not warn or ticket her, and rebuild a really fractured relationship that people can have with their police.
> Think about the famously robotic Queen's Guards in the UK. Insults or bait should roll off police like water from a duck's back.
But that's not about de-escalation training. That's about focus on duties. You poke a toe over the wrong line and you're going to get aggressively yelled at, or shoved.
I think it goes without saying that there's a line. And also that they're still famously robotic.
The police should react appropriately when faced with violence or an especially difficult customer, but their focus on duties should be to minimise fiery situations where they can.
In Belgium it is a criminal offence to 'insult' a police officer, they call it "Smaad aan de politie" in Dutch/Flemish. I know because I got a verbalisation once and I didn't need to say a lot to get it. Thankfully I didn't need to go to court and got a criminal record that way.
I once lived next to a guy who drank a lot and who assaulted his older daughter when he drank too much. We had thin wales so we heard the scuffles and the cries. We always called the police but they didn't do anything about the situation. To be honest Belgian justice is a joke, in a lot of cases involving violence they never prosecute anybody.
After I while I got really fed-up after the x number of times the police came and did really nothing than telling the guy to be quit.. . I made - not saying that I was correct - remark that being a police officer in Belgium must really been the most pointless job you could do. Drive your bike without a light and you get fined, hitting your children and you get a free pass. That - and that alone - was enough to get verbalised.
Same in NL, but people go around it by making it an opinion instead of a direct insult, then it becomes freedom of speech. As in, instead of saying "You're a dick", you go "I think you're a dick". Subtle, but apparently enough.
I have heard plenty of people insult police officers in public and even spit at them in the Netherlands without them doing anything. I learnt in school it is illegal to do so, I have never seen any of them do anything about it in real life. Even without the subtleties; quite the opposite.
Police officers have constantly crown prosecutors (or their assistants) on the line and these are the people who really call the shots on whom to arrest and how to proceed whenever something's getting serious. Going by the description, dad/daughter affair should have definitely been referred to Tribunal de la Jeunesse and I bet it was. Belgian prisons are also overcrowded and justice system understaffed so that prosecuting small one-time offenses is definitely not a priority.
Towards the end of the video, the officer in fact alleged she had kicked him. It's not clear to me when that happened. Possibly her foot scraped his leg in the initial scuffle to pull her out of the car. Alternatively, it may have happened in the portion that is off video. Either way, the female police officer noted evidence of the scuff, presumably on his uniform. Incidental things like these seem to be taken as evidence of "assault" all too often.
I was surprised by this, like other sibling commenters. I was under the impression that common assault is only enacted when the victim is threateningly contacted or injured, or has reasonable fear of that being about to happen. Maybe threatening language might play a part in that.
Having a quick Google, the articles I've come across seem to indicate that swearing at police has in the past been interpreted as illegal, but nothing has mentioned it being classed as assault.
There's section 5 of the public order act which is about saying / doing things "likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" to the public, which has been interpreted as including police officers. I don't know anything about having to say things twice or it being classed as assault.
There was a 2011 ruling in England where the judge said that officers were so regularly on the receiving end of the "rather commonplace" expletive that it was unlikely to cause them "harassment, alarm or distress".
The Met continues to arrest people for swearing at police as they rejected the ruling. I know that Police Scotland continue to arrest people for swearing at police but I'm not sure how/if it has affected forces in England and Wales. At the time it was reported that the precedent could likely quash any future charges in similar circumstances.
There's 2011 advice provided to the Met which says that courts are unlikely to convict because officers are assumed to be robust: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761
It's probably a bad idea to direct insults at officers (because no-one likes being called a fucking facist wanker) and results will vary by location.
I'm not sure, but I think that after the first time the officer should say "don't use that language at me" and therefore probably tells the citizen that they are causing harassment and distress. Then if they continue to do it, after the warning, it becomes an offence. So perhaps it should be "continues to use offensive language after a warning about the language has been given".
It's illegal in Germany as well ("Beamtenbeleidigung" literally insult of a civil servant). The fines are pretty mild but it's a funny law (imo). The line isn't exactly clear. Some things qualify as insults, others don't.
Iirc "Clown" qualifies but "Bulle" (somewhat similar to the US use of pig=cop) doesn't because it is considered common use now.
The rulings usually seem arbitrary.
[The same laws apply for insulting non officers btw.]
Edit: Upper limit is technically one year in prison or a corresponding monetary fine (value depends on your income as is standard in Germany)
There is no such thing as a "Beamtenbeleidigung" in Germany, though it is a quite common myth. People in office enjoy no special rights in that regard. There is a difference, though, in the law process. Insults as a criminal offense need a personal demand for a penalty to warrant persecution by the state. For people in office, this can be replaced by a substitution demand by the state, supposedly to warrant respect for office in general.
Then, there isn't a catalogue for insults and their penalty. That's because criminal law in Germany is driven by the idea that the thing to be penalised is the individual guilt, rather than an objective action. This has a lot of consequences, one of them being that your action is weighted by what you wanted when doing the potentially criminal action, i.e. the intent.
> They do it because they can, because they are taught power and control over people is everything and the slightest challenge should be met with extreme force.
Maybe they do it for more mundane reasons: because they are bored of nothing happening and just decide to check a car to break monotony. Maybe they are having a bad day and something that would not have bothered them any other day is pissing them off.
The problem is that comparatively to other first world countries, the US society is quite violent. You put a small army of armed regular human being on the street in a country with a small to medium expectation of violence and stupidity will have dearer consequences.
Without blacks murdering other blacks in gang violence the numbers are roughly the same as other developed countries, as this article reluctantly admits at the end.
Where by "roughly the same" you mean "twice as high", and by "black" you mean "black and hispanic", and, of course, the demography that creates those statistics and confounds simple comparisons like that is left entirely out of your one-liner.
>While it is never a bright idea, it is certainly not illegal to be rude to a police officer. Assaulting them certainly is but no-one is claiming that in this case.
It isn't illegal to be rude, but the cop also doesn't have to let you off if you are being an asshole. She broke the law and he was going to be nice and let her off with a warning. Instead she was combative and he decided not to.
He asked her nicely to put out the cigarette and she essentially told him to fuck off she can do what she wants. Nobody has to sit there as inhale your shitty smoke.
Cops can order you out of your car for no reason once you got pulled over. It is definitely not false arrest. And I think the cop had totally reasonable grounds to make her get out.
Would you sit there and get shittalked while someones blowing smoke in your face because she has an authority/anger problem.
Being a dick to a police office who can still use his discretion to let you off is a really dumb move.
I might not sit there and get shit-talked to, but it is a police officer's job to deal with troublesome people in a manner that is safe, calm, professional, and respectful to all those involved. Your implicit acceptance of the "play nice to cops" game ignores the possibility of systemic biases present in "the game".
I always find it ironic that, for example, the NYPD's slogan is "Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect"... I have no doubt that the majority of interactions between citizenry and police are filled with all three, but it's the sore thumbs like the OP that are truly glaring.
I'm not talking about "playing nice" I'm talking about not acting like an asshole. It's stupid to act like an asshole to someone you want to give you a break/benefit of the doubt.
The cop isn't disrespectful until she refuses his order several times and he was to force her out of the car. At which point she cusses him out for several minutes straight.
It would be great if we had saints who could stand being yelled at like that without yelling back, but I sure couldn't.
The cop is disrespectful immediately. She's got a valid gripe (getting out of the way of the police officer means she gets pulled over), and he doesn't like that he's being called out on his shenanigans (threatening a ticket for failure to signal when pressured by aggressive driving).
See how that works? It's a he-said, she-said. It's great that there's one side that's obligated to act professionally and respectfully; it's a pity that that obligation seems to have fallen by the wayside. (Or, perhaps it never existed for certain segments of the population.)
What video are you watching? The first interaction is completely civil.
The second time he asks if she is okay and she goes on a tirade. He says "ok" and then asks politely if she can put her cigarrate out. He literally says "Do you mind" and "please."
And her resonance is "I'm in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette." And he says to get out of the car. She refuses and says she doesn't have to.
>"threatening a ticket for failure to signal when pressured by aggressive driving"
He's like 5-6 car lengths behind her. Watch the video.
8:42: You ok? (An apparently conscientious and concerned question from the police. Good, but too bad he doesn't stay like this.)
8:53: (Irritated, but civil response, by the accused, detailing why the cop is being a dickhead.)
9:15: (Cop doesn't like that he's being called out on dickhead moves and the tenor of the conversation changes. Cop proceeds to use his higher standing to escalate the situation instead of deescalating.)
