> The same day as the court’s ruling, DeSantis signed into law two bills affecting law enforcement in Florida. Two judges on the panel that issued the ruling Friday were DeSantis appointees.
> One new law makes it illegal after a person has been warned to approach first responders or remain within 25 feet while they are performing a legal duty if the intent is to interfere, threaten or harass them. The new law doesn’t prevent people from recording law enforcement but can require them to move 25 feet back, which can make it more difficult.
> The other requires that citizen review boards in Florida – intended to provide independent oversight of law enforcement actions – be re-established so that members are appointed by a sheriff or police chief and that at least one member be a retired law enforcement officer.
I wonder if the first will stand up to Constitutional review. I imagine there are many First Amendment protected purposes for recording that may require the recorder to be within 25 feet of the officer. For example, if they're recording during windy conditions and need to hear what the officer says. I also wonder how the "intent" will be interpreted by courts. Probably in a way that is most favorable to LEOs.
The second law is just a straightforward neutering of citizen review boards.
This sounds like a case of "the citizen review board was created by fed-up voters at the municipal level, and then the state stepped into neuter it". Because DeSantis etc. are about local control except when the locals make a decision they don't like.
I find it interesting how it probably evolved from "people on the citizen review board don't know what it means to police" to a moderate position of "why not add a retired policeman, so he can at least explain it to them?" to "fuck it, let's dismantle the whole thing"
> people on the citizen review board don't know what it means to police
If regular people are hearing what an officer is doing and need to be explained by a former cop, "yeah, <horrific behavior> is just part of the job" then what is even the point of having a citizen review? Isn't that the very class of behavior the board exists to stop?
I don't know, I don't want want to be too political here. But there were people saying out loud that it would be better to have no police at all a few years back. Not sure how common this position is nowadays. But that shows that it is easily possible for people to come to unrealistic conclusions if they don't have a real dialog.
The article I read pointed out that ther used to be a report on the FDLE website, done by a LEO, that came to the conclusion that the Citizen Review boards had generally good feedback by the LEOs they were reviewing and from the communities. Of course, that report has apparently been scrubbed from the FDLE site now.
See also: the Texas "water breaks ban", which actually superceded all county and municipal employee protections in a wide array of classes that exceeded the state minimums.
There was no water break ban as such. And no one in Texas will forbid employees from drinking water in the scorching heat unless it is to make a political point.
Yes, I explained what the law actually was in my comment. The nickname was earned by removing municipal protections for hydration breaks along with every other protection not specified at the state level.
Sounds like the police trying to influence the boards to me.
Police already have power to ruin lives or at least make them seriously inconvenient. A retired cop generally still has friends and/or family that are active cops, and therefore has some influence.
Which means folks aren't nearly as free to speak or do their jobs freely. This is true even if you personally don't feel this way around any sort of law enforcement - you know others do.
What's the potential positive influence here? Genuinely trying to find one. Is it that a cop can tell the board "oh that's no big deal we assault everyone?" Policing isn't hard to understand, if it were there might be some minimum training standards somewhere.
As someone who was a reddit junkie who got guilty pleasured by youtube into watching tons of police bodycam videos...
People generally have no idea what it like to be a cop and what is and isn't legal. For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
> People generally have no idea what .... is and isn't legal.
Neither do the cops, in their defense. And at least the not-cops in this situation aren't paid a salary and empowered by the state to do violence to people in the course of enforcing that law.
> Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police
Those bastards, asking... public servants to... serve... the public. Gosh we beat the shit out of this guy and he has the audacity to ask for a doctor afterwards, so entitled.
> In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
The word "criminal" is incredibly load-bearing in this sentence.
I suggest watching some of the videos to pull yourself back into reality a bit. Body cam watch, code blue cam, police activity, etc., there are a whole bunch of channels that just post public body cam footage.
The overwhelming majority of people doing blatantly dumb illegal shit don't just put their hands behind their back and say "you got me!" when the cops show up.
They really genuinely believe they can convince the cops that the hammer they threw in the bushes wasn't being used to smash car windows, and all the shit in their pocket wasn't stolen from the cars with smashed windows all around them. And then they physically fight the cops, lose, and say they are suffocating and need to go to the hospital.
I totally get that there are videos of cops being evil. I wager I have seen more of them than you, since they get tons of views and attention on body cam channels. But I will also wager that you have no idea how dumb and childish the average criminal is. There are 100,000 normal police encounter videos of police dealing with total idiots for every 1 evil cop needlessly killing someone video. You just have 0 exposure to them.
> For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
I don’t have any trouble believing that your social media feeds have rage bait videos that follow this pattern, but I’d remind you that the videos recommended to you are unlikely to be representative of reality.
Some feeds support narratives like “criminals lie and waste resources” whereas others show “cops lie and hurt people”, and what you see is strongly correlated with what will catch (and maintain) your attention.
The body cam channels aren't really trying to push a narrative. They just take public body cam footage from a handful of locales and upload it with very little production work. It's almost no work and generates (comparatively) a lot of views. The majority of it is pretty mundane, lots of drunk people.
I wouldn't compare it to agenda channels that upload heavily edited and cherry picked content with "telling you how to feel" narration. The unedited average police doing average police work content is enough to stand on its own.
The thrust of the videos is not political in any way. The channels host videos of bad cops just as eagerly as any other channel. They just want views from content that they don't have to produce themselves.
The fact of the matter is though that for every bad cop interaction, there are about 10,000 normal ones.
I don't know what you are talking about. The text is very clear on this.
30.61 Establishment of civilian oversight boards.
(1) A county sheriff may establish a civilian oversight
board to review the policies and procedures of his or her office
and its subdivisions.
(2) The board must be composed of at least three and up to
seven members appointed by the sheriff, one of which shall be a
retired law enforcement officer.
They can appoint everyone on it. This is something setup by the sheriff, and the sheriff controls the appointments. They don't have ot appoint all the people, but they can. Which means the original comment still stands.
> Having a retired cop in the room who understands police work sounds pretty sensible to me.
That doesn't mean they have to be on the board. You can easily bring cops in when needed.
> Would you rather someone unelected by the citizens decide who sits on the citizen review board?
Not sure what the point of this argument is. The mayor could appoint someone. The public can directly elect someone. Why is Florida making the boards charged with oversight of the police can only be appointed by the sheriff? It does not sound like a 'citizen review board' but it does sounds very prone to corruption.
Would you think it's a good idea if there were a Presidential Review Board that is named by the President? After all he/she is elected by the people!
The whole point of a review board is to be independent of the authority it is supposed to review. So, a police review board mustn't be selected by a member of the police forces, even an elected one.
While what you're describing is a bad model when you want independent review, its exactly how many (all?) of our federal oversight agencies work.
The FAA, USDA, NTSB, etc all regulate industry by quite often asking the industry what regulations are needed and how to enforce them. Its common for industry to even be expected to enforce regulations on themselves, leaving us with situations like Boeing.
I'll be very happy if that's a broad sentiment reaching beyond HN.
Our regulatory agencies are worse for all of us when they're owned and operated by industry.
A peaceful change seems really, really tricky. Its so much easier to create regulations than remove them. Congress would have to ignore industry money and want to push through change, these agencies would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and industry would have to deal with all the churn without cracking our economy since GDP and employment numbers seem to be the only things that really matter to our executive branch.
I'm not the previous poster, but the words "by someone elected" don't belong in your question. No citizen with a brain is going to select police to review their own behavior, even if they are selecting them to do policing. In fact, I don't think you're unclear on anything: you're just attempting to direct people away from the actual issue with some bad-faith feigned ignorance.
>the words "by someone elected" don't belong in your question [about power derived from elections].
Do they not belong because they are untrue, or perhaps because they make your taking exception to their argument incoherent? Nah, it must be that everyone who disagrees with you on the internet has no brain in bad faith.
because a citizen review board is supposed to be representative of the citizenry, not a group of people appointed by the person/thing they are reviewing. Many jurisidictions have rules around the composition, so not just "anybody" can BE on the board, but typically anybody can TRY to be on the board. Example: the legislation could state "a member from the city/town council, and n members of the public" or something similar, intended to promote broad oversight. This is the opposite of that.
no, but it could be someone elected who is not part of the police. Of course you can argue that you believe that other someone would be corrupt anyway, but at least this removes the appearance of impropriety
Appearances might not be as important as actual issues, though - I think it is okay to do it this way. Doctors in the UK sit on ethics boards looking at other doctors' behaviour.
I would think it would be good to say that not more than 50% can be ex-law enforcement though, to ensure a reasonable mixture.
That is a different type of review though. Police departments also have Internal Affairs officers who review the work of other policemen for various problems.
Citizen review boards become necessary because the public is losing confidence in an entire institution. If the public trusted the police department, then an outside review board would have been entirely unnecessary, the IA department would have been enough.
Hospital review boards are not necessary for this reason: overall local hospitals are trusted enough to ensure that they can handle bad actors on their own (in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception).
> in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception
I don't think this statement aligns with reality:
> The mission of our various state medical boards is to “protect health care consumers through the proper licensing and regulation of physicians and surgeons” [15]—to protect, in other words, specifically from doctors who would intentionally harm their patients. But medical boards typically are more lenient with problem physicians than other patient safety processes.
> For example, over a 10-year period, researchers found that “seventy percent of the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem” [1]. Additionally, 67% of insurance fraud convictions were associated only with what I would describe as light discipline—no suspensions or license revocation from medical boards. It seems that medical board members have confused their statutory duty toward patient safety with a well-meaning but terribly misjudged desire to rehabilitate problem doctors.
> Board member Eserick "TJ" Watkins, who was appointed in 2019, charged that the board doesn't serve patients. Watkins started tracking discipline cases and says the California Medical Board handed out more lenient punishments than its guidelines suggested in nine out of every 10 cases. [...]
> "The way they speak is always with doctor care in mind. You never hear patient care, ever — and I mean, ever," said Watkins.
This suggests that maybe there should exist citizen's review boards of medical malpraxis just as we are trying to create for police. Thanks for bringing this up.
Yep. There's just incredible demand for media attention on police problems (or certain problems) and in a country of 350m you can always find something somewhere that can be reported.
What the poster above is showing is that even the medical review boards are actually bad and should probably be replaced with independent oversight. You seem to think that it's the other way around.
You genuinely believe that the United States is #1 in the world for lowest per capital w.r.t. police problems like corruption and brutality?
Where does that belief come from? Do you just default to thinking that the US is the best, or is this opinion based on some sort of life experience?
Like can you not conceive of another country where the kinds of things that go on in America with police are not routine?
Have you been to another country? Have you ever just walked down the street somewhere else? I've been to many countries, one of which is America and holy shit I can tell you that the police there are weird.
It is very common for a city/town to have at least one councilor on the police review board for their term, and while not perfect this is close to "elected". I already need to vote for school board trustees and a bunch of other positions I know/care nothing about, don't make me vote for all board compositions too.
The first is an absolute farce. All an officer who doesn't want to be recorded needs to do is get in your face (or have his partner get in your face) - at which point, you are now recording within 25 feet of an officer, and must either stop, or face arrest.
If you take a few steps back, he can, of course, repeat this process ad-infinitum.
Sure, you can argue this in a Florida court, and you might even win, but in the meantime, the law accomplishes exactly what it intends.
Looks like the distance is actually 20 feet, and it specifically states that you can't approach a first responder with intent to harass after being given a verbal warning. If a first responder approaches you then you've done nothing wrong.
> If a first responder approaches you then you've done nothing wrong.
That is not how this is going to be enforced. Other places have passed this law and cops repeatedly walk up to people recording and threaten them to go back or block their view and often arrest them under their interpretation of the law the recorder then has to spend time and money to fight or simply suffer the consequences of an arrest even if they're not ultimately charged.
Yeah there's definitely all the usual problems of having to fight an unlawful arrest. Its expensive, or you likely get poor representation from a court appointed lawyer, and it can take a ton of time that most people don't have to spare.
Unfortunately its up to jurors in these situations. If we fundamentally disagree with a law as written and can't get representatives to throw it out, just toss out the case. Jurors aren't legally bound to decide whether the facts as presented meet the law as written. Jurors are empowered with deciding whether a peer should be punished. In the case of a law that you disagree with for whatever reason, you are well within your rights to go not guilty and avoid punishing a peer for something you don't think is worth punishment.
>> Jurors aren't legally bound to decide whether the facts as presented meet the law as written. Jurors are empowered with deciding whether a peer should be punished.
That is fascinating to me and the opposite of my previous understanding! Do you have any links or experience to provide? Many thanks! :)
Jury nullification is the term to search for here. I'd really recommend you just dive in and do your own reading. Its a complex topic that is viewed very poorly by lawyers and judges, not surprisingly as it means the success of their cases depend on juries that may not necessarily be predictable.
The history of this is fascinating though as it goes right back to the founding of the US and why our legal system is designed the way that it is. I know one of the founders wrote extensively on this I want to say it was John Adams but then I'm sure Hamilton did as well since the dude never stopped writing.
In the US jurors are basically untouchable for any decision they reach and can't be made to testify about their deliberations. So nullification is an off shoot from those two things where a jury can decide whatever they want even against their oath to follow the jury instructions and decide impartially. The prosecution tries to screen for this though during selection.
"Follow jury instructions" is a very slippery slope that IMO we shouldn't be okay with.
It allows for a scenario where lawyers and/or the judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted by the court, facts deemed relevant as determined by the court, and decide only if the facts presented appear to have violated the statutes presented.
This isn't a way that law should work and there's absolutely no reason to have a jury in the first place if it is going to be so mechanistic.
A jury is there to judge the actions of one of their peers. Lawyers are there to present the facts and the arguments for why a person should be considered guilty or innocent. A judge is there to make sure the proper procedure is followed and the trial is fair. That's it.
