"Is that a law?" Sharpe asks in the recording. "That's not a law."
In 2022, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that would allow the city's police department to access footage from private security cameras under certain circumstances. A new city report sheds light on just how much the police have used the privilege.
Between 2021 and 2022, news reports depicted a wave of "smash-and-grab" retail thefts across California. San Francisco Mayor London Breed complained that city policy did not allow police to access security camera footage during emergency situations. "Where there were multiple robbery crews hitting multiple stores, [police] couldn't even access those cameras, which is ridiculous," Breed said in December 2021.
"There is a balance to be had, I know," she noted. "But right now, if our officers cannot use cameras during a mass looting event, then that policy is out of balance."
The following year, at Breed's urging, the city government implemented a 15-month pilot program in which the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) could "temporarily live monitor activity during exigent circumstances, significant events with public safety concerns, and investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations." Investigators would need the camera owner's "express consent," but they could access the feed live for up to 24 hours after receiving access.
As part of the ordinance, the SFPD would compile quarterly reports detailing how many times it requested access to video footage and for how long. The report released in January shows that in the third quarter of 2023, covering July through September, SFPD made 34 requests to view private footage, all of which were approved. All told, 51 officers and 13 sergeants spent a collective 193 hours and 19 minutes monitoring live surveillance footage—the equivalent of more than eight full days in a three-month period.
Despite being touted as a method to disrupt mass retail theft, 29 out of the 34 requests were for narcotics investigations. Police made 49 arrests as a result of surveillance, of which 42 were for narcotics—including possession or sale of opiates, heroin, methamphetamine, etc.—while two were for homicide, four were for "theft/larceny," and one was for "delaying, or obstructing peace officer duties" in connection with possessing or receiving stolen property.
Interestingly, all of the requests stemmed from just five census tracts—plots of land that cover about 4,000 residents on average.
The report is anonymized, excluding any information about the camera owners "to decrease the likelihood that they may face retaliation related to criminal investigations." But there is still enough to be able to draw certain conclusions.
"By far the longest monitoring session was during the Outside Lands Music Festival in August in Golden Gate Park, when officers watched 42 total hours of live footage," the San Francisco Chronicle noted in its review of the available data. "Police were able to make five arrests for theft, pickpocketing and resisting an officer during that time, but it's unclear what other use police had for the nearly two consecutive days of live media feeds during the festival."
Further, "only one of those five arrests led the district attorney's office to file charges."
Proponents may point to the arrests as evidence of the policy's success, even apart from the two homicide suspects. Immediately after taking office in 2022, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins backed Breed's proposal for what became the pilot program. "This policy can help address the existence of open-air drug markets fueling the sale of the deadly drug fentanyl," Jenkins noted. "Drug dealers are destroying people's lives and wreaking havoc on neighborhoods like the Tenderloin," one of the five census tracts represented in the report.
But it's not clear whether the same results could have been achieved without giving police real-time access to private cameras.
"The need for greater transparency…is crucial to truly evaluate the impact that access to live surveillance has had on policing," write Saira Hussain and Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In particular, the SFPD's data fails to make clear how live surveillance helps police prevent or solve crimes in a way that footage after the fact does not."
But rather than erring on the side of caution, San Francisco is openly embracing further surveillance: The city is rolling out new traffic cameras, which are more effective at filling government coffers than preventing traffic fatalities.
Next month, city residents will be able to vote on Proposition E, which would "permit the [SFPD] to use Surveillance Technology for at least one year" before the city government could disallow it. As one city employee said at a November 2023 meeting of the Board of Supervisors, the SFPD would "have a one-year pilot period to experiment, to work through new technology to see how they work," apparently making San Franciscans into guinea pigs for the surveillance state.
The post San Francisco Police Spent 193 Hours Over 3 Months Watching Private Surveillance Footage appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a victory for privacy rights, the country's leading video doorbell company announced this week that it would no longer give law enforcement agencies direct access to customers' footage.
Ring, which is owned by Amazon, offers a companion app called Neighbors, which lets users upload and share footage captured by their Ring video doorbells and surveillance cameras. The company touts that Neighbors improves safety and fosters a sense of community.
Ring debuted the Request for Assistance tool in 2021, a Neighbors feature through which law enforcement agencies could "request information or video" from users. Ring noted at the time that "you always have total control over your experience. Request for Assistance posts are opt-in, nothing is shared with any agency unless you actively go through the steps of choosing to do so." Requests would also be publicly accessible.
Eric Kuhn, who runs Neighbors, wrote on the site's blog this week that Ring would be "sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool." Kuhn noted that "public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events," but "they will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app."
Kuhn didn't specify why Ring was choosing to shutter the RFA tool, but it was a potential civil liberties nightmare. As Reason noted in July 2022, police departments could access users' Ring footage without a warrant. While Ring insisted that users had control over who had access to their footage, the Law Enforcement Request page on Amazon's website included a bright red "Submit Emergency Request" button, and Amazon's Law Enforcement Guidelines noted that the company "reserves the right to respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving a threat to public safety or risk of harm to any person."
In response to a letter from Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), Amazon admitted in July 2022 that "so far this year, Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times." While Amazon was apparently proud of its restraint, that it had only granted 11 requests in six months, Jason Kelley and Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that "there is no process for a judge or the device owner to determine whether there actually was an emergency. This could easily lead to police abuse: there will always be temptation for police to use it for increasingly less urgent situations."
This was especially concerning given how closely the company aligned itself with law enforcement: In major cities like Akron, Ohio, and El Monte, California, Ring donated doorbell cameras for police departments to give out for free. Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, started a cloud-based doorbell camera registry in which citizens could make their recordings easily available to police.
Notably, the RFA program being discontinued is separate from Amazon's Law Enforcement Request tool; as Ring's parent company, Amazon may still be able to exert authority over Ring's disclosure decisions. But it still signals a step in the right direction that police departments will increasingly need to rely on warrants if they want access to your private footage.
Cmdr. Joe Garrett with Illinois's Merrionette Park Police Department told CBS 2 that he was "a little disappointed" with the change, but added, "We'll learn to adjust to it. If we have to get search warrants, we'll have to learn to be a little quicker about it."
The post Amazon's Ring Will Stop Giving Police Your Doorbell Footage Without a Warrant appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy as We Know It, by Kashmir Hill, Random House, 352 pages, $28.99
"Do I want to live in a society where people can be identified secretly and at a distance by the government?" asks Alvaro Bedoya. "I do not, and I think I am not alone in that."
Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says those words in New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill's compelling new book, Your Face Belongs to Us. As Hill makes clear, we are headed toward the very world that Bedoya fears.
This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company's existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could identify nearly anyone on the planet based only on a snapshot of their face.
Hill spent several months trying to talk with Clearview AI's founders and investors, and they in turn tried to dodge her inquiries. Ultimately, she tracked down an early investor, David Scalzo, who reluctantly began to tell her about the company. After she suggested the app would bring an end to anonymity, Scalzo replied: "I've come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there's never going to be privacy. You can't ban technology. Sure, it might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can't ban it." He pointed out that law enforcement loves Clearview AI's facial recognition app.
As Hill documents, the company was founded by a trio of rather sketchy characters. The chief technological brain is an Australian entrepreneur named Hoan Ton-That. His initial partners included the New York political fixer Richard Schwartz and the notorious right-wing edgelord and troll Charles Johnson.
Mesmerized by the tech ferment of Silicon Valley, the precocious coder Ton-That moved there at age 19; there he quickly occupied himself creating various apps, including in 2009 the hated video-sharing ViddyHo "worm," which hijacked Google Talk contact lists to spew out a stream of instant messages to click on its video offerings. After the uproar over ViddyHo, Ton-That kept a lower profile working on various other apps, eventually decamping to New York City in 2016.
In the meantime, Ton-That began toying online with alt-right and MAGA conceits, an interest that led him to Johnson. The two attended the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump was nominated. At that convention, Johnson briefly introduced Ton-That to internet financier Peter Thiel, who would later be an angel investor in what became Clearview AI. (For what it's worth, Ton-That now says he regrets his earlier alt-right dalliances.)
Ton-That and Schwartz eventually cut Johnson out of the company. As revenge for his ouster, Johnson gave Hill access to tons of internal emails and other materials that illuminate the company's evolution into the biggest threat to our privacy yet developed.
"We have developed a revolutionary, web-based intelligence platform for law enforcement to use as a tool to help generate high-quality investigative leads," explains the company's website. "Our platform, powered by facial recognition technology, includes the largest known database of 40+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources."
***
As Hill documents, the billions of photos in Clearview AI's ever-growing database were scraped without permission from Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media sites. The company argues that what it is doing is no different than the way Google catalogs links and data for its search engine, only that theirs is for photographs. The legal memo leaked to Hill was part of the company's defense against numerous lawsuits filed by social media companies and privacy advocates who objected to the data scraping.
Scalzo is right that law enforcement loves the app. In March, Ton-That told the BBC that U.S. police agencies have run nearly a million searches using Clearview AI. Agencies used it to identify suspects in the January 6 Capitol riot, for example. Of course, it does not always finger the right people. Police in New Orleans misused faulty face IDs from Clearview AI's app to arrest and detain an innocent black man.
Some privacy activists argue that facial recognition technologies are racially biased and do not work as well on some groups. But as developers continued to train their algorithms, they mostly fixed that problem; the software's disparities with respect to race, gender, and age are now so negligible as to be statistically insignificant. In testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hill reports, Clearview AI ranked among the world's most accurate facial recognition companies.
***
To see the possible future of pervasive facial recognition, Hill looks at how China and Russia are already using the technology. As part of its "safe city" initiative, Russian authorities in Moscow have installed over 200,000 surveillance cameras. Hill recounts an experiment by the Russian civil liberties activist Anna Kuznetsova, who submitted her photos to a black market data seller with access to the camera network. Two weeks later, she received a 35-page report detailing each time the system identified her face on a surveillance camera. There were 300 sightings in all. The system also accurately predicted where she lived and where she worked. While the data seller was punished, the system remains in place; it is now being used to identify anti-government protesters.
"Every society needs to decide for itself what takes priority," said Kuznetsova, "whether it's security or human rights."
The Chinese government has deployed over 700 million surveillance cameras; in many cases, artificial intelligence analyzes their output in real time. Chinese authorities have used it to police behavior like jaywalking and to monitor racial and religious minorities and political dissidents. Hill reports there is a "red list" of VIPs who are invisible to facial recognition systems. "In China, being unseen is a privilege," she writes.
In August 2023, the Chinese government issued draft regulations that aim to limit the private use of facial recognition technologies; the rules impose no such restrictions on its use for "national security" concerns.
Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are using facial recognition tech to monitor women protesting for civil rights by refusing to wear hijabs in public.
Coappearance analysis using artificial intelligence allows users to review either live or recorded video and identify all of the other people with whom a person of interest has come into contact. Basically, real-time facial recognition will not only keep track of you; it will identify your friends, family, coreligionists, political allies, business associates, and sexual partners and log when and where and for how long you hung out with them. The San Jose, California–based company Vintra asserts that its co-appearance technology "will rank these interactions, allowing the user to identify the most recurrent relationships and understand potential threats." Perhaps your boss will think your participation in an anti-vaccine rally or visit to a gay bar qualifies as a "potential threat."
What about private use of facial recognition technology? It certainly sounds like a product with potential: Personally, I am terrible at matching names to faces, so incorporating facial recognition into my glasses would be a huge social boon. Hill tests a Clearview AI prototype of augmented reality glasses that can do just that. Alas, the glasses provide viewers access to all the other photos of the person in Clearview AI's database, including snapshots at drunken college parties, at protest rallies, and with former lovers.
"Facial recognition is the perfect tool for oppression," argued Woodrow Hartzog, then a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, and Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology, back in 2018. They also called it "the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented." Unlike other biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints and DNA, your face is immediately visible wherever you roam. The upshot of the cheery slogan "your face is your passport" is that authorities don't even have to bother with demanding "your papers, please" to identify and track you.
In September 2023, Human Rights Watch and 119 other civil rights groups from around the world issued a statement calling "on police, other state authorities and private companies to immediately stop using facial recognition for the surveillance of publicly-accessible spaces and for the surveillance of people in migration or asylum contexts." Human Rights Watch added separately that the technology "is simply too dangerous and powerful to be used without negative consequences for human rights….As well as undermining privacy rights, the technology threatens our rights to equality and nondiscrimination, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly."
The United States is cobbling together what Hill calls a "rickety surveillance state" built on this and other surveillance technologies. "We have only the rickety scaffolding of the Panopticon; it is not yet fully constructed," she observes. "We still have time to decide whether or not we actually want to build it.
The post Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who watches the watchmen? All of us, if we're smart. In the age of surveillance, that means monitoring how and where the snoops put us under scrutiny. Among the people and organizations doing such important work is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which recently updated one of its countersurveillance tools.
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans' privacy," the group announced January 10.
The hub consolidates information about such evolving and increasingly common technologies as automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones, face recognition, gunshot detection, and social media monitoring. There's also a news section featuring relevant articles about such topics as the huge amount of data modern cars collect about their drivers and the legal status of surveillance efforts in various jurisdictions.
Not all of the technologies and practices covered by the Street Level Surveillance hub are inherently bad; body-worn cameras (BWCs), for instance, have been championed by reformers as a means of recording interactions between police and the public so that there's an objective record of events.
"For nearly two decades, law enforcement agencies have explored and implemented the use of body cameras as a tool to help hold officers accountable and make departments more transparent," PBS News Hour reported in 2020.
But, as EFF points out, "because police often control when BWCs are turned on and how the footage is stored, BWCs often fail to do the one thing they were intended to do: record video of how police interact with the public." The organization says the cameras should be used only with strict safeguards regarding usage, privacy, and storage of recordings.
Other technologies are more obviously intrusive, such as automated license plate readers (ALPRs) which "capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time." While the readers have the potential to solve crimes by showing who was at the scene, they do so by following people's movements and can build patterns of life around where people travel and with whom they associate.
"Where you go can reveal many things about you—whether you attend political rallies, which religious institution you attend, if you go to the gun store," the ACLU's Allie Bohn warned the South Bend Tribune in 2014 about the use of automated license plate readers.
That was two years after New York City cops were found to be tracking mosque attendance using ALPRs.
EFF engages in extensive litigation to limit the use of ALPRs and to restrict data-sharing among law-enforcement agencies.
The Street Level Surveillance hub integrates closely with EFF's already established Atlas of Surveillance. Users can search the Atlas for jurisdictions to see what surveillance tools are currently in use in their hometowns or in places they're visiting.
Unsurprisingly, Washington, D.C. is closely monitored by the powers that be. Residents and visitors in the nation's capital are scrutinized by automated license plate readers, face recognition scanning by the FBI of driver's license photos, a registry of private security cameras, gunshot detection microphones (yes, they can overhear conversations), cell-site simulators which pinpoint the locations of phones and their users, and more. The Atlas lists the surveillance tools used in the city and links to more information on them—including the extensive write-ups on the Street Level Surveillance hub.
The Atlas also includes an interactive map of the United States plotting the use of various surveillance technologies, including links to information about local implementations. It's a handy tool if you're planning a trip and want to see just how likely it is that you'll wind up on somebody's radar (or camera, or microphone). In 2022, I used the map to trace a road trip my son and I took to visit a college campus in Kansas.
"According to the Atlas of Surveillance, we passed through jurisdictions that, in addition to bodycams and doorbell cameras, register private surveillance cameras for official use, monitor the public with drones, detect gunshots, use facial recognition, track cellphones, and automatically check passing license plates against databases," I wrote at the time.
That route isn't becoming any more private, but the leg of our journey through northeastern New Mexico and into Kansas remains relatively unmonitored.
For those who truly want to marinate in the Big Brother experience, EFF also offers Spot the Surveillance, a virtual reality tool demonstrating how to identify spying technologies. According to the summary, "the user is placed in a 360-degree scene in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, where a young resident is in the middle of a police encounter. By looking up, down, and all around, you must identify a variety of surveillance technologies in the environment, including a body-worn camera, automated license plate readers, a drone, a mobile biometric device, and pan-tilt-zoom cameras."
No, thanks. I'm paranoid enough as it is.
For anybody concerned about privacy and surveillance, and interested in how the use of such technologies is implemented and regulated, EFF's Street Level Surveillance hub offers a handy resource. Instead of wondering just what biometric surveillance is, you can quickly look it up and be simultaneously informed and creeped out by discovering that it "encompasses a collection of methods for tracking individuals using physical or biological characteristics, ranging from fingerprint and DNA collection to gait recognition and heartbeat tracking."
Biometric surveillance is an evolving field and not yet widely implemented as such, though various technologies under the very broad heading (it includes tattoo recognition) are certainly gaining ground. But it's closely related to face recognition, which is all over the place.
It's all just a little bit spooky. But so long as the snoops are watching us—and they are—it's only fair that we return the favor by keeping an eye on them, too.
The post The Cops Are Watching You appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In May, Reason wrote about the trend of "First Amendment auditors," activists who film in government buildings in order to test the limits of what is and is not allowed. One in particular, SeanPaul Reyes, films with a GoPro and posts the videos on his YouTube account. Reyes has been arrested multiple times for filming in public places, including inside New York City police stations.
Today, Reyes filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD in conjunction with LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a New York–based legal defense fund that focuses on police abuse. LatinoJustice attorney Andrew Case announced the suit at a press conference Monday afternoon.
The NYPD Patrol Guide states that while recording the police is generally allowed, "Members of the public are not allowed to photograph and/or record police activity within Department facilities," and officers are authorized to ask the person to stop filming and to arrest them if they don't. A department spokesperson told Gothamist that recording inside a police station "undermines the privacy of people who interact with the criminal justice system and compromises the integrity of ongoing investigations."
Case says the NYPD is correct—up to a point. He tells Reason that while parts of the police station are certainly off limits, "publicly accessible lobbies" are a different story. "The NYPD says it needs this policy to protect the identity of those waiting in line in a precinct's public lobby," Case noted in the Monday press conference. "But precincts have plenty of private space. Sensitive witnesses do not come in through the front door and wait for a detective before a crowd of strangers."
"The First Amendment is obviously not absolute," Case tells Reason. "There are some places—for example, courtrooms—where there are rules about when you can and cannot record. And these have been developed, and these have been tailored, and these have been examined under the First Amendment."
"Our contention is [the NYPD's] rule, and the way this rule was written, and the way this rule is implemented, since it's an absolute ban, is not narrowly tailored and, therefore, will violate the First Amendment."
In addition to court costs and attorney fees, Reyes seeks an injunction against the NYPD preventing officers from arresting anyone for simply filming in publicly accessible areas.
Reyes has run afoul of government officials across the country through his activism: Earlier this year, he was found guilty of simple trespass in Danbury, Connecticut, for filming inside City Hall. In May 2021, Reyes was arrested for obstruction after filming a traffic stop conducted by a sheriff's deputy in Harford County, Maryland; he later agreed to community service and a written apology to the deputy in exchange for prosecutors dropping the charge.
But Reyes's activism has also born results: Police in Rahway, New Jersey, launched an internal investigation over officers' treatment of Reyes. Reyes' trespassing arrest in Danbury prompted neighboring towns to reevaluate and reassess their own public filming policies, and a Danbury officer was docked five days' pay for using an anti-gay slur during the arrest.