You're missing the change in the cop's mindset right before the "asking about the cigarette." If the cop actually felt confident about why he pulled her over, he would have been able to handle how she responded. Instead, he felt threatened by the questioning of his motives. Why didn't he articulate the full reason and purpose for the stop right then and there? He decided to continuing escalating, and that is primarily on him. He could have slapped the ticket into her face and walked away.
Also, he wasn't bothered by the cigarette until he perceived an affront to his authority. That's childish playground behavior, not an attitude befit a public servant.
5-6 car lengths on a wide open road is an instigation. If a non-police officer driver does this, you wonder to yourself, "why is this guy up my ass?" This isn't some densely packed freeway, and he's 5-6 car lengths behind her. Why do that?
Probably because he ran her plates and got a driving record and warrant check. That's why it takes so long between the first time a cop comes to your window and giving you the ticket.
As for why he didn't say so right away the second time, probably because she was making faces or otherwise indicating that she was mad. And that is when he starts asking more questions.
I bet the minute she refused to put out her cig, he was going to give her a real ticket.
So, she's making faces and is angry, and that's your greenlight/"difference maker" for the cop to give her a ticket? Wow. This is exactly the "playing nice" game that I've described in a cousin thread.
If the cigarette is such an issue, why didn't he ask her that before she rebuked his grounds for the ticket? He's power tripping the whole time after she hints that she's not pleased, and you're greenlighting his power trip because she wasn't a bootlicker.
This is victim blaming at its finest... she's rightfully angry, and you're saying we can't blame the cop for not keeping his cool?
The third video shows cars disappearing. It looks like they want to hide something. I see several episodes where nothing happens, no cars and no people in view. Why not copy those moments? Or is this done on purpose by an editor who cannot disobey an order (to make parts of the video disappear), but can sabotage the result by playing stupid?
I usually take the side of the cops, but this whole thing is pretty sketchy.
First, she gets pulled over for an improper lane change. When was the last time you got pulled over for something so random and minor? Then the cop starts harassing her to put out her cigarette, then tells her to get out of the car, then threatens to tase her, then the officer leaves out may of the details of the arrest in his report.
Then she dies in an apparent suicide days later. And now, we have a poorly edited video of the incident.
None of the facts in this case add up at all.
So yes, it would seem they have plenty to hide and this video only adds fuel to the fire that they're covering something up.
>First, she gets pulled over for an improper lane change. When was the last time you got pulled over for something so random and minor?
Drive a beat up old vehicle in a wealthy area and it will happen every month or two, even if you're doing the same speed as everyone else. If it's a slow shift cops will pull over anyone suspicious which basically means looking different or out of place, just a funny looking hat or a bunch of boxes in your back seat could be enough to catch their eye, then they'll pull you over for something like doing 4 over, rolling a 4-way stop or a lane change violation even if you're the only vehicle around and it's 1AM. I find a lot wrong with this "stopping people the check their papers" behavior, but that's not the point, point is that it happens and is likely what happened here so making the traffic stop itself was likely a perfectly normal practice.
Being white with a clean record I've always gotten off with a warning. If any of those weren't the case or I fumbled the "where are you coming from/going to" question I'm sure I'd receive a lot more scrutiny. If you don't just bend over at that point and the officer is a jerk then theres a chance of things going downhill like we've seen here.
It wouldn't surprise me if they doctored the video as a knee-jerk reaction. It's a small organization with lots of group-think with a culture discouraging transparency. They had after more than a decade of being allowed to do all sorts of things without public scrutiny. A dumb mistake like releasing a edited video is most certainly not out of the question. If they edited it it was likely done in-house (explaining the abundance of "rookie mistakes") to prevent a loose end.
Can anyone present one other instance where an issue with the camera, recording medium or data corruption at any stage of the process between capture and youtube that has resulted in a video with these characteristics?
Exactly, also, if this were the case, it implies that every other dash camera of the same make is unsuitable for use as evidence & not fit for purpose.
There are some evidence recording systems that are supposed to be tamper-proof. So the video while being recorded is digitally signed, and then the officer's recording system uploads it securely to the police servers when back at the station. This is to maintain a complete chain-of-custody, so that when used as evidence in court, it can't easily be dismissed or disregarded.
This one... is apparently not? What's going on here?
This has also clearly been cropped to exclude the timecode. As far as I have ever seen from dashcams, the timecode is usually and quite sensibly burnt-in to the actual video to make editing harder.
What do you mean by "burnt-in" exactly? Like a watermark? I don't see any reason why the running timestamp can't be encoded in the file format, invisible to the user. Then tampering would at least require some technical know-how.
Meaning the timestamp is included as pixels in the video frame, it's not metadata. Usually the timestamp also has some alpha, it's not just a black background, so tweaking it would require some skill. This is far from foolproof but it at least raises the bar a little bit.
It can be useful because when you're watching a video where nothing is moving, you know the video hasn't frozen; and if you transcode the video to another format (upload to youtube, for example) the data is preserved.
Of course, even better would be if the cops' cameras recorded to a standard format that included accurate timecodes and secure digital signatures - and that same format could be viewed by most video players.
When Texas DPS installed the first camera systems which were VHS tape systems. In those, the officer was responsible for changing their own tapes and turning them in to their supervisor. In rural areas this means that there could be a considerable amount of time that the tape was available for editing. Those systems were an improvement over nothing at all, but there was always the possibility for funny business. The systems main effects were to protect officers from frivolous claims and assist them in report writing. They couldn't stop a dishonest officer from destroying a tape, and therefore didn't always protect people from abuse.
I'd like to think that things (other than the format) have improved in ~25 years, but there is no guarantee of that. Often enough, it takes a significant event like this in order to motivate the right people to do their jobs properly.
I don't think you'd know from the released video whether or not it had been tampered with (in terms of the tech you're talking about); presumably if it had, it wouldn't be admissible in court for precisely that reason. This is PR, not evidence.
Did you read the parent comment? What does tamper-proof mean to you?
It's digitally signed and then the officer's recording system uploads it securely to the police servers when back at the station. This is all to maintain a complete chain-of-custody, so when used as evidence in court it can't be easily dismissed or disregarded by the criminal's attorney.
It can't be edited because there wouldn't be a digital signature!!!?
Cameras will malfunction but not like you're saying they will.
Relax. This situation has me riled up too. But s/he was trying to be humorously sarcastic. Not exactly condoned HN comment behavior, and a bit flip given the seriousness of the topic, but not what you thought s/he was saying.
Also the parent says "There are some evidence recording systems..." We don't know if this police department's system is one of those.
I haven't read or seen anything to indicate that Tx DPS uses any sort of technology to protect chain-of-custody from tampering by troopers or other parties within DPS. This isn't a problem for state prosecutions because a DPS trooper is a sworn officer and is usually considered a reliable witness.
I appreciated your contribution of sarcasm and I'm sorry if my playing off your sarcasm caused you grief. It's stupid that people downvoted (what's the HN euphemism for this?) your comment. It was appropriate.
Keep commenting. Moderate yourself; Fuck karma... just stay positive, I don't know what happens to the people <0. I heard they burn the bodies for fuel to run the server.
"Gen-Y places a high value on authenticity. Sarcasm can be seen as 'inauthentic' and diminish the immediately perceived value of a piece. Satire, however, is a goodthing. Sarcasm is cheap; Satire is art. ... Sarcasm is more easily absorbed by the digestive tract of Gen-Y due to the short chains it forms. ... Society, long having moved from prechewed, tasteless meat into pre-prechewed, more tasteless meat substitute, the majority of Gen-Y simply can't process more than 140 characters at a time. ... Somewhere in every great satire post-2000 must be sarcasm, how ever much it cheapens the 'experience'."[1]
You'd think I wouldn't be getting killed here. Everything is falling flat. Bah humbug.
It can be edited for public use. And for good propaganda of course. ;-) But when in court, I hope they have the digitally signed version. If that one gets lost somehow, that would be bad.
In case someone takes his comment seriously, there's mine. In case someone takes my comment seriously they'd agree with the grandparent so no harm done.
There's the chance someone would agree with the grand/parent ('malfunction...', secure, etc.), read my comment, and think... well that's ridiculous.
Case study for "'/s' considered harmful"; Would-be PhDs take note.
So lets look at what we have in terms of video / audio.
1)Repeated unimportant segments of video.
2)A fairly good sounding audio track.
3)An audio track which is not the same length of the video track.
4)The video issues do not start happening till over 20 minutes into the uploaded video, and then happen at multiple times over the next 15 minutes.