Jurors aren't bound to listen to only what lawyers tell them to listen to. Jurors are asked to decide whether or not to punish the person in question for the crime they're charged with.
Of course lawyers will try to screen for this view though. They want a predictable jury that will listen to every instruction given to them without question. When juries think critically and decide for themselves a lawyer can't predict which way the trial will go and a carefully constructed series of facts and yes/no questions during testimony may be wasted. Lawyers want a script and assured convictions when they can't get deals before trial, that's the whole game.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. Quoting with emphasis mine.
> judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted by the court, facts deemed relevant as determined by the court, and decide only if the facts presented appear to have violated the statutes presented.
> This isn't a way that law should work and there's absolutely no reason to have a jury in the first place if it is going to be so mechanistic.
> A jury is there to judge the actions of one of their peers. Lawyers are there to present the facts and the arguments for why a person should be considered guilty or innocent.
This isn't how it's supposed to work. Juries are not supposed to "decide if the facts appear to have violated the law". Lawyers are not supposed to "present the facts".
The textbook explanation of how the system is supposed to work is: juries are supposed to decide the facts after considering the evidence presented (either written or live testimony by witnesses), and then, given the facts they have determined, apply the law as instructed by judge (and argued by lawyers), decide the result of the case.
In short, facts are supposed to be decided by juries, and law is interpreted by the judge after hearing legal arguments from the lawyers. I think you kind of got it backwards.
Perhaps what actually happens in courts deviate from the textbook norm (since I don't know where you got your information from), but it's not supposed to happen that way.
The instructions are a product of both the prosecution and defense and largely just lay out what components the state is supposed to prove in order to satisfy the requirements of each of the charges. Those requirements are not as simple as just what's in the law and often are modified by court cases which is why they exist.
I do think juries have a role in using nullification judiciously but it's also important to remember the most prominent and wide spread use of jury nullification in history was during the Jim Crow era when juries routinely refused to convict or charge (in the case of grand juries) lynching cases.
That seems like a reasonable explanation of legal instructions, definitely more clear than my earlier one.
IMO the use of jury nullification really shouldn't depend at all on how it was used in the past though. Plenty of things have been used for terrible causes in the past, we can't throw the baby out with the bath water.
That isn't the correct bill, the bill that passed has the more broad phrasing "to violate such warning and approach or remain within 25 feet of the first responder"
Oh thanks, yeah that clarification is an important one!
The or remain addition ruins it, though I also don't see that holding up in court with any reasonable jury. In that scenario, if I start more than 25 feet away and stand my ground if a cop approaches me only with the intent of making me move or stop filming, I've truly done nothing wrong and the cop is intending to infringe on my rights.
Will a judge or DA see if this way? Almost certainly not. But if I were on the jury I'd throw that shit out, I don't really care what the law says as written if its a law I don't think is constitutional or reasonable. Juries are there, in part, to act as a check on the legal system.
28 It is unlawful for a person, after receiving a
29 verbal warning not to approach from a person he or she knows or
30 reasonably should know is a first responder, who is engaged in
31 the lawful performance of a legal duty, to knowingly and
32 willfully violate such warning and approach or remain within 25
33 feet of the first responder with the intent to
The remainder of 33 is really important. If the first responder needs to move in the direction of the videographer in order to perform their duty, then the videogrpaher should move.and give them space. If the movement is not necessary, then they would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the videographer was remaining in place to harass the responder or otherwise was impeding to their duty.
It is not a crime to be within 25 feet of the first reaponder, it is only a crime if all elements of the statute are met.
That's the usual phrasing of trespass laws, and remain here means "remain after approaching". I can't see any judge siding with a cop following someone and requiring him to stay 25 feet away.
You’re overestimating judges. Even aside from the possibility of corruption, which has certainly happened before and will again, some judges are awful people or not very clever. Generally the minimum requirement to be a judge is to pass the bar and then get elected by people who don’t know anything about you. It usually helps to be a friend of cops.
Here’s a judge who jailed a guy known for reporting on police misconduct under the excuse that he refused to become a sworn witness in the trial of a cop murderer - which he had nothing to do with, and was simply attending in the audience.
https://therealnews.com/a-cop-watcher-attended-the-trial-of-...
(I think what they were trying was just kick him out of the courtroom; my understanding is that when someone is a (potential) witness testifying in a trial they are not allowed to attend)
I agree with your implicit statement that this is a problem. It’s also important to note that “lay judges” only exist in eight states, and, AFAIK, where they exist, their authority is almost if not entirely limited to misdemeanor cases.
> I think what they were trying was just kick him out of the courtroom; my understanding is that when someone is a (potential) witness testifying in a trial they are not allowed to attend.
If the judge just wants someone out of their courtroom they can simply order them to leave. If they do not leave a bailiff or two will be happy to encourage them to go.
Earlier that week officer Dean had been convicted of killing Jefferson. The trial then moved to the sentencing phase.
On the day the conviction was announced there had been a group protesting in front of the court. When the officer's family was escorted out through a side door many of the protest group moved to there and confronted the family. There were allegations that this included threats against the family, including specific death threats.
One of that group, Mata, showed up in court later as a spectator but instead of sitting with Jefferson's family and supporters sat with Dean's supporters, within immediate reach of Dean's family.
The defense attorneys wanted to talk to him to bolster their case that the trial should have been moved to another county. The judge wanted to talk to him because the judge was concerned that someone who was part of the group that had allegedly issued death threats to Dean's family was sitting right next to that family [1].
You can't legislate away corrupt judges. Also when one of the sides asks to question you as a witness and the judge proceeds to swear you in, you do just that and later complain, not start and argument there and then.
What happens in court is irrelevant. The police will have arrested you, and they had a "reasonable pretext", so they won't face any repercussions. You, however, will not only lose the opportunity of filming them, but will at least spend one night in jail. You might get some damages from the city, but most likely not enough to cover the court costs of even pursuing this.
Once the law is on the books it gives cops an(other) easy excuse to arrest you and throw you in jail for recording them. Many people can't afford to miss a day of work, let alone try a case in court.
Then simply you've never hung around a single judge.
I come from a family that had more than its fair share of members that work in law enforcement and first responders. I've hung out with judges at barbecues at their house. The people at these private events are mostly other elected officials and other law enforcement officers. These people are their friends, they've known them for years or decades, hell, quite often grew up together. And yea, while a judge can attempt to be unbiased as possible, human nature always leads people to bias toward those they know and against those they do not.
Unless the judges actively punish the cops for doing this, the cops win, and are incentives to bully away any potential witnesses. It is not enough for the judge to just throw out the charges.
Using deadly force against police officers in the middle of doing their duty is a recipe for being beaten and then murdered, even if you were technically within your legal rights to do so.
I thought you can only use deadly force if you fear for your life. A cop approaching you, or even physically grabbing you and moving you to a new location won't kill you.
I don't know what you consider to be a credible threat to your life but those two examples make the top five for me. There is no one I will ever interact with that has a greater chance of ending my life than an on duty police officer. Not the least of which because a random civilian that kills me will for sure go to jail which can't be said for the cop.
If a guy with the closest thing the real world has to a license to kill, who is doing something bad enough to warrant being recorded for later evidence, turns their attention to intimidate you or physically force you to stop — this is a person you believe yourself to be safe around?
Trying to apply "stand your ground" in such a situation almost certainly increases the odds that you will die.
Look, I'm not condoning police violence or immunity. I'm just saying that, as a purely practical matter, if you fear for your life when you interact with police, trying to "stand your ground" does not make you safer. Quite the opposite.
Most people competent with a gun can. The requirements for firearms practice (and especially draw-and-fire drills) for cops are pretty minimal across the board. Your average 3-gun or USPSA competitors (who admittedly train much more than a bench shooter probably does) likely spend 30x more hours per year training than a cop does.
Most of them require 20 hours or less PER YEAR, and that is not just firearms training, but total training across e.g. deescalation, driving, EMT, less-than-lethal force, crowd control, etc. Several of them specify that the firearms training is only 2 hours. Most hobby shooters can knock out 12 hours of dedicated firearms training in a month or 2 of weekend range days, so 6x what a cop might have to do in 12 months.
Outdrawing the cops isn't the issue, outnumbering them is. Unless you've also got 300+ buddies you can call for support, you're going to lose in the end.
Here's a breakdown of the civilian training requirements:
--- end requirements.
It's not exactly relevant that some people spend personal time shooting as a hobby, if you're not willing to admit that some of those people are cops.
> a breakdown of the civilian training requirements
Which is why I specified:
> most people competent with a gun
Most civilians are not people competent with a gun.
It is very relevant that hobby shooters can easily far outpace police in their weapon competency with just a casual amount of shooting practice (hell, most ranges give you a 2-hour block of time, so even one range day a YEAR could put you even with some of these departments). Whether some cops are also hobby shooters is irrelevant to the complete lack of reasonable training requirements at a policy level before we turn cops loose on the streets with firearms.
The police often interpret recording as a threat (to hold them accountable). They then can construct situations to make it impossible to record without intefering.
> I wonder if the first will stand up to Constitutional review. I imagine there are many First Amendment protected purposes for recording that may require the recorder to be within 25 feet of the officer.
It may be possible to stand 25ft back and hold a 15ft long pole with a camera, or place a phone/camera on the ground and then stand back, to get past this issue.
Yeah, very many people can't afford a decent lawyer when they need one, and might not get one even if they can, in which case legality really is... aside.
No, it means that the boards have their power stripped until their membership is replaced by the new, captive appointees that can be relied on to not be independent of the agency they are notionally overseeing, at which point their powers are restored.
That's what “required to be re-established” means.
I don’t find the word re-established in there. So, I think that’s just the wording that the newspaper picked. Regardless of any difference between establish or re-establish, it doesn’t really make sense to put too much weight on subtle implications of the newspaper’s wording.
Not completely. It also means to disband something that currently exists, then recreate it, effectively reestablishing the board. You are paying attention to only one possible reading, which is the one not consistent with the truth. Citizen review boards exist in Florida. These currently functioning boards will have their power stripped immediately and members will be replaced with captive appointees. This is not creating citizen review boards, this is destroying them
Congress gets "reestablished" every two years. The English government gets "reestablished" every year when the Prime Minister asks to form a government in the Monarch's name.
So it could just mean when the current term is up and the new appointees are sworn in.
> Probably in a way that is most favorable to LEOs.
I think this makes sense. Would be bad if every time a police officer tries to stop a crime, suddenly 20 hard of hearing people need to crowd around him really close in order to record him. Oh look, the criminal got away again. There are situations where different laws will conflict, and I hope in those situations crime prevention and safety take precedence.
Modern phone cameras are really good and 25 feet isn't very far. Seems like a good compromise so that cops can do their jobs but there can be some citizen oversight.
> Would be bad if every time a police officer tries to stop a crime, suddenly 20 hard of hearing people need to crowd around him really close in order to record him
It would. Do we have credible examples? Because we have a lot of evidence of cops lying, and only being caught on account of recordings, with disastrous effects. If one side is hypothetical and the other substantiated, it strikes me as reasonable to favour one over the other.
There's a reasonable distance that a law enforcement officer (or paramedic, or firefighter) need to be in control of, in order to focus on their job. Maybe it's 1ft, maybe it's 50ft: the courts should decide.
There's also a reasonable public expectation to be able to record police officers doing their job, for subsequent review.
Hopefully we can all agree that someone loudly "recording" shoulder to shoulder with police officer disrupts their ability to resolve situations? Just as we can agree that not having any recording of a police officer's potentially illegal actions is antithetical to ensuring justice?
There are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement.
There are corrupt cops who abuse recording limitations to disrupt transparency.
There are a lot of laws passed to clarify or elaborate on existing laws. Unless there's common law that already specifies this exact scenario, this just specifies a specific case for judges, citizens and first responders.
I get the impression this law exists more for political reasons than for practical application --not that it won't be applied. Floridian voters seem to like the police but hate taxes. Granting powers to the police to help them harass "undesirables" without any added cost is the kind of law they get excited for.
>If I'm on the ground and an officer is yelling at me, I do not want other people even within that officer's bubble of space.
If you're in that position, particularly for something as simple as he took something you said the wrong way, the cameras might keep the officer from going overboard too.
Oh, always-on cameras are a 100% prerequisite solution. The presumption needs to be that if a body camera is ever off, the worst thing happened while it was.
Along with ensuring that hardware reliability and UX clearly communicates camera functioning to officers. (I'm not young enough to still assume widely-deployed tech, procured by the government, in real world scenarios is always functional)
> we can all agree that someone loudly "recording" shoulder to shoulder with police officer disrupts their ability to resolve situations
Sure. We can also agree that throwing rotting sea slugs at anyone eating a hamburger is disagreeable. But absent evidence of it (a) happening and (b) going un(der)punished, any legislation to ban it is performative.
Performative legislation isn't bad per se. Ideally, it would have no effect. But given almost any increase in legal surface area brings rise to unintended consequences, the result is a net negative.
> are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement
Again, do you have examples of people recording police disrupting law enforcement where those recording weren't punished (sufficiently)?
> Both of these things are wrong
If one is occuring more frequently, and moreover going more-frequently unpunished, then tipping the scale further in that direction is counterproductive.
If police abuse is running rampant while nobody can find unpunished instances of disruptive recording of the police, then these rules are more likely to further the abuse than facilitate legitimate law enforcement. (To say nothing of the wasted political capital, given the myriad of problems Florida has to deal with.)
> suddenly 20 hard of hearing people need to crowd around him really close in order to record him
It’s already against the law to interfere with an arrest. A mob of people surrounding officers attempting to arrest someone is already illegal, whether they have cameras in their hands or not.
Laws that rely on an officers/departments personal reading of a situation/interpretation are easily confused and abused, especially when it's something as fuzzy as "interference". Having clarity is nice. I personally think it's fine to give an officer some sort of personal space. If I were an officer arresting someone, I wouldn't want someone affiliated with them standing 5 feet behind me, where I would have to worry about being attacked. Not sure how this works indoors though, where 25 feet would make observation impossible.
