In general, courts have held that Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination pertain to testimonial evidence, not broadly to any possible evidence that might be incriminating.
The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature.
The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock.
Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.
While I agree with OP that this is a clear cut case of no 5th amendment protections, I can't agree with your reasoning: the fact that police officers have qualified immunity means that in theory they can, in fact, plead the 5th when charged with something that would fall outside of the qualified immunity. We've had several high-profile cases of police officers being charged with murder recently, and I don't believe a single one was compelled to testify against themselves.
> they can, in fact, plead the 5th when charged with something that would fall outside of the qualified immunity.
True, but this is not an arbitrary process, it must actually be adjudicated, which is where I would expect the protections to apply. The judge could, after removing the immunity, then decide that the bodycamera of the incident cannot be submitted into evidence without further proceedings.
Right, but that's where OP's point that these don't count as testimony comes in anyway. Qualified immunity does not imply no 5th amendment protection, so the question of whether these count as testimony will come up because pleading the 5th is possible.
They weren't acting in the scope of the job that qualified them to have immunity. If they were, it would apply, and seemingly they could testify about that specific job duty that they are unable to be prosecuted for.
> Since police officers enjoy blanket qualified immunity they absolutely do NOT have 5th amendment protections when it comes to their jobs.
Qualified immunity for police is a civil liability doctrine and not relevant to criminal charges.
The 5th amendment most certainly applies to criminal charges brought against any citizen, police included. AFAIK, it is applicable in civil lawsuits as well in order to protect a defendant from testimony being used against them in future charges, although adverse inference can be surmised in civil cases.
Right, and then they just enjoy defacto immunity in the criminal system due to their proximity to the other arms of justice (judges, prosecutors, etc).
So that hardly ever matters, even if it is technically possible.
In the political arena of recent years, lawyers and judges "being made a laughing stock" has not turned out to the be the deterrant it was once thought to be.
It was never a deterrent. There was a whole generation of old white guys who wrote phrases like "emanations from penumbras" with a straight face--waving their hands to establish what their legal analysis could not--who are held in high esteem today.
Douglas' "emanations" argument was that the right to privacy can be inferred from other enumerated rights (First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments), i.e. a constitutional interpretation that unenumerated rights exists. Arguments against implied but unenumerated rights in the constitution can easily be made, but summarizing this as hand wavy leaves out a lot of detail.
The law is far more rigorous today than it was 50 years ago. The dumbest legal theory in recent memory, that the vice president can refuse to certify the election, is more rooted in in the constitutional text—the 12th amendment does assign the vice president at least a ceremonial role in the process—then a bunch of established mid-20th century precedent. Which is not to suggest that the VP certification theory isn’t terrible—it is. But at least it pretends to be a legal argument, based on constitutional text, rather than philosophical or sociological braying.
The fact that the 5th protects from self-incriminating, WTF is a police chief saying officers are doing that would be incriminating? Like what an absolute asshat of a position to take.
The question I always ask is, why is there even an off button? It defeats the entire point of the camera as it’s meant to keep cops honest and not abusing the inherent power of their position.
When they go to the bathroom. If they have to take a personal call. This police chief is an idiot, but we shouldn’t let him let us dehumanise police in general.
Mentioned on the a similar comment regarding bathrooms. I think there's other ways to engineer a mutually acceptable solution. Just requires some intent and planning. The off button is just rolling over on accountability when it can be used at will. It's the lazy approach and it's absolutely a byproduct of them not wanting accountability yet being the ones procuring body cameras (eg. they asked for off buttons)
They should be under surveillance that they cannot disable 100% of the time they are receiving tax money, full stop.
Schedule bathroom breaks and have the devices shut off then for a defined period of time. Stagger them to make criminal conspiracies harder. Prohibit fraternizing with coworkers in off hours on penalty of termination. Automatically make public all video and audio surveillance more than 180 days old.
Talking to an informant or source. Having that recorded might make them vulnerable to retaliation or more reluctant to talk to the police because of the fear of retaliation.
The theory of police since Sir Robert Peel created the Met has been that the links between the police and the community they serve are the most important thing. It is the connection between the force and the people that provides them with the information to prevent crime from happening, to identify them when they have happened, and to solve them once they have been committed. So these links and friendships should be the basis for the the philosophy of policing in the past centuries. And those could indeed be compromised by being recorded.