Case charges that the NYPD forbids recording in precincts "so that it can control what video comes out of the precincts." Ideally, the presence of police-worn body cameras would obviate much of the need for citizens to do their own filming. But New York City has dragged its feet in recent years on complying with requests for body camera footage. A 2019 Gotham Gazette report noted that the city had provided 140,000 body camera videos to the Brooklyn district attorney during the previous year, even as it was "delayed or completely delinquent" in filling about one-third of citizen requests for footage.
Citizen recording offers an extra layer of accountability that cities may be unwilling, or hesitant, to provide.
Nationally, the legal climate for allowing citizens to film police is growing more tolerant as well. Arizona passed a law last summer that would ban filming within 8 feet of police. On Friday, Judge John Tuchi of the U.S. District Court of Arizona ruled the law unconstitutional and blocked its enforcement. Citing other state laws that protect police from interference, Tuchi wrote that the law "prohibits or chills a substantial amount of First Amendment protected activity and is unnecessary to prevent interference with police officers."
The post 'First Amendment Auditor' Sues NYPD Over Right To Record in Police Stations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In December, Reason reported that game wardens were trespassing onto private land and placing trail cameras in order to conduct surveillance—all without a warrant. In an ironic twist on that trend, a new lawsuit filed this week by the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, accuses Virginia's wildlife agency of trespassing on private land and taking a trail camera.
Josh Highlander lives at the end of a quiet residential road in rural Virginia. His house sits on about 30 acres and has "No Trespassing" signs posted all around the property line. On April 8, the first day of turkey season, Highlander's wife and son were outside playing basketball. When their ball rolled toward the woods, Highlander's wife went to retrieve it—and spotted an unknown person in the trees wearing full camouflage. She rushed her son back into the house and told her husband.
Highlander rushed outside and made a circle of the property around the house but didn't see anybody. By this point, Highlander already knew that both his father and brother had encountered agents of the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) that day—he assumed that if the mystery guest wasn't a hunter who had gotten lost, then it was probably the DWR.
Later that night, Highlander noticed that one of his trail cameras—located about 150 yards from his house—had stopped transmitting photos. When he went out to check, he discovered the camera was gone. It was only once he contacted the county sheriff to report the camera stolen that he learned it was in the possession of the DWR, which he says has yet to contact him about it.
On June 8, Highlander held a press conference at his house with I.J. attorneys Joe Gay and Josh Windham to announce a lawsuit against the DWR for what Gay characterized as its "unconstitutional policy and practice of searching private land throughout the Commonwealth, without a warrant, and seizing private property from that land, also without a warrant."
Highlander assumes that DWR plans to search the camera's photos for evidence of hunting violations to use against him. "It doesn't seem right," he said at the press conference, "knowing that at any second, the game wardens could roll up here and ticket you based on something that they took from you,…retroactively using your property against you."
Reason has reported that wildlife agencies often trespass on private land without warrants or permission. (In one case in Connecticut, wildlife agents even attached cameras to bears in order to conduct passive surveillance.) As justification, states cite the "open fields" doctrine, in which a century of Supreme Court precedent holds that open fields contain fewer Fourth Amendment protections than a person's home and the "curtilage," the area immediately surrounding it.
Some states actually provide greater protections than the Fourth Amendment: In 2018's State v. Dupuis, the Vermont Supreme Court found that "Vermont's Constitution establishes greater protection against search and seizure of 'open fields' than the U.S. Constitution, requiring that law enforcement officers secure warrants before searching open fields when the landowner demonstrates an expectation of privacy," such as by putting up "No Trespassing" signs.
As the I.J. lawsuit states, "Article I, Section 10 of the Virginia Constitution forbids government officers from conducting warrantless fishing expeditions—roving searches and seizures of private property—in hopes of uncovering evidence against the owner." The lawsuit asks for reimbursement of Highlander's "cost and expenses," an order for the state to return his camera and destroy any photos it took or retained, and injunctions declaring the state's actions to be unconstitutional.
The post Virginia Wildlife Agents Came Onto His Land and Stole His Camera. Now He's Suing. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Recording the police can be an effective tool for transparency and oversight, but a new report shows how far the New York Police Department will go to keep from being filmed.
Courts have generally upheld a right to film so long as citizens don't physically obstruct official police business. But police departments are constantly relitigating the question. In 2018, for instance, North Carolina police claimed that a right to record the police did not include a right to livestream the police. A federal appeals court rejected that argument in February.
This week, an article in Gothamist profiled "First Amendment auditors" who film in government buildings, including police stations, to test the boundaries of what is and is not allowed. One activist in particular, SeanPaul Reyes, posts his encounters with police in New York City on the YouTube account Long Island Audit. He has been arrested multiple times for filming.
The NYPD claims that while recording police may be okay, recording inside a police station is not. A department spokesperson told Gothamist that recording inside precincts is forbidden "because it undermines the privacy of people who interact with the criminal justice system and compromises the integrity of ongoing investigations."
This question is also not settled in jurisprudence. In 2020, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled that the First Amendment did not protect filming in a police station lobby.
But New York City is different: After the NYPD banned filming within police precincts in 2018, the City Council passed the Right to Record Act, which codified an affirmative right to record police officers "acting in their official capacity, with limited exceptions." The bill contains no provisions that would prevent filming within police stations.
The law also required the NYPD to publish "the number of arrests, criminal summonses, and civil summonses in which the person arrested or summonsed was recording police activities." Gothamist reported that between 2021–22, there were more than 2,700 arrests of people who were recording police.
Notably, those 2,700-plus people were not arrested for filming the police but while filming the police. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2022, 396 people were arrested while filming the police; the most common offenses listed were second- and third-degree assault (62 total incidents), petit larceny (25 incidents), and resisting arrest (22 incidents).
Despite the law's passage, police remain hostile to being recorded. Last year, New York Mayor Eric Adams warned citizen videographers from standing too close to police while filming, suggesting that "If your iPhone can't catch that picture with you being at a safe distance, then you need to upgrade your iPhone."
Speaking to Gothamist, former NYPD Lt. Eric Dym accused activists like Reyes of "maneuvering and manipulating the law" and said they should consult with officers on the scene before filming. Before he retired last year, Dym had more civilian complaints than any other NYPD officer, including 52 allegations of misconduct; up to that point, the city had paid out more than $1.5 million to settle lawsuits in which he was named.
The NYPD's refusal to allow filming may not be legal. "It's kind of a delicate balance that depends on the situation," Stephen Solomon, editor of NYU's First Amendment Watch, told Gothamist. "But a blanket restriction typically is not consistent with the First Amendment."
The post NYPD Claims It's Illegal To Film in a Police Station appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. Navy had the National Park Service remove two privately owned webcams from Cabrillo National Monument after those cameras captured two Navy ships almost colliding in San Diego Bay. In a statement, Navy officials cited security reasons, saying the 24-hour video feed from the cameras revealed "aircraft hangars and flight lines [at Naval Air Station North Island], Naval Base Point Loma submarine assets, and the tracking of military personnel working aboard Naval Base Coronado." But Barry Bahrami, who owns the cameras, said they had been in place for almost 10 years, and the Navy never raised any security concerns until viewers saw the near collision between the ships.
The post Brickbat: Setbacks at Sea appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yes, you are well within your First Amendment rights to livestream video of police officers in action. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit confirmed that in a ruling released this week.
It really shouldn't have been a question. Courts have, on a number of occasions, upheld the right to photograph or take video of police officers.
But police officers in Winterville, North Carolina, insisted that livestreaming that video on social media is different. During a 2018 traffic stop—which car passenger Dijon Sharpe started sharing on Facebook Live—an officer tried to take away Sharpe's phone, calling it an "officer safety issue." Another officer told Sharpe, "In the future, if you're on Facebook Live, your phone is gonna be taken from you…and if you don't want to give up your phone, you'll go to jail."
Sharpe sued. And a U.S. district court sided against him, writing "that an individual's right under the First Amendment to record a traffic stop" and to "real-time broadcast a traffic stop from within the stopped car" was not "clearly established." That meant the officers involved were entitled to qualified immunity.
Sharpe then took the case to a federal appeals court, with a horde of civil liberties groups —including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute, and the National Police Accountability Project—backing his position.
This time, the court sided with Sharpe in part.
Winterville "failed to establish that the alleged livestreaming policy is sufficiently grounded in, and tailored to, strong governmental interests to survive First Amendment scrutiny," the court held in a Tuesday decision, penned by Judge Julius N. Richardson. "So we vacate the district court's order declaring the policy constitutional and remand for further proceedings."
"Creating and disseminating information is protected speech under the First Amendment," noted Richardson:
And other courts have routinely recognized these principles extend the First Amendment to cover recording—particularly when the information involves matters of public interest like police encounters….
We agree. Recording police encounters creates information that contributes to discussion about governmental affairs. So too does livestreaming disseminate that information, often creating its own record. We thus hold that livestreaming a police traffic stop is speech protected by the First Amendment.
Nonetheless, the Winterville police officers are still entitled to qualified immunity, the court held. Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, police officers are only open to individual liability if they violate a clearly established right that is protected by the Constitution. But the legality of livestreaming traffic stops was not clearly established, the judges said.
"The State of Our Union Sucks." In yesterday's Roundup, we covered President Joe Biden's 2023 State of the Union address and his weird quest to micromanage the minutiae of American travel. Since then, Reason has published a half-dozen posts tackling various other facets of Biden's comments and proposals.
"The state of our union sucks," writes Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch, taking a big-picture view of Biden's speech. "The bipartisan (if shouty!) embrace of big-government nationalism ensures our populist moment won't end any time soon."
Other Reason writers have tackled Biden's comments on immigration, schooling, policing, and more. Check them out:
• Biden's Foreign Policy Is Adrift
• The Cops Who Killed Tyre Nichols Could Be Convicted of Murder and Still Get Qualified Immunity
• Biden's Claims About Universal Pre-K Are Malarkey
• Biden's Proposed Assault Weapon Ban Is Unconstitutional, Unlikely, and Ineffectual
• Biden's Anti-Vaping Policies Undermine Cancer Moonshot
• Calls To 'Close the Border' in Response to Fentanyl Deaths Are Misguided
Bonus: Joe Lancaster takes a look at the GOP rebuttal to Biden's speech, which was "light on policy and heavy on grievances."
On vanity license plates, selective censorship, and Tennesseans' fondness for DEEZNTS:
Do vanity plates communicate secret messages from Tennessee's government? Listen to today's argument to find out: https://t.co/Q9G61IVHPJ. https://t.co/5q2Cv9q7s2 pic.twitter.com/YPrdnbehcs
— Daniel A. Horwitz (@danielahorwitz) February 8, 2023
The case in question involves a Nashville woman, Leah Gilliam, whose vanity plate—69PWNDU—was deemed by the Tennessee Department of Revenue to be illegally offensive. More from the lawyer bringing the case here.
Gun rights in Biden's America. Today, Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, and the Heritage Foundation Legal Fellow Amy Swearer will be having a live discussion about gun rights and gun violence in Biden's America.
Biden is definitely no fan of gun rights. But a series of court decisions and policy changes "have expanded Second Amendment rights over the past several decades," notes Gillespie. So are gun rights actually growing or shrinking these days? And what about gun violence?
Tune in on YouTube starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time to hear them discuss.
Google lost $100B of market cap today as its Chatbot Bard made a factual error during its first-ever demo and its AI event fell flat.
Must be the most costly live demo fail of all time
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) February 8, 2023
• "The Labor Department's internal watchdog identified nearly $30 billion more in pandemic unemployment benefits that were wrongfully sent out than previously estimated," reports Politico. That brings the total of wrongful payments to approximately $191 billion.
• The House Oversight Committee is fighting Twitter censorship the wrong way, Robby Soave writes. "The approach taken by the Republican House majority—haul tech executives before Congress and attack them for being the victims of government pressure—is both counterproductive to the goal of defending free speech online, as well as a galling example of Republican members of Congress doing the very thing they claim to oppose."
The post Yes, You Have a First Amendment Right To Livestream Cops appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. House of Representatives has struggled all week to elect a new speaker. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.), the presumptive frontrunner, has so far lost over a dozen separate votes as he struggles to win over dissenters in his own party.
During what should otherwise be a completely routine and unexceptional parliamentary procedure, viewers are glued to C-SPAN, the nonprofit cable channel that has aired live, unedited footage from the House floor since 1979. The proceedings have even produced viral moments: Newly-elected congressman and serial fabulist George Santos (R–N.Y.) sitting alone in the House chamber. Children, tired and bored, waiting for their parents to finish.
In two other separate videos, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) spoke privately with far-right Reps. Paul Gosar (R–Ariz.) and Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), her presumptive ideological opposites. The video of Gaetz and Ocasio-Cortez prompted speculation as to what the two were discussing; when The Intercept's Ryan Grim asked her, Ocasio-Cortez said that the two were discussing a "side deal" that McCarthy allegedly tried to strike with some Democrats.
If this week feels unusually exciting for the typically staid C-SPAN, there's a reason for that. Ben O'Connell, C-SPAN's director of editorial operations, told VICE that private video cameras are usually not allowed in the U.S. House. The House Recording Studio, a government entity, controls all cameras in the chamber and allows C-SPAN and others to broadcast the footage it captures. Many times over four decades, C-SPAN asked for permission to add its own cameras to the chamber, and each time the House denied the request.
But C-SPAN is allowed to bring in its own cameras during certain high-profile events, like swearing-in ceremonies or the State of the Union. Since the House speaker vote is one of those events, and it has stretched on for several days, the cameras have been able to stay and capture candid moments between members that would otherwise not be seen by anybody not physically present.
In practice, there are strict rules on what the House's own cameras may cover, only showing the member speaking or a wide shot of the dais. In the past, any deviations from that format proved controversial: Then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.), who joined Congress the same year C-SPAN debuted, routinely gave speeches after House business had concluded, for the benefit of the viewing audience at home. In 1984, then-Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill (D–Mass.) ordered the cameras to cut away and show that Gingrich was addressing an empty chamber. The incident later led to a contentious debate on the House floor.
In fact, government officials often resist openness: Even though C-SPAN started showing House proceedings in 1979, the Senate did not assent until 1986. The Supreme Court still does not allow video or even photographs of its oral arguments; it took the COVID-19 pandemic for the Court to finally offer livestreaming audio rather than simply transcripts and recordings after the fact.
The benefits of more openness are apparent this week in the House: Elected representatives earning a taxpayer-funded salary should be doing their business in as open a manner as possible. That not only includes their public speeches but what they do when they're not speaking into a microphone.
We only know about Gaetz and Ocasio-Cortez's private confab because it took place while C-SPAN was allowed in; that few seconds on air led to widespread speculation, which prompted journalists to look into it and learn more information about McCarthy's wheeling-and-dealing behind closed doors. Without the special permission granted for the event, the American public would not have known about any of it.
More openness in government is a good thing, even (and especially) when government officials resist it. After a new speaker is elected, he or she should allow the new cameras to stay.
The post Cameras Should Stay in Place After the House Picks a Speaker appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's a common type of government official who sincerely believes the world would be better and their suffering subjects much happier if the restraints were removed and politicians were free to act as they wish. That their sincere belief in their goodness is exactly why we need those restraints always escapes them. The latest example of the breed is New York City Mayor Eric Adams who, unironically, urges his constituents to embrace the surveillance state because "Big Brother is protecting you."
Adams, a former police officer who took office at the beginning of 2022, has made an issue of crime in the city, which is rising following pandemic-era disruptions to society after decades of decline. He returned to crime last week in an interview with Politico's Sally Goldenberg and Joe Anuta:
Adams promised an expansion of technology-assisted policing to detect weapons. Over the past year, he has promoted the use of cameras and lauded divisive facial recognition devices.
"It blows my mind how much we have not embraced technology, and part of that is because many of our electeds are afraid. Anything technology they think, 'Oh it's a boogeyman. It's Big Brother watching you,'" Adams said. "No, Big Brother is protecting you."
This isn't the first time that Adams has invoked surveillance as the cure for crime concerns. Last January, his office issued a "Blueprint to End Gun Violence," and the mayor vowed that "from facial recognition technology to new tools that can spot those carrying weapons, we will use every available method to keep our people safe." But now Mayor Adams is openly belittling concerns about the surveillance state and urging city residents to learn to love Big Brother. At no time has he acknowledged that Big Brother might be a sketchy character, or that his former colleagues at the NYPD have an unfortunate history of abusing surveillance powers—a history that the city's own government acknowledges.
"The NYPD's surveillance of individuals and organizations perceived as enemies of the status quo dates back to early 1900s," notes a 2019 article published by the New York City Department of Records & Information Services. "At different periods, the focus was on anarchists, labor leaders, Nazi supporters, white supremacists, socialists, and communists."
Controversy over decades of surveillance led to litigation and the 1985 Handschu Guidelines, which created a mixed panel of civilians and police to oversee future surveillance.
In the post-9/11 period, those guidelines were relaxed as much mass surveillance focused on Muslims, coming to an end (supposedly) only in 2014 with the resolution of a lawsuit against the city. Still, in 2016, Senior United States District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. disapproved the settlement in the case pending stronger safeguards after the revelation of "repeated, near-systemic violations by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau of a pertinent Handschu Guideline."
"It must be acknowledged that the history of the NYPD's adherence has been problematic at times," added Haight about years of continuous violations. "In the 2003 opinion reported at 288 F. Supp. 2d 411, the court had to deal with NYPD detention and questioning of anti-war demonstrators inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the newly enacted Modified Handschu Guidelines."
So, if Eric Adams wonders why people embrace George Orwell's warnings and fret, "Oh it's a boogeyman. It's Big Brother watching you," it's because the police have been watching all sorts of people for over a century, often in violation of even rules loosened for their convenience.
The surveillance technology championed by Adams offers new opportunities for abuse. For example, ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, relies on microphones scattered around the city to detect loud noises which its technology then identifies as either harmless or shooting-related, with various degrees of accuracy. You see where this is going, right? Microphones scattered around the city… .
"Though the microphones are as high as 100 feet above the ground, they have the ability to pick up intelligible conversations, which have been deemed admissible in court as part of several criminal cases around the country," Anthony Fisher wrote for Reason in 2015.
Earlier this month, emails obtained by Bloomberg revealed that ShotSpotter has been sharing the locations of its microphones with NYPD officials—something it said it wouldn't do. Police then have the potential to tap into those systems to listen in on "conversations in hushed tones and normal conversation inside a home through an open window or door if they occur close enough to a sensor."
The NYPD says it's not doing that, but it also said it would abide by the Handschu Guidelines.
The facial recognition technology also touted by Eric Adams was used in November to bar a woman from Madison Square Garden in New York City after the technology identified her as an attorney for a law firm that represents an opponent in a lawsuit. While that incident involved little more than pettiness by a private party, you don't have to wonder how the technology could be abused by a government; just contemplate its use by Chinese authorities in their ongoing experiments in high-tech dystopia.
"China's facial recognition system logs nearly every single citizen in the country, with a vast network of cameras across the country," Alfred Ng noted in a 2020 CNet article. "China's aggressive development and use of facial recognition offers a window into how a technology that can be both benign and beneficial—think your iPhone's Face ID—can also be twisted to enable a crackdown on actions that the average person may not even consider a crime."