What can we conclude about the video? Well I can't conclude anything, but I sure get a lot of questions.
Could this be an issue with the recording of the video stream? I don't know seems like we might have some experts here on video recording equipment here that might be able to say if this is a type of problem that is even possible, maybe even some with knowledge of the type of equipment used in police dash cams.
Has anyone seen anything like this 'just happen' in digital video before? I haven't but my experience is limited. Anyone else?
Why is the audio OK but the video is bad? Well audio and video could be recorded separately, and if they weren't they are not hard to separate, and audio is much easier to edit.
Could the video of been edited? Well sure it was probably at least cut for upload. If it was edited the editor really sucked.
If the video was edited, why would the video be edited? Maybe it was cut to remove something that happened in one of the frames somewhere during one of the repeats. Maybe the audio was edited too and it was edited to more closely match the audio length (matching just as well as the video was edited). Maybe someone started editing the video to hide something in a missing segment and didn't finish or get to the audio before it was uploaded.
What other things besides editing and recording failure could explain the video issue? I don't know.
Do we have any experts here who given the available youtube video on the Texas Department of Public Safetys youtube page could do analysis on a more in depth level than watching it? I don't know but I think this question is why I see this belonging on Hacker News.
No. No, no, no! We do not live in a universe where "issues uploading" a video results in edits to that video. That explanation is immeasurably implausible.
Is sharing doctored evidence with the media a crime itself, or is it only a crime if that evidence is used in court? Sure, the are free to only share a subset because of privacy etc., but purposefully misleading?
When that uploading includes recoding and other processing, it's plausible.
This video is probably encoded 2-3 times. The first time it is digitized in the camera. The cops might have recoded after taking it off the camera. And then youtube.
This is some low budget police department whose IT department is probably a secretary who happened to have a PC at her house in 1993 when the spot was created.
Warez scene release come with errors with regularity and those guys release stuff all the time and know what they are doing.
> Warez scene release come with errors with regularity and those guys release stuff all the time and know what they are doing.
That's because they are supposed to make edits (cutting out the commercial breaks, for instance), the errors happen because the edits are done hastily, in order to release first.
The police isn't supposed to edit or tamper with the video at all, and I can't imagine any way edits like this (missing bits and looping) can just appear by accident or technical error. The only edit I can imagine to happen by accident is an interrupted upload/transfer, which would cause the video to be truncated at some point, all the way to the end. It can't just leave parts out in the middle or loop certain bits.
One thing that lends doubt to the malice hypothesis is my hope that nobody would be so dumb as to think that such a ham-fisted attempt at manipulation would pass muster. But so far I am at a loss to imagine what kind of errors would result in that video.
Please name a technical problem which would result in the same bit of video appearing more than once in a sequence.
If this was someone pressing play+record on an analogue audio-only tape, after fumbling around with fast-forward and rewind, sure! But this most certainly is not that, let's be clear.
This is not a technical "problem". There is incompetence here, I agree, but not the flavor you are suggesting.
I don't remember him saying "Because you know your rights" in response to that question, which she asked quite a few times (she did declare that she knew her rights, but that was the only mention of rights I remember). I also don't remember him answering "Because no one'll believe you." I want to say he did answer "Because I can.", although I can't be certain without investing more time than I have to devote to this right now.
I don't have the best of memories though, if this quote does happen in the video can some one give us a time stamp. I mean I assume its after asking her to put out her cigarette and before her head was slammed into the concrete if this conversation did take place, but as I said don't have the time at the moment to check.
I bought two cheap dash cams from Amazon. They shipped from China. They were 14.99 each. You get a cam, suction cup, and cig. Lighter plug. I bought two because I keep one in the in the car in case one breaks.(you need to buy a sd card). It's been a year, and no pullovers? The cam is holding up just fine. It loops. You will forget it's there. It goes on when you start the car. It will stay on when the officer tells you to turn off the vehicle.(need to program it though).
Cops have stopped pulling me over for no reason. Before the cam, I was getting pulled over for driving an old car, or I was driving between 10 p.m. - 2:30 a.m.? I wish I had these cams when I was younger. Could have saved a lot of pointless questions, and aggravation?
I'm a white guy who's been pulled over so many times for no reason--I lost count; I can't imagine what minorites have to go through? We should be able to drive without that constant fear of harassment. Harrasement is being pulled over for made up reasons? Cams have helped in my world. They have worked so well, I thinking about mounting a rear cam? "See them coming and going?" Sorry, if I sound jaded, but I live in a low crime area. Cops have become revenue collects here.
(Also white). In my 20s, I used to get pulled over a couple times per year. Maybe 10-15% of those resulted in tickets.
Now (in my 40s)? I get stopped every 4-5 years.
What's different? I grew up, got married, had kids and, most importantly, stopped driving like a jackass.
I don't doubt for a second that some people get stopped a lot, and that some of those stops are for "thin" or distasteful reasons. However, my experience is that keeping your car registration current and not drawing attention to yourself with aggressive driving goes a long way to not meeting the police on the side of the road.
> I'm a white guy who's been pulled over so many times for no reason
Is there a correlation here?
Where I'm from you don't get pulled over for anything. The roads are a free-for-all wild west: taxis stop in the middle of the road in front of you for no reason. So many people die on the road every year. If you do get pulled over for a misdemeanor there is a good chance you can talk or bribe your way out of it and carry on with your reckless driving.
I would happily take a ticket for failing to indicate.
That is different from racial profiling and hate crimes. Don't confuse hard working cops doing their job with idiots with badges and guns.
Since you didn't indicate where you're actually from, I'm not sure what to make of your anecdotes. I'm from a small town in Indiana that has/had very little actual crime and yet a relatively large police force. When I was a minor I was harassed multiple times by police for violating curfew. Took a few rides in a cop car for nothing other than being out past 11pm. In 2004, some of Indiana's curfew laws were struck down by the federal supreme court, but that didn't stop the bastards, and new laws keep coming. Have a look at the mess here:
Having been on the receiving end of (just a little) police harassment, it's very easy to see how aggressive policing has led to tragedies like this one and countless others. Cops deal with a lot of bad characters, but it seems they're too often looking for trouble when they harass people like this.
3rd world. It would be pointless to divulge more because: people would have a hard time believing it, it would detract from what happened to Sandra and it's quite off-topic. The core of the point is that there are good cops and bad cops.
> I was harassed multiple times by police for violating curfew.
There's a line. Harassment/your experience is firmly on the wrong side of the line. Being kindly escorted home during a lawful curfew is not the wrong side of the line. I'd happily oblige to the later: the cop is just doing his job.
What I'm really trying to say is: the American police force seems so have a bunch of bad apples, however, you really don't want to tie the hands of the good apples.
Tricky. It needs to upload video in realtime, otherwise they can just take the camera. You could equip it with its own SIM card, but won't that be prohibitively expensive?
I suppose the sim part could be done via bluetooth to the phone in your pocket. Airtime could be minimized by only uploading after hitting the panic button, so even if they notice the camera and confiscate the physical recording, you've got something up to the cop reaching for it uploaded.
No, but I've been pulled over for absolutely no reason at all. I was let go without any issue, but something about me made the officer suspicious, although he couldn't find any reason to keep me. He asked me questions about what I was doing (I was driving home from work) and I answered them honestly and politely as possible, even after he wasn't able to provide an answer to my polite question, "what seems to be the problem, officer?".
I know the consensus here is to refuse to answer any questions, but I think if I had tried that approach in this situation, I would have spent the night in jail (and maybe longer, depending on the availability of a judge).
I was pretty pissed off at the time, but I only let myself show it after he let me go.
I got pulled over for driving a Volvo while being non-white. The officer said it was because I didn't come to a full stop at the stop sign. Yes, that was probably just barely technically true at this deserted 4-way stop intersection with great visibility.
He asked me what I did for a living. I should have refused to answer that as irrelevant and none-of-his-business, and I could easily have afforded the unjust consequences (unlike many people who are racially profiled), yet I still felt powerless and coerced to answer. I regret that. I was polite, cooperative, and with my wife. The officer was rude and menacing. The racial profiling and assumptions about how I could be driving a nice car were clear as day.
Or, make it very clear with your license plate and stickers that you know your rights better than most. You will NEVER get pulled over! Going with the "I'm a lawyer"? Make sure you don't say "I'm a defense lawyer", ha!
I've been pulled over a couple of times (in different states) and I have been asked what I do for a living both times. I'm not black. It honestly felt like a normal part of their questioning procedure.
I have always been polite and honest. Got away with verbal warnings both times (was above the speed limit).