Modern American policing doesn't work, and seems to this outsider to oftentimes be more based on a military occupation force than a police living inside their own community, but this is how it is supposed to work.
I don't buy this argument. As an informant how can I be absolutely sure it's not recording? The only way to be certain it's not recording is to not bring it to the 'meeting'.
Why should someone betraying their community's trust be protected from reprisals? We've seen how the police operate our whole lives. Collaborating with occupying armies has always carried a dangerous social cost. It's absurd for a snitch to think they'd be insulated from the social costs of betraying their community.
When body cameras first rolled out, someone (an actual person) had to review the footage. Officers had to wait for that review to be completed before ending their shift. If I recall correctly, that wait was overtime at first and then policy was modified and it became unpaid time.
No offense, but that _sounds_ like a super-specific policy :)
Also, how would that even work? Is there a second person who's watching the first cop's entire day? Like, even at 8x speed that's an hour for to watch an 8 hour shift.
It seems like a more reasonable / likely policy is that the video footage is automatically archived and then deleted after a reasonable time (3 months? 6? a year?) if it's not requested by anybody.
That way someone can request the relevant footage when a (hopefully infrequent) complaint is made, possibly after the requester has gotten a lawyer (etc), but the 99% of the footage that isn't useful never consumes anyone's time ("Watch as Officer Smith.. PATIENTLY WAITS FOR THE LIGHT TO TURN GREEN!!!1!!!1" :) ).
It can absolutely vary by department. However, the NYPD historically has set trends other departments follow.
From their Patrol Guide, below is what an officer is to do with video before their next tour of duty. My local department adopted this language almost verbatim.
These cameras are not upload and forget it. I'd encourage you to read on some of this as your comment "how would that even work" tells me your jaw is about to be on the floor when you read about the levels of red tape attached to these. To be clear, I'm pro camera and accept these costs of oversight. That doesn't mean the system cannot be improved.
Fun, but sarcastic idea: YouTube is filled with First Amendment Auditors. @AuditTheAudit has 818,495,408 views... let's let departments upload and have would be FA auditor viewers review, and if needed, tag videos for Internal Audit review. The People were going to give their time away anyhow, might as well save some fellow tax payers money... Wait, I take this back. I can see the officers now starting the body cam footage to talk about Better Help and Express VPN... never mind!
NYPD Patrol Guide 212-123:
16. Access the video management system on the Department Intranet or
Department smartphone to classify videos based upon the nature of the event.
a. Select one category for BWC video retention from the dropdown
list in the following priority order:
(1) Arrest,
(2) Homicide,
(3) Summons,
(4) Investigative Encounter, and
(5) Uncategorized.
b. Document the nature of event from dropdown list (e.g., EDP, DV
incident, home visit, etc.),
(1) If the nature of the event cannot be selected from the
dropdown list, enter a description of the event and include
the associated ICAD number.
c. If related to an arrest, enter the complete arrest number, beginning
with the borough letter designation in the appropriate field, and/or
d. If related to a Terry Stop/Level 3 Encounter not involving an
arrest, enter the Stop Report number in the appropriate field.
17. Categorize all BWC videos by the end of next scheduled tour
Cops radio dispatch for everything, dispatch could disable it during their breaks. Simple checks and balances.
This might not be the ideal solution, it's the one that I thought of in 20 seconds of reading your response - which admittedly, I hadn't even considered. But instead of taking this as an absolute solution please take it as the, "maybe we just need to put some thought into things and we could figure out the better solution that doesn't involve an on demand off button" because that is essentially shrugging off the accountability concern most citizens have.
Probably not. But, no less than she'd want to talk about it in front of a jury which we completely accept as part of the judicial process.
My opinion is this is a bit of a straw man argument. Video and digital recordings are just increasingly part of the modern world. Everyone, victims included, need to come to terms with that. And, in turn, agencies need to secure the footage and make sure victim footage remains private, just like any evidence needs to be protected/private. Are there any cases of footage like this being hacked/leaked without the victims consent? While possible, it shouldn't hamstring our police policies around bodycams. It's also a conversation that doesn't necessarily need to occur with the uniformed cop in the field. The officer needs to take her in to the station and have that conversation with a detective and such. It's almost always recorded there (AFAIK in these types of crimes.)