Chinese officials may also believe, like Mayor Adams, that "Big Brother is protecting you." But Big Brother is "protecting" against things that upset Big Brother. Big Brother is certainly not prioritizing the concerns of people who don't want to be tracked, scrutinized, overheard, disarmed, judged, and penalized by intrusive officials whose standards differ from their own.
Adams may assume his own goodness, but "of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive," as C.S. Lewis warned us. "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Ultimately, the very fact that Eric Adams, in the guise of Big Brother, wants to protect New Yorkers is all the more reason to tell him to get lost. A surveillance state is no less tyrannical, and perhaps even worse, when the snoops really believe in what they're doing.
The post New York City Mayor Eric Adams Wants You to Love Big Brother appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Five Louisiana law enforcement officers have finally been charged with crimes in connection with the brutal death of Ronald Greene, a 49-year-old motorist stopped by state troopers in 2019 and then viciously beaten by them.
When Greene died, authorities told his family he had been killed in a car crash fleeing from police outside Monroe. In reality, Greene did crash his car into a tree, but that's not what killed him. Police body camera footage showed the troopers pulling him out of the car, beating him, tasing him, and even dragging him across the ground. The family's suspicions of the official account were bolstered by an emergency room report of Greene's injuries that didn't match what they were told.
The body camera footage was concealed from the public. The state didn't even open an investigation of the incident until more than 450 days after Greene's death, after his family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in May 2020. Then the Associated Press somehow got its hands on the body camera footage and released clips of it to the public in 2021, showing Greene's beating. The A.P. also got a recording of one of the troopers involved, Chris Hollingsworth, confessing to a colleague that he "beat the ever-living fuck" out of Greene. After Hollingsworth was told in September 2020 that he was going to be fired for his role in Greene's death, he died in a single-car crash.
On Thursday, a state grand jury indicted five other law-enforcement officers connected. They face a host of charges from negligent homicide to malfeasance. The harshest charges were directed toward Master Trooper Kory York, who is seen on the footage dragging Greene across the ground by his ankles and putting his foot on Greene's back to force him face-down on the ground.
The A.P.'s accounting of all the charges shows a remarkable amount of not just cruelty but ass-covering:
The others who faced various counts of malfeasance and obstruction included a trooper who denied the existence of his body-camera footage, another who exaggerated Greene's resistance on the scene, a regional state police commander who detectives say pressured them not to make an arrest in the case and a Union Parish sheriff's deputy heard on the video taunting Greene with the words "s—- hurts, doesn't it?"
The Justice Department has launched an investigation of the Louisiana State Police to determine whether the treatment of Greene is an indication of widespread violent behavior toward black citizens. Just months after the A.P. released footage of Greene, it released body camera footage of a black man, Aaron Bowman, being beaten by a state trooper with a flashlight after Bowman was pulled over for "improper lane usage."
That trooper, Jacob Brown, resigned and faces state and federal charges. He's scheduled for trial in March.
According to the A.P., Union Parish District Attorney John Belton had been delaying state charges while the Department of Justice considered federal civil rights charges against the troopers involved. But, reportedly, federal prosecutors doubted they'd be able to prove that the troopers acted "willfully" in violating Greene's rights, so they told Belton to move forward with a state grand jury to consider charges. The federal investigation remains open.
As I noted when the body camera footage was first released, imagine whether any of this would have happened had the footage not leaked. Not only is the case an important reminder of why we need to require police to wear body cameras, but it's also a warning of the dangers of allowing the law enforcement agencies to control when footage can be made public.
The post 5 Louisiana Officers Indicted for Beating Motorist Ronald Greene to Death, Then Covering It Up appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Marine veteran who was tackled on his own porch for filming a police officer has settled an excessive force lawsuit against the city of Vallejo, California, for $300,000, the Vallejo Sun reports.
The settlement is yet another in a string of costly excessive force lawsuits against the city of Vallejo. Despite its relatively small size, the Vallejo Police Department has generated a large number of civil rights lawsuits and settlement payouts.
In January 2019, Adrian Burrell, a documentary filmmaker and former Marine, saw the police stopping his cousin. Burrell used his cell phone to record the traffic stop from his porch. When Vallejo police officer David McLaughlin saw Burrell filming him, he ordered him to get back, although Burrell was standing about 20 to 30 feet. Burrell refused.
Multiple federal appeals courts have upheld a broad First Amendment right to film the police, so long as one isn't obstructing them from their duties. This is where the interaction between Burrell and McLaughlin should have ended.
Instead, McLaughlin holstered his gun, turned his back on the suspect he had moments ago considered an apparent threat, and approached Burrell. "You're interfering with me, my man?" McLaughlin asked. "You're interfering, you're going to get one from the back of the car."
"That's fine," Burrell responded. The officer started handcuffing Burrell, and told him to "stop resisting."
"I'm not resisting you," Burrell said.
"Stop fighting or you're going to go on the ground," McLaughlin said. Burrell's cell phone did not capture what happened next, but his lawsuit claims that McLaughlin swung him to the ground and knocked his head against a wooden pillar on Burrell's porch.
Burrell was then detained in the back of a police car. He has said that McLaughlin released him after finding that he was a military veteran.
Last year, Vallejo paid $270,698 to Santiago Hutchins to settle another excessive force lawsuit filed against McLaughlin. Hutchins and McLaughlin, who was off-duty and out of uniform at the time, got into an argument in a parking lot outside of a pizzeria. McLaughlin pulled a gun and held Hutchins at gunpoint until several other officers arrived and took Hutchins to the ground. A cellphone video taken by a bystander showed McLaughlin then savagely punching and elbowing Hutchins as he was being held down.
According to his lawsuit, Hutchins suffered "a concussion, right eye hematoma, facial pain, headache, swelling in the head, face contusions, face lacerations, muscle strains, and rib contusions" as a result of the beating.
McLaughlin is also one of several Vallejo police officers alleged to be part of a group of Vallejo officers who bent the tips of their star-shaped badges to mark fatal shootings. McLaughlin testified in court earlier this year that a Vallejo police lieutenant bent the tips of his and his partner's badges following a 2016 shooting.
"I was assaulted by a police officer who participated in blood rituals, the bending of badges to celebrate murders of Black and Brown folks," Burrell declared in a statement to local news outlets through his attorney. "No amount of money can give back what was taken from me during this violent assault nor during the dehumanizing, patronizing and disrespectful litigation process." But with the money awarded to him, he continues, he plans to found "a non-profit organization that will provide the families of individuals who are affected by police violence, and the survivors of community violence time and space to heal."
McLaughlin is still a Vallejo police officer.
The post California City Pays $300,000 to Marine Veteran Tackled for Filming a Cop From His Porch appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On September 2, 2018, Hunter Hollingsworth spent the day on his farm in Camden, Tennessee. Dove season began the day before, and he had some friends over to hunt. That evening, he looked up and saw a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) agent and a Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) officer converging on his location, but Hollingsworth wasn't nervous. He was angry.
According to a report later filed by FWS Special Agent Jesse Fielder, Hollingsworth approached the officers "in a confrontational manner," with a shotgun still in one hand and a beer in the other. Hollingsworth "started cursing at SA Fielder about SA Fielder being on his dove field." Even after Fielder took Hollingsworth's gun and handcuffed him, Hollingsworth continued to curse at the officers for harassing him: "I hadn't done a damn thing wrong, y'all fuck with me every time I damn hunt."
Looking back, Hollingsworth tells Reason, "Some of the things I said, some of my actions, I'm not proud of." But he says he felt backed into a corner: At least seven or eight times, Hollingsworth says he had spotted wildlife officers on his land without a warrant. Usually they look around for violations, sometimes they take pictures or videos.
And then there was the time he found a camera installed on his property—one he hadn't been told about, much less given permission to set up.
Hollingsworth had been ensnared by a longstanding practice in which state and federal wildlife agencies intrude on clearly marked private property, and in some cases set up cameras, without permission from the property owner.
Thanks to a series of court rulings stemming from Prohibition, the practice is legal. But it means that agents of the state can not only enter private property at their whim but install warrantless surveillance systems that can be used to incriminate individuals for activities on their own property.
That's how Hollingsworth ended up not only being arrested, but fined, stripped of his hunting license, and sentenced to probation after his home was searched by armed state wildlife agents. Hollingsworth's case illustrates an overlooked limitation to Fourth Amendment protections, in which nominally private property quietly becomes a tool of state surveillance.
A number of state wildlife agencies as well as FWS claim the right to not only enter private property, but in some cases to plant cameras as well, without either a warrant or the property owner's permission. For example, a chapter of the FWS policy manual denoting "circumstances where a Service officer may observe and obtain evidence without courts considering it a search" stipulates, "when Service officers enter onto open fields…their observations are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
The open fields doctrine dates back to the Prohibition-era Supreme Court decision Hester v. United States (1924). Revenue agents caught a bootlegger with jugs of moonshine. He was on his property but away from his home. He sued to overturn his arrest, as the officers were on the property without a warrant. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the arrest, finding that "the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their 'persons, houses, papers, and effects' is not extended to the open fields."
Decades later, the Court affirmed the decision in Oliver v. United States (1984): Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. held that "in the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment." Further, "steps taken to protect privacy," like fences or "No Trespassing" signs, "do not establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate in the sense required by the Fourth Amendment."
Citing William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, Holmes held that the home and the "curtilage," the area immediately around the home, are distinct from other physical property. On one hand, it may make sense that a purely open, undeveloped plot of land would not receive the same Fourth Amendment protections as a person's domicile. But in a case involving state and local law enforcement agents finding a field of marijuana plants after searching a suspect's property without a warrant, the Kansas Court of Appeals interpreted Hester and Oliver to mean that "an open field need be neither 'open' nor a 'field' as those terms are used in common speech."
Because the Court has given its imprimatur to warrantless intrusions on private land, landowners' only recourse is state law. But state laws and practices vary widely. For example, Charlanna Skaggs, general counsel for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), says that "DCNR follows Alabama law and would not place cameras on private property unless authorized by law or with express permission."
Meanwhile, just one state over, Mark McKinnon of Georgia's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) says that its "game wardens are permitted to place cameras on private property without requesting permission from a supervisor or from the property owner." McKinnon cited DNR Law Enforcement Division policy that limits camera use to still photos only, and no shots of the curtilage. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR) has a preprinted form that officers can fill out to request permission to place cameras on private property, though KDFWR records custodian Jeff Bardroff tells Reason that the form is a "recent implementation" and "has yet to be used."
It can also be difficult to parse exactly how common the practice is, depending on where you live. Reason has previously reported on a Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) wildlife officer placing a camera on private property without a warrant or permission. That incident was revealed as a result of a lawsuit filed against the state by the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm that has also represented Hollingsworth.
But as I.J. attorney Joshua Windham told Reason, "Neither [TWRA nor PGC] has any sort of record-keeping policy with regard to warrantless entries on private land….The agencies that oversee these officers don't engage in meaningful oversight of their day-to-day activities. They are given basically an infinite leash, to go out, patrol private land, and enter and leave people's properties whenever and however they please." Both TWRA and PGC gave Reason similar responses, that records of warrantless camera surveillance either did not exist or had not been retained, even though ongoing litigation demonstrates that such cases exist in each state.
Tennessee law states that the TWRA "has the power to…enforce all laws relating to wildlife, and to go upon any property, outside of buildings, posted or otherwise, in the performance of the executive director's duties."
Hollingsworth's farm sits on 93 acres, on which he does not live. The land is not easily accessed: Getting there requires driving down a private road, walking through a neighbor's pasture, and unlatching two separate gates. "No Trespassing" signs are posted around the entrance. And yet state and federal agents still routinely show up unannounced.
In December 2017, nine months before Hollingsworth ended up in handcuffs, he was confronted on his land by TWRA Officer Kevin Hoofman. Hollingsworth complained, "There ain't no sense in you coming down here every time I hunt, didn't nobody invite you," to which Hoofman replied, "When you bought your hunting license, you invited me."
Hoofman alleged that Hollingsworth had planted corn in violation of state laws against hunting over bait. Hollingsworth denies the allegation, and tells Reason he had planted corn around a duck blind for natural cover.
Hunting over bait means exactly that: spreading bait to attract animals, and hunting the ones that show up. The practice is controversial. Many states, including all Midwest states, have completely or partially banned it. Under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the practice is banned when hunting all migratory birds, including ducks. Violators can be assessed up to a $15,000 fine, six months in jail, or both.
What Hollingsworth did not know at the time was that the previous month, Hoofman reportedly found corn cobs and kernels in a pond on Hollingsworth's property, which could constitute improper baiting. He referred the case to FWS Special Agent Kyle Lock for potential federal prosecution.
Then on or before November 30, Lock installed a trail camera on Hollingsworth's property. Trail cameras are weatherproof photo or video cameras designed to be set up outdoors, typically so hunters can see which animals come through an area and when. The cameras are triggered by motion and heat to either take pictures or video.
The camera on Hollingsworth's property had an antenna so that all photos, once taken, would be transmitted wirelessly. It was fastened to a tree by zip ties, about eight feet off the ground, pointing to the main road leading in and out of the property. Notably, this angle would not capture any hunting activities; it would only serve to catalog who was coming and going.
One morning in late January, Hollingsworth was heading out to hunt when he spotted the camera lens reflected in his headlights. He knew by the antenna that it wasn't one of his, so he took it down and carried it back to his house to determine where it may have come from. The S.D. card contained nearly 1,200 photos taken between November 30 and January 21, including Hollingsworth and his friends coming and going.
Hollingsworth took the camera to Jack Leonard, his attorney and hunting buddy. Leonard tells Reason that the camera was not marked as property of law enforcement, but he also suspected that it might be.
"I anticipated legal action coming," he said, and so he advised Hollingsworth to "secure it, keep it safe." Hollingsworth put the camera in his gun safe, where it sat for eight months.
According to a search warrant application, as the FWS and TWRA tried to interview Hollingsworth's hunting companions during the September 2 encounter, agents overheard his girlfriend saying that they had found cameras on their property, and "we got them at the house."
At no point had FWS or TWRA agents felt it necessary to get a warrant to search or surveil Hollingsworth's property. But on the basis of the missing trail camera, Lock obtained a warrant on September 7, 2018. The following morning, five FWS agents and five TWRA agents showed up with guns drawn to search Hollingsworth's house. FWS Agent Brandon Ennis indicated in a report on the search that by taking the trail camera, both Hollingsworth and his girlfriend had violated 18 U.S. Code § 641, "theft and/or possession of government property, less than $1,000," a class A federal misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison and/or a $100,000 fine.
As one page of an FWS investigation report summarizes the events, "SA's served a search warrant on HOLLINGSWORTH's residence on September 7, 2018 in reference to the stolen government property (Covert game camera) that was stolen from HOLLINGSWORTH's farm." The report uses the word "stolen" twice. But there's no reckoning with how it applies to an item placed on Hollingsworth's property without his knowledge or permission.
In April 2019, Hollingsworth was charged with six federal counts in the Western District Court of Tennessee, including improper bait placement, hunting over bait, and "knowingly conceal[ing] and retain[ing] property of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service…with the intent to their own use and gain."
Whatever one's opinion about the ethics or legality of hunting over bait, the only clearly willful property violations occurred when agents of the state stepped on to Hollingsworth's land and placed a camera in order to document his movements, without his permission or a judge's approval. It wasn't until he removed an unfamiliar camera that he was arrested and threatened with jail time.
He ultimately agreed to a plea. In exchange for the other charges being dropped, Hollingsworth pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. He was fined $3,000 and sentenced to three years of probation and suspension of his hunting privileges.
In 2019, Hollingsworth sued the TWRA, the FWS, and Hoofman and Lock, for violating his constitutional rights. The district court threw out the case, with Chief Judge S. Thomas Anderson writing that a camera in an "open field" did not constitute a Fourth Amendment violation, and that even if it had, "defendants would still be entitled to qualified immunity." According to 1982's Supreme Court decision Harlow v. Fitzgerald, government officials are immune from civil liability as long as the conduct at issue "does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights." (What, precisely, that phrase means is still up for debate.)
But in a motion brought by I.J. earlier this year against the state agency, Hollingsworth and another Camden landowner, Terry Rainwaters, successfully challenged the practice. A three-judge panel from the Benton County Circuit Court affirmed that the state's Constitution is more protective than the U.S. Constitution, and the law governing TWRA "implicate[s] constitutionally protected property" and is "facially unconstitutional." The state appealed the ruling in April.
For Hollingsworth, things can't quite go back to normal. He got his hunting license back November 6, but he says that now whenever he goes out, "I'll be extremely paranoid, because I feel that they're gonna have a vendetta out against me now, and I think that they'll be watching my every move." He says that with court costs and attorney's fees, he spent over $10,000 to plead guilty to a charge that usually carries a much smaller penalty. Besides, "I've already lost my license for three years; you can't put a price on that."
Nonetheless, he's hopeful that the circuit court ruling will stand up on appeal. "It was a long three years, but the three years was worth it as long as the ruling holds that they can't come on private property without a warrant. There's enough people that will benefit from that, that it was worth losing my license for three years and it was worth the $10,000."
Windham, the I.J. attorney, is also optimistic not only that the TWRA case will survive, but that it signals a path forward. "The most promising frontier, in terms of how to curb the government's currently-unlimited power to invade private land, is to start with state constitutional litigation and state legislatures." The Tennessee case rests on the fact that the state's constitution is more protective of private property than the U.S. Constitution. "Barring that," he says, "the most promising avenue is for states to pass laws that specifically restrain government actors from doing this sort of thing, that explicitly requires them to seek consent, get a warrant, or show some other exception to the warrant requirement, before they search private land."
In fact, multiple states' constitutions also provide greater protection against warrantless surveillance, and those rights have been affirmed in the respective state supreme courts. In 2018's State v. Dupuis, the Vermont Supreme Court affirmed that "Vermont's Constitution establishes greater protection against search and seizure of 'open fields' than the U.S. Constitution, requiring that law enforcement officers secure warrants before searching open fields when the landowner demonstrates an expectation of privacy," such as "No Trespassing" signs. As far back as 1970, the Mississippi Supreme Court determined in Davidson v. State that a game warden's search of a suspect's land was illegal, even though it turned up stolen property. The ruling stated that the "right to be secure from invasions of privacy by government officials is a basic freedom in our Federal and State constitutional systems."
But state laws and state courts only constrain state actors: After all, federal agents placed a camera on Hollingsworth's property, with the blessing of prior federal case law. "To fully and finally eliminate the open fields doctrine's reach," Windham says, "we're going to have to find courage to find a federal remedy to this. Whether that means federal courts, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, recognizing that the open fields doctrine is wrong as a matter of Fourth Amendment law, or whether that means Congress passes a statute that says federal officials have to comply with the same basic constraints that police would have to when entering a home," it will take a concerted effort to stake out a win for private property rights nationwide.
The post Wildlife Agents Placed a Camera on His Property Without a Warrant, Then Raided His Home After He Removed It appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lawsuit asks whether livestreaming cops is protected by the First Amendment. It's well-established that Americans have a First Amendment right to record police. But do we have the right to livestream that recording? That's the central question in a case currently before a federal appeals court.
The question stems from a 2018 traffic stop in Winterville, North Carolina. When police pulled over a car in which Dijon Sharpe was a passenger, Sharpe whipped out his phone and started a Facebook Live stream.
One cop tried to grab Sharpe's phone, saying "we ain't gonna do Facebook Live, because that's an officer safety issue."