This assumes sane body camera policies are in place, like immediate dismissal if the camera/mic is turned off/covered, during any part up to or during an arrest.
> This assumes sane body camera policies are in place, like immediate dismissal if the camera/mic is turned off/covered, during any part up to or during an arrest.
Assuming fantasies is rarely helpful when judging the effects of legislation.
> This assumes sane body camera policies are in place, like immediate dismissal if the camera/mic is turned off/covered, during any part up to or during an arrest.
I think every single copy would be fired because of this. I've yet to see any body cam footage during an arrest where the camera wasn't covered up at some point. And since you are the one proposing clarity and specifics here, you've just demonstrated by having these specifics in place don't always help.
After all, can you, with 100% accuracy, measure with just your eyes 25.1 feet? What's the cop going to do? Break out the measuring tape? Where do they measure from? Also, how do they prove the intent part. After all, that's subjective. If I'm recording but my intent is not to do anything that is listed in the law, it doesn't apply to me.
So, lots of lack of clarity in between lots of bad specifics.
> And since you are the one proposing clarity and specifics here, you've just demonstrated by having these specifics in place don't always help.
What I said is not the policy of most stations. I never claimed it was. But, it is a logical implementation that would protect against bad officers. For those places where it is policy, a failure of enforcement doesn't mean we throw out the concept of law, ffs.
> So, lots of lack of clarity in between lots of bad specifics.
You know what's harder to judge than, say, 25.0 feet? Having to completely guess, leaving it up to how grumpy the officer is.
It's OK to expect higher standards from police officers. Cameras should record all day and officers should only be allowed to mark timestamps they wish to be deleted later. The footage should still be logged in a black box, encrypted with something to make it not easily accessible. That way a cop could "whoopsie" their camera before beating someone, but it would still ultimately be possible to get that recording.
My proposal is simple: a cop is someone deputized by the State to be a cop who is operating a body cam.
Body cam is off? He's just a citizen with a nightstick. When he's tried, prosecution is held in contempt of court if they allow the jury in any way to know that, were his camera on, he would have been a police officer. Same with the defendant: if he mouths off about what was otherwise his job, he's going to jail for as long as it takes to convene a fresh jury, no bail, contempt.
Mandatory body cams were also dismissed by the cynical, and it's the rule in many forces now, perhaps even most. This is just an extension of that policy.
No, it isn't actionable. It would require constitutional amendments in multiple states, changes to state law, changes to multiple federal laws, and I wouldn't be surprised if it all got thrown out at multiple levels. That is no more an action than "thoughts and prayers".
That requires a reliable test that can filter them, including new officers. If you think you can easily filter "good" and "bad" people, acting in extreme circumstances, you're delusional.
Bingo, you have the answer. Now do the same suggestion for security cameras in homes for domestic violence, bathrooms for rape, politician's and judges offices for bribery, offices of government clerks, etc.
You'll realize people get very uncomfortable very quickly when you start heading down a near bulletproof solution. They want the chaos, the charade and they definitely want the "vagueness" of laws because they can't handle the black and white nature of a lot of laws that were drawn up lazily.
Sure, but less personal reading is a good thing for the public. For example, speed limits make it clear how fast you can go, requiring something exceptional for an officer to stop you, and acting as protection if they do [1]. Similarly, this makes it clear that they can't threaten you with claims of interference, beyond this distance, unless you're doing something exceptional.
Yup, though as a counter, police academies really focus on the ability to generate PC (probable cause). It’s a highly prized skill.
Something hanging from a mirror, a broken tail light, out of spec window tint, child seat improperly secured, load improperly secured, weaving in the lane, driving too slow for conditions, too fast for conditions, driving inconsistent speeds, not properly signaling, failure to maintain your vehicle in a safe condition (bald tires), illegally modified emissions controls (exhausts), using a cell phone while driving, etc.
Also, speedometers are notoriously out of calibration, and no one is going to believe the driver when they say they were going x speed without some evidence.
The vehicle code is huge, and it’s a rare driver that can’t be pulled over for something. ‘Fishing’ is a common activity that catches a lot of drug smuggling, people on warrants, DUI, etc.
Speed traps also generate a lot of revenue for many departments, depending on state laws.
If you look like you keep your nose clean, you’ll usually get left alone though, unless they’re bored.
I’ve personally had at least 2 instances where I was driving on rural highways at night, and was followed for 15+ minutes by police trying to find a reason to pull me over so they could search me though. They both let me go after it was obvious I wasn’t a drug smuggler or DUI.
I struggle to think of examples where a suspect has actually ELUDED law enforcement due to citizens recording an interaction or arrest, and I'd be very curious to see any such thing.
I will agree that such recording has interfered with the arrest process at times, and that is more problematic.
But I'm a paramedic/firefighter and often have to work on patients (in an MVA, for example) in much closer proximity to rubberneckers.
I've seen plenty of videos of police where the people filming are actively escalating tensions. It's usually by yelling though, not filming, but the yelling seems to usually be for the video, rather than anything productive.
As someone who works in emergency services, frankly, "so what?". If you can't tune that out as background noise, you're not going to be able to do your job effectively. Otherwise, what, you have police who can only do their job in ideal circumstances.
Like when I teach EMTs and paramedics, and we cover things like extricating patients from vehicles. "This is great. The vehicle is level, you're in an apparatus bay at a fire station, you have great lighting, no noise, it's not pouring rain..."
More often than not, I see police escalating situations with people of interest and bystanders, rather than the other way around.
I'm assuming you're not speaking about law enforcement since you didn't mention it specifically but I think there's a big difference between a chaotic and interested crowd vs an antagonistic crowd.
Law enforcement are often trying to handle a person they view as dangerous and, if there's a crowd of people around who are vocalizing their displeasure with you, you're going to feel more in danger.
I don't disagree with you about police escalating _violence_ in these situations which is why I specifically said "tensions".
IMO, a bad cop who is completely in the wrong and prone to violence will be more likely to commit violence if their attention is split between their suspect and the antagonistic crowd. Being surrounded by unfriendly people doesn't make people react better than they would have otherwise.
There are plenty of bad cops around. All I'm advocating for is that, if you're recording an altercation you believe unjust, record it and don't become part of it.
Why would it be bad? Surely sunlight is the best disinfectant? Let people film as much as possible. It's been demonstrated that police cameras don't always function... mysteriously.
My personal take about giving an inch on this topic is that it'll embolden people to "get involved" without much facts but having a lot of emotions about a volatile situation. E.g. Some rando drug dealer purposefully shouting at a nearby uninformed mob about "profiling", so everyone gets involved because hey "cops are bad, shame poor brown person", they all shout at the police officer, they all offer their opinion whilst not being a judge or jury. Next thing it's sheer Chaos for the simple encounter, because we forget that mob mentality is a real thing.
I don't want to open up that messy box. The rule should be simple, stay at least 25ft away and record if you want to. This shouldn't even be up for debate.
Like who even wants to be within 25ft of anything remotely dangerous unless someone you know is involved. Why are we even having this discussion.
My theory: Because people want to neuter the police so that they can sow chaos and destabilize society. Bonus points, they take away the people (police) keeping the violence and bullies at bay through the threat of fear and consequences.
Your personal take is that of someone who hasn't been bullied or abused by officers of the law, I'm assuming. Consider that some people have, and they may want police accountability, with no desire to sow chaos.
I'm not a drug dealer, but I did get not so nice treatment from police once. Well, more than once but this was the most applicable to this discussion.
I was profiled, verbally assaulted, shouted down, searched, etc. All while AK assault rifles were being waived around to scare me while my car was searched.
I knew I did nothing wrong and it was just corruption and intimidation and fishing. So I responded with yes sir, no officer, etc. Eventually it blew over.
No idea how it would have went if bystanders started getting involved and causing chaos with proximity to the police.
How come this kind of shit is only a problem in places where police are more likely to be involved in criminal events that involve brutalizing innocent people?
Does Norway have a problem with an excessive number of people filming police interactions in public?
Apparently all that's required to make recording a phone call legal is to play a 3 second recorded message saying "This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes" because that's what every corporation does. They don't ask, or verify consent. Why can't I do that on my phone? I will happily have my phone say "This call may be recorded" before every call I pick up, so that every call can be recorded.
Fun times, try telling those same corporations that you're recording the call. I've yet to have any proceed other than (politely, but promptly) disconnecting the call.
Check your local laws. In some places, if either party announces the call can be recorded than either party may record it. Ie if the Corp says the call is being recorded, you can record as well without being required to say anything. It is already assumed the call is being record.
Honestly I always take "This call may be recorded" as two way consent :) one time someone was referring to person with hard to pronounce name and I said "that's fine I will play it back". Person responded: "wait, are you recording? I didn't give you my consent". To which I said yes you did, when I called your line answered with announcement that this call can be recorded. He wasn't too happy :)
It's a bit tricky, since "this call may be recorded" often is played only to you before connecting to the other person, so technically this announcement was not made to them.
Their line helpfully tells you in advance "this call may be recorded." Great! Looks like permission to me! Record I shall! If they object to the call's being recorded, they ought to take that up with whomever controls their phone lines.
If you're calling a corporation (or they called you) then it's the corporation that's the legal entity being recorded... Not the person on the other end of the phone.
People have separate rights even if they are employees, and wiretapping laws apply to recording people - like, the company recording their own calls can easily be a violation of wiretapping laws if they don't properly inform their employees.
Huh. I’ve bluffed that once when I was getting bad service because I thought it would get the agent to pay more attention. Can’t say it had the intended effect, but they did not hang up. I just got a “yessir”.
(In case anyone is reading this, I push my calls through Telnyx, have inbound/outbound recording on, and just caught PayPal removing the 2FA from my account, after I begged them not to, and then stalling me on the phone and transferring me to a manager after their call centers closed.
Not necessarily. Imagine the following: my company doesn't record calls, but we say that we "may" record calls because we think it will convince callers to behave. My employees know that their call is not being recorded, and getting one party to consent to something we don't actually want to do is business as usual.
If this took place in a two-party consent state then your consent alone is not enough, you'd also need the caller's consent which my company doesn't have. If you were to record the call without letting the employee know beforehand, that recording would be illegal.
The idea is that if you don't consent you hang up after hearing the message.
Funnily, the phrasing "may be recorded" is not interpreted by the corporations as "the customer may be recording as well" and in many cases their default policy is to not talk to you if you've declared you're recording. Single-party consent jurisdictions make it even more muddy.
My car insurance company actually refused to talk to me when I called them after my accident, knowing their phone line would tell me the call may be recorded, and therefore I would record it. They would only talk to me if they called me, so I started answering with, "This call may be recorded. By continuing, you acknowledge your consent." Most of the time, they just hung up.
They were trying to screw me, and the state insurance commissioner finally had to step in and put them in their place. The person who caused the accident had the same carrier I did, and since they knew they were on the hook for the charges either way, they made no effort at all to adjudicate fault. They wanted to split it 50-50, and I wasn't having it.
> Single-party consent jurisdictions make it even more muddy
Don't they simplify it? You're on the call. If you consent to recording, you've given your single-party consent. You don't need to tell the company you're calling you're recording.
Just say it while you are on hold. They don't make any effort to ensure you hear their notification, so why should you make any effort to ensure that they hear yours?
> Just say it while you are on hold. They don't make any effort to ensure you hear their notification, so why should you make any effort to ensure that they hear yours?
This is possibly worse than staying silent, given you're betraying bad intent.
Yep. Them saying it may be recorded for quality purposes should be enough, your complaint using the recording is to improve the quality of service you receive.
>Funnily, the phrasing "may be recorded" is not interpreted by the corporations as "the customer may be recording as well"
IANAL but AFAIK the "this call is recorded ..." warning that they automatically play gives license for both sides to record, even in a 2 party consent state.
The point is more the attitude of "Fine for me but not for thee", with the corporation in question almost undoubtedly recording the call, but balking when a consumer dares do the same
I love how they dress it up as "may be recorded", as if whenever you hear that message there's a small chance the recording isn't sitting in some S3 bucket.
Always be in the habit of saying “me too” to the robot that plays that message. Then it’s not even deceptive, you clearly stated to the other “party” that you are recording. Not your problem if the other end wasn’t listening because they made you talk to a poorly built robot.
In which jurisdictions--if any--does that actually matter?
AFAIK there is no state where anti-recording rules are asymmetric between participants. Either both have an expectation of non-recording, or neither do.
This reminds me of an old idea I called Reverse MFA where the person you're talking to over the phone must provide a valid 6 digit number before you give out personal details like birthday, SSN, etc.
Pshaw, next thing you'll be saying companies have to be liable when criminals fool their employees rather than pushing all the consequences onto innocent customers under the phrase "identity theft." :p
Not exactly the same, but wouldn't it be possible using a VOIP service like Google Fi to have/generate a large number of phone numbers? Give each contact their unique number, so if you ever get spam called you can detect where your number leaked from.
(If it isn't directly possible, I'm fairly sure using some sort of iot telephony servive would help getting hundreds of legitimate numbers. Now only to build a cell interceptor to funnel them all to one phone!)
I don't think Google Fi is a VoIP service? At least, not any more one than any other cellular provider in these days where "WiFi Calling" is widespread.
Last I knew, they used T-Mobile for their cellular connection.
Google Voice can record calls if you press 4. A voice comes on and says so.
Only a couple times have I used it on purpose, but it has triggered on me accidentally a handful of times over the years, usually in weird situations like in my car (older cars, with Bluetooth-only car phone systems). Makes everybody nervous, myself included.
When you do get a live person, you can say that you do not consent to be recorded. When I’ve done this the person on the other end claims to stop recording.
I am not a lawyer or something, but maybe, saying "By continuing, you agree to have the call recorded for quality and training purposes" makes more sense? It's technically verifying the consent, I guess.