Do you really think he asked you what you did for a living out of racial profiling?
I've been pulled over multiple times and have never been asked that question. All of our sample sizes are entirely too small.
That being said, instead of thinking about the question first and then asking if it points to racial profiling, start the other way: Do you think racial profiling exists? If yes, is it plausible that an officer would ask a non-white person this question after profiling?
I grew up in a small southern town. I was the weird kid, had funny hair and didn't wear cowboy clothes. I was pulled over at least seven or eight times for no reason. Once I was told I was being pulled over because some kids were playing mailbox baseball in the neighborhood I just left. Another time I was told the area I had just left was known for drugs and the cop wanted to find out if I had bought any... the area I had just left was an abandoned empty field in the middle of nowhere and I had simply drove through it as a shortcut. I've been told my tail light was out only to find it miraculously working went I went to check. I've been told I fit the profile of another guy who was throwing bricks at a house. If a cop doesn't like the way you look and wants to release some aggression, they will make up any excuse to pull you over. I did know my rights so all the examples I mentioned didn't lead anywhere, I worry what those times would have been like if I hadn't been white.
It happened to me once too, but after answering a couple questions, which I probably should not even have done, I asked them if I had to stay there and talk to them and was let go. You should not talk to police: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc .
At a traffic stop, they are asking you questions for three reasons.
1. To find out who you are.
2. To decide if they should give you a ticket or let you go.
3. To try to get you to give them permission to search you and your car, or to get you to say something that gives them probable cause to search you and your car without your permission.
Whether it makes sense to answer a question or not depends on the reason behind that question.
If you refuse to answer the #1 questions, that is your right. They can then arrest you, and hold you until they can figure out who you are.
They cannot arrest you for not answering the #2 or #3 questions, and you should definitely not answer the #3 questions. Even if you never use illegal drugs or engage in any other illegal activity, a passenger may have accidentally dropped something in your car.
If you don't answer the #2 questions, you are almost certainly going to get the ticket for whatever they pulled you over for. If you want to get off with a warning, you have to give the officer some reason to not give you a ticket, and that's hard to do without saying something (especially if you were actually violating a traffic law).
I would think that the only reason you can be arrested for refusing to answer #1 is because driving requires a license. Being stopped on the street or while not operating the vehicle does not require you identify yourself to the police. They would then need some independent probable cause to believe you are wanted in connection to a crime.
Ironically, you can only refuse to provide your name if you have a "reasonable belief" that doing so could incriminate you!
-----
Justice Kennedy wrote, "While we recognize petitioner's strong belief that he should not have to disclose his identity, the Fifth Amendment does not override the Nevada Legislature's judgment to the contrary absent a reasonable belief that the disclosure would tend to incriminate him."
My 17 year old boy was driving his beater car the other day, with his girlfriend, and a county sheriff crowded up behind him, real close. He was trying to coax the kid into speeding.
I've talked to my kid a lot about the relationship between the cops and citizens. He was very calm about it, and maintained his speed. The cop passed and left after a minute or so.
Failing to signal. Infinitesimal failure to stop. Changing lanes just a smidgeon before the solid white line changes to dashed. These are all just entry points for cops to fuck with you, either just for the sake of fucking with you, or to escalate up into something that goes on their performance evaluation metrics. 'Cause you know that they get measured, and you can't measure "didn't pull that guy over because he wasn't doing anything." Their incentives are your peril.
I doubt if he needed to crowd that close. In fact if he wasn't a cop, and a cop was watching, he could have been pulled over for following too close. What if a dog jumped in front of my son's car?
I have often been tailgated by police, and I agree that it is dangerous. However, it is common, and I never felt like I was being deliberately goaded. At worst, they may have been hoping for me to make a mistake. Usually, they just hang out for a couple of minutes and then pass (driving well above the speed limit, I might add, if we are going to enumerate all of the moving violations regularly committed by the police).
And, I wish police would fine people for tailgating. I've never seen it happen.
I guess it depends on intent (and your perspective). I have never felt there was any malicious intent . . . they just seemed to be checking me out before going on to the next car. Maybe I am naive, but I think that assuming the cops are out to get you is a bad place to start from.
I went to university at New Paltz, NY, which is a college town with a reputation for parties, though nothing horrific. Around the town, there were huge numbers of police (especially compared to the small population of the town) all seemingly trolling for petty drug arrests. They would pull college kids over for stuff like this all the time and use it as an excuse to search the car. While I never got the lane change excuse, I have been pulled over for not coming to a full stop at a stop sign multiple times, when I was either sure that I did come to a full stop or brought the car to a barely perceptible crawl for a long time while checking for other vehicles. When the officer would realize there were no drugs to find in the vehicle, they'd often become belligerent.
I'm white and have been pulled over twice in North Carolina for having NJ plates on Route 95. It's a major drug corridor and being out of state had to mean we were running drugs.
I was with my brother both times. We were shouted at, separated, patted down, and questioned repeatedly, trying to find some disparity in our stories and an excuse to search the truck.
I imagine it would have been much worse/more aggressive if we were minorities.
My wife and I have occasionally entertained the thought of moving from rural NJ up to New Paltz. Seems like a cool town when we visit. Not interested in bringing my family and my tax dollars up to a town with an overly large police force with not enough to do though, so thanks for the comment.
I have to say though that New Paltz and its environs are a place whose loveliness far outweigh the dickish-cop and puking-frat-boy problems. I think if you're white and don't look student-age, you'll mostly be left alone. If amazing nature (the Shawangunk ridge), tight-knit community, lots of small businesses, a tiny walkable downtown core surrounded by what feels more rural than suburban, and vocal lefty-but-not-too-lefty culture mean anything to you, then do give it some thought.
And the locals will tell you where the trick half-mile-long speed limit drops that you'll never notice until you're pulled over are.
> amazing nature (the Shawangunk ridge), tight-knit community, lots of small businesses, a tiny walkable downtown core surrounded by what feels more rural than suburban, and vocal lefty-but-not-too-lefty culture
Yes, exactly that. We like those things. We have almost all of those things in Sussex County NJ, and a good job to boot, but it's a really nice town to visit. Reminds me of where I went to school in Boone NC.
A family member was fined for failing to indicate well in advance of turning a corner. Not the same thing but it's in the ball park.
I've always thought you Americans were just complaining about "first world problems." However, between Charleston and Sandra Bland I am really sitting up and taking notice now: please continue to demand answers. These hate crimes simply cannot be a reality in advanced societies.
Yes. I never really ever know if it's because I'm black or not, because I have always been stopped for cause. And being the empathic sort, I'm always cool, because truthfully a cop doesn't know what they are getting into - and I'm usually pretty confident I do know the situation I've gotten into, a person just trying to do their job, which in this instance is being an officer. I'm going to make your job easy.
I'm not so sure that's the case though these days. Everyone has a bad mood, a bad day or a sucky life, the only difference is some have a gun and the ability to lawfully leave me to bleed out on the side of the road. Is this the person I going to meet when I get pull over next time?
I've been pulled over (1997) while being a passenger in a older (1970sh) truck in Palo Alto at night. The officer was really friendly, asked what we were doing in the neighborhood (We were driving around slowly, looking for a house we were trying to visit), and wished us a good evening after confirming we were on the up-up. The driver (my friend) was hispanic, I'm a white guy. License and Tags were up to date - it was just a kind of crummy truck. I thought it was really weird, but he said that sort of thing had happened to him several times - he attributed it a lot more to the truck being in a nice neighborhood than him personally.
On the flip side, a couple years earlier, when I had just moved to the Bay area in 1995 (from Vancouver,BC ) I had gotten a bit lost with friends, and had slowed down, and were stopping at various intersections in East Palo Alto trying to get our bearing. (I just realized - this is something anybody who grows up with GPS enabled smartphones will never have to do) A police office pulled us over to find out what we were doing, and then suggested (once again, really nicely), that we probably shouldn't be stopping in this neighborhood at that time of night (East Palo Alto, unbeknownst to us, was a very high-crime area in 1995)
I guess my point is - Police pull people over when their spidey sense goes off all the time. And it can be all sorts of things that will trigger it. I guess I'm blessed with white skin, but the many interactions I've had with police in which they've engaged me because whatever it was I was doing seemed sketchy at the time, always ended up well. Though, honestly - they've got guns, so I've also been pretty sensitive to the fact that if I made them nervous they might shoot me.