"Facebook Live … we're not gonna have, okay, because that lets everybody y'all follow on Facebook that we're out here," said another officer. He told Sharpe that "in the future, if you're on Facebook Live, your phone is gonna be taken from you … and if you don't want to give up your phone, you'll go to jail."
"Is that a law?" Sharpe asks in the recording. "That's not a law."
Sharpe is right—there's no law explicitly saying one can't livestream interactions with police officers. But there's also little legal precedent for what happens when one attempts to and cops curtail that attempt.
"No circuit court has yet ruled on whether passengers in traffic stops can be blocked from recording police or on whether live-streaming is different from merely recording," notes The Washington Post. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which will hear this case, "has not ruled on the right to record at all."
The 4th Circuit heard oral arguments for the case—Dijon Sharpe v. Winterville Police Department—in October.
"This case is important; it's going to affect thousands of thousands," Sharpe's attorney, Andrew Tutt, told the court. "This case has important consequences for every police-citizen interaction in this circuit."
Sharpe said he had wanted to livestream the traffic stop because he thought it was suspicious (the cops said the car's driver ran a stop sign, something Sharpe said did not happen) and because of previous negative interactions he and family members have had with police. His cousin, Dontae Sharpe, was imprisoned for 24 years on murder charges despite a key witness recanting testimony after trial (Dontae was finally released and formally pardoned in 2021). "Since getting involved in efforts to free Dontae, Dijon says his encounters with police grew increasingly hostile, culminating in his being Tasered and beaten by police officers in 2017," notes the Post. "With no video to support his version of events" that time, "he was forced in court to apologize to them."
This time around, Sharpe wanted to make sure there was a real-time recording of events that police could not later alter or delete. After an officer told him this wasn't OK, he sued.
A U.S. district court sided with the cops. "The Fourth Circuit has not held in a published opinion that an individual's right under the First Amendment to record a traffic stop is clearly established, much less held that an individual has a right to record and real-time broadcast a traffic stop from within the stopped car," wrote the judge in an August 2020 decision. Thereby the police could not have known their actions were wrong, and were entitled to qualified immunity.
"Seven federal appellate courts have affirmed that there is a First Amendment right to film the police," notes the Post. "But all said there can be 'reasonable' restrictions on that right, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not clarified what counts."
Sharpe then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. And a slew of civil liberties organizations have filed briefs on behalf of Sharpe's position.
The appeals court "should hold that…the right to record is not limited to recording for future publication," states the American Civil Liberties Union in one such brief. "Rather, it protects—and, if anything, derives from—the right to publish and disseminate video, including the right to do so instantaneously. The First Amendment protects the choice of when to publish just as it does the choice of what to publish, and whether to publish at all. In other words, the First Amendment protects the right to livestream, which
enables individuals to simultaneously record and broadcast."
"Any reasonable officer should have known that preventing Mr. Sharpe from livestreaming his encounter with police would violate his clearly established First Amendment rights," states a brief from the Institute for Justice. "After all, six federal circuit courts, the Department of Justice ('DOJ'), and numerous local governments have long agreed that the First Amendment protects an individual's right to record police in public."
"Police have great power. Civilian recording of police officers serves the public's vital interest in ensuring that police exercise this power lawfully," states a brief from the National Police Accountability Project.
In holding that qualified immunity applied in this case, "the district court heavily emphasized that the many other cases on this subject did not involve the exact facts as Mr. Sharpe's case—specifically, that he was not just recording the encounter, but also 'real-time broadcasting with the ability to interact via messaging applications in real-time with those watching a traffic stop from inside the stopped vehicle,'" notes the Cato Institute in its brief.
"But this approach to assessing whether rights are clearly established is exactly the sort of misapplication of qualified-immunity precedent that the Supreme Court recently warned against in Taylor v. Riojas," the Cato brief continues. "Taylor reaffirmed that the fundamental question in qualified immunity cases is whether the defendant had 'fair warning' that their conduct was unlawful, not whether there is a prior case with functionally identical facts."
"Unfortunately, the sort of misapplication of qualified immunity employed by the district court—construing 'clearly established law' to effectively require a case with identical facts—is no isolated error, but rather part of an all-too-common practice in lower courts," the brief reads. "That persistent misunderstanding of qualified immunity not only gets the law wrong, but its application to police officers has exacerbated a growing crisis of accountability for law enforcement officers generally."
Appeals court won't pause ruling against student loan forgiveness plan. After a Texas judge ruled President Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan unconstitutional, the Biden administration appealed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to pause the judge's order as the administration's appeal plays out. The court said no.
"A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit in Wednesday's brief order declined to put Pittman's ruling on hold while the administration appealed his decision, but the court directed that the appeal be heard on an expedited basis," reports Reuters. "The White House had no immediate comment but the administration has said that if the 5th Circuit declined to halt Pittman's order it would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene."
Ohio arrests journalist covering murder trial. "An ongoing murder trial involving multiple defendants has resulted in the editor of small local paper being arrested for performing an act of journalism," reports Techdirt.
The case revolves around recorded testimony from one of the defendants, Jake Wagner. In general, "courts permit recordings and broadcasting of criminal trials," but "the relevant exception here is that witnesses can request their testimony not be recorded or broadcast and, if the court agrees, this permission is revoked during this testimony," Techdirt's Tim Cushing explains. Wagner "made this request and had it granted. Nonetheless, someone attending the trial recorded it and passed it on to Derek Myers, who runs the Scioto Valley Guardian."
Myers and the Guardian published some of the audio with this note:
The Guardian received a portion of Jake Wagner's testimony on his first day on the witness stand. The Guardian wants to disclose that the audio was not recorded by a member of the media and was submitted to the Guardian's newsroom by a courthouse source who is authorized to have their cell phone in the room.
Nonetheless, officers with the Pike County Sheriff's Office arrested Myers and seized his laptop and his phone.
Myers was charged with having used the contents of an illegally obtained recording. But the First Amendment protects Myers and his paper from prosecution for merely publishing information or audio of public interest that it obtained legally, even if that audio was illegally obtained by someone.
As Cushing puts it: "This wasn't wiretapping. This was journalism."
While Myers should ultimately beat this, he still "had to post a $20,000 bond, must submit to alcohol/drug tests [???], and keep his schedule open to attend any court hearings until the charges are either dropped, or he's cleared by the court," notes Cushing. "Why must he do this? Because the government is clearly in the wrong, yet has the luxury of being wrong until proven otherwise."
More bad news for the crypto industry: One of the world's largest crypto exchanges, Kraken, is laying off nearly a third of its work force, to the tune of around 1,100 people being let go. CEO and co-founder Jesse Powell called the move necessary "in order to adapt to current market conditions."
"Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of new users entered the crypto space and millions of new clients put their trust in Kraken during that time. We had to grow fast, more than tripling our workforce in order to provide those clients with the quality and service they expect of us," writes Powell in a blog post on the Kraken website. "Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets. This resulted in significantly lower trading volumes and fewer client sign-ups. We responded by slowing hiring efforts and avoiding large marketing commitments. Unfortunately, negative influences on the financial markets have continued and we have exhausted preferable options for bringing costs in line with demand."
• Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) has been voted House Democratic leader, replacing Nancy Pelosi.
• Officials keep finding new ways to access private records without a warrant.
• Indiana's attorney general continues to try and punish a doctor who provided an abortion to 10-year-old girl.
• "Today might not be a great time to buy a home. Tomorrow might not either," writes Annie Lowrey.
• On the demise of Amazon's Alexa.
• "A new expanded law on 'foreign agents' in Russia comes into force Thursday, signifying an intensifying crackdown on free speech and opposition under President Vladimir Putin that has accelerated as his fortunes in Ukraine have deteriorated," reports CNN.
The post You Can Record Video of Police in Action. But Can You Livestream That Video? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yet another public official in the Chicago area has been accused of corruption in connection with the implementation and operation of revenue-generating red-light cameras.
Illinois State Sen. Emil Jones III (D-Chicago) was indicted in September on federal charges of bribery and lying to the FBI. He's accused of accepting $5,000 and the promise of a job for an associate from a person connected to SafeSpeed, a red-light camera company. In exchange, Jones allegedly promised to exclude SafeSpeed from parts of a proposed state bill from 2019 that called for a state study of automated traffic enforcement systems like red-light cameras.
At this point, we should not be surprised at accusations of corruption and bribery concerning the extremely active revenue-generating cameras in the Chicago area. Speed cameras (distinct from red-light cameras) in Chicago accounted for nearly $90 million in revenue in Chicago in 2021. Mayor Lori Lightfoot even arranged to have the cameras hit cars traveling just six miles per hour over the speed limit to help boost the city's revenue. Claims that these cameras reduce speeding are belied by the data that the city saw more fatal crashes in 2021 than in 2020 or 2019.
Red-light cameras have been creating their own set of additional corruption problems. In 2016, a former Chicago official was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for taking $2 million in bribes from a different red light camera company to secure a contract with the city. As with the speed cameras, the red light cameras are a huge source of revenue for Chicago. In 2020, the city issued an estimated 500,000 red light camera tickets from 300 cameras for a dollar value of more than $52 million.
Jones is not even the first politician to get into legal hot water for inappropriate ties with SafeSpeed. The Chicago Sun-Times, reporting Jones' indictment, notes four other local officials who have faced charges in the past for misconduct connected to SafeSpeed's work in the Chicago suburbs. There's an ongoing federal corruption investigation of various officials attempting to secure deals for SafeSpeed in exchange for favors. The cases all appear to be connected with a former SafeSpeed employee named Omar Maani, and SafeSpeed has put out a statement that it is "shocked and saddened." The company has portrayed Maani as a rogue actor. SafeSpeed and its owners are not accused of any misconduct. In 2020, Maani entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement with the federal government and is cooperating with prosecutors.
Jones, meanwhile, is ignoring calls by Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to resign from the state Senate, though he did give up his position as chair of the Senate Licensed Activities Committee. Jones's attorneys told the Chicago Sun-Times that he maintains his innocence and asked the public not to "rush to judgment." He's running unopposed for reelection in November.
Red light cameras, meanwhile, are still making citizens miserable while serving as a cash cow. The village of Oak Brook, a suburb west of Chicago, is trying to get neighboring Oakbrook Terrace to turn off their red light cameras, but Oakbrook Terrace is refusing. Oakbrook Terrace's former mayor, Tony Ragucci, is one of the officials in this scandal. He pleaded guilty in May to pocketing close to $90,000 in exchange for allowing SafeSpeed to operate red-light cameras in the town.
The state's Department of Transportation got Oakbrook Terrace's cameras turned off temporarily, but the town (with a population of fewer than 3,000) got a restraining order to let them operate the cameras again.
"We all know it's about money. Revenue. Legal or illegal. That's why these cameras are there," Oak Brook Village Trustee Mike Manzo said, according to ABC7 News in Chicago. "These cameras are not there because of safety."
The post Chicago's Red Light Cameras Keep Fueling Corruption Scandals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Law enforcement access to certain private data, like surveillance camera footage, typically requires a warrant. But increasingly, police are finding ways around that requirement. For owners of Amazon's popular Ring video doorbells, police can submit an "emergency request" to get access to a customer's stored footage without the customer's permission. Now, in San Francisco, police can get live access to private security cameras, even if no crime has been committed.
Last week, the city's Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance regulating San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) access to private security cameras, including those put up by homeowners on their own property. The new policy establishes a 15-month pilot program, which would allow the SFPD to "temporarily live monitor activity during exigent circumstances, significant events with public safety concerns, and investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations" as well as "gather and review historical video footage for the purposes of conducting a criminal investigation."
Nominally, the proposal is supposed to help ameliorate police staffing issues: By the end of the year, SFPD expects to be more than 800 officers short, which constitutes more than a third of a fully staffed police force. But Supervisor Dean Preston disagreed, stating that the Board of Supervisors "handed $50 million extra in increases to the police department this year, with no real showing of need, because they were so supposedly understaffed." Now, he says, not only does the SFPD need the extra $50 million, "but they have to have dramatically expanded surveillance rights because they're theoretically understaffed. That really doesn't resonate with me."
Privacy advocates opposed the measure as well. Jennifer Jones, an attorney with the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told ABC 7 News that California misdemeanors include "posting an ad on city and county property without authorization, [or] disturbing a religious [service] with rude or indecent behavior." SFPD could theoretically seek live access to private security camera feeds in either case. As Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), wrote, "misdemeanors like vandalism or jaywalking happen on nearly every street of San Francisco on any given day."
Previously, under a 2019 ordinance, officers were only permitted access to live camera footage without a warrant under "exigent circumstances," which it defined as "an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury." In December, Mayor London Breed complained that this minor stipulation "hobbled law enforcement when confronting life-threatening incidents like active shooters, suspected terrorist events, hostage taking, kidnapping, natural disasters, or looting." Breed does not detail any such cases of terror, hostage, or kidnapping events since the 2019 ordinance was passed, and there is notably a major difference between those situations and looting. She further wrote that the ordinance should be modified "to clarify that peace officers are allowed to access live-feed and in[-]real-time surveillance technologies when necessary to maintain public safety." District Attorney Brooke Jenkins indicated her office supported the measure, saying it could "help address the existence of open-air drug markets fueling the sale of the deadly drug fentanyl."
Breed and a city supervisor submitted similar proposals before ultimately agreeing to the current version after negotiating with the SFPD.
Notably, the final version of the proposal requires the camera owner's "express consent." But once access is granted, SFPD can continue streaming live for up to 24 hours. And there are a worrying number of justifications the department can cite, including "Significant Events" for "placement of police personnel due to crowd sizes."
According to a 2020 lawsuit, SFPD "acquired, borrowed, and used a private network of more than 400 surveillance cameras" to snoop on Black Lives Matter protests. This directly violated the city ordinance passed less than a year earlier, which limited police access only to extremely limited, severe circumstances. Prior to the 2019 policy, SFPD did the same thing in order to surveil Pride parades and Fourth of July celebrations.
The post San Francisco Police Can Now Have Live Access to Nearly Any Camera in the City appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The term "surveillance state" brings certain images to mind: cameras on every corner, cataloging passersby's every move. What one may not always consider is that some of those cameras may have been put up by private citizens for nonpublic use.
In 2018, Amazon bought Ring, a company that manufactures video doorbells, cameras, and other home security equipment. At its acquisition, just a few years after failing to get an offer on ABC's Shark Tank, the company was valued at upward of a billion dollars. Ring's doorbells give consumers live video of any visitor to their home; the company's founder touts that its products prevent neighborhood crime.
To that end, Ring provides a companion app, Neighbors, which functions similarly to NextDoor. Customers can share camera footage or safety alerts with other nearby Ring users. Ring has also partnered with over 2,000 police departments across the country. Using the Neighbors app, police are able to request access to customers' video footage to aid in investigations.
Ring's website stresses that it is the customer's choice whether or not to turn over the footage in response to a request. But as it turns out, that may not always be true.
Earlier this month, The Verge reported that despite Ring's assurances, police can access users' stored footage without the customer's permission or even a warrant. The Law Enforcement Request form on Amazon's website even includes a bright red "Submit Emergency Request" button. While Ring's Terms of Service stipulate that it will only furnish content to law enforcement, for example, "if legally required to do so" or to "comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process or reasonable preservation request," Amazon's Law Enforcement Guidelines state that it "reserves the right to respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving a threat to public safety or risk of harm to any person."
In fact, in a July 1 response to questions from Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), Amazon admitted that so far in 2022, "in response to an emergency request," Ring provided customer footage to law enforcement 11 times. Given the number of police agencies in the program, this is a fairly insubstantial percent of the total, but it's also only for a single year; the company did not provide totals for any previous year. And as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out, "there is no process for a judge or the device owner to determine whether there actually was an emergency."
Not to be outdone, San Francisco is taking things a step further. After the city recalled its progressive district attorney last month, Mayor London Breed appointed Brooke Jenkins as the interim replacement. Now, both Breed and Jenkins support a proposal to the Board of Supervisors that would give law enforcement real-time access to surveillance cameras, including those owned by individuals or businesses, like Ring or competitor Google Nest. SFGate reports that currently, local ordinance allows real-time access "only if there is a serious risk of physical injury or death." The new proposal would expand this field to "crimes such as retail theft, rioting, looting and drug-dealing."
This new ordinance is troubling enough without considering Ring's sheer growth: Since more cameras make its features more effective, Ring has given away free and discounted doorbells in cities across the country and advocated that law enforcement encourage citizens to purchase cameras. In Los Angeles, the company enlisted more than 100 police officers to hawk Ring products in exchange for free or discounted cameras. In Lakeland, Florida, Ring donated 15 doorbells for police to give away to residents for free in exchange for "Engag[ing] the Lakeland community with outreach efforts on the platform to encourage adoption of the platform/app." It additionally contributed $10 per Lakeland-area download of the Neighbors app toward the purchase of further Ring products for police to give away.
There would perhaps be some comfort if this burgeoning public-private panopticon were effective in reducing crime. Unfortunately, both scientific and anecdotal evidence says otherwise. Ring boasted of crime rate reductions between 20 percent and 55 percent in different areas of Los Angeles using its video doorbells. But an MIT Technology Review study was unable to replicate those findings, finding that the doorbells had little if any effect whatsoever. Additionally, officers have said that Ring users often tie up police resources with false-alarm reports.
An expanding network of cameras would be troubling enough if they were all simply self-contained and on private networks. The fact that police agencies are increasingly exerting control over the recordings and feeds of private cameras should alarm civil libertarians. As EFF wrote, "Once infrastructure exists, there will always be temptation for police to use it for less urgent situations."
The post Police Can Access Your Ring Camera Footage Without a Warrant appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's motto is "free minds and free markets." But we also believe in free content. You read our website for free. You listen to our podcasts for free. You watch our videos for free. You get our newsletters for free.
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]]>After police in Aurora, Colorado, mistook a blue SUV with Colorado plates for a stolen yellow motorcycle with Montana plates, they pulled up behind the parked car, ordered the driver and the passengers out at gunpoint, and forced them to lie facedown on the pavement. Neither the driver, Brittney Gilliam, nor her passengers—four girls ranging in age from 6 to 17—had done anything wrong. But the terrified, wailing girls were still detained for about 10 minutes, with two of them in handcuffs, until after the cops realized their mistake.
The 2020 incident, much of which was recorded by a bystander, provoked international outrage at the gratuitous trauma inflicted on Gilliam and the girls. But newly released internal reports and body camera videos suggest that the cops at the scene were more upset by Gilliam's anger and onlookers' criticism. The evidence, which Chicago defense attorney Mike Buresh obtained under Colorado's Criminal Justice Records Act, reveals a chasm between ordinary people who are appalled by police abuse and cops who think they are simply doing their jobs.
On a Sunday morning last August, Gilliam, a 29-year-old food service worker at the Denver County Jail, drove her sister's 2009 Dodge Journey to a nail salon. She was accompanied by her 6-year-old daughter, Gilliam's 17-year-old sister, and two nieces, ages 12 and 14. They planned to have their nails done and get ice cream afterward. But when they arrived at the nail salon, they found it was closed. Gilliam and the girls were sitting in the parked SUV as she used her smartphone to find an open salon when a police car pulled up behind them and two officers, Darian Dasko and Madisen Moen, got out with their guns drawn.