May is about permission or likelihood. Can is about capability. A telephone call can be recorded even if it may not be recorded. That is the recording apparatus exists and is connected needing only the signal to start recording but permission is not forthcoming.
It is only in colloquial speech that the two are equivalent.
I think this is an interesting decision for a two party consent state. Typically in a two party consent state all private conversations cannot be recorded unless both parties agree to have it recorded. This means it is illegal to secretly record a private conversation. However, the judge ruled that “conversations concerned matters of public business, occurred while the deputies were on duty, and involved phones utilized for work purposes.” have no expectation of privacy.
As someone living in a two party consent state that is not Florida I am curious if this precedent will carry weight in my home state.
I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, especially with the current scotus, but I wouldn't be super surprised if courts found it legal to record government officials in general. Other forms of communication (like email) for government employees are already subject to FOI requests, and the barrier for them to block FOI requests when it's about an interaction you were a part of is much much higher in general than for asking about interactions with other people.
> As someone living in a two party consent state that is not Florida I am curious if this precedent will carry weight in my home state.
A Florida decision carries no precedential power outside Florida, but judges in other states can nonetheless refer to the Florida decision for its analysis.
Just to be clear, this
was a decision of Florida’s 5th district of appeal, not a federal district court. So there is zero precedential effect outside Florida.
> Waite was separately convicted of battery on a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest with violence after he was accused of striking a deputy with his elbow when they arrived to arrest him on the wiretapping charges.
> Waite surrendered after a detective shocked him with an electrical device.
> “Waite did not demonstrate a lack of good faith and should have complied without resorting to violence,” the judges said.
Love this double standard. Armed men can show up at your door, shackle your wrists behind your back, and haul you off to a cage, all in bad faith, but if you resort to meeting violence with violence, you're the one who gets sentenced.
To be clear, where is your society at and are you guys taking people from mine? Lol, because people getting the utter shit beat out of them by the police irrationally and with zero consequences is remarkably common here in America.
I have managed to avoid it, but I know more than a few people who’ve been roughed up in bad faith…
The institution of uniformed police forces is relatively recent, established in the 1800s, and it reflects an 1800s era sensibility towards crime. In that it is predominantly focused on protecting the property interests of the wealthy. (The original police forces grew out of a desire to socialize the costs of protecting merchant investments -- the warehouses and docks and factories in much of the world, and slaves held as property in the south of the U.S.)
Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch".
Police in the modern era have been used as a threat of violence against common people more or less since their inception in the 1800s, from slave patrols to strikebreaking. They've been used as political assassins killing the political opponents of the state (see Frederick Hampton) to the systematic oppression of gay and trans people (see, for instance, Stonewall inn). Lest these feel like old examples, just this year police shut down a gay bar in Seattle for having "indecent apparel" being worn by the gay men in attendance.
I think it's absolutely fair for people to think critically about the history and legacy of the institution and wonder, is this the best institution we can imagine to fill this role? Are there better ways to imagine the roles it fills today? Are there systemic issues that need fixing with it?
The reason I bring this forward is that any thoughtful critique of the institution is often painted broadly as, "you are just an anarchist who cannot think beyond your slogans!" Perhaps the institution could do with some immiseration.
Prior to uniformed police, law enforcement was a largely private matter, and private "thief-takers" were enlisted to apprehend criminals. My understanding is modern state-run police forces developed in response to public anger over misconduct and corruption in the thief-takers, such as the Macdaniel affair.
Particularly they were infamous for playing "both sides" by taking money from a victim to arrest a thief, then taking money from the thief not to arrest them.
> Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch"
Dispensing violence as part of these watches was also generally accepted. I'm not sure how that would work in a modern environment.
(You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. The people maintaining order had their own security forces.)
Yeah, I'm explicitly not calling for the return to night watches. I'm saying it should be possible to imagine societies without uniformed police forces, because we've had many models for justice without them in the past. We could, with some effort, imagine something better.
That's the bad alternative, for sure. I'm an anarchist (not the purge, but instead self organizing local communities kind). I genuinely believe that much of the role can be done by local community, reserving only the most violent and extreme things for a uniformed force.
This was way better written than the expletive filled reply I had cooking in my head. I appreciate the history, and in reply to the other commentor, I DO condemn the whole institution, and anyone who participates in it. This isn't some job where you're tricked into doing heinous things to ordinary people, they choose to be that way & anyone working to further the goals of the organization is part of the problem.
Appreciate it. It was apparently flagged, despite my efforts to present a historical accounting and narrow, factual framing that was relatively judgement free until the end where I suggested we should be allowed to be critical towards police.
Appreciated. Could be a fascinating read, how societies through history have maintained internal order with various approaches to security. Did Rome have police? What about the Venetians or 16th-18th century europe? Any reading recommendation?
Also, I’m now curious what a the future of homeland security could look like. Is anyone writing rationally about this?
Rome had a few different approaches, the Vigiles mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. Some places had night watches run by their local communities. Some had night watches you could pay to avoid participating in. It was considered quite unpleasant and low class to perform a night watch, so the people paid to do it were often those who could not otherwise find work or found it difficult to work elsewhere.
In some societies you could seek justice via a duel, essentially calling out the criminal and relying on social pressure to see the duel adhered to.
In England there's a system of tithings, shires and shire reeves, individuals who were kept employed and told to keep the peace. The shire reeves could muster people to enforce the law, temporarily.
In the 1600s-1800s the monarchs in various countries instituted police forces, but they were typically plainclothes or carried only a symbol of office. (E.g. a badge) These police were closer to what we expect police to be in the modern era, but were not typically or consistently in the same visible, standard uniform. (Though they may have carried, e.g. a sword that might mark them out.)
The U.S. also had other police systems, including slave patrols, essentially self formed posses that would ride down escaped slaves.
In the 1800s, police forces in England thought, "you know what would deter crime? Visible police!" And they began to standardize uniforms with the intent to prevent crime, rather than react to crime. Prior to this moment, policing was typically reactionary -- an aggrieved party seeking justice. The innovation was that if people saw a neighborhood patrolled by uniformed police, they might believe that area was safer and criminals might go elsewhere.
Around the 1860s, this idea really took off, and you see many places copying it.
Great post, but I feel an aside on the England situation is in order. Prior to police forces, for anything too big for the Shire Reeves or Justices of the Peace to handle, the solution was "send in the army". This came to head at the Massacre of St Peter's Field (often called the "Peterloo Massacre", for example on its wiki page) where several hundred protesting workers were killed in a cavalry charge in 1819.
The massacre caused such public outrage that, among other things, London set up the Metropolitan Police (a.k.a. "the met") 10 years later. They were deliberately designed to be a non-militarised force: they wore visible uniforms, but they were black instead of the army's red; they carried truncheons instead of swords or firearms (this is also why most police in the UK to this day do not carry firearms); they were deliberately "civilian" not "paramilitary"; and they were "answerable to the public" in the words of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (under whom the force was set up). The preventative instead of reactionary nature of policing definitely fits into this context too.
No, you don’t. Police in the US is militarized but still police (which ironically is part of the problem, AFAIK. They would have better training had they been in the army in some cases).
Countries like Italy have Army corps (the Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza) that do police work but are still part of the army, in addition to also having regular Police. I think this is not uncommon in countries where Napoleonic France had a strong influence, but there’s plenty of commenters here with a better knowledge of the domain, so please correct me if I misremember:)
But having part of the army do police work doesn’t really fix most problems with the police, of course.
The problem is that they are equipped like the army in many cases, and certainly seem to have the mentality that they are some kind of counter-insurgency force on occupied hostile territory.
If you've read my other posts you've probably been able to infer that I'm not a fan of the police, but I find that being quippy about them undermines actual meaningful conversation about their history and how they could change.
I'm sorry, but it does have a different meaning. The gendarmerie are military units, police departments are typically civilian units. There's a clear difference in reporting, accountability, access to weaponry, training, and cultural expectations.
It's not just a different word. Maybe you are from a part of the world where military operate the police force and we have different experiences? I'm from the U.S.
> There's a clear difference in reporting, accountability, access to weaponry, training, and cultural expectations.
I'm happy to stipulate this. But it doesn't mean what you think it means.
> The gendarmerie are military units, police departments are typically civilian units.
Because this is clearly false.
Think about the Air Force. Compared to the Army, there is a clear difference in reporting, accountability, access to weaponry, training, and cultural expectations.
And yet, obviously, the Air Force is a division of the army (small 'a'). There are no civilians who care about the distinction between the Army and the Air Force, because it is meaningless outside of paperwork.
This is also true of the police. They have their own reporting structures, accountability procedures, weaponry, training, and internal culture, and they are very clearly a military organization. Their entire purpose is to enforce the will of the state by using violence. They do not have any function other than that. And that function is what defines the military.
Hmmmm.... on the one hand, I see and understand the argument you are making regarding the use of state violence. On the other hand, I don't think most folk use that as the only difference between military and civilian.
The police are subject to civilian law, cannot, for instance, be deserters. The police lack training and aren't a national force with unified standards. The police can just quit at any time. The police, in many places, are subject to civilian oversight and review.
The differences I think are still material, even though they do have the monopoly of state violence against the people of their nation.
That would be nice. In fact the police are immune to many laws.
> The police lack training
Huh?
> and aren't a national force with unified standards.
This is no part of what anyone thinks "military" means. Blackwater isn't a national force either.
> The police can just quit at any time.
This does not affect the nature of what they do.
> The police, in many places, are subject to civilian oversight and review.
Ditto.
Imagine you're explaining the police to someone from the year 1600. Your primary goal is to convince this person that they aren't soldiers. What would you say?
Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.
Because most people don't equate "order" with "oppression by the wealthy", they understand it to mean "the stability that allows me to live my life without fear", which is a pretty unambiguously good thing by most people's measurement.
We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.
I don't understand how it's a 'very weird take' on its meaning. Is it any weirder than people finding comfort in it?
It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.
From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations.
> it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required
It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.
I was never confused about what is more popular. Re-reading what I wrote might make that clearer to you?
My interpretation of the phrase strictly retains the semantics, including that of the word 'order' to essentially mean 'the state', or perhaps more generously 'the status quo'. Like I said, it's not one of the more obtuse slogans, like ones artfully designed to sound reasonable when taken at face value but is actually semantically overloaded, take any dog whistles like weird anti-trans rhetoric about chromosomes which was never actually about chromosomes. I hear they're on to hand-wringing over gametes now; I wonder what they'll run to next. This thin blue line stuff doesn't have any of that overloading (or resultant churn); the semantics of the phrase itself are no deeper than it first appears.
It's especially funny to me, an anarchist, who believes that self organizing communities built around wellbeing for all would be radically better than today's world. If the police are the only thing between today's world and "luxury space communism", maybe the police need to be re evaluated.
Also an anarchist! Totally agree. Oh how I dream of it!
It's been very frustrating watching so much police violence, corruption, etc. being openly reported internationally and nothing changing, at all. In Australia (and from what I've heard of the US) there's not much of an effort to try and suppress news of or spin better PR over the horrific stories of police brutality and corruption any more. Like they're not even bothering to keep up pretence and plausible deniability any more. It feels like we're unfortunately a long way from re-evaluating the police even very strictly within the current political frameworks we have. Gotta try to stay optimistic and active, though!
What exactly is the difference between your "self organizing communities" and the cities and towns we have today? Nobody is forcing you to live in a city, you are free to move to any other city in the country.
Cities of millions of people are too big to effectively be a self organized community, imo. And I have moved to a city or town that operates closer to my ideals.
But the other thing that's important to remember is that those communities need to be organized for the well being of all, and there aren't such places today.
Also, there's a practical element. Capitalism is here and powerful. I still need to eat, so I participate. I just also spend a lot of time and money on mutual aid (I have a spare house I rent at "cost of maintenance" to families in need, because I believe housing should not be a commodity. Do I take what I can out of the capitalist mode and put it into the anarchist mode.)
And you don't think self-organizing communities built around their well-being will ever decide to do anything against those that go against its well-being? What if they end up making a defacto police force anyways, what then?
Also an anarchist, though not the kind you probably are ("anarcho capitalist" vs "anarcho space communist"). Either way, I don't have a rainbow happy view of human nature, and as such I don't think you can get away from having bad guys that require some sort of police or enforcement.
It's important to separate the roles police play. Sometimes they are detectives, solving crimes. Sometimes they are traffic enforcement, mental health interventions, noise violation enforcement, violent robbery halters, etc. Not all of these roles need be filled by an armed central full time force.
While I'd personally push for removing most of those roles from a police force, and I believe that communities could do so safely and better with more community run organizations, as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them. If a group decides they really want police, then they should do that. I'd disagree with their decision, but that's ok.
> as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them
Isn't this more or less what's already happening today? Some communities have scaled back their police force dramatically, others have maintained theirs or even scaled them up.
Is the difference just that you'd prefer to see us start from a clean slate and choose from the buffet table, rather than have to migrate from legacy systems?
Now I'm wondering about analogies to useful-but-dangerous technologies, where "why do you worry so much about the police" is a bit like "why do you worry so much about butane lighters and cans of gasoline."
Ah, no; this is historically completely inaccurate. Even as early as 1285, King Edward I put into law rules on the minimum number of officers (“constables”) per area.
Constables are not the same as "uniformed police forces". Constables and shire reeves (from which we derive the word sheriff) did predate uniformed police forces, but they generally operated on the "I'm the local law, and if necessary I can draw on local posses to enforce my law". A constable with the power to draw men into his service temporarily is not the same as "these hundred men are full time employed as police officers as their job".
The men hired by constables were typically not uniformed, full time workers, but temporary muscle.
The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800 with London following in the 1820s.
Also, IIRC, constables in England were not paid in money, they were paid in opportunities to dispense violence (which many men find rewarding for its own sake) without incurring legal liability and in opportunities to stick it to their enemies as long as the enemies were sufficiently low in rank.