Fundamentally, the problem with that approach to policing is that racism is inherent to human interaction. Without training to recognize it, unconscious bias will set off a person's "spidey-sense" because they perceive someone of a different skin color to be "out of place" subconsciously, which makes them keener to look for reasons to stop at a conscious level. This is to say nothing of people who know they're racist and don't care; I'm thinking specifically of people who haven't been trained in unconscious bias yet.
As the officer, you're not even likely to notice you're doing it. As a person of the "wrong skin color" driving through a high-rent neighborhood, you'll start to notice real fast that your commute is disrupted all the damn time.
My personal story: I'm white, but I used to drive a beater with crappy temperature control and was taking a new route home late at night while wearing a stocking cap. Got pulled over for ostensibly making a left on red (on a deserted road in the middle of the night, when I'm pretty confident the light was green). If the officer's real reason for pulling me over is that I looked like I was casing the neighborhood for a place to rob, I don't really blame him; I was dressed like one of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone. ;)
A "spidey sense" is not a legal basis for anything, so indulging such a sense implicitly involves some degree of fabrication of "objective" causes.
Be that as it may, the "spidey sense" excuse could and should hold at least some water with most people, if they trust the intentions of the police. But I grew up with harassment by the NYPD and then small-time police in the Hudson Valley, and saw non-white friends and bystanders (I'm white) get it ten times worse. Surely, this applies to many in the US.
In the few experiences I've had where police help was legitimately needed, I was met with bored annoyed "what can we do?" apathy. So, forgive me if I respectfully doubt that any significant number of street-level police cultivate some intuitive sense for crime, when routine profiling, harassment, and fabrication (much easier modes of operating) seem to be standard practice.
American relations with law-enforcement are about as low-trust as it gets in a 1st world country, that's the unfortunate reality, which will take decades to turn around, if ever.
Blacks are indeed pulled over more than whites. Here is some data for 2008 traffic stops.
• 8.4% of all drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop that year.
• 9.9% of male drivers were stopped, 7.0% of female drivers.
• 8.4% of white drivers were stopped, 8.8% of black drivers were stopped, and 9.1% of hispanic drivers were stopped.
• Speeding was the most common reason for being stopped.
• 85% of drivers felt the stop was legitimate. This breaks down as 86% of white drivers thought the stop was legitimate, 74% for black drivers, and 82% for hispanic drivers.
• 5% of stops led to a search of the driver, the vehicle, or both. Male drivers were more likely to be searched than female drivers (7.4% vs. 1.6%). By race, it was 3.9% for whites, 12.3% for blacks, and 5.8% for hispanics.
• Black or African American alone, percent definition and source info Black or African American alone, percent, 2013 (a) 13.2%
• American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent definition and source info American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent, 2013 (a) 1.2%
• Asian alone, percent definition and source info Asian alone, percent, 2013 (a) 5.3%
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent definition and source info Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent, 2013 (a) 0.2%
• Two or More Races, percent definition and source info Two or More Races, percent, 2013 2.4%
• Hispanic or Latino, percent definition and source info Hispanic or Latino, percent, 2013 (b) 17.1%
• White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, percent definition and source info White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, percent, 2013 62.6%
Although they can't pull you over for being black. What they will/do say is "In our experience whenever we see a black guy and a white guy in a beat up car in this neighborhood, they are usually buying drugs." Sometimes they just don't have a reason so they manufacture one.
""Did that just yesterday. What cemented my decision to issue a cite was the fact that the operator was on the cell phone (the reason he didn't signal) and didn't even get off the phone with me standing at his window. I had to ask him if he wouldn't mind getting off the phone to talk to me."
Sounds like time for one of those discretionary arrests for a traffic violation."
Just wow. A lot of the responses on this forum are incredibly entitled, power trip-y, and precisely why no one trusts cops anymore.
Well, to be fair, talking while on the phone is a safety issue. Though yeah, I agree, a lot of the posts are basically "I arrested him because he disrespected mah authoritah".
This certainly wasn't the case here and it a great many cases the officer won't be able to discern the race of driver until stopped. Now there may be some truth to the matter of what happens after a stop.
As for the pull over, out of state tags and not signaling when a cop is coming up on you just makes you a good choice to pull over.
Given the fact that the officer made a u-turn in order to speedily follow her car way before the "failure to signal" happened, it seems to me watching the video without pretty much any context, that the lane change was merely an excuse to pull her over.
Any police officers knows if they really need such an excuse, they just need to follow a given car for a few minutes: it's guaranteed something will happen which justifies the traffic stop.
> Any police officers knows if they really need such an excuse, they just need to follow a given car for a few minutes
And the worst thing is they tail you when they follow you, making you nervous and more likely to make a mistake. That's also what the officer did here.
Tailgating is illegal (at least, here in the UK) precisely because it is so dangerous, for many reasons including the one you point out. Of course, that doesn't apply to officers of the law.
Illegal here in the US as well. Doesn't stop cops though. Seriously, this must be standard operating procedure for cops, happens to me all the time (and I'm white, fwiw). It usually doesn't result in me getting pulled over, but it's nerve-racking. Which I imagine is intended...
Tailgating does apply to officers of the law, they need to act in a way that reduces the possibility of serious harm proportional to any criminals being pursued. Police on duty can be guilty of DWDC&A or dangerous driving.
The video starts with a woman who was given an information-only warning. Was that woman white or black? Officers don't know who they pull over, but they do know who they ticket and who they let off.
When someone says "I saw you driving fast behind me, and I got out of your way" the correct response is probably "oh, thank you maam, I misunderstood. Sorry for pulling you over. You have a nice day" or somesuch.
Indeed. Blatant honest racism is just one sort, but there is racism that is built into the system (like how white killers are mentally ill in the media, while black killers are called thugs), or unconsciously part of how you think (see http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/09/21/racism-from... ).
Note the following shows a 50% difference in call back rates based on name alone, with identical resumes, which is pretty relevant for techies looking at resumes. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
> Note the following shows a 50% difference in call back rates based on name alone, with identical resumes, which is pretty relevant for techies looking at resumes. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
I've heard that's much less about race than about class; Jamal may be a predominately black name but even more than that it's a predominately poor name. I'd be interested to see a replication that watched the names by average income/education/similar - or one that used stereotypically rich and poor names within the same race.
America is also a pretty classist place, but for me the people you hear saying "it's about class, not race" are mainly working to ignore that America is a pretty racist place. And indeed, part of why it's easy to make that argument is that almost all of America's history involves racial discrimination to create and magnify class distinction. See, e.g.: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
I'd be interested to see how the study you suggest turns out, but I wouldn't expect it to be much different; there's too much other evidence of purely racial bias.
Race and class are tightly bound in America. But there are some things in the study that are at least suggestive that it's a racial difference.
First they attempted to assess names race, and got rid of names that were insufficiently suggestive of race.
The study varied postal addresses and included African American names from richer neighborhoods and whites from poorer neighborhoods, and included both low and high quality resumes. Hypothetically, if people were associating black names with low class more then white names, then there should be a significant difference in the benefits of a "good" neighborhood between whites with a good neighborhood and blacks. There was none.
Further, one would assume that if class was the determining factor, then a better quality of resume might offset this. It did, but to a lesser degree for African American Names... that is, whites got more effect from a better resume then blacks did.
A white name was, by the researchers estimates, the equivalent of an additional eight years of experience for black people.
If being perceived as black, or if names that are predominantly understood as black are sufficient to assign a person to a lower class, I'd argue that that's inherently racial discrimination.
The latest meme is that black killers are 'thugs' while white killers are 'mentally ill' in the media. It doesn't take much effort to find the media calling mentally ill black killers mentally ill.
Yes, just after paying at the toll booth. I am about 99% sure that I used my turn signal, as it is a huge pet peeve of mine, but there is always a chance that I did actually forget, or that I didn't get the lever all the way down. The officer had me come back to his vehicle, in the front seat surprisingly, and questioned me about where I was going, where I was from, where I was coming from, what I did for a living, etc. while he ran my information. It wasn't just friendly banter, it was an interrogation. In the end I received a warning. I had considered complaining when I returned home, but thought it better to let it go. For reference, I'm a mid 30's white male, and I was travelling with my wife and kids in a plain Hyundai Sonata. I've read reports of similar experiences.
Yeah, I have. I was speeding once (dangerously, tbh, though it was 3am in the morning) but obviously the cop didn't get me on radar and wanted to pull me over and give me a ticket. I think getting irritated over a ticket like that is reasonable. Certainly, if I was a black civil rights activist I might get a little annoyed.
I wonder though if there was something off about the license plate associated with the car. Does anyone know if this thing was completely clean?