The officers ordered Gilliam and the girls to put their hands out the windows, which they did. Dasko told Gilliam to put her keys on the roof of the car. Dasko's body camera, which began recording at 10:54 a.m., captured this exchange while Gilliam was still sitting in the driver's seat:
Gilliam: What's the reason for this stop?
Dasko: This is a stolen vehicle.
Gilliam: This is a stolen vehicle?
Dasko: Yes.
Gilliam: My sister's car is a stolen vehicle?
Dasko: It's a stolen vehicle.
Gilliam: I'm going to prove your ass wrong. This was a stolen vehicle a long time ago…
Dasko: It's a stolen vehicle.
Contrary to Dasko's mantra, it was not a stolen vehicle. As he later acknowledged, police records indicated that the SUV was reported stolen on February 2, 2020, and recovered three days later. Yet a license plate reader had erroneously flagged the car as stolen, and the record Dasko initially received included a photo matching the car Gilliam was driving. Dasko said he checked with a dispatcher to confirm that the car was stolen, and he was told it was.
It turned out that hit was actually for a stolen motorcycle registered in Montana. If Dasko had run the plate number through the National Crime Information Center's database, he would have discovered the error, and this whole encounter could have been avoided. But he did not do that.
Dasko nevertheless was immediately on notice that something was amiss with his information. He disregarded Gilliam when she repeatedly told him the car was her sister's, even when she offered to prove it by showing him the registration. Instead, Dasko and Moen, a trainee he was supervising, proceeded to treat Gilliam and the girls like dangerous criminals.
According to a state lawsuit that Gilliam filed in January, the cops patted down everyone, including the 6-year-old. With guns drawn, they made everyone lie on the pavement. They handcuffed Gilliam, the 12-year-old, and the 17-year-old. The complaint says "Defendant Officer 4 tried to handcuff six-year-old L.T. [Gilliam's daughter], but the handcuffs were too big to fit around her wrists."
Exactly who was handcuffed, and how those individuals should be described, became a point of contention. "They put handcuffs on the babies," a male bystander can be heard saying in Dasko's video. "That's not true," an angry female officer replies. "That's a lie. No handcuffs went on that child…There were no handcuffs on the small child." That much is true, but it elides the question of whether the cops tried to cuff her, as the lawsuit alleges.
Although Moen's body camera video should cast light on that issue, 10 crucial minutes are missing from the version released by the district attorney's office. Buresh has asked the office to explain the legal justification for that redaction but has not heard back yet. [Update: In a March 25 email to Buresh, Chief Deputy District Attorney Ann Tomsic said "all redactions to body worn camera footage were done to protect the identity of minor children." Tomsic said that decision is authorized by a provision of Colorado's public records law that allows agencies to withhold material when releasing it is "contrary to the public interest."]
In his video, Dasko tells a sergeant: "No little, underaged kids were put in handcuffs. There was a little tyke…and she just sat there with her sister [actually, her cousin]. We never put any underaged children in handcuffs. All were proned out here, besides the driver, [who] was over here because she was uncooperative." Dasko seems unfazed by the impact that being "proned out," with or without handcuffs, might have on a little girl. Furthermore, the bystander video confirms that the 12-year-old and the 17-year-old were handcuffed. Dasko's definition of "underaged children" evidently excludes anyone past puberty.
According to a report from Officer Travis Hanson, the 14-year-old, whom he describes as "the third woman with the small child," would have been handcuffed too, but he decided that was unwise, because "a large crowd [had] developed, was extremely agitated, and [was] encroaching on our position." In other words, the problem with handcuffing an innocent 14-year-old girl was not that it was patently wrong but that witnesses might perceive it that way.
Dasko likewise tries to minimize the threat of deadly force against the girls. "At no time did any Officer on scene run up to the juvenile female or child and point their duty weapon in their face," he writes. Yes, the officers pulled out their guns and forced a 6-year-old to lie on the ground. But they did not point their guns in her face, which to Dasko's mind apparently makes it OK.
Unsurprisingly, the girls were terrified by this sudden and inexplicable use of force. They can be heard crying and whimpering in the bystander video. "I want my mother!" the 6-year-old says. "Can I have my sister next to me?" one of her cousins asks. "Can I help my sister?"
Dasko and Moen blame Gilliam for upsetting the children. "Gilliam began screaming and yelling more," Dasko says in his report, "which made the younger child cry." Moen concurs that the girls' emotional state was Gilliam's fault. Gilliam "began to scream and yell to the occupants on the passenger side making them visually upset," she writes. "The passengers began to scream and cry."
Although Dasko describes Gilliam as "uncooperative," which he says was the reason he separated her from the girls and placed her in the back of his patrol car, she actually followed all of his instructions. But she also repeatedly and profanely objected to the way Dasko was treating her, which seems to be what bothered him.
Gilliam "was verbally aggressive yelling and cussing," Dasko complains. And even when he finally took off her handcuffs—which he did not do until six minutes after he learned that the car was not stolen—she was not properly grateful. "As I was releasing Gilliam from hand-cuffs, I tried to explain our mistake," he says. "Gilliam was very hostile towards Officers and stated she wanted to check on her kids."
Other officers were likewise irked by Gilliam's attitude. "Brittney kept yelling and scream[ing] at us," Officer Devin Drexel writes. "When she would ask a question for us to answer, she would shout over us when we attempted to speak to her."
When Sgt. Edward Lopez approached Gilliam to explain what had happened, Sgt. David Wells says, "Gilliam would yell and talk over SGT Lopez and would not allow him to speak."
Lopez himself was annoyed. "As I approached her," he writes, "she looked at me and stated 'you're a Sergeant,' and began shouting at me, informing me that the officers pointed guns at her and her children, saying she was in a stolen car. I attempted to explain the circumstances to her several times however she continued to interrupt me, not allowing me to give her an explanation."
These officers seemed to think the problem was Gilliam's rudeness rather than the shocking incident that provoked it. Lt. John Tollakson took a different view. "She was upset that police pointed guns at them and specifically the children and that they were handcuffed," he notes. Tollakson "agreed with her being upset about this instance (I would have been upset too) and apologized to her for this incident/inconvenience."
Tollakson's impression of Gilliam was different from his colleagues', possibly because more time had elapsed or because he treated her more respectfully. "We shook hands at the conclusion of our time together," he writes. "I would also note that while she was visibly upset, she and I spoke with each other civilly and in conversational tones."
Yet even Tollakson implies that the officers' handling of the encounter was justified in the circumstances. After all, they did what they were trained to do during a "high-risk vehicle stop," a label that automatically applied in this case, since they mistakenly thought the car was stolen. "It is not uncommon for persons in stolen cars to be armed," Tollakson says, "and it was also not uncommon for suspects to be teenagers to include females."
The bystanders who witnessed the encounter or its aftermath saw things differently. "They had guns on kids!" Jennifer Wurtz says in the video she recorded. "That little girl did not need to have her face in the concrete." Another woman agrees that "you shouldn't do that to a baby." A man declares, "This is some bullshit." Another bystander notes that "the car's not even stolen." A woman says "these babies are traumatized" and wonders, "How can they trust police officers?"
Although those seem like pretty cogent points, the cops were upset by the criticism. "A group of irrational people began yelling at us and recording," Officer Kristi Mason complains in her report. "I had to tell one irrational white female several times to step back and record from a distance."
If Mason is referring to Wurtz, that characterization is inconsistent with Wurtz's recording. Wurtz repeatedly expresses her concerns about the incident, insists on her right to record it, and offers to talk to the children because "they're obviously scared." But she remains calm throughout. "At some point," she says to one of the cops, "when you see little kids screaming and crying with their faces in the concrete, your partner has to go, 'OK, let's get 'em up.' It took far too long."
From Hanson's perspective, however, Wurtz was "interfering with our investigation." While "you have every right to record," he says, "I'm going to give you a lawful order to step away at least 25 feet."
The cops were clearly unnerved by the fact that they were being recorded. "Just be advised," someone says over the radio in Dasko's video. "We have a lot of people out here recording." Talking on his cellphone with a sergeant, Dasko says, "Oh, it's a disaster. We've got people recording, people yelling here." Just to be clear: The "disaster" was not the erroneous detention of an innocent family; it was the people "recording" it and "yelling" about it. In their written reports, Dasko, Mason, Wells, Drexel, Tollakson, Officer Steven Garcia, Officer Michael Enriquez, and Officer Jonathan Kwon likewise note that bystanders were using their cellphones to record what was happening.
All that attention explains why so many officers ultimately converged on the scene. By one bystander's count, there were eventually nine patrol cars in the parking lot. "Due to a hostile crowd closing in recording Officers screaming and yelling obscenities a request for more Officers was made and supervisors to respond," writes Dasko, who says "there were police agitators on scene."
Wells also was disturbed by the onlookers. "I observed numerous parties near the scene, yelling at officers and stating they were recording on Facebook Live," he says. "The parties were making anti-police statements and yelling about 'babies being handcuffed and guns pointed at them.'" Lopez likewise "observed several parties shouting at the officers already on scene and pointing their cell phones at the officers." Enriquez "observed several citizens recording Officers on scene" and "making it known they dislike Aurora PD." Drexel says "the bystanders made it known they dislike the Aurora PD by making anti-police statements." Garcia says "there were 15-20 people on scene antagonizing officers."
The reports leave the impression that the police were facing an incipient riot, requiring a large number of officers to "keep the peace." The body camera videos paint a less alarming picture. Yes, some bystanders raised their voices, and some of them cursed. But I did not hear any blanket condemnations of the police, let alone any threats of violence. The cops' fixation on disapproving bystanders armed with nothing but cellphones is of a piece with their emphasis on Gilliam's ire. In both cases, they are deflecting attention from what police did by focusing on the disagreeable response it provoked.
A few days after the incident, Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson apologized to Gilliam and her family, offering to pay for the girls' psychotherapy bills. "This was a horrible mistake and one that I hope we can at least correct for the kids," she said. "We must allow our officers to have discretion and to deviate from this process when different scenarios present themselves. I have already directed my team to look at new practices and training." Yet five months later, the Aurora Sentinel reported that "a spokesperson for Aurora police said there have not been any specific changes to the department's high-risk stop policies in recent months."
Gilliam, who argues that the Aurora Police Department (APD) has a history of racially biased law enforcement, was not impressed by Wilson's apology. "If it was a white family," she told The Denver Post, "it never would have happened."
A few weeks before Gilliam filed her lawsuit, Chief Deputy District Attorney Clinton McKinzie announced that his office would not be filing criminal charges against Dasko or Moen. "Despite the disturbing fact that terrified children were ordered out of a vehicle at gunpoint and placed face-down on the ground, our conclusion is that there is not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the APD officers involved unlawfully, intentionally, knowingly, or negligently violated any Colorado criminal law," McKinzie said in a January 8 letter to Wilson. "What happened to the innocent occupants is unacceptable and preventable, but that alone is an insufficient basis to affix criminal culpability to the two officers involved in the initial contact."
In reaching that conclusion, the district attorney's office consulted with Paul Taylor, a former police officer and an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Colorado Denver. "Given the information they were relying on and the training they had received, the officers involved in this incident were reasonable, prudent and safe in their choice and use of tactics, weapons and restraints," Taylor said. "All of the officers involved in the incident acted in a professional, safe and respectful manner in all their interactions with the driver and the other occupants of the vehicle during the encounter."
It is true that Dasko was generally calm during his encounter with Gilliam. Whether his treatment of her was "respectful" is another matter. He ignored her truthful assurances that the car was not stolen, refused to look at evidence to that effect, and stubbornly insisted that she was lying, all because of a stupid and easily avoidable mistake. He threatened her with a gun, barked orders at her, forced her to kneel and then lie on the pavement, frisked her, clapped her in handcuffs, and imprisoned her in the back of his patrol car. Meanwhile, his colleagues were subjecting her daughter, sister, and nieces to similar treatment—all for no legitimate reason.
In contrast with Dasko, Gilliam was loud, profane, and angry, much to the dismay of the officers who were victimizing her and her family:
Gilliam: You've got my fucking kids on the fucking floor! Kids!
Dasko: OK. We'll deal with that.
Gilliam: Don't tell me "OK"! Who the fuck are you? Kids! Do you see how you're scaring kids?
Dasko: OK. We'll deal with it…because we don't know what's inside the vehicle and what's going on. We'll find out. OK? We'll find out.
As Dasko says that, he is clapping the cuffs on Gilliam, figuring he would arrest her first and "find out" whether she was actually guilty of anything later. Of course Gilliam was mad, because this was a maddening situation, made all the more maddening by Dasko's blithe manner.
In the body camera videos, Dasko repeatedly explains what happened to sympathetic colleagues, blaming the dispatcher for his blunder. He also complains that he tried to apologize to Gilliam, but "she doesn't want to talk to us."
After Ronald Gilliam, Brittney's father, arrives, Dasko finds him calmer and more receptive. "I'd like to apologize," Dasko says. "It was a mistake on our end." Gilliam tries to explain the gravity of the situation: "These are young kids…You know what's going on now. Everything police do is going to get scrutinized." And when that happens, cops are sure to complain about the scrutiny rather than wonder whether the problem might be their own attitudes and practices.
The post The Cops Who Drew Guns and Forced an Innocent Family To Lie on the Pavement Were Dismayed by the Angry Response appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Trump administration's latest "economic nationalism" scheme involves having taxpayers underwrite a $765 million loan to Eastman Kodak, the long-struggling camera company, in the hopes of transforming it into a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
If that sounds like a far-fetched idea, well, give some credit to the lobbyists who apparently made it happen.
The Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay reports that Kodak restarted its shuttered D.C. lobbying team in April of this year and proceeded to spend $870,000 on influence-peddling in the months leading up to last week's announcement by the White House. That's twice as much as the company had ever spent in a single quarter, according to lobbying disclosures, and it appears to have paid off.
When the White House announced the massive loan to Kodak last week, Trump lauded it as a "breakthrough in bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States." Eastman Kodak will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, which are the chemical compounds used as the building blocks for many drugs. The loan to Eastman Kodak is supposed to be repaid within 25 years.
The White House is throwing all that taxpayer-backed cash at a company with no experience making pharmaceuticals as part of an overall effort to shift the global supply chains for pharmaceuticals. Some Republicans—including Peter Navarro, Trump's top trade advisor, and lawmakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.)—fear that America is too dependant on imported drugs and APIs manufactured in China.
In reality, however, there is little cause for concern. The global supply chains for pharmaceuticals are diverse and resilient. And even though China's share of the market has been growing in recent years, the United States imports far more pharmaceuticals from Ireland and other countries than it does from China. Only 13 percent of the facilities used to make APIs that go into America's drug supply are in China, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
But corporate lobbyists aren't letting the opportunity go to waste. The deal with Eastman Kodak follows on the heels of the Trump administration's announcement in May that it was handing a $350 million contract to a relatively unknown Virginia-based pharmaceutical company, Phlow Corp., to compete with drugmakers in China.
That deal happened despite the fact that Phlow Corp. doesn't have any history of mass-producing pharmaceutical drugs, and appears to have been founded earlier this year for the purpose of cashing in on Trump's protectionist politics. A Phlow spokesman told BioPharma Dive, a trade publication, that the company's leaders had been "communicating with government officials about the U.S. pharmaceutical supply for more than a year" and that Phlow's "stated mission" is "reducing the U.S.' dependence on foreign supply chains." And one of the company's board members has been making the rounds in media and congressional committee hearings to talk-up America's supposedly dangerous over-reliance on Chinese drugs.
The Phlow Corp. deal might have some red flags, but the Eastman Kodak loan stinks to high heaven. Shares of Kodak stock soared last week—before and after Trump announced the massive infusion of taxpayer money into the long-struggling New York-based company. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether some people might have been tipped off about the deal before it was publicly announced.
But insider trading is a petty charge compared to the most obviously odious parts of Trump's Kodak moment. The press release announcing the deal says the massive loan to Kodak will create 360 new jobs—that's more than $2.1 million per job.
That's a ton of money to do….what exactly? Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow and trade policy expert with the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that private companies are already reconfiguring their supply chains to account for lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. "The supply chain issue that Kodak and the Trump administration claim to have identified yesterday might not even exist by the time Kodak Pharmaceutical is operational," he writes.
And there are plenty of other questions. Even if you give the White House the benefit of the doubt on the question of whether America needs to invest in API production, why does it makes sense for a bankrupt camera company to be the government's champion? Will spending $765 million to boost Kodak stock and create 300 jobs materially shift the global supply chains for pharmaceutical drugs—a market that's worth well over $1 trillion annually?
The answers, of course, lead right back to Markay's reporting. Lobbyists have seized on the Trump administration's "economic nationalist" agenda because it is little more than a cronyist attempt at propping up domestic companies with taxpayer cash under the guise of geopolitics.
Spending $870,000 to make $765 million? Just call it the art of the deal.
The post The Trump Administration's $765 Million Kodak Deal Is More Proof That 'Economic Nationalism' Is a Scam appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the years since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a wave of protests against abusive law enforcement, there has been a remarkable shift in public opinion about race and policing.
A Washington Post poll released this week found that 69 percent of Americans say Floyd's killing represents a systemic problem with policing, while just 29 percent say it's an isolated incident; six years ago, the Post reports, more than half of Americans saw police killings of unarmed black men as isolated events, with just 43 percent viewing them as part of a wider trend.
That shift has produced bipartisan support for activism against police violence. The Post poll found that 74 percent of Americans support recent protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Democrats were more likely to support the protests, but a majority of Republicans and independents backed them too. A Monmouth poll released last week found that 57 percent of Americans, including about half of white Americans, said police officers were generally more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat white people, which The New York Times describes as a "drastic change" in public attitudes about racial disparities in policing.
As with nearly all instances of rapid social change, there are many factors at work. The Black Lives Matter movement has tirelessly emphasized racial disparities in law enforcement and made police reform an urgent national priority. Conservative activists have embraced criminal justice reforms that reject tough-on-crime policies. News coverage has become less deferential to police narratives. The political class has, in some instances, distanced itself from law enforcement. Social media has proven a potent tool for activists to organize and get out their message. None of these forces should be discounted.
But perhaps the simplest story one can tell is this: We filmed the cops, and people changed their minds.
For the last two decades, America has conducted an experiment in mass videography. Virtually everyone in the country now carries a camera in his or her pocket. In addition, our highways, streets, and sidewalks are watched by an array of public and private digital eyes, recording, if not everything, then much of the nation's public interactions—including with the police.
In the early days of mass camera adoption, cops resisted public attempts to film them, often attempting to shut down and even destroy videos of their work taken by citizens.
It's not hard to understand the resistance. Those ubiquitous cameras—on cellphones, on dashboards, in stores, on police uniforms—have repeatedly given the public deeply disturbing glimpses into how officers of the law do their jobs.
They showed us the horrific final moments of George Floyd and Eric Garner, six years apart, as they slowly asphyxiated from the force that police officers exerted on their bodies, each man gasping for breath, crying out for their lives, struggling to form the words, "I can't breathe."
They showed us the shots a South Carolina cop fired into Walter Scott's back as he fled on foot after being pulled over for a broken taillight. They showed us the 40 seconds during which Minnesota cafeteria worker Philando Castille was pulled over by a Minneapolis patrolman and then shot to death after disclosing that he was carrying a firearm. They showed us the arrest of Sandra Bland, a Texas woman pulled over for failing to use a turn signal, as an angry cop pointed a weapon at her and screamed, "I will light you up!" (A few days later, she was found in her jail cell, hanged to death.)