"legal liability": if you beat someone up in Medieval Europe, the big danger is not the authorities' sentencing you to jail, it was getting sued by your victim.
England before 1780 or so was organized for the benefit of the artistocracy (barons and higher ranks). You can see just from the fact that constables were not paid a salary that they probably were a net harm (more of a menace than a help) to the common person, but they were a net benefit to the aristocracy because they generally kept commerce humming along at an faster rate than it would have without the constables and because any constable that messed with an aristocrat would be harshly punished. (The aristocrats specialized in military violence, but it was tedious for them to moderate disputes between commoners, so they farmed some of that work out the the constables, who of course were commoners.) When historians say the world's first police force started in England in 1810 or whatever year it was, they mean the first force with a monopoly on violence that was a net benefit to the every class of society including the commoners.
> The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800
They were a thing in Imperial Rome [1]. I believe they got the idea from the Egyptians, who seem to have invented civil policing (or the Chinese, depending on how you categorise police).
Otherwise, what we today consider police work would have been handled by an army.
The Vigiles come up a lot in this conversation, however, they were a military unit.
In most cases when people think of police in the contemporary setting, they think of a non military force. But you are correct that I should probably say "uniformed civilian police force" rather than "uniformed police force", as there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform.
> Vigiles come up a lot in this conversation, however, they were a military unit
Source?
They certainly weren't organised under the Roman military. Until the 2nd century, Roman citizens weren't even allowed to serve as vigiles. We could argue they were a paramilitary, but then almost every contemporary police force would qualify as well.
> there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform
This was the status quo. The exceptions were the civilisations which invested into legal systems and the investigation of crimes, and even then generally only for a minority. One could argue that industrialisation increased the value of a human life enough that a lord dealing with crimes by murdering random peasants (or a nightwatch "cleansing" its community by beating up a pariah) became untenable.
My understanding of the vigiles was that they were under the direct command of centurions, despite being largely slaves, and were organized into barracks. Vigiles could achieve higher or more desirable ranks directly through their service.
The vigiles centurions were military men.
I think it's fair to say, "welllll sorta" to my assertion that they were military, given it was predominantly their individual commanders that were military. But I would assert most folks would find it unfamiliar to think of their local police force being commanded by a military commander.
Edit: I want to address directly the idea that the role of police would be conducted by the army, historically. One, sorta, depends historically, but two that's reinforcing my point -- the role police fill has been achieved by many different things in human history, from mobs to armies to uniformed civilian police. We must not accept that the police as they exist today are the only way policing can be done. So often, people fail to imagine better or different ways of achieving that role because they assume it's the way it's always been.
My whole point is that police, as we understand them today, is not the way they've always been. We can and should question whether this latest evolution of the role is still the right one.
> the vigiles was that they were under the direct command of centurions, despite being largely slaves, and were organized into barracks
I've had difficulty determining if these were military centurions, or a broader use of the term.
Also realised: it’s uniquely difficult to draw a civil-military distinction in ancient Rome given how they thought about leadership--a good politician was a good general and vice versa. Within that context, given they were a mix of slaves and freedmen, had short life expectancies and were lightly armed [1], arguing they were more military than civil is like saying our police are military on the sole basis of being commanded by seargeants.
> must not accept that the police as they exist today are the only way policing can be done
Agree. A lot of things we administer today, on the other hand, were never publicly administered. Like mental health.
Fair enough. Of all the historical policing systems, the vigiles seem to be more similar to modern police forces than other systems.
I still think the vigiles are probably notably quite different from police - operating mostly at night, being able to move directly into the military, sleeping in a barracks. Much of the policing during the day was carried out by cohortes urbanae, which definitely were military units.
But they were an organized firefighting and policing force (and I haven't been able to find information on whether they were uniformed). I can see the resemblance, but they also existed in Rome for 300 years then disappeared.
> and I haven't been able to find information on whether they were uniformed
Why the obsession with the uniform? If the institution we have today was suddenly replaced with one that had all the same powers but no uniform, would that be a substantially different institution?
It feels like you included it in the definition mostly in order to more effectively exclude all pre-modern police forces.
Because it was a defining reason for their creation. Uniforms in policing represented a change in public thinking about crime prevention vs crime reaction. It marked the moment in time when the modern police force was effectively born.
Before that, we did have police, but they were different in meaningful ways. Such forces were largely concerned with dealing with crime post facto, and were not always considered particularly professional. The uniforms were a fundamental shift in the theory of policing.
I don't believe I said the historical systems were better or preferable.
Please double check the post I made, I highlighted the existence of alternative systems not to say "return to tradition", but rather to say "police forces as we know them today are not axiomatic. We can invent other systems."
Police may be an improvement on those past systems, while at the same time be outmoded (if one believes they are outmoded.)
So what's the penalty for not moving back 25 feet? Death?
Seems like officers in the USA have carte blanche to just shoot the crap out of anyone not complying with their 'lawful' orders - whatever the hell lawful means these days.
It likely depends on the colour of your skin, and what kind of day the officers have had so far - but given US police history, I can't imagine it's long before they shoot someone in the back while claiming they were "interfering".
Arrest, even if you're not charged ultimately there's a lot of power in being able to just initiate an arrest suddenly you're resisting arrest if you aren't cowed immediately and even if the original charge is bogus you've got the cops get out of liability free card of slapping on a resisting charge. And even if they don't pull that legal judo move you're still stuck in the system for a while and that's majorly disruptive to your livelihood even if you don't ultimately get charged with anything and get released asap.
How is that not fruit from the poisoned tree? If the initial charge is bunk, all subsequent charges must be by default since the origin of the conflict was unjust. Which means, if a cop hits you with "resisting arrest" when the initial offense isn't worthy of arrest, then hitting that cop square in the face should not be punishable by law.
If cops can't be sued for their actions due to qualified immunity, then they should absolutely fear the response of people unjustly detained. This American cop carte blanche is going to fucking stop.
I think this is a good thing. The government could record you without your consent, the citizen should be allowed to as well. I understand police need warrants, but what is the citizen to do? Especially when so many courts, judges, and juries take the word of police over the citizen.
An old neighbor of mine has a webcam mounted in his front window to record license plates of people driving through his neighborhood. When I asked him why he told me that it was because the government and other people are recording his movements, why can't he?
That argument feels like a cheap cop-out. I want my government to follow a different ruleset than I have to: They should have the monopoly on violence and taxes.
Now, whether that applies to privacy is a different question, but it's clearly not as black-and-white as your neighbor makes it out to be.
> I want my government to follow a different ruleset than I have to
That's the definition of tyranny and authoritarianism. The same rules that apply to them should apply to us. To suggest otherwise is to accept there are special classes of people who are more deserving of freedoms than common men. The government people are just fallible, corruptible men. They are not a superior class of people who have a unique capacity for the lawful application of violence. They're just humans like us. They deserve to have exactly the same freedoms we ourselves enjoy, no more and no less.
Legally the government can’t record you without your consent.
In public, you have no expectation of privacy - so anyone can film anyone, government or non-government. That would be most police activity. Any other police activity - such as when raiding a home - would be subject to standard legal review in terms of admission into discovery and whatnot.
With a warrant, they definitely can legally record you without your consent and your knowledge, e.g. secretly invading your home and placing recording devices there - IMHO that's the point of the parent post; while there are checks and balances that require legal review, in the end, the government can do all that unilaterally after a judge approves that it is necessary.
Yes. Not just with a warrant, but often without a warrant or just cause. The police can lie to you, violate your rights, and do almost anything they want to you, but if you don't have body cam or other video/audio evidence, as so many, many people have found, you are screwed.
There is an excellent shortcut called "Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over" that "will dim your phone, pause any music being played, and start recording video from your front-facing camera."
Not all cops are bad, but the power imbalance makes these issues necessary for citizens to protect themselves.
My point is that the same body of text (state law) that defines wiretapping laws (recording consent) also defines that the police can record without consent with a warrant and/or with probable cause - and if not, the footage (and other gathered evidence) is both inadmissible in court and could be grounds for a lawsuit depending on how egregiously they violated your rights.
Only in the US. In most developed nations, this isn't the case: even in public you have a certain amount of privacy allowed, so for instance, people aren't allowed to take your photo without permission. Of course, there's practical limits here, but usually it comes down to whether the person is the subject of the photo or not. If a person sees themselves in a public photo, but they're in a crowd off in the distance, then that's ok. If someone is following them around and taking fairly close photos of them, that's not.
This makes sense cause the public official doesn't have an expectation of privacy when they are performing their official duties. That makes sense. Nothing they should be doing when they are conversing with a member of the public should be private to them (unless it is private to the person they are talking to - and if it's private to someone else then they probably shouldn't be sharing it with the person recording).
“Waite emailed his recording of the call to the sheriff's office records department and requested an internal investigation. A month later, Waite was accused of five counts of illegal wiretapping for recording the conversation with the sergeant and four other calls with sheriff’s employees.“
That reminded me of a case where an employee was recording their coworker sleeping through the night shift, and it was the employee recording that got into trouble because recording a video (or audio) is against the rules. Nothing happened to the employee sleeping through the night shift. Crazy. What to even do in such cases, really? The recording was just proof or evidence, otherwise it would have been one employee's words against the other.
A classic Florida move of one step forwards and two back. Sure you can record law enforcement now but the review boards will be stocked with people hand picked by the sheriff when you go to complain about their abuses.
That's the same as one-party consent (that is, one of the parties having the conversation, not random passersby), which in the US applies federally as well as in about 3/4 of the states.
But most states - whether one-party or two-party - do not require consent to record a broad swathe of exceptions (particularly extortion, but not just that). Exact laws vary quite a bit - honestly one of the worst things about America is how different laws (of all sorts) can be in different jurisdictions.
Sometimes in a private conversation I will say things I would not want the public to hear me say. In places where there is one party consent it requires much more trust to have these types of private conversations, because any conversation could be recorded and placed on twitter.
For example, I think it's awful that in some places it's legal to privately tell you friend about a mental health struggle you are having, and for that friend to, without your knowledge, share a recording of that conversation with other people. In my mind two party consent is a basic data-privacy law. You cannot create a record of something you expected to be private. You can have an expectation of a private conversation to be private.
Taking a recording and sharing the recording are two different things. I think the intention universally is to deter from sharing the recording. Punishing taking the recording is also a way to do that, but I don't see much harm in having private recordings for personal use.
What a bad take. Private doesn’t mean “off the record”. Making it so that you can’t record unless you ask the other party for consent to record makes it harder to hold people accountable for their actions, gather proof of labor law violations, and confess to other types of crimes.
If you’re saying something that “could be placed on twitter”, maybe reflect on the harm your statement is causing that the rest of society agrees about. Even if this was a law, the only defense is suing anyone who records your conversation and brings it to the limelight - the JKR approach.
> “As soon as I grabbed his arms to put him under arrest, to put them behind his back, that’s when I catch an elbow to my face, to my lower right jaw,” said Glaze, the deputy who arrested Waite.
I would love to know how the deputy is grabbing arms. I mean try this at home, get a friend to face away from you and once you touch their arms they can try to elbow you in the face. Like the guys 63 and somehow he can extend half his arm length (it's elbows) to hit you in the face?
One-party consent as a law never made sense to me. Our whole system of governance relies on consent of all parties involved, or at least a majority of. Even the definition itself of consent requires this - in other words 1 party consent = 1 party non-consenting..
New York is one-party consent; however, such recordings are not admissible as evidence in court, that requires two-party; one-party recordings can be used to embarrass.
It makes me sad that this positive ruling is in a case of a SovCit. It’ll just empower them to believe even harder that their magic incantations are valid.
> Waite disputed that he was a sovereign citizen. “Totally false,” he said. “The only time I ever used the word ‘sovereign’ was to claim my private property is not state sovereignty land.”
They hate being called SovCits because they know it’s associated with crazy behavior. I watched a video recently of an arrest where one said that term was like making a racist comment. She and her husband both used some other nebulous term, but they were part of the same belief system as SovCits. But you’re right, I’m going on a single statement from LEO. Though I wouldn’t expect them to use that term pejoratively if it wasn’t true and they wished to discredit him. They’d make a claim having something to do with a law violation.
Police can be extremely vindictive. For instance, they tried to put this guy away in prison for potentially decades because he recorded phone calls of statements they made in an official capacity.
I've seen cops make statements that they must have known were not truthful to people's employers, seemingly for no purpose other than to damage the person's reputation after a heated (but legally protected) conversation. I've worked on bills where multiple members of law enforcement turned up to testify to say things that I'm pretty sure they knew were wrong, just to get their way in policy.
The sad reality is that there are many cops out there who lie to get their way and hurt people they don't like, and so I really don't find it hard to believe that they would accuse this guy of being a sovcit to damage his credibility.
edit: also in this case, remember that they've also accused him of resisting arrest when they went to get him for recording phone calls. So they've also made many claims that WERE about law violations.
I'll go out on a limb and say that not many people know what SovCit means and therefore it wouldn't be a typical discrediting / slandering title. Are cops liars? Absolutely. I think this wouldn't be an effective lie.
Really disappointed in DeSantis. Not that I'm even remotely shocked - he's an outright fascist and this sort of ruling and law is right out of 1984. Let's hope that the Supreme Court strikes down both laws.
> One new law makes it illegal after a person has been warned to approach first responders or remain within 25 feet while they are performing a legal duty if the intent is to interfere, threaten or harass them. The new law doesn’t prevent people from recording law enforcement but can require them to move 25 feet back, which can make it more difficult.
> The other requires that citizen review boards in Florida – intended to provide independent oversight of law enforcement actions – be re-established so that members are appointed by a sheriff or police chief and that at least one member be a retired law enforcement officer.