> I think getting irritated over a ticket like that is reasonable.
Can I just check: you think it's reasonable to be irritated after being stopped after being caught speeding? Or you think Sandra Bland is reasonable in being irritated?
I have. The officer was following me for awhile, and he claimed I started changing lanes to get off a highway before I turned my signal on, which probably had some truth to it. My tabs were about 6 months out of date (it just completely slipped my mind), and I had heard they can't stop you just for that, so I assumed it was just an excuse to pull me over.
When he got to the car, he claimed to smell a large amount of alcohol on my friend and me. It was like noon on a Saturday and we had not been drinking at all. He asked me to get out and do a sobriety test, which I did and passed. After that he just gave me a warning for the tabs, which I was not expecting considering how out of date they were. He never mentioned the lane change again after he first said why he pulled me over. Full disclosure, I'm white.
I was on a two lane road once, in the fast lane, driving the posted speed limit right at dusk. I noticed car headlights coming up behind me at a very high rate of speed and realized it was a cop. I assumed there was a hurry to get to an accident or something. I switched lanes to get out of the way, but found myself pulled over instead. The cop kept asking "why did you change lanes like that?" And I kept replying that "you were doing what looked like 90mph coming up behind me, what reasonable person wouldn't?". Really felt like the guy was having a bad day and looking for someone to take it out on. He wrote me a ticket.
Sounds like a time to go into court and seek clarification: "I just want to be sure of this, the official policy of the XXXX police/sheriff is that when a car is approaching rapidly from behind I should expressly NOT get out of that lane?"
Of course, that smartass approach may get you more crap in the future.
Yes, and ticketed. A Houston PD unmarked car cut me off in traffic and I switched lanes to avoid their car. I was ticketed for "Changing Lanes Not in Safety" by another officer who was following.
I was escorted out of my car and asked how much marijuana I was carrying. I wasn't carrying any, so I told them so. They searched the car and didn't find any, so then escorted me to the police station for further questioning.
The investigative officer there quickly realized that I was not the person they initially thought. Overall a great experience.
I haven't, but it's happened to one person in my family.
I have seen someone who was pulled over by the police, then let go, then make an illegal u-turn while turning back onto the road and was pulled over again within seconds :)
Edit: I have been randomly questioned a few times playing Ingress at post offices at 3am.
I got pulled over doing 70 on a freeway in medium-heavy traffic because a cop noticed the inspection sticker on my windshield was 2 months out of date. You never know what kind of bug has crawled up an individual officer's ass on any given day.
I have not, but I know people who have. They were all pulled over after finishing a bar shift by police officers waiting for people to leave the bar and make a mistake so they had an excuse to pull over a possibly impaired driver.
One time after a night drinking in Pasadena I noticed that cops were sitting just down the street from the multi-story garage in which I had parked. I slept in the car for a few hours and avoided problems.
Sure. It's something that happens all the time. It's an excuse to check for more serious violations. If everything passes a cursory check it'll be a warning, like he said, and you're on your way.
Whatever else went on here, that part was not out of the ordinary.
Sure, but minor offenses are often a pretense for racial profiling, where the thing that attracted the cop's attention is driving while black.
It's why young African Americans are more likely to be arrested for minor drug offenses, despite offending less then the average young white person. (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/04/t... ) And indeed if you look at the ACLU Report on disparities between whites and blacks for minor marijuana offenses, page 178 has Waller County, where this happened, as one of the ones with disparities in arrests above the national average. Note: It's a PDF: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel...
This is important. Manufacturing a reason to pull someone over after the decision to pull them over is incredibly easy. The original decision is often rooted in racial profiling.
>The original decision is often rooted in racial profiling. //
How can you tell?
Surely the point you're making is that the real reason for pulling the person over is not the one given, how then can you establish it's "racial profiling".
I've been pulled over (UK) by police for having a stop light out, reasonable as it's a traffic violation. They asked the usual sort of questions and I got a "producer" (notice to produce various documents at a police station in the near future). How could you establish that this was because the officer was acting racist towards me?
Telling the race of a person from behind when following their car seems quite hard.
Statistics could show that more of a particular race were pulled over but that race could constitute a greater proportion of the local poor who being less able to keep their vehicles in good order are more likely to be stopped. That would create an apparent bias were there was none.
I think you can control for socioeconomic class of the areas. Though I would argue that an area where black people are more likely to be unable to afford proper maintenance for their vehicles, are more likely to be poor in general, may be an area where other disadvantages (like the lower wealth per family and employment rate for African Americans, and were blacks got worse loan terms, or weren't allowed to rent or buy in better sections of town) may contribute to a systemic bias.
Its harder -- or, perhaps more accurately, "less of an apparently viable course of action" -- if you have experience, first- or second-hand, which indicates that failure to submit to even superficially non-mandatory requests of a police officer has a non-negligible likelihood of resulting in escalation with potentially serious personal consequences.
I suspect that part of eevilspock's basis for the statement was a belief (which I would think is justified) that these experiences are substantially correlated with race.
Have you never met a bully? Did they play nice when you did? Not everyone is inherently as reasonable and "nice" as you think yourself to be. This may be hard to grasp if you've spent your entire life in exclusively civil company, but there are plenty of people with malicious intent in the world. And is it any surprise that they would be drawn to a profession wielding physical dominion over the common citizen?
All? No. He never said all, and that's an unfair way you're phrasing the argument. You're deliberately setting it up so that anyone who disagrees with you is immediately painted as blaming the victim. That's not what this discussion is about and you know it, so shame on you. He said you're more likely to. But in some cases, the situation could have been improved to the point where the outcome could have been completely different if the person had complied with the officer. I'm not saying the cop was right in any of the cases, but if I see a semi truck barreling down the freeway into oncoming traffic... I have the right-of-way because I'm in the correct lane, but you'd better believe I'm going to get out of that truck's way. Because absolute best case result there is that I will die a quick and painless death.
I was in Madison WI when Tony Robinson was killed and saw some of the protests against the police. It was interesting to me that the spirit of the protests weren't harmed by the fact that Tony had assaulted people on the street then tried to kill the police officer responding to the incident.
Sitting in jail innocent and alive is always better in my book than being gunned down in the street by a scared and trigger-happy cop.
Shame on me? Bull. Plain and simple. The commenter completely painted the victim in the wrong here. If cops are comparable to semis baring down on the freeway then we need to abolish them completely because they are out of control. And playing nice isn't going to change that.
Sitting in jail innocent and alive should not be the lesser of two evils.
Again, you're framing it as a black and white, this or that argument. It's not. Cops abusing their power is wrong. People refusing to follow the orders of police officers is wrong. Arresting someone for contempt of cop is wrong. Resisting arrest is wrong. Driving a semi the wrong way down the road is wrong. Not swerving to avoid the semi is wrong. If an officer wants to arrest you and you start becoming physically violent, you are in the wrong. At that point it doesn't matter that the cop was wrong first, because you're already dead.
Now, if your goal is to become a martyr for your cause, then you've just hit the jackpot. If your goal is to take another breath, to see your loved ones one more time... becoming physically violent with a cop is a really bad idea. Is this the way it should be? No, we shouldn't be afraid of police officers. But for better or worse, this is how it is. Your platitudes about "cops are bad, the victim is right" isn't entirely realistic unless the goal is to create more martyrs.
Yes. In nearly all these stories, the victim is resisting arrest in one form or another. The moral of the story is: don't resist arrest. Respect the police and follow their orders. If you have an issue, take it up with the judge later.
At least in a vehicle, the Supreme Court has ruled that the police have the authority to order you to exit the vehicle and to use force to compel your compliance.
"Please" implies a non-obligatory request; it can also be used as a layer of politeness over a command, but confirming the intent is not unreasonable. That police have the power to order you to exit the vehicle does not imply that any request to do so is an order.
The Supreme Court has determined that the police have the authority to -demand- your exit from a vehicle, orthogonal to the issue of "Am I free to go?" and other detainment questions, and to compel your exit from the vehicle using force if necessary (at which point you reach the awkward catch-22 of "is this classified as 'resisting arrest'?"
I'm not. Though, if you ask an officer of the law, you'll be told there is nothing wrong with civilly asking for clarification and/or verbalizing that you disagree (but will comply).
True. The police will simply stop your car remotely, or redirect it to wherever they want to interact with you, based on whatever information about you and your driving patterns the car is required to provide to law enforcement.
But yes, legitimate issues with driver error will be a thing of the past.
Instead of teaching kids how to code at school we should teach them law and what police officers are allowed and not allowed to do when pulling you over or showing up on your property, etc.
