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Cop snatches phone and smashes it (gets caught on video anyway)

Ironically cops resist body cameras. If they didn't we could readily see these officers dealing with "scum". I suspect that there's not as much "scum" as cops would like us to believe.

Of course you'd suspect there's not much scum out there. You compare the work life of a police officer with a Walmart greeter.
 
There is a bigger problem. Let's say you are right and one out of every thousand is a problem (though I dispute that), there aren't enough cops willing to step forward and report the bad cops. When a cop sees another cop abusing his authority, is he not obligated to report that crime as any other crime? Aren't violations of the public trust egregious violations that all police should take seriously.

If you are allowed to create numbers out of thin air, then here is one I'm making up. if 99.9% of cops are good, then I speculate that 50%-70% of cops have seen other cops violating the rights of citizens and have done nothing about it.

Are those "good" cops?

Really? Google 'Internal Affairs'. Read the volume of officer to officer complaints. You'll be surprised.
 
Funny how your comparators to police officers are always those who have virtually no mental stress in their day to day work lives. And in what world are postal workers, garbage men, and construction crews videoed routinely in their jobs and that video emailed off to CNN for review? That's just nuts.
Those are all jobs that are in public view and those employees can be filmed at any time.
 
Of course you'd suspect there's not much scum out there. You compare the work life of a police officer with a Walmart greeter.
Cops could prove that there's lots of scum out there in their day to day interactions by simply wearing body cameras.
 
My only comment on this is to ask who in their right mind would want to be a police officer in this day and in this political/social climate? Constantly watched/taped, constantly second guessed, constantly accused of being criminal or thugs, and constantly having an entitled public up in their faces everywhere they go and work.

Being a police officer today has to be one of if not the most stressful of jobs going. You couldn't pay me enough to be one and I'm grateful for those who do the job and do it well.
I wonder the same thing about politicians. Every single nuance of your life is open and scrutinized, and even if you cured cancer and brought puppies back from the dead half the population would criticize you for it.
 
I simply point out, for what it's worth, that no sane person would volunteer to train and enter law enforcement these days due to the political/social climate. As such, your desire to weed out "jack boot" assaults through citizen video and blanket condemnation of all police whenever such a situation occurs, will only serve to weed good people out of the law enforcement ranks and challenge good people from even entering the field and you'll be left with the "jack booters" as the norm.

Funny how you seldom see videos like this of jackasses getting arrested and what they do in the process.



It doesn't help your argument to make the false claim that I am making blanket accusations. Again, most cops are good.

But we have to reform the military mindset, and we have to weeds out the bad cops.
 
Those are all jobs that are in public view and those employees can be filmed at any time.

Indeed - CNN is sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for the next citizen video of the mailman delivering the mail to the wrong address.
 
I wonder the same thing about politicians. Every single nuance of your life is open and scrutinized, and even if you cured cancer and brought puppies back from the dead half the population would criticize you for it.

Bang on, 100% right. The media and the public's insatiable appetite for human failure has left many important fields, politics being a prime one, to the least capable among us.
 
It doesn't help your argument to make the false claim that I am making blanket accusations. Again, most cops are good.

But we have to reform the military mindset, and we have to weeds out the bad cops.

Police forces do that on a regular basis.

You think ginning up an angry crowd, convinced all cops are animals, makes policing better? All that does is promote a military mindset.
 
:shrug: initially his actions look fairly indefensible, however, it's pretty obviously clipped. We will see what fully comes out.

In the meantime, those who rush to jump on the cop are operating in as much dark as those who rush to defend him.
If she were in the way, or in potential of being harmed, they could arrest her or otherwise restrain her.

Seriously, what plausible reason could the cop have for smashing her phone/camera then running away? Essentially, he acted as accuser, judge, and jury, over... well, I'm not over what. :shrug: I cannot think of a single plausible (legal) reason for that particular action.
 
Police forces do that on a regular basis.

You think ginning up an angry crowd, convinced all cops are animals, makes policing better? All that does is promote a military mindset.



well, what would you suggest to end this militarization of police, and the excessive use of force problem that we see almost DAILY, these days?


And don't blame the military mindset on those opposing the military mindset, it came from the wars on terror/drugs, and the 1033 program. It came from the recruitment videos, and the "going into battle mindset". it didn't come from the people they are sworn to protect.
 