This is why abolitionists were mostly always against body cameras from the beginning. They would never have allowed them to become widespread without a way to control the usage of the camera and release of the footage. It is just another thing they can use against you but is powerless against them. It was never going to be a tool of accountability.
Tools and training aren't the problem with police, tools and training won't fix the problems with police.
Nah. Being a police officer has implicit trust and, trivially and obviously, responsibility to the community served that being a private citizen does not.
Pretending they’re the same, or that being an officer is essentially identical to any other profession, is absurd.
An annoying reminder to people: Reason is making this a national news story, but it's more meaningfully a local news story. For residents in much of the country, if you simply engage in local politics --- in most places, very few people seriously do this! --- you can get policing officials fired for saying ridiculous stuff like this. Residents probably have more say in how policing functions than they do in almost any other public policy matter (maybe, depending on your state, excepting public schooling).
Our PD wanted to roll out Flock cameras villagewide, and citizen involvement commissions ratcheted down the deployment to a handful of cameras, which are not authorized for use for stopping even stolen vehicles, just violent crime suspects and stolen license plates. The PD wanted it to be otherwise, but it does not take a lot of public pressure to rein them in: the ABQ city council is the boss, not the police chief.
I'm not saying Reason is wrong; they're clearly right, and this person is a moron. But I'm strongly urging people to engage locally on stuff like this, rather than bloodying their foreheads on national politics. Or, worse, convincing themselves that there's nothing at all to be done about it; that's what people like this ABQ Chief are counting on.
Agree with your point, but do want to point out I've lived in places where not toeing the local party line results in real life harassment, even stalking of people's kids, from friends of elected and non-elected officials. Sometimes that local party line is that police are infallible, and if you ever disagree with what they want to do, that must mean you're criminal and hate police, and are made a local pariah when you're personally called out by the police chief.
People have been driven out of town for voicing support for BLM, for example, not to mention the harassment that comes from participating in school board meetings if you disagree with the board.
Not even sure what my point is here, other than saying that sometimes engaging in local politics isn't safe for everyone. I made a post about it here on HN in the past, but I watched a single mother get doxxed and harassed because she disagreed with the mayor on policy. The mayor did the doxxing. YMMV of course.
I was going to write a guarantee that engaging in local politics will be more effective than writing about it on a message board, but engaging with local politics often is exactly that: message board discussions with your neighbors. So a first step I'd offer to finding those pressure points: figure out where your neighbors talk about policy (and other stuff), and post.
You’re making it sound easier and more certain than it really is. “Engaging with local government” is very often ineffective. Case in point: our municipal government bought a hotel right across the road from a high school and converted it for housing the homeless. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but in this case there are no prerequisites, and sex offenders and drug addicts are OK, right next to the school. There was a “public comment” meeting, lots of people (myself included) came and protested, only to be told in the end: “fuck off, the decision has already been made and there’s no recourse”. Which is to say, complaining seems to only work if you can play different parts of the government against one another, or if they’re already looking for a justification to do what you’re proposing. If that is not the case, you’re SOL.
Public comment isn't engagement. I know hearing that will piss you off. But apart from putting up giant numbers, numbers way out of norm of what contentious issues pull into meetings, it's just about the least effective way to influence your local government. Everybody knows the score: public comment is canvassed before the meeting, and (again, unless you're putting up huge numbers) represents attempts by tiny minorities of the community to override the will of the voters, by paying more attention than ordinary voters and showing up on a random Tuesday night to complain.
The irony is, there are plenty of ways for tiny minorities to exert outsized influence in most communities. Here's a really basic one: instead of showing up and giving tedious public comment, reach out directly to your council members (or, better yet, the relevant commissioners, if they exist, who probably never get any kind of public comment) and do private comment.
That's not much more effective than public comment, but it is more effective. There are better things to do than that!
(Having said all this: I'm glad your muni made the decision it did. The high schoolers will be fine. Building housing for homeless people is good for the community. Every time a muni does it, people come out of hte woodwork with stories about sex offenders and drug addicts. Sounds like your council has its head screwed on right; good for them.)
Critically, you need to inform them that your support is contingent on their action on the matter. Even better if you can get a handful of friends to do the same. Politicians may care about issues but they care more about keeping their jobs.