I have no clue if the cop was right when he said that he has "every right" to ask her to put down her cigarette and step out of her car. Cops pull this shit all the time betting on the fact that citizens have no f-ing idea what they actually can and can't order them to do.
"I will light you up!", just for that this guy deserves to be fired.
> Instead of teaching kids how to code at school we should teach them law and what police officers are allowed and not allowed to do when pulling you over or showing up on your property, etc.
It's probably better to teachchildren how to safely interact with police, and how to safely gather evidence which can be used later to persue complaints against abusive officers.
The fact that this is already a thing in some parts of the US should be a big flag that something is seriously wrong.
It's baffling to me that when police accept communication problems are a thing that they then train African american youth to be compliant, rather than training police to not be assholes.
The problem with teaching this is that is depends highly on the situation. There are not brightline rules that a person can easily understand.
Are you being detained or arrested is not a bright line rule. You can go from one to teh other without anyone saying anything. And the rules for police differ.
I'm a lawyer and I couldn't even begin to tell you the rules for my own state, let a lone some random place in Texas.
Though one bright line rule is that cops can make you get out of your car. That is pretty much their discretion.
The fact that you are a lawyer and can't describe the rules is scary. I'm not calling you an idiot, this is a comment on the stupidity of lawmakers if what you say is true.
I find it very scary that we accept a principle such as Ignorantia juris non excusat but don't bother teaching law and make it understandable to common people.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about details to be used during a trial, but just day-to-day interaction with police officer / social services / etc.
Can they really order you out of your car? Do they have to give a reason? Can they enter your home without a warrant? Can they really take your kids if you don't willingly let them in? Are they authorized to ask you about your profession?
They will always use people's ignorance to scare them and force them to comply, but that's the direct road towards a police state.
It isn't law makers, it's the common law system. The law isn't just statutes, but also law created by judges over all of US and even English history. Most of the law surrounding traffic stops is created entirely by court rulings.
The big stuff is more clear but there are always exceptions. So no, a cop can't just enter your house without a weapon. EXCEPT: if they are in hot pursuit of a criminal; as part of a legal arrest; to save someones life; etc. But each of those rules has wrinkles that local courts have rules on.
The implication here seems to be that the dashcam video was re-edited before being released to the public.
If true, oddly enough, I'm not sure a crime was committed, although it sure feels like somebody should go to jail. But I am not sure. Is there a law that says that everything the police releases to the media concerning possible court cases must be the same evidence that will be presented at trial? Or are they free to spin and edit things however they like? I believe they are.
Assuming this line of reasoning, the LAT may have jumped the gun by releasing the story when it did. It would have been much more interesting to have let the video stand as a Press Release, then see if they tried to use it in court, then run the story. As it is now, we'll never know how that scenario would have turned out.
He's probably getting down voted because his statement does not appear to be even remotely true, at least judging by the data in your first link.
I picked a few at random from the July group, and the closest any came to someone being killed for "disrespecting" the police was a couple of them who were shot for pointing guns at police, which is certainly disrespectful.
I don't think that anyone would written in any formal document or non-fringe paper that killing was caused by disrespectful behavior. But I can't imagine that it was no factor in any of the killings.
If you have a group of people that have right to kill someone for legitimate reason you can be sure, I think, that some of them will be less reluctant to exercise this right if they are distressed by disrespect shown towards them by this person.
Take this guy for example (I just read about one at random):
Unarmed guy who riding skateboard down the street was killed because he didn't obey commands from police and they were unable to subdue him. Technically he was killed for using potentially lethal weapon on police officer. For me if disrespect and police vulnerability towards disrespect wasn't a factor there, the policemen would back off after initial trouble and keep an eye on the guy while waiting for back-up.
The Guardian has a pretty good online feature that aggregates the data on police-involved killings. If you look past the sometimes-disingenuous framing and dive right into the data, there are plenty of interesting things to learn.
One of the first things you notice after for instance binning all the deaths for a couple randomly-selected months: the modal circumstance for police-involved fatality in the US is "engage in a confrontation with police with a lethal weapon". This remains the case even after you discard from that bin every story in which the involvement of the weapon is contested. For every case in which the victim's family, friends, or bystanders argue no weapon was involved, there are several --- often 4-5 --- in which the victim was clearly armed; roughly 1:3 knives:firearms.
Really, the modal circumstance for police-involved fatality in the US is "engage in a confrontation with police while illegally armed with a firearm".
It's easy to see why the data would show this but the news narrative wouldn't. People who wave guns at police officers are almost always in some way marginalized: they're mentally ill, and/or already deeply involved in criminality. Those stories are unfortunately not newsworthy. There's a bigtime availability bias involved in analyzing police policy from the news media.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I think the attention being focused on police departments today is an unalloyed good.
The next thing you learn is that we really need to do something about tasers, because if there's a top 3 set of circumstances for death involving police officers, "death after tasing" is at least #3.
> The next thing you learn is that we really need to do something about tasers, because if there's a top 3 set of circumstances for death involving police officers, "death after tasing" is at least #3.
Since you've looked at the data, could this be survivorship bias? Is there data on how often tasers are used where firearms would've been, in the absence of tasers? It certainly could be that tasers reduce the number of people killed by police, but it sounds hard to measure that.
Let's say 80% of people killed were armed, 60% with firearms. That still leaves 20% of unarmed and 20% of armed with knives which are common tool abundant everywhere. Grabbing some of them was surely crime of passion. And between grabbing a knife and stabbing someone with a knife is a long way.
I'd say that it all still leaves plenty of room, given how many people are killed by the police and how few are legally executed to believe that there's no huge gap between number of people legally executed and number of people killed by the police as a result of policemen vulnerability towards disrespect and propensity to escalate confrontation to maintain authority.
I see this question a lot. I think we as a community can decide that by way of votes. The moderation team can also offer second judgement, which it seems to have passed. Liberty and actions of the police seems like a topic many hackers are interested in. The consistent votes on such issues lend credence to this.
Quite aside from the fact that hackers are people too and care about all sorts of issues, this article is specifically about the video tape being doctored, so has a technical aspect that could lead off into discussions in several directions.
And if don't express certain viewpoints, you're downvoted to oblivion. I wouldn't mind a filter for these types of articles (every other website on the world is already discussing the police+victim story of the month), and you can't ever side with the police here.
I see that. I guess I should send all my political friends to HN to post more such articles and comments cause where else but a place called "Hacker News" would one do that? I mean, I know I came here for just such topics.
"Here is a video that shows apparent tampering. What are the chances these anomalies are result of faulty equipment or software? How likely is it that these anomalies are the result of deliberate human edits?"
Several HN readers are involved (professionally or as a hobby) in "film stuff" - editing software; cameras; etc. there's probably someone here who could point to known bugs in software / hardware if these exist.
Many people on HN are involved in selling stuff, which means they have an interest in manipulating people. Seeing examples of failed human interactions is instructive. Although it's tempting to say "you'd have to be a fucking idiot to think the cop's attitude would work" there are enough of these videos to show that people get caught up by something that cause poor interaction. There are probably examples of founders making similar mistakes leading to PR disasters.
I really, REALLY want the cops to be at fault here, but I just don't know about this one. The sound seems to be mostly intact, unless there is some kind of offset because it does crackle and spit at one point. A lot goes on between the suspect and officer ON camera and I wonder what could've possible happened off camera bad enough to warrant being hidden when what's on the camera is already there. I mean, this guy pulled her out of her car and threw her on the sidewalk because she got a bit snarky over a ticket.
Another concern is the absence of a timestamp. This I'm not as worried about because they probably cropped it out. It's definitely understandable, especially for public-facing video to crop out some of more sensitive metadata like time, officer info, car info, etc. It's not nearly as concerning as the video itself.
Then there is the case of the actual jumps themselves. What makes me doubt is that they aren't just jump cuts, there's some stutter and back and forth motion for each cut, and there's also some video artifacts for each one.
I despise the police, I really do. The very idea of police is repulsive and disturbing, in my opinion. That being said, I think LA Times is definitely suspect here for such a bait-y headline over what looks to be an actual video issue. I mean: "arrest video has continuit problems, anomalies"? No shit, the video is messed up. It also has the entire dialogue between the two leading up to the arrest, it even has a whole other stop from another time!
I just don't see the possibility that they are hiding something, when there is so much on tape already.
I despise the police, I really do. The very idea of police is repulsive and disturbing, in my opinion.
You mean this in an idealistic sense? I was just remembering this morning an old friend who regularly used the word 'pigs' to describe police, and how I found it ridiculous.