Didn't you just bleat about how you were upset I falsely claimed you make blanket statements? And now you claim your post proves that police work isn't as dangerous as we are led to believe. Hilarious.


SO wait, I can't look at statistics and state that police work isn't as dangerous as we are led to believe without it being a blanket statement?


How what now? :lol:
 
Didn't you just bleat about how you were upset I falsely claimed you make blanket statements? And now you claim your post proves that police work isn't as dangerous as we are led to believe. Hilarious.
Police work isn't that dangerous. Just because cops are persistently in fear of the average citizen doesn't mean the average citizen is dangerous.
 
So every government employee who interacts with the public is videoed and the video is emailed off to CNN or whomever for viewing and critique on a regular basis?
That solution seems to be awfully cumbersome on at least two counts.

1) We could choose to only record the actions of only some government employees.
For example
We could instead use some sort of cost/benefit analysis to determine which government employees are worth the trouble of recording.
Certainly with many government employees we already have a sufficient "paper trail" in the logs of their computer usage and what-have-you. For many other government employees the probability of their actions ever being worth the effort of viewing may be essentially nil.

We could just take a vote at the relevant levels of govt as to which employees we'd like to have recorded.
A community could have any number of reasons for wanting to have some government employees recorded that do not apply to all government employees.

We are not restricted to recording ALL government employees.
Recording all government employees is one of the things which makes your proposed solution seem impractical, inefficient, and inordinate.

2) Additionally, shipping the jillions of video logs around would be a great waste of effort and bandwidth.
It would be better to handle the records just as we currently handle video and other records--store them and let them be accessed as necessary.
CNN doesn't really want forty hours a week of officer Bob filling out paperwork, attending meetings, writing traffic tickets, etc.
No one else really does either.
All that's wanted is man-bite-dog stuff.

The solution you propose is both unnecessary and unwanted.
We should probably go with a system where the recordings of some government employees were merely stored and available for review as ReverendHellh0und suggested up thread.

Ftr, I think this is already how the recording of government employees is handled, fwiw.

Funny how you seldom see videos like this of jackasses getting arrested and what they do in the process.
To be fair, they made a few reality tv shows about jackasses getting arrested. I do not blame you one bit for seldom seeing the shows though.
Only watched 'em when my kin were in 'em. ; )

Crooks being regular jackasses about getting arrested is kind of dog-bites-man territory.

But let's regularly show the type of scum these police officers have to deal with on a regular basis and not just have the media cherry pick which "cop scandal" they want to promote for ratings next. But no, we can't do that, because poor little Johnny and Jill criminal have privacy rights and we must protect the poor dears from being embarrassed.
You may be relieved to find out that neither Johnny nor Jill have any such protection or power (with the possible exception of some minors).
Bodycam footage as well as dashcam footage and any other regular surveillance footage is covered under the FOIA just like any other record.


Obviously, your mileage may vary from the reasonable opinions expressed above.
 
If she were in the way, or in potential of being harmed, they could arrest her or otherwise restrain her.

Seriously, what plausible reason could the cop have for smashing her phone/camera then running away? Essentially, he acted as accuser, judge, and jury, over... well, I'm not over what. :shrug: I cannot think of a single plausible (legal) reason for that particular action.

I can think of a couple of possible reasons why photography could be a threat. For example, if we caught you repeatedly filming how we moved through a city overseas, we knew that you were collecting against us for TTP purposes, and so not only did we take your camera, we took you and let you sit down with an interrogator and explain yourself. Additionally, there is such a thing as LE Sensitive Information, which does need to be protected.

The 10 second clip absolutely looks like he's in the wrong. My point is simply that we don't have all the relevant data, some of which may radically change how we view this situation. That is why I also point out that at this point, most of America was convinced that the guy in Ferguson was in the Hands Up Don't Shoot position, whereas now we know that those witnesses were lying.

Lying because they were mad that a cop shot a guy who was (apparently, the evidence says) in the act of violently assaulting him, having just committed a violent crime to which the officer was responding. Because there is a subset of our populace to whom cops are always in the wrong, and de facto The Enemy. And they will jump on or - in some cases - exaggerate to the point of fabrication any story that feeds that narrative.
 
Police work isn't that dangerous. Just because cops are persistently in fear of the average citizen doesn't mean the average citizen is dangerous.

Let's say that I give you a bowl of M&M's and tell you that one in 50 are filled with cyanide. Would you eat a couple of handfuls?
 