And over the last two weeks, cameras have given us a parade of videos showing how some in law enforcement behave when facing a national outcry over abuses of power and excessive use of force: with abuses of power and excessive use of force.
Researchers have spent years digging into crime data and arrest reports in order to demonstrate the racial disparities in police work and sentencing. But charts and graphs and studies, while valuable, can only do so much. Images inevitably have a more visceral impact.
Each video is an act of documentary filmmaking, and each one helps to tell a story. Although the particulars differ, that story has been remarkably consistent: police abusing their power to violent ends, especially when interacting with minorities. Tell a story enough times, show it happening again and again and again, and it reshapes the way people see the world. Over time, in the public mind, a pile-up of anecdotes eventually becomes data.
As University of Wisconsin journalism professor Douglas McLeod, who studies the way news consumption affects culture and politics, recently told The New York Times, the steady stream of videos depicting police abuse, in combination with the distribution of those videos through social media, has changed the way people see law enforcement abuses:
Dr. McLeod said that as videos showing police brutality against black people have appeared relentlessly on social media, they have helped persuade skeptical Americans that an endemic problem exists. "When these things accumulate over time, and we start to see more and more of these images, the evidence starts to become more incontrovertible," he said.
These videos not only show us what police do; they show us how that differs from what police say they do. The Minneapolis Police Department initially said in a press release that George Floyd's death stemmed from a "medical incident during a police interaction." The video shows an emotionless officer kneeling on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes as the victim begs for his mother and his life. Buffalo police said an elderly protester "tripped and fell"; a video shows he was pushed by two officers wearing face shields and carrying batons. The Texas cop who pulled Sandra Bland out of her car said he was afraid; the video Bland took of her own arrest shows that he was angry—and she was the one who was exhibiting fear.
The tragedy is that these videos could not save the life of George Floyd, or of any of the other victims of police brutality who have come since. Images alone cannot substitute for action. But they can be a motivating force—a rallying point for a ground-up movement demanding change.
There is already some evidence that this has begun: In a handful of large cities that have adopted reforms designed to reduce the use of force—including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—police killings have dropped in recent years. The data, according to a FiveThirtyEight report on trends in police killings, suggest that "reforms may be working in the places that have implemented them. Many of these reforms were initiated in response to protests and public outcry over high-profile deaths at the hands of police."
Abusive officers recently caught on video, meanwhile, are being swiftly disciplined: The two Buffalo officers who pushed the elderly protester were suspended without pay. All four officers involved in the incident that led to Floyd's death have already been charged. The officer whose chokehold resulted in Eric Garner's 2014 death, in contrast, wasn't fired until 2019.
Minneapolis, meanwhile, is backing out of negotiations for a new contract with its police union. And when cameras aren't present, it's a point of contention: Among the causes for outrage in the police killing of Breonna Taylor during a no-knock raid in Louisville, Kentucky, this year is that the cops weren't wearing body cameras. Going forward, the city will require police to wear them. Earlier this month, the city's police chief was relieved from duty after it was discovered that officers involved in a separate shooting did not activate their cameras.
It's true that some studies have found that body cameras do little to alter police behavior. The look of cold, almost bored, indifference on the face of the officer who knelt on Floyd, despite the conspicuous presence of onlookers filming the incident, suggests the limits of video to directly change law enforcement behavior; a police department press release noted that active body cams were worn during the incident.
The numerous videos showing police abuse during demonstrations against police abuse provide more evidence that cameras alone don't stop police misconduct. As Reason's Eric Boehm wrote, it has sometimes seemed that the nation's police are determined to demonstrate exactly why people are protesting them in the first place.
Yet even if videos aren't directly changing police behavior, they are almost certainly contributing to the public's shifting perception of that behavior, bolstering the case made by activists by making it harder and harder to deny. In turn, they are putting reforms that might have seemed difficult or impossible just a few years ago within reach. On its own, filming police brutality isn't enough. But each new clip that circulates shows us the vivid and excruciating reality of what has happened and what is happening—and demonstrates, over and over again, what desperately needs to change.
The post We Filmed the Cops. People Changed Their Minds. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hundreds of animal rights activists have sneaked onto farms to do hidden-camera investigations. They often expose animal abuse.
Their videos led companies like Walmart and Wendy's to impose stricter animal welfare requirements on companies that sell them meat.
Of course, farm groups don't like the secret recordings. Kay Johnson Smith of the Animal Agriculture Alliance tells John Stossel that the videos often mislead consumers into thinking farm conditions are worse than they are. She accuses activists of "stalking farms to try to capture something that the public doesn't understand."
Her group and others push state politicians to pass so-called "ag-gag" laws that make it a crime to mislead in order to get a job on a farm. (That's often how activists get on farms to film.)
"We call it farm protection," says Johnson Smith.
Stossel asks: "What about everybody else? Why do you get special protection?"
She responds: "The agricultural community is the only business community that this sort of tactic is really being used on right now."
Stossel pushes back: "I'm an investigative reporter. I can't do my job if there are laws that prevent me from showing things. Nobody believes it if you don't see it."
"These activist groups want to eliminate all of animal agriculture," Johnson Smith replies.
Some activists do want to stop people from eating meat. But many of their undercover investigations show real animal abuse. Some have led to convictions of abusive farm workers.
"These groups are exposing issues that are happening," Stossel points out.
"If they really cared about animals," says Johnson Smith, "they would stop [the abuse] right then. Instead, they go weeks and months without reporting anything to the farm owners [because] they want to make their sensational video!"
The Agricultural Alliance now pushes for laws that would force activists to report abuse quickly. But that would kill investigations before they can document much, explains Amanda Howell of the Animal Legal Defense Foundation.
One has to film for multiple days, Howell notes. Otherwise, "a company can say, 'This is a one-off!'"
Johnson Smith replies, "There are bad apples in every industry, but 99.9 percent of farmers do the right thing every single day….Farming isn't always pretty."
Howell says that the only way for the public to learn the truth is if undercover investigations are allowed. "We should all be worried when corporations are supporting laws that impinge our right to free speech."
Stossel agrees. "Whatever you thinks of the activists, and I have problems with many of them, government shouldn't pass special laws that prevent people from revealing what's true."
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: No Filming on Farms appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>China's Skynet and Sharp Eyes projects aim to comprehensively surveil China's 1.4 billion people by 2020 through a network of 626 million video cameras stationed in public spaces monitored using facial recognition technologies optimized via artificial intelligence. These vast video surveillance systems will help enforce the Chinese government's social credit system that awards points to citizens who behave and docks those who commit crimes, fail to pay bills, or criticize the communist regime. Folks who get put on the government's "List of Untrustworthy Persons" due to their low scores are forbidden from purchasing such items as high-speed rail and air tickets or hotel rooms, among other punishments. Five million people have been barred from high-speed trains and 17 million from flights under the scheme, according to Time magazine.
Although it is hard to gauge real public sentiment in authoritarian China, there is some evidence that many Chinese citizens feel safer knowing that Big Brother is watching over them. On the other hand, The New York Times reports in an article published as part of its superb Privacy Project that the Chinese government has built out a video surveillance system designed to ethnically profile and track millions of its restive Uighur citizens. This is possible because Central Asian Uighurs in general look somewhat differently from China's majority Han population.
"The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China's rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review," reports the Times. "The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism."
Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law told the Times,"If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity."
To see how effective facial recognition video surveillance might be in the United States, the Times ran a test using off-the-shelf Amazon facial recognition technology to filter images captured from video cameras located in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library's main branch. The Times ran the Bryant Park images through a database it built using public photos of people who work in the area. The result:
Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.
As government and private face databases expand and real time video detection accuracy improves, the cost of tracking us will fall ever lower. The Times notes that New York city police have access to 9,000 camera feeds in lower Manhattan alone. Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that because of how quickly the technology has advanced, she would now support a wholesale ban on government use of facial recognition.
In the Times' article detailing how the Chinese government uses facial recognition to monitor the Uighurs, MIT artificial intelligence researcher Jonathan Frankle warned, "I don't think it's overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy. Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it's using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into."
Yes it is.
The post The New York Times Built a Functioning Private Facial Recognition System appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Cameras are a great equalizer when civilians encounter law enforcement officers. One Indianapolis woman recently learned how cameras can also make you a target.
According to WTHR, Demetria Brown was stopped near the a scene of a crash when an officer asked if she had a phone. After confirming that she did, the officer asked if she could record the scene for him. Brown made sure to get his name and other relevant information in the process.
As she was assisting the first officer, a second officer approached her and demanded that she stop recording. Brown attempted to explain the situation to the officer, but was placed in handcuffs. Another person was able to take the phone and show Brown being arrested.
At one point in the video, the arresting officer discusses his actions with another officer off-screen. After realizing that Brown was in fact abiding by the wishes of the first officer, the second officer uncuffs her and lets her leave.
A video of the incident was posted on Facebook.
Prior to the incident, the Indianapolis Police Department announced a series of listening sessions aimed at garnering feedback on a proposed body camera program. The department has invited residents in all districts to participate. Perhaps they should hold a session to educate officers on the right to record.
The post One Officer Asked Her To Record a Crash Scene With Her Phone. Another Officer Arrested Her for It. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A former Chicago city official is heading to prison after getting caught taking $2 million in bribes from a red light camera company.
John Bills, former deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation, was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in federal prison for taking bribes from Redflex Traffic Systems, an Australia-based company. Bills was found guilty in January of having accepted cash, a new Mercedes car and an Arizona condo from Redflex in return for helping the company secure a $100 million contract with the city of Chicago.
"Every bribe that is taken, every kickback that is tendered or received, every amount of cash that is pocketed further erodes the rule of law," U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall said, according to the Chicago Tribune. "It erodes faith in our government, and that takes years to rebuild."
The Tribune said the sentence was one of the toughest ever handed down to a non-elected public official convicted of corruption.
Bills will soon have company behind bars. Martin O'Malley (no, not that Martin O'Malley), a personal friend of Bills' who admitted acting as a "bagman" to deliver Manilla envelops full of cash to Bills on behalf of Redflex, is scheduled to be sentenced for his role in the scheme later this month. Also convicted and awaiting sentencing is former Redflex CEO Karen Finley.
Before the contract was terminated by the city in 2013 (after the Tribune exposed the how Redflex had bought influence from city officials), it was the most lucrative red light camera deal in the country. At one point, Chicago's red light cameras provided 20 percent of Redflex's revenue, even though the company operated similar automatic enforcement devices in dozens of American cities. Redflex also benefitted from the publicity of having a contract with Chicago and used that deal to help convince other cities to acquire similar programs, prosecutors said when they brought the case against Bills in 2014.
The bribery convictions won't stop Chicago from using the lucrative red light cameras.
In 2015 alone, Chicago made more than $285 million from more than 2.2 million tickets issued by the red light cameras installed at 149 intersections across the city. Chicago also has more than 300 speed cameras that bring in about $15 million in revenue each year.
Even though city officials say the cameras are meant to improve safety at dangerous intersections, there's little evidence they actually do that. A Chicago Tribune investigation published in 2014 found that 40 percent of the cameras installed during Chicago's decade-long contract with RedFlex were actually increasing the frequency of traffic accidents and resulting injuries. Studies in other cities—including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., and elsewhere—have found a similar uptick in rear-end crashes at intersections with red light cameras, likely caused by drivers who are slamming on the brakes to avoid a ticket instead of proceeding safely through the intersection.
That's just what happens when the cameras are working properly. An apparent malfuction affecting some of Chicago's red light cameras in the summer of 2011 resulted in huge spikes in the number of tickets issued—one camera spit out 560 tickets in 12 days after issuing just 100 tickets in the previous six months. The city's traffic court tossed out about half of those tickets, but the whole incident was made more suspicious by the fact that Redflex did not notify city officials that anything unusual had happened (officials claimed they learned about the problem when reporters asked about it).
Bills isn't the first person to go to jail for helping red light camera companies grease the skids.
John Raphael, a lobbyist for Redflex, was sentenced to prison last week for soliciting bribes to city councilmen in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. Shawn Brown, former mayor of Saint Peters, Missouri, served a year in prison after taking a bribe from Redflex in 2006. Jay Morris Specter, another Redflex lobbyist, was convicted in 2007 of committing fraud.
The post Bribery Convictions Won't Shut Off Chicago's Red Light Cameras appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>North Carolina has just passed, and Gov. Pat McCrory has signed, legislation that would declare that police recordings—both body camera and dash cam footage—are not public records under state law and would follow a different set of disclosure rules.
All of this is happening at a time where citizens are hungry for police actions to be more transparent and accountable to the public so that abuse can be fought against. Instead, North Carolina is using their concerns over the potential privacy over those who are being filmed to significantly curtail the ability for citizens to see what is happening in police recordings.
There's two major components to HB 972: when people may view these recordings and when the recordings may be publicly released.
For disclosures—who may watch a recording—the law requires the viewer to be a person in the recording or a representative for a person in the recording (and they cannot record or copy the video). Even then, police have wide discretion to decide how much of a recording to allow somebody to watch or to decide it contains "highly sensitive" material and reject the request. The person can then appeal to the courts, and a judge can overrule them if the judge determines the police abused their discretion.
A judge will also be the person deciding whether police footage will be publicly released. The law enforcement agencies cannot decide for themselves to release footage. And in order to get a court order to get footage released, the requester needs to have a sense of actually what they're looking for and what time it takes place in the video footage. That is to say, you have to already know what's in the video and where in order to request having it released.
The state has been attempting to spin the law as a good thing because it also prohibits the footage from being kept confidential in a police officer's personnel file, and therefore completely hidden. But that's cold comfort when the process to gain transparency is dependent on the mercy and cooperation of the police themselves and judges.
The North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is not happy:
"Body cameras should be a tool to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable to the communities they serve, but this shameful law will make it nearly impossible to achieve those goals," said Susanna Birdsong, Policy Counsel for the ACLU of North Carolina. "People who are filmed by police body cameras should not have to spend time and money to go to court in order to see that footage. These barriers are significant and we expect them to drastically reduce any potential this technology had to make law enforcement more accountable to community members."
There is some good news in the bill, though it's completely unrelated to police footage access. HB 972 also authorizes a needle exchange program for the state and access to naloxone kits to help counteract drug overdoses. Actually, that's really good news. A shame it's been attached to this terrible policy that helps give cover to police secrecy.
The post N.C. Exempts Police Recordings from Public Records Laws appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The initial video of Alton Sterling's shooting — which began to go viral shortly after being uploaded to the internet late Tuesday — was not shot by random bystanders who happened upon the scene, but rather by members of Stop the Killing, a Louisiana-based group of activists whose mission is "To stop the violence and senseless killings in our communities," according to their website.
The group's founder, Arthur "Silky Slim" Reed, is a former gang member who writes in his bio that he spent "12 years bouncing between gang life and prison" before finding his calling as an anti-violence activist, youth counselor, radio host, and filmmaker who creates work "geared to expose violence and senseless killings in communities throughout America."
Reed's group has access to police scanners, and as a practice, heads to scenes of potential violence, sometimes capturing murders on video and using the footage in documentaries geared at scaring young people straight from the potential allure of a life of crime.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Reed says members of Stop the Killing heard a call on their scanner which led them to the fateful scene of Sterling's shooting:
Early Tuesday morning, members of his team — he wouldn't say who, nor confirm he was present, citing safety concerns — filmed the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling outside the Triple S Food Mart. After police did not immediately release any footage of the shooting, Reed and his team uploaded the video to Facebook and Instagram at about 5 p.m. Tuesday.
'We see a great injustice, and we wanted it to be known," Reed said. "We're forcefully seeking justice. This is a civil rights movement, and this is the continuation of same struggle that black people have been going through for so many years."
By uploading the video, Reed could ensure that people would know exactly what happened.
Reed also told the Post that his group does not normally release violent footage to the public over social media, but that he felt compelled to do so in this case because "This is our third killing here in Baton Rouge by the police department."
The officers involved with Sterling's death — Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake — were both wearing body cameras, but both claim their cams "fell off" during the altercation. If not for the footage shot by Stop the Killing members, as well as the cell phone footage released by Triple S Food Mart owner Abdullah Muflahi, the public would have only the police version of events to go by. This is why maximum transparency, ideally provided by both the public and the police, is necessary to properly adjudicate tragedies like this.
Read more of Reason's coverage of the goverment's War on Cameras here.
The post How Local Anti-Violence Activists Brought the Alton Sterling Shooting Video to the Public appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The United Kingdom is big on mass surveillance, with local authorities reportedly spending over £277 million between 2012 and 2015 on CCTV camera systems.
In 2013, the British Security Industry Authority (BSIA) estimated there were about five million security cameras in the U.K., which works out to one camera for every 14 citizens. A 2015 report in Wired UK suggested the average person in the U.K. is captured on 30 different security systems a day.
Now it appears that facial recognition technology is coming to music festivals, having already been deployed at the Download festival in Leicestershire, England last year. The specific application used, NeoFace, is described on its manufacturer's website as "a contact-free non-obtrusive approach makes for a more easily integrated and acceptable identification solution using existing CCTV cameras." The NEC corporation adds:
Unlike other biometric systems, facial recognition requires no physical or active interaction with the subject, making it one of the least intrusive yet highly accurate biometric modes. It enables faces to be recorded and archived at a distance, act as a crime deterrent, and help identify a person in real-time.
In the United States, we're not quite at U.K.-levels of ubiquitous security cameras, but since the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013, U.S. cities have been racing to catch up. In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, Beantown itself went ahead and secretly used facial recognition technology at a concert in the city's Government Center, an outdoor street-side pavilion only a few miles from the site of the attacks.
Reporters at Dig Boston uncovered documents in 2014 pertaining to surveillance at the Boston Calling concert:
Shockingly, these sensitive documents have been left exposed online for more than a year. Among them are memos written by employees of IBM, the outside contractor involved, presenting plans to use "Face Capture" on "every person" at the 2013 concert. Another defines a party of interest "as anyone who walks through the door."
The urban laboratory described herein details specifications of a so-called Intelligent Operations Center designed and licensed by IBM. As it turns out, this integration of the company's branded Smart Surveillance System (SSS) and Intelligent Video Analytics (IVA) software was preceded by a beta phase piloted at the 2013 Boston Marathon less than two months before the expanded system was rolled out at Boston Calling.
Shortly after Dig's reporting went public, Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project told Noisey's Luke O'Neil, "This is definitely not the first time that government and private actors have worked together to use people attending an event like that as guinea pigs."
Kenneth Lipp, one of the reporters who broke the story for Dig also told Noisey that "what's very concerning is how recklessly they tested something on the public carte blanche, predicated on this Never Forget thing, post-9/11 thing." Lipp adds, "What it means to me is cities using integrated surveillance, having tech partners that establish themselves as contractors in the city by putting their hardware in the infrastructure. Once they have infrastructure in place, they can apply any of the software they want to it."
Boston was understandably on edge after the bombings, and even with government-mandated "lockdowns" and "shelter-in-place" orders, 86 percent of Greater Boston residents reportedly approved of how law enforcement handled the hunt for the Tsarnaev brothers. Almost half of those polled by MassInc Polling Group said "they are more concerned that the government will not go far enough to investigate and prevent terrorist attacks."