I wonder if the first will stand up to Constitutional review. I imagine there are many First Amendment protected purposes for recording that may require the recorder to be within 25 feet of the officer. For example, if they're recording during windy conditions and need to hear what the officer says. I also wonder how the "intent" will be interpreted by courts. Probably in a way that is most favorable to LEOs.
The second law is just a straightforward neutering of citizen review boards.
If regular people are hearing what an officer is doing and need to be explained by a former cop, "yeah, <horrific behavior> is just part of the job" then what is even the point of having a citizen review? Isn't that the very class of behavior the board exists to stop?
I don’t know, but I know what the point of the law was.
Having a retired cop in the room who understands police work sounds pretty sensible to me.
Police already have power to ruin lives or at least make them seriously inconvenient. A retired cop generally still has friends and/or family that are active cops, and therefore has some influence.
Which means folks aren't nearly as free to speak or do their jobs freely. This is true even if you personally don't feel this way around any sort of law enforcement - you know others do.
It seems obvious to me that that's important knowledge for a team tasked with regulating police work.
There are plenty of standards. and all cops go through a ~6 month Police Academy before they get the badge.
And if you think you know as much about police work as someone who has done it for decades, I don't think we can get much further in this discussion.
People generally have no idea what it like to be a cop and what is and isn't legal. For instance, just about every single person who resists arrest now also yells that they cannot breath. Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police (and waste taxpayer money to have an ambulance come out).
In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
Neither do the cops, in their defense. And at least the not-cops in this situation aren't paid a salary and empowered by the state to do violence to people in the course of enforcing that law.
> Then the cops ask if they need medical, which of course they say yes, simply to make things more difficult for the police
Those bastards, asking... public servants to... serve... the public. Gosh we beat the shit out of this guy and he has the audacity to ask for a doctor afterwards, so entitled.
> In a vacuum it looks bad. But in the context of every single criminal doing the same extreme heel dragging, you start to see what is going on.
The word "criminal" is incredibly load-bearing in this sentence.
The overwhelming majority of people doing blatantly dumb illegal shit don't just put their hands behind their back and say "you got me!" when the cops show up.
They really genuinely believe they can convince the cops that the hammer they threw in the bushes wasn't being used to smash car windows, and all the shit in their pocket wasn't stolen from the cars with smashed windows all around them. And then they physically fight the cops, lose, and say they are suffocating and need to go to the hospital.
I totally get that there are videos of cops being evil. I wager I have seen more of them than you, since they get tons of views and attention on body cam channels. But I will also wager that you have no idea how dumb and childish the average criminal is. There are 100,000 normal police encounter videos of police dealing with total idiots for every 1 evil cop needlessly killing someone video. You just have 0 exposure to them.
I don’t have any trouble believing that your social media feeds have rage bait videos that follow this pattern, but I’d remind you that the videos recommended to you are unlikely to be representative of reality.
Some feeds support narratives like “criminals lie and waste resources” whereas others show “cops lie and hurt people”, and what you see is strongly correlated with what will catch (and maintain) your attention.
I wouldn't compare it to agenda channels that upload heavily edited and cherry picked content with "telling you how to feel" narration. The unedited average police doing average police work content is enough to stand on its own.
The fact of the matter is though that for every bad cop interaction, there are about 10,000 normal ones.
30.61 Establishment of civilian oversight boards. (1) A county sheriff may establish a civilian oversight board to review the policies and procedures of his or her office and its subdivisions. (2) The board must be composed of at least three and up to seven members appointed by the sheriff, one of which shall be a retired law enforcement officer.
They can appoint everyone on it. This is something setup by the sheriff, and the sheriff controls the appointments. They don't have ot appoint all the people, but they can. Which means the original comment still stands.
> Having a retired cop in the room who understands police work sounds pretty sensible to me.
That doesn't mean they have to be on the board. You can easily bring cops in when needed.
> That doesn't mean they have to be on the board. You can easily bring cops in when needed.
The experience from Oakland/SF is that the review boards gets controlled by anti police activist who make policing near impossible.
Would you rather someone unelected by the citizens decide who sits on the citizen review board?
Not sure what the point of this argument is. The mayor could appoint someone. The public can directly elect someone. Why is Florida making the boards charged with oversight of the police can only be appointed by the sheriff? It does not sound like a 'citizen review board' but it does sounds very prone to corruption.
The whole point of a review board is to be independent of the authority it is supposed to review. So, a police review board mustn't be selected by a member of the police forces, even an elected one.
The FAA, USDA, NTSB, etc all regulate industry by quite often asking the industry what regulations are needed and how to enforce them. Its common for industry to even be expected to enforce regulations on themselves, leaving us with situations like Boeing.
I think there's a seachange in sentiment reflected in this thread that says these norms should be revised.
Our regulatory agencies are worse for all of us when they're owned and operated by industry.
A peaceful change seems really, really tricky. Its so much easier to create regulations than remove them. Congress would have to ignore industry money and want to push through change, these agencies would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, and industry would have to deal with all the churn without cracking our economy since GDP and employment numbers seem to be the only things that really matter to our executive branch.
Do they not belong because they are untrue, or perhaps because they make your taking exception to their argument incoherent? Nah, it must be that everyone who disagrees with you on the internet has no brain in bad faith.
Otherwise you are suggesting a Police Review Board, aka Internal Audit which already exists.
I would think it would be good to say that not more than 50% can be ex-law enforcement though, to ensure a reasonable mixture.
Citizen review boards become necessary because the public is losing confidence in an entire institution. If the public trusted the police department, then an outside review board would have been entirely unnecessary, the IA department would have been enough.
Hospital review boards are not necessary for this reason: overall local hospitals are trusted enough to ensure that they can handle bad actors on their own (in general - it's not like there are 0 cases of bad doctors being covered by their colleagues, but they are the exception).
I don't think this statement aligns with reality:
> The mission of our various state medical boards is to “protect health care consumers through the proper licensing and regulation of physicians and surgeons” [15]—to protect, in other words, specifically from doctors who would intentionally harm their patients. But medical boards typically are more lenient with problem physicians than other patient safety processes.
> For example, over a 10-year period, researchers found that “seventy percent of the physicians with a clinical-privileges or malpractice-payment report due to sexual misconduct were not disciplined by medical boards for this problem” [1]. Additionally, 67% of insurance fraud convictions were associated only with what I would describe as light discipline—no suspensions or license revocation from medical boards. It seems that medical board members have confused their statutory duty toward patient safety with a well-meaning but terribly misjudged desire to rehabilitate problem doctors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8445548/
> Board member Eserick "TJ" Watkins, who was appointed in 2019, charged that the board doesn't serve patients. Watkins started tracking discipline cases and says the California Medical Board handed out more lenient punishments than its guidelines suggested in nine out of every 10 cases. [...]
> "The way they speak is always with doctor care in mind. You never hear patient care, ever — and I mean, ever," said Watkins.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctor-complaints-discipline-ca...
I don't think they said this at all.
You know there are countries that have less of these problems per capita.
Where does that belief come from? Do you just default to thinking that the US is the best, or is this opinion based on some sort of life experience?
Like can you not conceive of another country where the kinds of things that go on in America with police are not routine?
Have you been to another country? Have you ever just walked down the street somewhere else? I've been to many countries, one of which is America and holy shit I can tell you that the police there are weird.
If you take a few steps back, he can, of course, repeat this process ad-infinitum.
Sure, you can argue this in a Florida court, and you might even win, but in the meantime, the law accomplishes exactly what it intends.
Looks like the distance is actually 20 feet, and it specifically states that you can't approach a first responder with intent to harass after being given a verbal warning. If a first responder approaches you then you've done nothing wrong.
[1] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2024/75/?Tab=BillText
That is not how this is going to be enforced. Other places have passed this law and cops repeatedly walk up to people recording and threaten them to go back or block their view and often arrest them under their interpretation of the law the recorder then has to spend time and money to fight or simply suffer the consequences of an arrest even if they're not ultimately charged.
Well, unless you're poor, then likely you can't beat either.
Unfortunately its up to jurors in these situations. If we fundamentally disagree with a law as written and can't get representatives to throw it out, just toss out the case. Jurors aren't legally bound to decide whether the facts as presented meet the law as written. Jurors are empowered with deciding whether a peer should be punished. In the case of a law that you disagree with for whatever reason, you are well within your rights to go not guilty and avoid punishing a peer for something you don't think is worth punishment.
That is fascinating to me and the opposite of my previous understanding! Do you have any links or experience to provide? Many thanks! :)
The history of this is fascinating though as it goes right back to the founding of the US and why our legal system is designed the way that it is. I know one of the founders wrote extensively on this I want to say it was John Adams but then I'm sure Hamilton did as well since the dude never stopped writing.
It allows for a scenario where lawyers and/or the judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted by the court, facts deemed relevant as determined by the court, and decide only if the facts presented appear to have violated the statutes presented.
This isn't a way that law should work and there's absolutely no reason to have a jury in the first place if it is going to be so mechanistic.
A jury is there to judge the actions of one of their peers. Lawyers are there to present the facts and the arguments for why a person should be considered guilty or innocent. A judge is there to make sure the proper procedure is followed and the trial is fair. That's it.
Jurors aren't bound to listen to only what lawyers tell them to listen to. Jurors are asked to decide whether or not to punish the person in question for the crime they're charged with.
Of course lawyers will try to screen for this view though. They want a predictable jury that will listen to every instruction given to them without question. When juries think critically and decide for themselves a lawyer can't predict which way the trial will go and a carefully constructed series of facts and yes/no questions during testimony may be wasted. Lawyers want a script and assured convictions when they can't get deals before trial, that's the whole game.
> judge can instruct the jury to exclusively consider the statutes in question as read and interpreted by the court, facts deemed relevant as determined by the court, and decide only if the facts presented appear to have violated the statutes presented.
> This isn't a way that law should work and there's absolutely no reason to have a jury in the first place if it is going to be so mechanistic.
> A jury is there to judge the actions of one of their peers. Lawyers are there to present the facts and the arguments for why a person should be considered guilty or innocent.
This isn't how it's supposed to work. Juries are not supposed to "decide if the facts appear to have violated the law". Lawyers are not supposed to "present the facts".
The textbook explanation of how the system is supposed to work is: juries are supposed to decide the facts after considering the evidence presented (either written or live testimony by witnesses), and then, given the facts they have determined, apply the law as instructed by judge (and argued by lawyers), decide the result of the case.
In short, facts are supposed to be decided by juries, and law is interpreted by the judge after hearing legal arguments from the lawyers. I think you kind of got it backwards.
Perhaps what actually happens in courts deviate from the textbook norm (since I don't know where you got your information from), but it's not supposed to happen that way.
I do think juries have a role in using nullification judiciously but it's also important to remember the most prominent and wide spread use of jury nullification in history was during the Jim Crow era when juries routinely refused to convict or charge (in the case of grand juries) lynching cases.
IMO the use of jury nullification really shouldn't depend at all on how it was used in the past though. Plenty of things have been used for terrible causes in the past, we can't throw the baby out with the bath water.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2024/html/...
The or remain addition ruins it, though I also don't see that holding up in court with any reasonable jury. In that scenario, if I start more than 25 feet away and stand my ground if a cop approaches me only with the intent of making me move or stop filming, I've truly done nothing wrong and the cop is intending to infringe on my rights.
Will a judge or DA see if this way? Almost certainly not. But if I were on the jury I'd throw that shit out, I don't really care what the law says as written if its a law I don't think is constitutional or reasonable. Juries are there, in part, to act as a check on the legal system.
Like the original comment said, it's "approach or remain"
It is not a crime to be within 25 feet of the first reaponder, it is only a crime if all elements of the statute are met.
Here’s a judge who jailed a guy known for reporting on police misconduct under the excuse that he refused to become a sworn witness in the trial of a cop murderer - which he had nothing to do with, and was simply attending in the audience. https://therealnews.com/a-cop-watcher-attended-the-trial-of-...
(I think what they were trying was just kick him out of the courtroom; my understanding is that when someone is a (potential) witness testifying in a trial they are not allowed to attend)
In large swaths of the rural parts of the US, judges are not required to pass the bar exam.
Or have a legal degree.
Or have a college degree.
Still problematic, in my opinion.
If the judge just wants someone out of their courtroom they can simply order them to leave. If they do not leave a bailiff or two will be happy to encourage them to go.
Earlier that week officer Dean had been convicted of killing Jefferson. The trial then moved to the sentencing phase.
On the day the conviction was announced there had been a group protesting in front of the court. When the officer's family was escorted out through a side door many of the protest group moved to there and confronted the family. There were allegations that this included threats against the family, including specific death threats.
One of that group, Mata, showed up in court later as a spectator but instead of sitting with Jefferson's family and supporters sat with Dean's supporters, within immediate reach of Dean's family.
The defense attorneys wanted to talk to him to bolster their case that the trial should have been moved to another county. The judge wanted to talk to him because the judge was concerned that someone who was part of the group that had allegedly issued death threats to Dean's family was sitting right next to that family [1].
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2022/12/19/man-arreste...
Then simply you've never hung around a single judge.
I come from a family that had more than its fair share of members that work in law enforcement and first responders. I've hung out with judges at barbecues at their house. The people at these private events are mostly other elected officials and other law enforcement officers. These people are their friends, they've known them for years or decades, hell, quite often grew up together. And yea, while a judge can attempt to be unbiased as possible, human nature always leads people to bias toward those they know and against those they do not.
If a guy with the closest thing the real world has to a license to kill, who is doing something bad enough to warrant being recorded for later evidence, turns their attention to intimidate you or physically force you to stop — this is a person you believe yourself to be safe around?
Look, I'm not condoning police violence or immunity. I'm just saying that, as a purely practical matter, if you fear for your life when you interact with police, trying to "stand your ground" does not make you safer. Quite the opposite.
So why in the world would you "stand your ground" in this scenario?? Perhaps you posted in the wrong comment thread?