Let's say that I give you a bowl of M&M's and tell you that one in 50 are filled with cyanide. Would you eat a couple of handfuls?



So you are saying a cop has a 1 in 50 chance of being killed.


Do you have links to back this up?
 
So you are saying a cop has a 1 in 50 chance of being killed.

No. I am attempting to use an analogy to make a point. If the majority of times a cop pulls over a car on the highway, the guy in it won't decide to pull a gun to get out of a ticket... but he will one in a thousand times... and you conduct two thousand pull-overs over the course of your career, that means someone is going to try to kill you twice for the act of pulling them over for speeding.


Math declares that the fact that most civilians are not dangerous =/= being a cop does not include danger.
 
No. I am attempting to use an analogy to make a point. If the majority of times a cop pulls over a car on the highway, the guy in it won't decide to pull a gun to get out of a ticket... but he will one in a thousand times... and you conduct two thousand pull-overs over the course of your career, that means someone is going to try to kill you twice for the act of pulling them over for speeding.


It's a poor analogy, and not analogolus at all.

one in a thousand times now.


Do you have a link proving that statistics?
 
I can think of a couple of possible reasons why photography could be a threat. For example, if we caught you repeatedly filming how we moved through a city overseas, we knew that you were collecting against us for TTP purposes, and so not only did we take your camera, we took you and let you sit down with an interrogator and explain yourself. Additionally, there is such a thing as LE Sensitive Information, which does need to be protected.

The 10 second clip absolutely looks like he's in the wrong. My point is simply that we don't have all the relevant data, some of which may radically change how we view this situation. That is why I also point out that at this point, most of America was convinced that the guy in Ferguson was in the Hands Up Don't Shoot position, whereas now we know that those witnesses were lying.

Lying because they were mad that a cop shot a guy who was (apparently, the evidence says) in the act of violently assaulting him, having just committed a violent crime to which the officer was responding. Because there is a subset of our populace to whom cops are always in the wrong, and de facto The Enemy. And they will jump on or - in some cases - exaggerate to the point of fabrication any story that feeds that narrative.

With all due respect, I think you're reaching. In your scenario, *IF* that is the case, that could be accomplished by confiscating the memory card or film if a camera. If time didn't allow for that, then confiscation and returning the device later. Destruction of other's personal property is simply punitive, and meant to be intimidating.

Yes, we should all have an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, and a healthy skepticism regarding all sides, but that doesn't warrant blind apologism when you have something like a video, either. There MIGHT be a good explanation that isn't caught on the video, but it'd have to be a pretty damn good one, and pretty bizarre.

And, no offense intended, but "we don't have enough data", to me, comes off as, "Damn, this doesn't look good, it doesn't fit my world view, and I can't reasonably refute it, so I'll go the 'let's be reasonable' route instead.", to try and cast doubt.

The Ferguson example doesn't really apply here as there was no video whatsoever. This incident hinges on the video.
 
With all due respect, I think you're reaching. In your scenario, *IF* that is the case, that could be accomplished by confiscating the memory card or film if a camera. If time didn't allow for that, then confiscation and returning the device later. Destruction of other's personal property is simply punitive, and meant to be intimidating.

Yes, we should all have an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, and a healthy skepticism regarding all sides, but that doesn't warrant blind apologism when you have something like a video, either. There MIGHT be a good explanation that isn't caught on the video, but it'd have to be a pretty damn good one, and pretty bizarre.

And, no offense intended, but "we don't have enough data", to me, comes off as, "Damn, this doesn't look good, it doesn't fit my world view, and I can't reasonably refute it, so I'll go the 'let's be reasonable' route instead.", to try and cast doubt.

The Ferguson example doesn't really apply here as there was no video whatsoever. This incident hinges on the video.

The Ferguson example hinged on limited information that became immediately available. So does this one. :shrug: I agree that it looks like it was wrong and abusive of the cop, I just also can imagine mitigating circumstances, and think we should wait to see if those are correct before we try to shoehorn this into some kind of national narrative about police.
 
:roll: This is a strawman. Maybe this will help.



Not a strawman. bud.


you said:
If the majority of times a cop pulls over a car on the highway, the guy in it won't decide to pull a gun to get out of a ticket... but he will one in a thousand times...


I want you to back this **** up with facts or statistics. It's nonsense.
 
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