If you're giving public comments saying things like "government sponsored access to hard drugs", it's really no wonder public comment isn't working out for you. If you're not known to be in a position to fund runs for competitive candidates in the next cycle (or to fund existing electeds you know to be on your side on this stuff), you should re-read Dale Carnegie before you attempt engaging again. I'm not snarking. You would not believe how much more effective it is just to not be another hyperbolic aggrieved person.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
As I think you can surmise from my first response to your comment, I don't agree at all with your premise. We just did the exact same thing your muni did, a block and a half from a high school and a block and a half from my house. I'm thrilled. But this very narrow policy dispute isn't interesting. You perceive my comment as a dunk on you, but I'm in fact trying to arm you to more effective work against my own policy interests, because I hate cynicism even more than I hate NIMBYism.
Would you be as concerned about the sex offenders and drug addicts if they were as well off as you? In many cases they are richer. Do you think they have "prerequisites" when trying to buy their third house?
> write a strongly worded letter to city council about the police?
Just show up and speak. Even if unofficially. Most people can’t be bothered to, and that gives the move power.
I’ve literally helped insert language into legislation at the state level because I was the only one who called on a niche bill and my state Assemblyman didn’t have the staff to go through it.
I'm glad nothing has happened to you. And I hope it never does. However that does not negate what I said earlier.
If a cop is willing to say that they don't have to have body cams on, then they're also probably willing to exact revenge on you if you fuck with them too much.
If cops wanted to win the trust of the public and work alongside their fellow citizens to keep their communities safe, they would welcome to use of body cams and hold themselves accountable to a high standard of integrity.
Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.
Who are "they"? I know plenty of cops who definitely do want this.
The internet is fond of talking about police as though they're a uniform entity that exists in more or less the same shape across the country (or the world).
They're not. The US alone has about 18000 law enforcement agencies spread across 3.7 million square miles and at least 10 distinctive regions and 50 states. Each reports to a different government body with different rules and different amounts of public participation, each has a unique culture. Plenty of our police departments are staffed by bullies, but plenty aren't. Many are staffed by people who actually believe that their role is to protect and serve, and those of us who live in communities like that are genuinely baffled by these conversations.
My understanding is that every police officer has either personally done something unethical or has watched another cop do unethical shit and look the other way. I have personally literally never heard of a cop holding their fellow cops accountable and not been punished for it by other cops. If you know of something, please tell me. I could use some more positivity in my life.
I'm not sure why it's on me to provide evidence against such a broad and sweeping claim about more than 900,000 individuals in 18,000 departments. Your claim is statistically extremely improbable on its face (except insofar as no one on the planet has never done something unethical), which is precisely my point: when you're dealing with nearly a million people in 18000 organizations spread across a country the size of the US you get a lot of variety.
As for producing evidence: of course I can't, because "police officer reports misbehavior through appropriate channels and the infringing officer is disciplined early in their career before they caused a major scandal" never becomes a headline for obvious reasons.
My personal interactions with police officers who truly believed in their mission to protect and serve and believed that the majority of their colleagues felt the same way are all I have, but I imagine that that's inadmissible.
> My understanding is that every police officer has either personally done something unethical or has watched another cop do unethical shit and look the other way.
Given it's statistically impossible that any individual has ever been able to follow every law in effect, at any given time (or place) in their life, the simple assertion that every cop has broken a law or witnessed another do so, is more likely than not.
> except insofar as no one on the planet has never done something unethical
It's accurate to say that if that's what OP meant, but it's also entirely uninteresting, so I'm kind of operating on the assumption that they didn't mean it that way.
1. I agree.
2. Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams in company vehicle and I wasn't comfortable with both the micromanaging that would invite, nor becoming training data.
Police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us working stiffs. If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. Everyone would be against body cams. Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.)
In the world we live in I am for police body cams, I think. Best worst option.
> Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams
That avenue is open for police officers too. If they don’t like the scrutiny they can and should absolutely leave the profession.
> Everyone would be against body cams
I don’t understand what you are saying. If police didn’t have the authority to use violence then everyone would be against body cams? I mean they wouldn’t be the police if that were so.