Here's a per-state breakdown of police training requirements. https://www.apexofficer.com/police-training-requirements
Most of them require 20 hours or less PER YEAR, and that is not just firearms training, but total training across e.g. deescalation, driving, EMT, less-than-lethal force, crowd control, etc. Several of them specify that the firearms training is only 2 hours. Most hobby shooters can knock out 12 hours of dedicated firearms training in a month or 2 of weekend range days, so 6x what a cop might have to do in 12 months.
Outdrawing the cops isn't the issue, outnumbering them is. Unless you've also got 300+ buddies you can call for support, you're going to lose in the end.
The old saying when running from the cops goes
> "You can beat Mopar, but you can't beat Motorola"
--- end requirements. It's not exactly relevant that some people spend personal time shooting as a hobby, if you're not willing to admit that some of those people are cops.
Which is why I specified:
> most people competent with a gun
Most civilians are not people competent with a gun.
It is very relevant that hobby shooters can easily far outpace police in their weapon competency with just a casual amount of shooting practice (hell, most ranges give you a 2-hour block of time, so even one range day a YEAR could put you even with some of these departments). Whether some cops are also hobby shooters is irrelevant to the complete lack of reasonable training requirements at a policy level before we turn cops loose on the streets with firearms.
> the intent [..] to interfere, threaten or harass them
?
It may be possible to stand 25ft back and hold a 15ft long pole with a camera, or place a phone/camera on the ground and then stand back, to get past this issue.
It says reestablished. How are they neutering something that doesn't exist?
That's what “required to be re-established” means.
https://myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?B...
I think it is under bill text/enrolled.
I don’t find the word re-established in there. So, I think that’s just the wording that the newspaper picked. Regardless of any difference between establish or re-establish, it doesn’t really make sense to put too much weight on subtle implications of the newspaper’s wording.
So it could just mean when the current term is up and the new appointees are sworn in.
I think this makes sense. Would be bad if every time a police officer tries to stop a crime, suddenly 20 hard of hearing people need to crowd around him really close in order to record him. Oh look, the criminal got away again. There are situations where different laws will conflict, and I hope in those situations crime prevention and safety take precedence.
Modern phone cameras are really good and 25 feet isn't very far. Seems like a good compromise so that cops can do their jobs but there can be some citizen oversight.
It would. Do we have credible examples? Because we have a lot of evidence of cops lying, and only being caught on account of recordings, with disastrous effects. If one side is hypothetical and the other substantiated, it strikes me as reasonable to favour one over the other.
There's a reasonable distance that a law enforcement officer (or paramedic, or firefighter) need to be in control of, in order to focus on their job. Maybe it's 1ft, maybe it's 50ft: the courts should decide.
There's also a reasonable public expectation to be able to record police officers doing their job, for subsequent review.
Hopefully we can all agree that someone loudly "recording" shoulder to shoulder with police officer disrupts their ability to resolve situations? Just as we can agree that not having any recording of a police officer's potentially illegal actions is antithetical to ensuring justice?
There are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement.
There are corrupt cops who abuse recording limitations to disrupt transparency.
Both of these things are wrong.
Right, it's already illegal to interfere with police.
It's unreasonably escalatory in situations that instead need more calm.
If you're in that position, particularly for something as simple as he took something you said the wrong way, the cameras might keep the officer from going overboard too.
Along with ensuring that hardware reliability and UX clearly communicates camera functioning to officers. (I'm not young enough to still assume widely-deployed tech, procured by the government, in real world scenarios is always functional)
Sure. We can also agree that throwing rotting sea slugs at anyone eating a hamburger is disagreeable. But absent evidence of it (a) happening and (b) going un(der)punished, any legislation to ban it is performative.
Performative legislation isn't bad per se. Ideally, it would have no effect. But given almost any increase in legal surface area brings rise to unintended consequences, the result is a net negative.
> are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement
Again, do you have examples of people recording police disrupting law enforcement where those recording weren't punished (sufficiently)?
> Both of these things are wrong
If one is occuring more frequently, and moreover going more-frequently unpunished, then tipping the scale further in that direction is counterproductive.
If police abuse is running rampant while nobody can find unpunished instances of disruptive recording of the police, then these rules are more likely to further the abuse than facilitate legitimate law enforcement. (To say nothing of the wasted political capital, given the myriad of problems Florida has to deal with.)
It’s already against the law to interfere with an arrest. A mob of people surrounding officers attempting to arrest someone is already illegal, whether they have cameras in their hands or not.
This assumes sane body camera policies are in place, like immediate dismissal if the camera/mic is turned off/covered, during any part up to or during an arrest.
Assuming fantasies is rarely helpful when judging the effects of legislation.
I think every single copy would be fired because of this. I've yet to see any body cam footage during an arrest where the camera wasn't covered up at some point. And since you are the one proposing clarity and specifics here, you've just demonstrated by having these specifics in place don't always help.
After all, can you, with 100% accuracy, measure with just your eyes 25.1 feet? What's the cop going to do? Break out the measuring tape? Where do they measure from? Also, how do they prove the intent part. After all, that's subjective. If I'm recording but my intent is not to do anything that is listed in the law, it doesn't apply to me.
So, lots of lack of clarity in between lots of bad specifics.
What I said is not the policy of most stations. I never claimed it was. But, it is a logical implementation that would protect against bad officers. For those places where it is policy, a failure of enforcement doesn't mean we throw out the concept of law, ffs.
> So, lots of lack of clarity in between lots of bad specifics.
You know what's harder to judge than, say, 25.0 feet? Having to completely guess, leaving it up to how grumpy the officer is.
Body cam is off? He's just a citizen with a nightstick. When he's tried, prosecution is held in contempt of court if they allow the jury in any way to know that, were his camera on, he would have been a police officer. Same with the defendant: if he mouths off about what was otherwise his job, he's going to jail for as long as it takes to convene a fresh jury, no bail, contempt.
Mandatory body cams were also dismissed by the cynical, and it's the rule in many forces now, perhaps even most. This is just an extension of that policy.
Zero tolerance and enforcement should be the starting place.
(Coupled with adjusting policies and procedures to be more in line with actual experience, if we're going fully transparent)
You'll realize people get very uncomfortable very quickly when you start heading down a near bulletproof solution. They want the chaos, the charade and they definitely want the "vagueness" of laws because they can't handle the black and white nature of a lot of laws that were drawn up lazily.
If you have non-omniscient enforcement, there's a certain amount of lubrication between the law and reality.
If you have omniscient enforcement, the onus is on the law to account for reality.
The exceptions are Grand Juries and indictments.
[1] https://www.heddinglawfirm.com/unlawful-police-stop#:~:text=....
Something hanging from a mirror, a broken tail light, out of spec window tint, child seat improperly secured, load improperly secured, weaving in the lane, driving too slow for conditions, too fast for conditions, driving inconsistent speeds, not properly signaling, failure to maintain your vehicle in a safe condition (bald tires), illegally modified emissions controls (exhausts), using a cell phone while driving, etc.
Also, speedometers are notoriously out of calibration, and no one is going to believe the driver when they say they were going x speed without some evidence.
The vehicle code is huge, and it’s a rare driver that can’t be pulled over for something. ‘Fishing’ is a common activity that catches a lot of drug smuggling, people on warrants, DUI, etc.
Speed traps also generate a lot of revenue for many departments, depending on state laws.
If you look like you keep your nose clean, you’ll usually get left alone though, unless they’re bored.
I’ve personally had at least 2 instances where I was driving on rural highways at night, and was followed for 15+ minutes by police trying to find a reason to pull me over so they could search me though. They both let me go after it was obvious I wasn’t a drug smuggler or DUI.
I will agree that such recording has interfered with the arrest process at times, and that is more problematic.
But I'm a paramedic/firefighter and often have to work on patients (in an MVA, for example) in much closer proximity to rubberneckers.
Like when I teach EMTs and paramedics, and we cover things like extricating patients from vehicles. "This is great. The vehicle is level, you're in an apparatus bay at a fire station, you have great lighting, no noise, it's not pouring rain..."
More often than not, I see police escalating situations with people of interest and bystanders, rather than the other way around.
Law enforcement are often trying to handle a person they view as dangerous and, if there's a crowd of people around who are vocalizing their displeasure with you, you're going to feel more in danger.
I don't disagree with you about police escalating _violence_ in these situations which is why I specifically said "tensions".
IMO, a bad cop who is completely in the wrong and prone to violence will be more likely to commit violence if their attention is split between their suspect and the antagonistic crowd. Being surrounded by unfriendly people doesn't make people react better than they would have otherwise.
There are plenty of bad cops around. All I'm advocating for is that, if you're recording an altercation you believe unjust, record it and don't become part of it.
I don't want to open up that messy box. The rule should be simple, stay at least 25ft away and record if you want to. This shouldn't even be up for debate.
Like who even wants to be within 25ft of anything remotely dangerous unless someone you know is involved. Why are we even having this discussion.
My theory: Because people want to neuter the police so that they can sow chaos and destabilize society. Bonus points, they take away the people (police) keeping the violence and bullies at bay through the threat of fear and consequences.
I was profiled, verbally assaulted, shouted down, searched, etc. All while AK assault rifles were being waived around to scare me while my car was searched.
I knew I did nothing wrong and it was just corruption and intimidation and fishing. So I responded with yes sir, no officer, etc. Eventually it blew over.
No idea how it would have went if bystanders started getting involved and causing chaos with proximity to the police.
Does Norway have a problem with an excessive number of people filming police interactions in public?
1. Ambiguous may, which could refer to permission or to possibility
2. Doesn't specify which party is permitted to do the recording/might be doing the recording
Makes me wonder why that phraseology is so widespread. Why not use We might record this call?
Gonna be a fun call with PayPal tomorrow!)
If this took place in a two-party consent state then your consent alone is not enough, you'd also need the caller's consent which my company doesn't have. If you were to record the call without letting the employee know beforehand, that recording would be illegal.
Funnily, the phrasing "may be recorded" is not interpreted by the corporations as "the customer may be recording as well" and in many cases their default policy is to not talk to you if you've declared you're recording. Single-party consent jurisdictions make it even more muddy.
They were trying to screw me, and the state insurance commissioner finally had to step in and put them in their place. The person who caused the accident had the same carrier I did, and since they knew they were on the hook for the charges either way, they made no effort at all to adjudicate fault. They wanted to split it 50-50, and I wasn't having it.
Don't they simplify it? You're on the call. If you consent to recording, you've given your single-party consent. You don't need to tell the company you're calling you're recording.
This is possibly worse than staying silent, given you're betraying bad intent.
IANAL but AFAIK the "this call is recorded ..." warning that they automatically play gives license for both sides to record, even in a 2 party consent state.
AFAIK there is no state where anti-recording rules are asymmetric between participants. Either both have an expectation of non-recording, or neither do.
In other words, phone number plus a 6-digit extension, otherwise voicemail.
Sort of like your code, but allowing a person to talk to you in the first place.
(If it isn't directly possible, I'm fairly sure using some sort of iot telephony servive would help getting hundreds of legitimate numbers. Now only to build a cell interceptor to funnel them all to one phone!)
Last I knew, they used T-Mobile for their cellular connection.
but it could be like letting smart people organize their life using email addresses in a similar way: foo+extra@gmail.com
Only a couple times have I used it on purpose, but it has triggered on me accidentally a handful of times over the years, usually in weird situations like in my car (older cars, with Bluetooth-only car phone systems). Makes everybody nervous, myself included.
In some jurisdictions, all that is required is an audible beep (or even no notice at all). In others, full consent [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...
So they are giving you explicit permission to record the call if they say the call may be recorded.
May is about permission or likelihood. Can is about capability. A telephone call can be recorded even if it may not be recorded. That is the recording apparatus exists and is connected needing only the signal to start recording but permission is not forthcoming.
It is only in colloquial speech that the two are equivalent.
As someone living in a two party consent state that is not Florida I am curious if this precedent will carry weight in my home state.
A Florida decision carries no precedential power outside Florida, but judges in other states can nonetheless refer to the Florida decision for its analysis.
> Waite surrendered after a detective shocked him with an electrical device.
> “Waite did not demonstrate a lack of good faith and should have complied without resorting to violence,” the judges said.
Love this double standard. Armed men can show up at your door, shackle your wrists behind your back, and haul you off to a cage, all in bad faith, but if you resort to meeting violence with violence, you're the one who gets sentenced.
I have managed to avoid it, but I know more than a few people who’ve been roughed up in bad faith…
Sounds about right.
I was worried that this referred to personal conversations and was about to say "dang have we gone too far?" but yeah this makes sense.
Probably goes without saying but — we don't want to condemn/bastardize/immiserate the entire institution...
Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch".
Police in the modern era have been used as a threat of violence against common people more or less since their inception in the 1800s, from slave patrols to strikebreaking. They've been used as political assassins killing the political opponents of the state (see Frederick Hampton) to the systematic oppression of gay and trans people (see, for instance, Stonewall inn). Lest these feel like old examples, just this year police shut down a gay bar in Seattle for having "indecent apparel" being worn by the gay men in attendance.
I think it's absolutely fair for people to think critically about the history and legacy of the institution and wonder, is this the best institution we can imagine to fill this role? Are there better ways to imagine the roles it fills today? Are there systemic issues that need fixing with it?
The reason I bring this forward is that any thoughtful critique of the institution is often painted broadly as, "you are just an anarchist who cannot think beyond your slogans!" Perhaps the institution could do with some immiseration.
Particularly they were infamous for playing "both sides" by taking money from a victim to arrest a thief, then taking money from the thief not to arrest them.
Dispensing violence as part of these watches was also generally accepted. I'm not sure how that would work in a modern environment.
(You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. The people maintaining order had their own security forces.)
By most definitions of "feudal", there has never been such a period. What does "feudal" mean to you?