So maybe Bostonians wouldn't have minded the use of facial recognition technology being used at a concert so soon after the attacks. But it's not insignificant that the government partnered with a private company and used the surveillance in secret.
As O'Neil notes in Noisey, law enforcement in Boston has in recent years spied on music events as a means of collecting data on Occupy Boston participants and illegal DIY concerts, which are often held without permits. Neither of those rise to the level of public concern as terrorism, but when police and government have fancy new toys, they want to use them.
The post Big Brother is Coming to a Music Festival Near You appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday FBI Director James Comey reiterated his argument that fear of ending up in a "viral video" has made police less aggressive, saying the phenomenon "could well be at the heart" of rising murder rates in some cities. Comey told reporters "there's a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime—the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, 'Hey, what are you doing here?'"
Comey admitted he had no solid evidence that police have in fact become less aggressive or that, if they have, it has anything to do with increases in violent crime. And although he said his understanding of the situation is based on conversations with police officers, his comments drew a rebuke from James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. "He ought to stick to what he knows," Pasco told The New York Times. "He's basically saying that police officers are afraid to do their jobs with absolutely no proof."
Nor is Comey's argument plausible, at least not the way he presents it. If it is simply good policing to ask a group of guys hanging out at 2 a.m. what they're up to, why would such an encounter be the stuff of a viral video? To attract a lot of negative attention online, the cop would have to do more than that. If he treated these (most likely) young black men disrespectfully, refusing to accept their explanations and insisting that they disperse under threat of arrest, that might do it. The incident also might get some attention if the cop tried to stop someone from recording it or used unnecessary violence, especially if that violence resulted in serious injury or death. But assuming that "marginal additional policing" is legal, effective, and unobjectionable, why would the possibility that it might be recorded lead to less of it?
Even if the problem Comey perceives were real, it's not clear what he wants to do about it, and the possibilities are unsettling. Courts and police departments across the country have recognized that Americans have a First Amendment right to record police officers as they perform their official duties in public, provided they do not interfere with the officers' work. But Comey's argument implies that recording cops is inherently disruptive because it has a chilling effect on perfectly appropriate and necessary policing activities. So even if a bystander with a cellphone is not, say, standing too close or intimidating witnesses, his very presence contributes to crime by instilling a fear of online ignominy in the hearts of brave yet easily cowed police officers. If so, dashcam videos recorded by the police themselves create the same hazard.
Another way to look at it, of course, is that watched cops are better cops. The knowledge that they might be recorded does have a deterrent effect, but in a good way: It deters quick tempers, recklessness, excessive force, illegal searches, and trumped-up charges. Furthermore, a video record can vindicate cops who are falsely accused of such abuses. In short, it is hard to see why conscientious cops would worry that their interactions with members of the public might be recorded, any more than conscientious blackjack dealers or bank tellers would. If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.
The post FBI Director Blames 'Viral Videos' for Rising Murder Rates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Fourteen-year-old Dedric Colvin was shot on Wednesday when Baltimore Police mistook his BB gun for a semi-automatic pistol. As Ed Krayewski noted on Hit & Run,
According to police, cops saw the boy with what looked like a gun and "gave chase," as the Baltimore Sun described it. The police commissioner insists there's "no reason to believe that these officers acted inappropriately in any way," because they didn't know if the gun was real or not. Police also brought in the boy's mother for questioning, and the police commissioner said she said she knew her son had left the home with the "replica."
If the officer involved had been wearing a body camera, might it have prevented this incident? In 2015, Reason's Paul Detrick sat down with former Seattle Police officer Steve Ward to discuss how cameras lead to better policing.
"Everyone behaves better when they're on video," said Ward, who started a body-camera company called Vievu. "I wanted to catch 100 percent of what a cop does."
Click below to watch the video:
The post How Body Cameras Help Prevent Tragic Police Shootings #DedricColvin appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) is leaving the door open for his support of a bill requiring police departments to equip their vehicles with dashboard cameras, after that law was ruled an unfunded mandated by the Council on Local Mandates.
"I signed it the last time so I'm certainly willing to look at it," Christie said, "but look at it in light of the new costs."
The dashcam bill, first introduced in 2014, included a $25 surcharge on DWI offenses as a method of paying for the dashcams. Christie has not been shy to support increased fines as a method of paying for government mandates before. In 2013, he signed a bill into law that increased penalties for failure to keep right from the $50 to $200 range to the $100 to $300 range, including a $50 surcharge to pay for "keep right" sign.
While the dashcam bill's sponsor argues that the Council on Local Mandates doesn't have the power to review partially funded mandates and asked Christie to appeal the decision, Christie agreed with the council that its decisions were not reviewable. The New Jersey Constitution calls the council's decisions "political and not judicial determinations."
The Constitutional provision about the Council on Local Mandates does offer a number of other ways legislation can avoid review by the council, including laws, rules, or regulations "which implement the provisions of this Constitution," something the bill's sponsors perhaps could have argued the dashcam law did, but didn't argue. Another provision exempts laws, rules, or regulations "which are required to comply with federal laws or rules or to meet eligibility standards for federal entitlements." There are no federal rules tying federal funding of local and state law enforcement to transparency measures like installing dashboard cameras or using body cameras.
I've previously suggested a tax on police associations and unions to pay for the dashcam, but suspect that's an idea that would be met in the New Jersey legislature with bipartisan opposition.
The post Chris Christie Urges Lawmakers to Rewrite Police Dashcam Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New Jersey's Council on Local Mandates has ruled that a 2014 law requiring police vehicles to carry dashboard cameras has been ruled unconstitutional, according to Philly.com. Article VIII, section II, paragraph five of the New Jersey constitution prohibits the state government from imposing "unfunded mandates" on local government and sets up the council to adjudicate.
Philly.com reports:
Deptford Township in Gloucester County challenged the law, arguing the $25 surcharge on driving-while-intoxicated offenses did not provide enough money to buy the necessary equipment.
In September, the nine-member board issued a temporary injunction blocking implementation of the law.
In its six-page opinion, the board called described the funding mechanism as "illusory."
The evidence submitted by Deptford, the board said, showed the surcharge "would fall far short of funding the instillation of either a vehicle-mounted or body-worn mobile video recording system."
I suggest a tax on police associations and unions to fund this mandate. Gov. Chris Christie (R), who signed the 2014 bill into law, has sparred with teachers union during his tenure as New Jersey governor but has largely avoided engaging police unions.
h/t Victor M
The post NJ Court Rules Dashcam Mandate Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Under an agreement announced yesterday, the city of Seneca, South Carolina, will pay $2.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of Zachary Hammond, an unarmed 19-year-old who was killed by a Seneca police officer last July. Lt. Mark Tiller claimed Hammond tried to run him over in a Hardee's parking lot, forcing him to fire in self-defense. But that is not what the dashcam video of the deadly encounter seemed to show, which helps explain why the city decided to settle.
Hammond had driven to Hardee's with his date, 23-year-old Tori Morton, who was lured there by an undercover cop posing as a marijuana buyer. Morton was sitting in the front passenger seat of Hammond's Honda Civic as Tiller approached the driver's side with his gun drawn, shouting, "Hands up! Put 'em up! Stop! Stop! Stop! I'm gonna shoot your fucking ass!"
Hammond, who was already backing up as Tiller approached the car, continued on his way, making a sharp left so he could pull out of the parking lot. Tiller ran into the path of the car, then backed up to avoid being hit.
When Tiller fired the first shot, which entered Hammond's chest through the left side, he was no longer in the car's path. Tiller fired a second shot, which hit Hammond in the back, as Hammond was moving past him. There is no indication that Hammond aimed the car at Tiller, and Tiller was not in danger of being struck when he fired those two rounds.
Tiller was nevertheless exonerated last October by 10th Circuit Solicitor Chrissy Adams, who concluded that he reasonably believed killing Hammond was the only way to avoid death or serious injury. The Justice Department is still looking into the shooting and could conceivably prosecute him for knowingly violating Hammond's constitutional rights, but such a case would be considerably harder to prove than the state charges that Adams rejected.
I think any fair-minded person who watches the video carefully has to question Tiller's use of deadly force. Even Adams conceded that it was "troublesome," although she emphasized that "Lt. Tiller had seconds to make this decision" and said "the law prohibits viewing Lt. Tiller's decision to use deadly force from the perspective of a 'Monday morning quarterback.'" Whether or not Tiller's actions were legally justified, Hammond's death is not just regettable but morally grotesque, since it would not have happened but for a two-bit drug sting that accomplished nothing, a pointless battle in an unjust war.
The post Senseless Police Shooting of Zachary Hammond Results in $2.2 Million Settlement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced criminal charges against three Santa Ana police officers who were caught by a surveillance camera eating what seemed to be cannabis-infused treats after raiding an unlicensed medical marijuana dispensary last May. Officers Matthew Sontag, Nicole Lynn Quijas, and Jorge Arroyo were each charged with petty theft for taking snacks from the employee break room at Sky High Holistic. The press release from the D.A's office describes the stolen items as "snacks available to staff, including Detour Simple protein bars and Mrs. Thinsters cookies." Sontag was also charged with misdemeanor vandalism for damaging five surveillance cameras by banging them against a shelf, a safe, a cash register, and the corner of a display case.
"While other SAPD personnel ate some protein bars," the press release says, "there is insufficient evidence that they knew the food items belonged to the dispensary and not their fellow officers. There was also no evidence that any SAPD personnel consumed any edible marijuana items available at the dispensary."
O.C Weekly's Nick Schou, who broke the story last June, is skeptical of the latter conclusion:
Right: No evidence whatsoever, other than the fact that the cops were at a pot shop, eating candy bars, and acting high. One is then left with the obvious conclusion that these poor officers are so underpaid that they have no choice but to munch down on pilfered protein bars while on duty. That makes so much more sense.
The officers' defenders initially claimed they were eating protein bars they brought with them, a story contradicted by the surveillance video, in which one officer announces, "There are some good-looking chocolate bars back there." At that point another officer goes off camera and comes back holding a bar that he unwraps and begins to eat. Later he directs another officer (apparently Quijas) to the source of the bars. She goes back there a couple of times, retrieving snacks that she shares with a few other officers.
Last July, Schou noted comments that reinforced the impression that the officers were chowing down on the dispensary's products. "These bars are pretty good," one cop says. "I kinda feel light-headed, though." Later a firefighter enters and says to Quijas, "You guys got that munchies now, huh?" She replies, "Mmm-hmm." The other officers laugh. In retrospect, the cops might have been joking about eating marijuana edibles while eating ordinary (but stolen) snacks, although it's not clear whether their urine or blood was tested to substantiate that explanation.
Sontag, Quijas, and Arroyo are scheduled to be arraigned on April 11. If convicted, Quijas and Arroyo face up to six months in jail and a $400 fine. Sontag faces up to 18 months in jail and a $2,000 fine.
After entering the dispensary, the officers disabled 16 visible surveillance cameras but missed four hidden ones. The D.A.'s office says turning off the cameras was consistent with "investigatory and officer safety protocol." But if the cops had done a more thorough job of eliminating electronic witnesses, their misbehavior never would have come to light.
Recognizing that fact, Sontag, Quijas, and Arroyo asked a judge to suppress the surveillance video, arguing that it violated their right to privacy. An Orange County judge had the good sense to reject that claim.
The post Cops Caught on Camera Eating Dispensary's Snack Bars Charged With Theft appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week a West Virginia woman who stood between her dog and a state trooper intent on killing him was acquitted of obstructing an officer by a jury in Wood County. It took jurors just half an hour to acquit 23-year-old Tiffanie Hupp after they watched the video of the incident that Hupp's husband, Ryan, shot with his cellphone.
Trooper Seth Cook came to the Hupps' house on May 9, 2015, in response to a dispute between a neighbor and Ryan's stepfather. There Cook encountered Buddy, a Labrador-husky mix who was chained outside the house. The dog, whom Hupp describes as "a big baby," ran toward Cook, barking, and Cook backed up. Even though the dog had reached the end of his chain and Cook was not in any danger, he drew his pistol. "I immediately thought, 'I don't want him to get shot,'" Hupp, who was in the yard with her 3-year-old son, told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The video shows her stepping in front of Cook, at which point he grabs her, throws her to the ground, picks her up, leans her against his cruiser, and handcuffs her.
"The officer alleged in the complaint that she raised her arm," Hupp's lawyer, David Schles, told the Gazette-Mail, "but we did stop-frame [of the video] for the jury, and it showed she was stationary, her arms at her side….All she said was 'Don't do that,' and [Cook] grabbed her by the bicep and spun her around, and she ends up falling down."
After he heard about the case, Schles contacted Hupp and offered to represent her for free. "I thought it was outrageous, this girl is being charged for standing in her yard doing nothing but saying, 'Don't shoot my dog,'" he said. According to Photography Is Not a Crime (PINAC), Cook "testified that he was not afraid of the dog, but was following training that required him to kill all dogs that approach him, even if it was chained and wagging its tail as Buddy was doing in this case."
Hupp told PINAC her case hinged on her husband's video, which they did not have for weeks after the incident because Cook confiscated the phone, which he was unable to access because it was protected by a password. "Without that video, it's just my word against a state trooper," she said. "Nobody is going to believe my word over law enforcement."
The post Jury Acquits Woman Arrested for Protecting Her Dog From a Cop appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>FBI Director James Comey says cops are reluctant to do their jobs because they worry that their actions will be captured on camera. Judging from the official response to the shooting of Zachary Hammond, they have little to fear.
Speaking at the University of Chicago Law School in October, Comey said police officers "in today's YouTube world" are afraid to get out of their cars, lest they face camera-wielding bystanders intent on recording them. He warned that good policing could "drift away from us in the age of viral videos" as cops refrain from confronting suspicious characters.
"I spoke to officers privately in one big-city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars," Comey said. "I've been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video."
You might wonder what exactly cops would do if they were sure they were not being recorded, or why they are so worried that practices Comey thinks are essential to public safety would be fodder for viral videos. But the truth is that cops rarely face serious consequences even when they star in videos that appall the average YouTube viewer.
To understand why, consider the exoneration of the police officer who shot and killed Hammond, an unarmed 19-year-old, in Seneca, South Carolina, on July 27. Three months later, 10th Circuit Solicitor Chrissy Adams said Lt. Mark Tiller was justified in using lethal force because Hammond was trying to run him over. But that is not what the dashcam video of the encounter seems to show.
Police planned to arrest Hammond's date, 23-year-old Tori Morton, whom an undercover cop had lured to a Hardee's parking lot by pretending to be a pot and cocaine buyer. Morton was sitting in the front passenger seat of Hammond's Honda Civic as Tiller approached the driver's side with his gun drawn, shouting, "Hands up! Put 'em up! Stop! Stop! Stop! I'm gonna shoot your fucking ass!"
Hammond, who was already backing up as Tiller approached the car, continued on his way, making a sharp left so he could pull out of the parking lot. Tiller ran into the path of the car, then backed up to avoid being hit.
When Tiller fired the first shot, which entered Hammond's chest through the left side, he was no longer in the car's path. Tiller fired a second shot, which hit Hammond in the back, as Hammond was moving past him. There is no indication that Hammond aimed the car at Tiller, and Tiller was not in danger of being struck when he fired those two rounds.
"The video viewed at full speed, standing alone, is troublesome," Adams conceded in the letter explaining her decision. She probably meant troubling, but the slip is revealing: The video, viewed at any speed, is indeed troublesome—that is, inconvenient—if you are determined to conclude that Tiller reasonably believed killing Hammond was the only way to avoid death or serious injury.
Adams managed that feat, despite the video and autopsy evidence to the contrary, by emphasizing how quickly Tiller killed Hammond. "Lt. Tiller had seconds to make this decision," she said. "The law prohibits viewing Lt. Tiller's decision to use deadly force from the perspective of a 'Monday morning quarterback.'"
As in the case of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was killed in 2014 because someone saw him playing with an Airsoft pellet gun, the officer's hastiness counts in his favor, and the recklessness of his approach does not figure in his legal culpability. These are the sort of breaks you can expect if you have a badge as well as a gun, and they are a pretty strong defense against viral videos.
The post Camera-Shy Cops Can Relax appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Great American Police Work story, reported at Raw Story, thanks again to the magic of cheap and widespread recording technology, involving:
Michael Picard's encounter with the troopers last September, when he and a friend were detained while standing on a highway to warn motorists about a DUI checkpoint in Hartford, Connecticut….
One trooper, identified as Jeff Jalbert, is seen approaching Picard's friend and saying that they were called to the scene because "somebody just said that one of you guys had a gun on them." Picard states that he is carrying a gun, but that he has a permit allow him to do so.
Trooper First Class John Barone is later seen in the video reaching for Picard's phone and telling him it was illegal for him to be filmed on a city street.
"Did you get any documentation that I am allowing you to take my picture?" Barone asks.
"No, but you're on public property," Picard replies.
"No I'm not," the trooper responds. "I'm on state property. I'm on state property."
Barone then seizes Picard's camera, but does not realize it captures his discussion with Jalbert, Sergeant John Jacobi, and an unidentified trooper after noting that Picard's gun is legal. Barone can be heard asking his colleagues, "Want me to punch a number on this? Gotta cover our ass."
Later, Jacobi recommends to the group, "I think we do simple trespass, we do reckless use of the highway and creating a public disturbance. All three are tickets."
"Then we claim that, um, in backup, we had multiple people, um, they didn't want to stay and give us a statement, so we took our own course of action," an unidentified trooper adds….
Picard says "As of now, the prosecutor has not dropped the case despite having video evidence of police misconduct."
Raw Story picked up the story from the Free Thought Project.
The video:
For extra police recorded dark tragi-comedy this morning, Oakland cops on tape telling Hernan Jamarillo in 2013 "sir, we are not killing you" minutes before the 51-year-old man they were all on top of died. His crime? Being in his room and acting erratically after his sister (foolishly) called the cops about a ruckus in his room she thought was an intruder.
Hat tip: Gabriel Starr
The post Our Police at Work: It's Not Public Property. It's <em>State</em> Property! And We'll Make Up a Reason We Bothered You to "Cover Our Ass" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did you wonder why the Chicago Police dashcam video that showed the fatal (and brutal) shooting of Laquan McDonald didn't have any sound? Its microphone was not working, and as DNAinfo in Chicago has discovered, the police department seems to have a bit of a problem with officers' dashcams and microphones cutting out, sometimes due to what was classified by the department itself as "intentional damage":
Maintenance records of the squad car used by Jason Van Dyke, who shot and killed Laquan McDonald, and his partner, Joseph Walsh, show months-long delays for two dashcam repairs, including a long wait to fix "intentional damage."
On June 17, 2014, police technicians reported fixing a dashcam wiring issue in police vehicle No. 6412, the squad shared by Van Dyke and Walsh, about three months after it was reported broken, records show.
A day later, the same vehicle's dashcam system was reported busted again. It took until Oct. 8, 2014, to complete repairs of what technicians deemed "intentional damage," according to reports.
Just 12 days later, on Oct. 20, 2014, dashcam video recorded from squad car No. 6412 on the night Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald did not record audio. The video that went viral showing Van Dyke killing Laquan was taken from a different squad car, but it, too, had no audio.
DNAInfo notes that four other police cars on the scene failed to record audio and only two of the five cars that had dashcams actually caught any video. On the night of the shooting one reported a "power issue" that kept the camera from being used, but technicians reported no actual problems upon inspection.