Besides one of the people who are for body cams is the police themselves. (Many of them at least). They have to deal with all sort of people. Some are okay. Some are scheming liars, who make up all kind of grievances. The body cam is protecting the officers from the lies of this second kind of people.
> Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam.
They don’t need to because they work in fixed workplaces where a fixed CCTV can cover their interactions. If waitstaff would be serving on the side of random roads, backyards, and in random homes it would probably make sense for them to wear CCTV.
> If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter.
That's the thing though, if the cop's use of violence up to killing a suspect was justified, then the body cam would not matter. So if you want that authority, then you have to expect proper oversight. The longer that oversight is avoided, the more intense that effort gets. If you don't like, don't shield those that are causing the problems.
In summary, at this point with their history, fuck'em if they don't like the oversight.
Yea the cameras aren’t really the problem. The problem is that the police are free to reach for any level of violence they want, no matter whether the situation calls for it, and are immune from repercussions. Even when the cameras are rolling, nothing stops them from beating and killing at will.
> Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.)
People working jobs like this are commonly under intense surveillance, being watched by multiple cameras from different angles for the entirety of their work day.
That sounds good, but it seems like every time I've seen body cam footage used, it's always had so much context removed as to make the police officers look as bad as possible. I usually have to go poking around for the full video and it always makes the whole situation a lot more nuanced than the bit that gets blown up by YouTube does.
Both you and the person you are responding to have valid points. You can't rely on altruism or rules alone. They must work together. Some positions require a certain level of idealism and self-accountability that can't be captured by system of rules. Police and doctors are two examples.
The comparison between police wearing body cameras and software engineers being monitored by screen recording is flawed. Police officers hold unique power and responsibility. They enforce laws, potentially use force, and make life-altering decisions. With such authority comes the need for transparency to maintain public trust.
Body cameras are essential for accountability, ensuring officers act lawfully and ethically in public interactions. This isn't just about ensuring an "honest eight-hour day". It's about protecting citizens' rights and upholding the integrity of the justice system.
In contrast, software engineers work in private environments where their actions don’t have the same direct impact on public safety or civil rights. They don’t have the same privileges as police, such as detaining individuals or using firearms in the line of duty, which require higher accountability standards.
Even when software engineers work on projects with life-impacting or public safety implications, they don’t operate in a vacuum. Best practices dictate that their work undergoes rigorous testing, peer reviews, and follows robust standards to ensure safety and effectiveness. Unlike police, who interact directly with the public and exercise immediate authority, engineers work in controlled environments without the same direct power over individuals.
and consider that it's absolutely certain that people died during the crowdstrike outage and recovery period (people die in and around healthcare locations all the time).
There will be some that died due to a delay in getting treatment, and|or other reason (see article for possible causes) and rightly or wrongly lawsuits will follow and judges will be making determinations of cause, etc.
Uh, if you are employed by a US company, they absolutely have the technical ability to screen record everything you do 24/7 on their hardware, and have the legal right to do so. Right now.
Cops have LESS accountability than your average office worker.
This makes zero sense. If I have a traffic camera in my car or an action cam on my bicycle helmet, there is no fifth amendment right to suppress that evidence in court. So, what in the fifth amendment makes this any different for a law enforcement officer?
I'm actually generally sympathetic to law enforcement officers. Most (but not all) cops are good cops. And it's a hard job. But it should be a hard job. After all, law enforcement is granted an unprecedented, exclusive power no one else has, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force. With great power comes great responsibility (and accountability). Law enforcement officers are employees of the state (which represents the people). When "we the people" collectively hire a few individuals to exercise violent force on our behalf, it's reasonable that we also require digital accountability, including GPS, video and audio recording as a term of that employment.
I’m not saying I agree but their argument seems to be that the body cameras being required to be running violates their 5th amendment rights. Your traffic camera was your choice to have running. Nobody required you to have one running.
It’s not a good argument but not wildly surprising either.
Police are employees and the cameras running is a term of their employment. To me, it seems no different than a delivery truck driver having a traffic camera on in the truck being a term of their employment. No one is forcing them to be employed in this job and they don't have a "right" to arbitrarily dismiss reasonable conditions of employment (like "wear a uniform", etc) and, in effect, force their employer to keep employing them despite not fulfilling their employment contract.