And I still do.
How would a world without police be better than the one we have? It wouldn't. It would be a horrendous place where the strong, the violent, the aggressive, triumph over the vulnerable. I honestly can't understand your attitude.
strong, the violent, the aggressive, triumph over the vulnerable
At their worst, the police can do this.
Police following the Peel principles are a great improvement to society. Many of the US's fragmented matrix of police forces have forgotten them and succumbed to lazy racism and target-driven enforcement.
The sad thing is that the deterioration of professionalism among police forces has led to the world that paublyrne described. I mean... in practice... for a large number of Americans... it already IS a world where "strong, the violent, the aggressive, triumph over the vulnerable". It's just that the "strong, violent and aggressive" are police, or gangs, or your occasional supremacist.
I feel bad for certain demographics in the US... but don't really have any sort of realistic solution for their issues. I just wish it wasn't this way.
It is fixable, once people want to fix it. But that generally only happens once the status quo is seen as really unacceptable. Whenever police violence is brought up, at the moment there are plenty of people willing to say "well she deserved it" or "it didn't happen that way". Enough of them need to be brought round or embarrased into silence.
The UK equivalent would be the rebuilding of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to stop it being explicitly sectarian.
The solution is to aggressively and systematically break the blue code of silence by offering massive incentives for cops to rat out their fellow officers for misbehavior.
Science thrives on peer review and making sure members of the community keep each other in check; let's give the police incentives to do that.
Also, break the police unions. Make it a felony for police officers to unionize.
"It would be a horrendous place where the strong, the violent, the aggressive, triumph over the vulnerable."
Only if there WERE violent and aggressive people who take advantage of the vulnerable. You could argue that it would be nice if everybody was nice to each other.
I know you don't understand. I don't call police names just like I don't call any other group of people names. They're still human beings.
People should be smart enough to defend themselves and their physical safety. Weak people who call the cops over a bump in the night are digging their grave, handing over their security to the state.
You think that the world would be ruled by the violent? Open your eyes, guy. It already is. I'm talking about equalizing the playing field. The weak won't get stronger unless someone is there to show them how to be strong.
> I despise the police, I really do. The very idea of police is repulsive and disturbing, in my opinion.
Well, come to Brazil, then. Murder rate comparable to modern armed conflicts but hey! Almost no police interactions at all! I've only ever been stopped at checkpoints - and that's their purpose. They might not even show up if you call the emergency number.
If you do interact with them, know that there are no dashcams. And even if they are, you'll never ever see their footage.
Also, you can't legally own a gun.
Let us know how long will it take to change your mind.
Is this enforced? By the police? Police who allow all crimes other than the "crime" of armed self-defense seem to match the description "repulsive and disturbing".
Could the dashcam video have been (amateurishly) edited to hide car's plate so that people present on the spot can't be harassed by journalists, etc. ?
I don't know why you are downvoted.
My best bet is that the equipment is some crappy cheap stuff and somehow the encoding process skips at some times for whatever reason.
Maybe it's too hot, something overheats, buffers... or just a bug of some ancient software.
I suppose this is just a bad choice in equipment. For example, in Germany CCTV cams in underground stations seem to have an incredibly bad black/white low-resolution quality and when bad things happen people are supposed to recognize some blurry face..
He asked her nicely if she could put out her cigarette for his benefit. She in return started ranting about how it was her car etc.
I don't care if she has the right to remain smoking in her car or not. Someone asked kindly for her to put it out, and she went full rant in return.
I'm sure statistically speaking, if someone is a complete asshole and "resists" any attempt to be nice to the police, they're likely to be breaking other laws - carrying drugs, no car insurance, etc etc.
If you get pulled over by the police, starting an argument and forcing them to escalate things isn't the best idea.
If you get (illegally) pulled over by the (racist) police, what should you do? Submit to their power trip instead?
Given that there's a lot of questions about the audio in general, I'm not sure how nicely he really asked - the entire veracity of the audio stream is under question here: the video skips around but the audio doesn't. That certainly lends credence to the "he was being nice" argument, except for the part where the "nice" could well have been added in post-processing.
Ultimately, a racist institution staffed by racists most likely murdered a woman whose only crimes were (a) not signaling to pull over after the officer signaled her to pull over, for some other reason, and (b) not being polite to the officer in question.
Until and unless you show me that police deserve politeness, the only reason to be polite to them is "because otherwise they may kill you". That is not only f'd up, it's literally terrorism. As in: these acts make us terrified and we are less likely to resist their authority. So, yeah.
" the only reason to be polite to them is "because otherwise they may kill you". "
Spot on. Everyone saying "she should have been nicer" are effectively saying that you should submit to the police or they'll kill you. Nobody is saying "he deserved politeness and she was rude" because it's very obvious that he was not polite to her. "How are you doing? You seem upset?" Well she just got pulled over and is getting a ticket bozo, what do you think?
I'm not sure if this is the place to engage meaningfully around common-sense misconceptions about race, class, and so forth in the US.
That said: "the majority of crime is committed by Black people" is something that I'd like to call out. Can you provide sources? How do you define crime? For example: white people are far more likely to deal drugs, but Black people are far more likely to get arrested for dealing drugs. [0]. The same article, and its cited bits, digs further into the old "black people do more criming" canard.
Your re-exercising of the "black on black" meme is also pretty tired. First of all: there's a lot of people doing a lot of stuff to improve that (c.f., My Brother's Keeper [1], an initiative that President Obama started and the right conveniently forgets every time they blow their dog whistles about the President and black-on-black crime). Secondly: not relevant to the discussion about the fact that Police seem to kill Black people every day, for reasons that we would be screaming about to the rafters if those victims of homicide were White.
Finally, can we at least agree on the statistics? Actually, not really: Law Enforcement in the US is really reluctant (one can only wonder why) about how many people they kill every day. Some crowd-sourced attempts to stitch together local reports into a national database [2] indicate that in 2014, the number works out to be about three people per day killed by LEO. That number is ridiculously high. The vast majority of these people are not white. LEO in many other "western" countries don't do this - in the UK in 2014 police killed one person, total. In Germany: none.
So, should we be distracted by your handwavy "black people deserve killing by police" narrative (because that's what you're actually saying), or could we at least agree that the police seem to be a direct and active threat to the lives and safety of People of Color in this country? It's not like this is a surprise - it hasn't been that long since the 1960s, and you see what we did back then. It's just nowadays people get offended when you point out that our national institutions are largely racist, just ever so slightly less overt about it than before.
She responded just as politely as he asked. "I'm in my car why do I have to put out my cigarette?" To which he responded "Well you can step on out now" instead of anything about why she should put it out, such as it being for his benefit. After that is when the ranting about it being her car started.
While I agree knowing her rights certainly didn't work to her advantage in this situation. Your interpretation of events is not what I consider correct, and mine may not be either. I would encourage other people to watch it and determine for themselves what was ranting and what was polite.
"Someone asked kindly for her to put it out, and she went full rant in return."
Which is not illegal. If she has the right to smoke, he has the right to ask her to stop and she has the right to say no.
"If you get pulled over by the police, starting an argument and forcing them to escalate things isn't the best idea."
Yeah, much better to let them do what they want, bully you and find something to arrest you and meet their quotas.
One should not get arrested for being rude, being rude is a fucking right, period.
Having watched the two short videos I really don't see any obvious things they could have hidden there. The audio (which I presume is the important part) appears to keep on going, while a short segment of the video repeats. They also mention in the article that "The audio ends more than a minute before the video images do. "
So to me this just sounds like some small parts of the video got repeated by accident, leading to a slightly "extended" video that becomes out of sync with the audio.
But maybe I'm being too naive here, I don't actually know the backstory of this.
Or, as I've read elsewhere, you pad unimportant sections of the video by looping, then cut out a few short important bits, and the overall length is unchanged.
But the length is actually increased by about a minute from the sound of it. Unless they also cut some parts of the audio but then forgot to match the length up again, which seems like a really weird mistake to make...
The willingness of police to label death a suicide never ceases to amaze me. I was on the beach down in Florida a few years ago and found a dead girl with her hands tied. Cops showed up and immediately assumed suicide. Turns out she had drug issues and had a history to support the assumption, but no reasonable person would approach a situation like that with such strong priors.
I'm not saying every crime scene is out of a Hollywood movie with a serial killer lurking in the shadows, but I would have really liked to see zero prior beliefs at that point. I'd sleep better knowing the people out there in charge of "serving and protecting" the general public viewed their occupation as a search for truth rather than some perverse version of The Office with guns.