Also, I’m now curious what a the future of homeland security could look like. Is anyone writing rationally about this?
In some societies you could seek justice via a duel, essentially calling out the criminal and relying on social pressure to see the duel adhered to.
In England there's a system of tithings, shires and shire reeves, individuals who were kept employed and told to keep the peace. The shire reeves could muster people to enforce the law, temporarily.
In the 1600s-1800s the monarchs in various countries instituted police forces, but they were typically plainclothes or carried only a symbol of office. (E.g. a badge) These police were closer to what we expect police to be in the modern era, but were not typically or consistently in the same visible, standard uniform. (Though they may have carried, e.g. a sword that might mark them out.)
The U.S. also had other police systems, including slave patrols, essentially self formed posses that would ride down escaped slaves.
In the 1800s, police forces in England thought, "you know what would deter crime? Visible police!" And they began to standardize uniforms with the intent to prevent crime, rather than react to crime. Prior to this moment, policing was typically reactionary -- an aggrieved party seeking justice. The innovation was that if people saw a neighborhood patrolled by uniformed police, they might believe that area was safer and criminals might go elsewhere.
Around the 1860s, this idea really took off, and you see many places copying it.
I'm on my phone, I'll dig for sources later.
The massacre caused such public outrage that, among other things, London set up the Metropolitan Police (a.k.a. "the met") 10 years later. They were deliberately designed to be a non-militarised force: they wore visible uniforms, but they were black instead of the army's red; they carried truncheons instead of swords or firearms (this is also why most police in the UK to this day do not carry firearms); they were deliberately "civilian" not "paramilitary"; and they were "answerable to the public" in the words of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (under whom the force was set up). The preventative instead of reactionary nature of policing definitely fits into this context too.
We do that now. The division of the army responsible for that is called "the police".
Countries like Italy have Army corps (the Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza) that do police work but are still part of the army, in addition to also having regular Police. I think this is not uncommon in countries where Napoleonic France had a strong influence, but there’s plenty of commenters here with a better knowledge of the domain, so please correct me if I misremember:)
But having part of the army do police work doesn’t really fix most problems with the police, of course.
If you've read my other posts you've probably been able to infer that I'm not a fan of the police, but I find that being quippy about them undermines actual meaningful conversation about their history and how they could change.
That doesn't mean anything. If we renamed the police "gendarmes", what would be different?
It's not just a different word. Maybe you are from a part of the world where military operate the police force and we have different experiences? I'm from the U.S.
I'm happy to stipulate this. But it doesn't mean what you think it means.
> The gendarmerie are military units, police departments are typically civilian units.
Because this is clearly false.
Think about the Air Force. Compared to the Army, there is a clear difference in reporting, accountability, access to weaponry, training, and cultural expectations.
And yet, obviously, the Air Force is a division of the army (small 'a'). There are no civilians who care about the distinction between the Army and the Air Force, because it is meaningless outside of paperwork.
This is also true of the police. They have their own reporting structures, accountability procedures, weaponry, training, and internal culture, and they are very clearly a military organization. Their entire purpose is to enforce the will of the state by using violence. They do not have any function other than that. And that function is what defines the military.
The police are subject to civilian law, cannot, for instance, be deserters. The police lack training and aren't a national force with unified standards. The police can just quit at any time. The police, in many places, are subject to civilian oversight and review.
The differences I think are still material, even though they do have the monopoly of state violence against the people of their nation.
That would be nice. In fact the police are immune to many laws.
> The police lack training
Huh?
> and aren't a national force with unified standards.
This is no part of what anyone thinks "military" means. Blackwater isn't a national force either.
> The police can just quit at any time.
This does not affect the nature of what they do.
> The police, in many places, are subject to civilian oversight and review.
Ditto.
Imagine you're explaining the police to someone from the year 1600. Your primary goal is to convince this person that they aren't soldiers. What would you say?
Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.
We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.
It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.
From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations.
> it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required
It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.
My interpretation of the phrase strictly retains the semantics, including that of the word 'order' to essentially mean 'the state', or perhaps more generously 'the status quo'. Like I said, it's not one of the more obtuse slogans, like ones artfully designed to sound reasonable when taken at face value but is actually semantically overloaded, take any dog whistles like weird anti-trans rhetoric about chromosomes which was never actually about chromosomes. I hear they're on to hand-wringing over gametes now; I wonder what they'll run to next. This thin blue line stuff doesn't have any of that overloading (or resultant churn); the semantics of the phrase itself are no deeper than it first appears.
It's been very frustrating watching so much police violence, corruption, etc. being openly reported internationally and nothing changing, at all. In Australia (and from what I've heard of the US) there's not much of an effort to try and suppress news of or spin better PR over the horrific stories of police brutality and corruption any more. Like they're not even bothering to keep up pretence and plausible deniability any more. It feels like we're unfortunately a long way from re-evaluating the police even very strictly within the current political frameworks we have. Gotta try to stay optimistic and active, though!
But the other thing that's important to remember is that those communities need to be organized for the well being of all, and there aren't such places today.
Also, there's a practical element. Capitalism is here and powerful. I still need to eat, so I participate. I just also spend a lot of time and money on mutual aid (I have a spare house I rent at "cost of maintenance" to families in need, because I believe housing should not be a commodity. Do I take what I can out of the capitalist mode and put it into the anarchist mode.)
Also an anarchist, though not the kind you probably are ("anarcho capitalist" vs "anarcho space communist"). Either way, I don't have a rainbow happy view of human nature, and as such I don't think you can get away from having bad guys that require some sort of police or enforcement.
While I'd personally push for removing most of those roles from a police force, and I believe that communities could do so safely and better with more community run organizations, as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them. If a group decides they really want police, then they should do that. I'd disagree with their decision, but that's ok.
Isn't this more or less what's already happening today? Some communities have scaled back their police force dramatically, others have maintained theirs or even scaled them up.
Is the difference just that you'd prefer to see us start from a clean slate and choose from the buffet table, rather than have to migrate from legacy systems?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable
The men hired by constables were typically not uniformed, full time workers, but temporary muscle.
The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800 with London following in the 1820s.
"legal liability": if you beat someone up in Medieval Europe, the big danger is not the authorities' sentencing you to jail, it was getting sued by your victim.
England before 1780 or so was organized for the benefit of the artistocracy (barons and higher ranks). You can see just from the fact that constables were not paid a salary that they probably were a net harm (more of a menace than a help) to the common person, but they were a net benefit to the aristocracy because they generally kept commerce humming along at an faster rate than it would have without the constables and because any constable that messed with an aristocrat would be harshly punished. (The aristocrats specialized in military violence, but it was tedious for them to moderate disputes between commoners, so they farmed some of that work out the the constables, who of course were commoners.) When historians say the world's first police force started in England in 1810 or whatever year it was, they mean the first force with a monopoly on violence that was a net benefit to the every class of society including the commoners.
They were a thing in Imperial Rome [1]. I believe they got the idea from the Egyptians, who seem to have invented civil policing (or the Chinese, depending on how you categorise police).
Otherwise, what we today consider police work would have been handled by an army.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigiles#Police_force
In most cases when people think of police in the contemporary setting, they think of a non military force. But you are correct that I should probably say "uniformed civilian police force" rather than "uniformed police force", as there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform.
Source?
They certainly weren't organised under the Roman military. Until the 2nd century, Roman citizens weren't even allowed to serve as vigiles. We could argue they were a paramilitary, but then almost every contemporary police force would qualify as well.
> there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform
This was the status quo. The exceptions were the civilisations which invested into legal systems and the investigation of crimes, and even then generally only for a minority. One could argue that industrialisation increased the value of a human life enough that a lord dealing with crimes by murdering random peasants (or a nightwatch "cleansing" its community by beating up a pariah) became untenable.
The vigiles centurions were military men.
I think it's fair to say, "welllll sorta" to my assertion that they were military, given it was predominantly their individual commanders that were military. But I would assert most folks would find it unfamiliar to think of their local police force being commanded by a military commander.
Edit: I want to address directly the idea that the role of police would be conducted by the army, historically. One, sorta, depends historically, but two that's reinforcing my point -- the role police fill has been achieved by many different things in human history, from mobs to armies to uniformed civilian police. We must not accept that the police as they exist today are the only way policing can be done. So often, people fail to imagine better or different ways of achieving that role because they assume it's the way it's always been.
My whole point is that police, as we understand them today, is not the way they've always been. We can and should question whether this latest evolution of the role is still the right one.
I've had difficulty determining if these were military centurions, or a broader use of the term.
Also realised: it’s uniquely difficult to draw a civil-military distinction in ancient Rome given how they thought about leadership--a good politician was a good general and vice versa. Within that context, given they were a mix of slaves and freedmen, had short life expectancies and were lightly armed [1], arguing they were more military than civil is like saying our police are military on the sole basis of being commanded by seargeants.
> must not accept that the police as they exist today are the only way policing can be done
Agree. A lot of things we administer today, on the other hand, were never publicly administered. Like mental health.
[1] https://novelsofcolinhough.wordpress.com/2021/03/27/the-vigi...
I still think the vigiles are probably notably quite different from police - operating mostly at night, being able to move directly into the military, sleeping in a barracks. Much of the policing during the day was carried out by cohortes urbanae, which definitely were military units.
But they were an organized firefighting and policing force (and I haven't been able to find information on whether they were uniformed). I can see the resemblance, but they also existed in Rome for 300 years then disappeared.
Why the obsession with the uniform? If the institution we have today was suddenly replaced with one that had all the same powers but no uniform, would that be a substantially different institution?
It feels like you included it in the definition mostly in order to more effectively exclude all pre-modern police forces.
Before that, we did have police, but they were different in meaningful ways. Such forces were largely concerned with dealing with crime post facto, and were not always considered particularly professional. The uniforms were a fundamental shift in the theory of policing.
Please double check the post I made, I highlighted the existence of alternative systems not to say "return to tradition", but rather to say "police forces as we know them today are not axiomatic. We can invent other systems."
Police may be an improvement on those past systems, while at the same time be outmoded (if one believes they are outmoded.)
If cops can't be sued for their actions due to qualified immunity, then they should absolutely fear the response of people unjustly detained. This American cop carte blanche is going to fucking stop.
Seems very fair to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
Now, whether that applies to privacy is a different question, but it's clearly not as black-and-white as your neighbor makes it out to be.
That's the definition of tyranny and authoritarianism. The same rules that apply to them should apply to us. To suggest otherwise is to accept there are special classes of people who are more deserving of freedoms than common men. The government people are just fallible, corruptible men. They are not a superior class of people who have a unique capacity for the lawful application of violence. They're just humans like us. They deserve to have exactly the same freedoms we ourselves enjoy, no more and no less.
In public, you have no expectation of privacy - so anyone can film anyone, government or non-government. That would be most police activity. Any other police activity - such as when raiding a home - would be subject to standard legal review in terms of admission into discovery and whatnot.
There is an excellent shortcut called "Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over" that "will dim your phone, pause any music being played, and start recording video from your front-facing camera."
Not all cops are bad, but the power imbalance makes these issues necessary for citizens to protect themselves.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/17/21293996/siri-iphone-shor...
Only in the US. In most developed nations, this isn't the case: even in public you have a certain amount of privacy allowed, so for instance, people aren't allowed to take your photo without permission. Of course, there's practical limits here, but usually it comes down to whether the person is the subject of the photo or not. If a person sees themselves in a public photo, but they're in a crowd off in the distance, then that's ok. If someone is following them around and taking fairly close photos of them, that's not.
This makes sense cause the public official doesn't have an expectation of privacy when they are performing their official duties. That makes sense. Nothing they should be doing when they are conversing with a member of the public should be private to them (unless it is private to the person they are talking to - and if it's private to someone else then they probably shouldn't be sharing it with the person recording).
“Waite emailed his recording of the call to the sheriff's office records department and requested an internal investigation. A month later, Waite was accused of five counts of illegal wiretapping for recording the conversation with the sergeant and four other calls with sheriff’s employees.“
Just common sense really.
Just sayin'
But most states - whether one-party or two-party - do not require consent to record a broad swathe of exceptions (particularly extortion, but not just that). Exact laws vary quite a bit - honestly one of the worst things about America is how different laws (of all sorts) can be in different jurisdictions.
For example, I think it's awful that in some places it's legal to privately tell you friend about a mental health struggle you are having, and for that friend to, without your knowledge, share a recording of that conversation with other people. In my mind two party consent is a basic data-privacy law. You cannot create a record of something you expected to be private. You can have an expectation of a private conversation to be private.
If you’re saying something that “could be placed on twitter”, maybe reflect on the harm your statement is causing that the rest of society agrees about. Even if this was a law, the only defense is suing anyone who records your conversation and brings it to the limelight - the JKR approach.
Some states are single party consent, some two, some might be more subtle.
I would love to know how the deputy is grabbing arms. I mean try this at home, get a friend to face away from you and once you touch their arms they can try to elbow you in the face. Like the guys 63 and somehow he can extend half his arm length (it's elbows) to hit you in the face?
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideo...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement
Good news! It's not.
I've seen cops make statements that they must have known were not truthful to people's employers, seemingly for no purpose other than to damage the person's reputation after a heated (but legally protected) conversation. I've worked on bills where multiple members of law enforcement turned up to testify to say things that I'm pretty sure they knew were wrong, just to get their way in policy.
The sad reality is that there are many cops out there who lie to get their way and hurt people they don't like, and so I really don't find it hard to believe that they would accuse this guy of being a sovcit to damage his credibility.
edit: also in this case, remember that they've also accused him of resisting arrest when they went to get him for recording phone calls. So they've also made many claims that WERE about law violations.
Just why?
Really disappointed in DeSantis. Not that I'm even remotely shocked - he's an outright fascist and this sort of ruling and law is right out of 1984. Let's hope that the Supreme Court strikes down both laws.
Can't wait to vote his ass out of office.