Yeah, what worries me is not that some individual police don't want accountability, but the system doesn't want to make rules that would hold police accountable.
Generally, not at the Chief level. Similar in the Fire Service. Chief/Deputy Chief/Assistant Chiefs are generally not unionized, because they have labor responsibilities.
1. The way I see it, Medina is either lying or an idiot. His signature is on the approval for SOP 2-8 which mandates the activation of OBRD; so did he sign it without reading it or willfully ignore it? Neither is acceptable of the chief of police. Besides, he has had extensive interaction with the disciplinary process and must understand the principles of e.g. Garrity protections.
2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs.
3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads.
4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process.
Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.
If you have additional authority you also have additional accountability.
When acting as an agent of the government, you don't have the same set of rights (both more and less) as one would have when acting in a commercial (agent of a corporation) or individual capacity. These are all very distrinct and (somewhat reasonably) well demarcated legal roles.
These fundamental principles (with varying levels of default qualified immunity) have been established across many sovereigns for centuries.
A police officer on duty, or in an official vehicle has zero expectation of privacy aside from being on break (say to go to the bathroom).
They are expected to fill out a duty log as a part of their job which may be used in an evidentiary capacity, and any failure to ensure that an issued piece of equipment is not used in support of that is a dereliction of duty.
>I do not understand the resistance from some police.
The police don’t care if the bodycam will exonerate them, because in the absence of a bodycam they will exonerate themselves and no one will do anything about it.
yep, when the police first stopped and attacked Tyre Nichols they had body cams on and thus only tasered and "slightly" roughed him up. When he ran away for his life and was later caught and methodically beaten do death by the police we have only security camera video from a nearby pole. If not for that video, Tyre would have died while supposedly "attempting to grab police gun" as those 5 or so police guys wrote in their falsified reports.
The Mayor’s standards for what he considers a hero are extremely low.
This police chief has no business leading other officers if this is the kind of example he sets. I understand the instinct to protect oneself, but undermining public trust to avoid a traffic citation and a substantiated complaint from a police review board should be beneath the chief of police or any officer.
Even if he is right (I firmly believe he is not) and police have a right not to incriminate themselves via body cam footage, this would only preclude courts from using footage as evidence of a cop's crimes. But what if the footage also contains evidence that a criminal defendant is innocent?
Chief Medina throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Of course the solution is not to turn off body cams. They serve a massive public good apart from catching police malfeasance - though that's good too.
The police do not have a constitutional right to prevent bad PR or boxing cops in on the facts with video.
That town sounds like the kind of place where dissenting views could face a lot of serious consequences because the corruption has captured everything.
Yep, that's a reasonable argument that people aren't going to have issues with. It would be news to almost anyone that the fifth amendment protects against not having to film yourself in the process of performing your civic duties so that you can commit crimes.
It's not far from claiming that grocery and retail thief's have a right to ask stores to turn off their security cameras so that they can steal from them.
Medina is special. It’s hard to understand that this guy hasn’t been fired already. Instead they just gave him a 100k SUV. It always amazes how low the standards for police are in the US and the things they get away with.
Uvalde re-elected all the shitheads that let their children die and actively prevented parents from intervening. Americans don't care if innocent people die in their pursuit to ensure that "bad" people suffer, and it really is the suffering that matters. Americans don't seem to be satisfied with a bad person merely sequestered away from society. It's funny, for people who believe in Godly judgement and actual Hell more than most developed countries, they sure love taking it upon themselves to do the punishing.
I guess they forget that god explicitly says they aren't supposed to do that.
Makes it difficult to lie on police reports and in court if they have video evidence saying otherwise.
The police making this argument should be taken as a general admission that by turning the cameras off, they intend to do something illegal. Otherwise the fifth amendment argument would be irrelevant.
Solution: Since the third party doctrine removes fourth and fifth amendment protections from everyone, just have Facebook or Google run the body cameras.
Um, the 5th gives you the right not to talk. It doesn't give you the right not to be recorded should you choose to talk. A cop has every right not to admit crimes into a government microphone. That is something different than saying that cops can disable microphones just in case they say something.
Simple response. Nope. They don’t. They are employees, and the body camera's falls under employee/employer contract law. They don’t have to be a cop. But if they want to be, they have to follow the rules of their employer.
The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature.
The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock.
Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.