This, observers might guess, does not appear to be an anomaly:
On 30 occasions, technicians who downloaded dashcam videos found evidence that audio recording systems either had not been activated or were "intentionally defeated" by police personnel, the records show.
It wasn't until the absence of sound on the videos from Laquan's shooting that problems with dashcam systems came to light.
Police officials quickly placed the blame on officers and shift supervisors responsible for making sure dashcam systems work properly before officers go on patrol.
In December, interim Police Supt. John Escalante warned the rank and file that they would be disciplined for failing to follow proper dashcam protocol. Weeks later, he followed through by hitting some officers and supervisors with formal reprimands and up-to-three-day suspensions.
A police union rep complained, wanting to know how they could be so certain that police purposefully caused damage. Well, a police spokesman pointed out that since the crackdown on officers to make sure they were operating the systems properly, there was a 70 percent increase in the amount of video uploaded at the end of each shift.
This is a reminder of the importance of not allowing too much secrecy of a police body camera program. The horrific MacDonald shooting brought to light a problem that apparently has been going on for a while. But some police departments are approaching the use of body cameras with the intention of keeping video secret from the public. If that happens, how will the public know whether the police are not subverting the system yet again?
The post Chicago Police Deliberately Sabotaging Recording Devices, According to Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Everybody (well, most everybody) wants police officers to start wearing body cameras. That's the outcome of a new poll by Cato/YouGov. A massive, overwhelming 92 percent want police officers to wear body cameras, support that crosses party lines.
And, as Cato pollster Emily Ekins (formerly of Reason) notes, those polled understand that body cameras aren't just about distrusting the police. Body cameras have the potential to protect officers as well:
Americans do not view the police wearing body cameras as exclusively protecting citizens from the police. Instead, 81% believe such a policy will protect both—the police officers who wear them and the citizens who interact with the police—equally. Only 10% expect cameras to protect citizens more and 9% percent expect cameras to protect police officers more. While African-Americans and Hispanics (19%) are about three times as likely as Caucasians (7%) to say cameras will primarily protect citizens, overwhelming shares of all groups still say cameras will protect both members of the public and officers equally.
Furthermore, more than half of those asked said they'd be willing to pay more in taxes to pay for body cameras, though Republicans were less likely and would prefer for money to be shifted from other spending to cover them.
Other poll responses were a bit more troubling. More than half of the people polled (52 percent) say that police officers should be allowed to view footage of incidents before they make official statements about violent encounters. Ekins notes that the question response seems tied to whether people polled have positive opinions toward the police. Those who have a favorable opinion of police are much more likely to say officers should be allowed to view footage than those who have unfavorable opinions.
And the most disappointing poll result shows that 65 percent of people surveyed believe that there's a "war on police." This response comes even as America sees the second-safest year for police officers in U.S. history. Violence against police is actually significantly down. But then Americans tend to think crime is up even when it's actually on a downward trend.
Read more about the poll here.
The post Americans Overwhelmingly Support Police Body Cameras, Understand They're for Both Sides appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In April, Officer Neal Browder of the San Diego Police Department shot Fridoon Rawshan Nehad from 20 feet away once in the chest after responding to a call about a knife-wielding transient threatening a porn shop clerk who told him he couldn't sleep in the alley behind the store. Browder did not turn on his body camera before leaving his vehicle, but part of the incident was caught on a nearby surveillance camera.
Authorities seized the footage as part of their investigation, and in November the district attorney decided not to pursue charges against the officers. The district attorney, Bonnie Dumanis, resisted releasing the footage but was required to after a judge sided with local media outlets and lifted a protective order for the video. So, via NBC San Diego:
Dumanis on Tuesday released surveillance video showing the moment Browder shot Nehad, along with body camera video from another officer, additional store surveillance footage, enhanced video of Nehad, still frames and a transcript of the dispatch officer communication from before, during and after the shooting.
The unprecedented move by the DA's office was to put the surveillance video in perspective, Dumanis said.
Dumanis said she did not want to release the video because of "a legal duty not to do anything that could prejudice a jury in a criminal trial," presumably other than deciding not to press charges or recommend disciplinary action—an attorney for the city mentioned a possible federal review when arguing against the release of the video in court, although the Department of Justice wouldn't confirm or deny a review to local media.
Browder told investigators there was no doubt in his mind Nehad was going to stab him. The police investigated why Browder didn't turn on his police body camera, and changed their policy to require cops to turn their cameras on before exiting a vehicle, not when first making contact with a suspect. Browder ended up back on the street, illustrating why body cameras don't work without transparency.
Activists from Black Lives Matter have started targeting police union contracts, often some of the biggest impediments to more transparency. The San Diego Police Officers' Association said it continued to have concerns "regarding the release of evidence in ongoing investigations, as it may jeopardize the rights of both officers and citizens now and in future cases."
Nehad's family, who says Nehad, a veteran of the Afghan Army, was mentally ill, have filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the police department.
Watch the surveillance video below:
h/t Scott F.
The post Judge Orders Release of Video in Fatal San Diego Police Shooting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In my column today about the November 2014 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at a Cleveland park, I note that it's unclear in the surveillance video of the incident whether the boy's hand moved toward his waistband before Officer Timothy Loehmann fired two rounds at him. But I say "it is indisputable that [Tamir] never produced a weapon." Apparently I spoke too soon, because Loehmann is now disputing that very point, saying in a statement released yesterday that Tamir was "reaching into his waistband" and "pulling the gun out."
That gun, you may recall, was a nonlethal, pellet-firing Airsoft pistol that had alarmed a bystander who called 911. Because the replica bore a strong resemblance to a real gun, whether Tamir was holding it when he was shot is obviously relevant in evaluating Loehmann's reaction. The problem for Loehmann is that his statement, while helpful in justifying his actions, seems inconsistent with what he said before and with what five use-of-force experts gleaned from the video.
As detailed by former Irvine, California, Deputy Police Chief Jeffrey Noble in an expert report released on Saturday by lawyers for Tamir's family, two other Cleveland officers and an FBI agent who arrived at the scene soon after the shooting said Loehmann told them Tamir "reached for" or "went for" the replica firearm, not that he was holding it. Ed Tomba, deputy chief of the Cleveland Police Department, did claim Tamir "went into his waistband and pulled out the weapon," but that was before police released the video, which does not seem to show him holding the toy gun as he is shot. Noble notes that two use-of-force experts consulted by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty thought Tamir seemed to be lifting his jacket and reaching for his waist, while a third conceded "the video is grainy and it is unclear—from the video—whether Rice reaches for his gun." Noble adds that "none of the prosecutor's experts claim that Tamir displayed the replica handgun, or that he made any threats toward anyone."
Another expert who prepared a report at the behest of the Rice family, Roger Clark, a former lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, notes that all three of McGinty's experts "appear to blame Tamir by emphasizing how real the toy gun looked without its orange tip." But Clark adds that "since Tamir wasn't holding the gun when the officers pulled up and when Officer Loehmann shot him, how realistic the gun may have looked is irrelevant because Officers Loehmann and Garmback did not assess the gun's appearance at all before Officer Loehmann fired" (emphasis added).
Contrary to all of these accounts (except for Tomba's), Loehmann's statement claims Tamir was holding the toy gun when he was shot. "I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband," he says. Loehmann also claims Tamir disregarded repeated orders from Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, to put up his hands. As their patrol car pulled up to the gazebo where Tamir was standing, Loehmann says, "I started to open the door and yelled continuously 'show me your hands' as loud as I could. Officer Garmback was also yelling 'show me your hands.'"
As Noble observes, however, "the video revealed there was not sufficient time for Officer Loehmann to have given Tamir any commands, combined with any opportunity to comply with those commands, before the shooting." The windows of the patrol car were rolled up as Garmback drove it into the park, meaning Tamir would not have heard anything Loehmann might have said while still in the vehicle, and Loehmann fired his gun less than two seconds after getting out of the car. Clark concludes "there was no time in those 1.7 seconds for Officers Loehmann or Garmback to have issued any intelligible commands to Tamir, much less for Tamir to respond to any commands."
Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, said Loehmann read his statement to the grand jury considering charges against him and Garmback but did not take questions. Garmback also read a statement to the grand jury, agreeing that "both Ptl. Loehmann and I directed the male to show his hands" and that "the male was pulling" what looked like a real gun "from the right front area of his waistband." Aside from their comments to other officers at the scene, these are the first public statements that Loehmann and Garmback have made about the shooting. Neither officer spoke to internal investigators last year or made statements last June, when McGinty released the evidence that the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department had collected.
The post Cop Who Killed Tamir Rice Claims Toy Pistol Was 'in His Hands' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Department of Justice is pushing hard for law enforcement agencies to start wearing body cameras to improve transparency and relationships with the community. They're even offering grants to police departments to help them implement programs (though said body camera programs don't actually have to be good or improve transparency about police conduct to the public).
But the Wall Street Journal has discovered a problem that's kind of funny and kind of sad: Because the Department of Justice hasn't developed its own policies for body camera use, federal law enforcement agencies like U.S. Marshals don't want to partner with any officers that are actually using them in task forces:
The contradiction reveals the potential challenges for federal agencies that work closely with local police, such as the U.S. Marshals. And it underscores how slow the Obama administration has been to craft its own rules on cameras, even as it pushes local authorities to quickly adopt them in the wake of high-profile police shootings.
At a meeting of Marshals supervisors several weeks ago in Colorado, Assistant Director Derrick Driscoll announced that the agency wouldn't allow any local law-enforcement officers wearing body cameras to serve on Marshals task forces, according to several people who attended the meeting.
The Marshals Service, an agency within the Justice Department, runs scores of task forces around the country, teaming up with local police primarily to hunt fugitives and violent criminals.
Mr. Driscoll said at the meeting that because the Justice Department hadn't given his agency rules on body cameras, the Marshals couldn't allow local police with recording equipment to work alongside them on task forces, the people who attended the meeting said. That's because when local officers join task forces, they must follow federal rules of operation, and for now that means no body cameras.
These task forces are not uncommon and are used to tackle gang problems and for drug sweeps. The failure of the DOJ to set rules in place means that if one of these police actions go awry, there may not be decent footage to see what actually happened.
If the DOJ is looking for tips on how to implement body cameras on their own agents, check out this "best practices" guide by former Reasoner Matthew Feeney, now a political analyst for the Cato Institute.
(Hat tip to former Reason editor Radley Balko.)
The post 'Body Cameras for Thee—but Not When You're With Me' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Responding to a noise complaint early Sunday morning at an apartment building in Tuscaloosa, police ended up arresting three University of Alabama students for harassment, obstruction, and resisting arrest. Those sound like the sort of bullshit charges that cops make up when they have no real justification for hauling people off to jail, and cellphone video of the incident, during which one student was shocked with a Taser and beaten with a baton, tends to confirm that impression.
The students, who apparently were celebrating Alabama's victory over LSU in a football game on Saturday, turned off their music when the police pulled up. You might think that took care of the noise complaint, but the bystander video shows an officer trying to drag a student out of the now-quiet apartment while his friends object. The students are argumentative but nonviolent.
"Please let go of him," says a male student wearing a baseball cap. "You are illegally entering."
"Don't treat him like that!" says a female student. "Why are you acting like this?…Do you have a warrant?"
"I don't have to have a warrant," the cop says.
As if to prove that point, the cop and a couple of other officers eventually force their way into the apartment and drag out the three students, throw them to the ground, and handcuff them. The student who gets the Taser and the baton seems to be the one who was pulling away from the cop's grasp as the video began.
Why was the cop trying to drag that student out? According to the cop, it was because the student grabbed his arm, justifying an arrest for harassment, a misdemeanor that includes touching someone "with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm" him. The student denied touching the cop's arm, and his friends agreed that no arm touching occurred, saying they were confident the video record would confirm that point.
In any case, the harassment allegation appears to have arisen in the context of a home intrusion that was not justified to begin with. It seems that pretext nevertheless begat the additional charges of obstruction and resisting arrest. Alabama's definition of obstruction "is intentionally broad so as to give law enforcement officers ample discretion in their interpretation," notes Steven Eversole, a Birmingham criminal defense attorney. "Arrests for obstruction tend to be made in the heat of the moment. Upon careful review after the fact, there is always the possibility that the arresting officer lacked sufficient grounds for the charge."
A.P. reports that "Chief Steve Anderson of the Tuscaloosa Police Department said he was 'deeply disturbed' by what he had seen in the videos and disappointed in the actions of the officers." Anderson called the incident "a black eye" for the department. The three officers are on paid leave pending an investigation by the department's internal affairs division.
"I respect your authority, but you are not allowed in my apartment," the student wearing a baseball cap told the cop who grabbed his friend. "You are not respecting my authority," the officer replied, and one suspects that was the real issue all along.
The post Tuscaloosa Cops Manhandle, Tase, Beat, and Cuff Students Whose Music Was Too Loud appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>[Update, 11:24 a.m.: Score one for transparency: The city has reversed itself and made its policy public. The Baltimore Sun has published the document here. Original post below.]
Body cameras have come to the Baltimore Police Department, with 155 officers donning the devices this week. This is a pilot program, aimed at allowing the city to decide which of three different camera vendors it should buy from; the rest of the department is scheduled to start following suit next year.
The new policy has been promoted as a way to make the police more transparent. But the city isn't being very transparent about how exactly the cameras will be used. The Baltimore Sun reports:
[T]he department declined to release the "draft policy" it developed to govern how and when officers use their cameras, how officers can respond to citizen requests not to be filmed, how the department plans to use the footage, and who will have access to the recordings. Those issues have been debated nationally and raise thorny legal questions, including around citizens' privacy concerns.
"We are working from a draft right now because we want to fine-tune that policy to make sure that, as we experience this pilot program, we're going to learn and the community is going to learn," said Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere. "We will be transparent moving forward and we will answer the community's questions in regards to what the policy suggests that we do at this point."
David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, a member of the mayor's body camera task force and the state's body camera commission, called the Police Department's decision not to publish its policy "incomprehensible and utterly unacceptable."
The state commission specifically called for policies to be public in its recommendations to state legislators, and members of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's task force "assumed and we specifically discussed that the policies would be public," Rocah said….
Residents who fear that officers' body cameras will "only be on when officers want them to be on and they won't be on when officers are engaged in misconduct" should be able to look to the department's policy for assurances that officers are being held accountable, Rocah said.
Rocah's bottom line: "You can't claim to be transparent and then say those orders are a secret. It's beyond ridiculous." To read the rest, go here.
The post Baltimore Police Start Wearing Body Cameras (UPDATE: City Releases Camera Policy) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the "Black Lives Matter" portion of the Democratic presidential candidates debate last night, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the use of body-worn cameras on police officers. Good idea. Earlier research has found that requiring officers to wear cameras tends to reduce both police and citizen violence. In a new study by researchers at the University of South Florida, Orlando cops were randomly assigned to wear body cameras and followed for a year. The results of that study found that wearing the cameras did reduce violence. Fox News reported:
In the year before they wore body cameras, the officers used force an average of 3.5 times.
During the year after half of the officers started wearing body cameras, the use of force dropped more than 50 percent, from 3.5 to 1.6.
"The degree and nature of the decline was pretty considerable," said Wesley Jennings, Ph.D., one of the study's three authors.
The officers who did not wear cameras also had a drop in the use of force, from 3.5 to 2.2.
The number of officers who got complaints from the public saying they used too much force, dropped from .26 percent to .09 percent.
Jennings said cameras change the behavior of officers, and of those they encounter.
"Both know it is being recorded, and that the evidence is not going anywhere," said Jennings. "They are both less-inclined to escalate an event."
Jennings' team also surveyed the officers afterwards, and found that most were originally skeptical that wearing the devices would change their behavior, or the public's.
But after the year, the officers with cameras mostly wanted to keep them, while those without mostly wanted them.
"As a society, we can certainly advocate for agencies- law enforcement agencies- to adopt these body-worn cameras," said Jennings.
Yes. Back in 2013, I argued in my article, "Watched Cops Are Polite Cops," that all police should be required to wear cameras.
However, some police departments—here's looking at you LAPD—want to keep the video secret from the public. Such a policy undermines public trust and must not be allowed.
The post Police Body Cameras Reduce Violence, Says Yet Another Study appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Check out this body camera footage from a police shooting in Cleveland. Not only do they refrain from immediately opening fire on an agitated man who actually shoots one of them, they give him plenty of opportunity to surrender afterward. Unfortunately he appears to have been insistent on committing suicide by cop and eventually got his wish:
The camera footage cuts off before showing the officers shooting Theodore Johnson, 64, to death, right after Johnson raised the gun he was holding. The body camera footage was released this week, but only after a grand jury had determined the four officers involved had been justified in the shooting.
In that sense, it's easy to see why the body camera footage has been released. While it's a reminder for cops that body camera footage can actually help them, there's still the matter that the same government officials who run this system of police accountability have a lot of influence over how much the public will get to see and when. If the shooting looked sketchy or much less obviously justified, and the grand jury had nevertheless declared it justified, would the prosecutor still have released it? Actually, they might have, given that authorities very quickly released the body camera footage when University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing (who has been indicted for murder) shot and killed a man who tried to drive away from a traffic stop over a missing front license plate. But the larger point is still intact: Officials who are heavily involved in the cases themselves are also deciding what the public is allowed to see.
Gov. John Kasich (candidate for president, some may recall) has just put together an advisory board to develop standards for body camera use in Ohio. They will be including an examination of privacy issues and public records issues involved in the use of body cameras.
Elsewhere on the police shooting beat, the feds may actually be getting serious about getting more accurate (as in, even remotely accurate) numbers on the number of people killed by police officers in America each year. As Reason and other media outlets have previously noted, the FBI's stats on justified homicides by police are gathered through a voluntary program that has a significant non-participation rate. As a result the federal numbers the FBi puts out for police homicides are missing somewhere around half of them.
So private media sources have stepped up to keep track of the deaths. Earlier this week FBI Director James Comey said he found the lack of reliable statistics on police shootings to be "embarrassing." From the Washington Post:
Speaking to a private gathering of more than 100 politicians and top law enforcement officials, Comey expressed frustration that the federal government has no better data on police shootings than databases assembled this year by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper.
"It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody," he said.
"You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to 'The Martian,' which I saw this weekend. .?.?. The CDC can do the same with the flu," he continued. "It's ridiculous — it's embarrassing and ridiculous — that we can't talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force."
The Department of Justice announced on Monday it will be creating its own database on deaths in police custody. How they're going to do so remains unclear at this point, but according to the Washington Post, one the possibilities is actually consulting those media created databases for more accurate figures and then requesting additional information from officials for each case.
The post Body Camera Footage Helps Protect Good Cops appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Minnesota police will not be following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Police Department, at least not without the help of the state's legislature.
The Los Angeles Police Department will be keeping its body camera footage for internal use only unless a judge orders its release. Police chiefs in Minnesota wanted to operate under similar rules. But the commissioner of their Department of Administration says they can't. Minnesota state law designates them as public records. If they want body camera footage to be treated differently, they have to get the law changed. From the Associated Press:
"Minnesota's data practices laws are designed to be neutral to technology," [Commissionaer Matt] Massman wrote. "The reality is, however, that body cams have the potential to collect substantial amounts of video and audio in private and very sensitive circumstances."
Transparency watchdogs contend that making footage private would lessen the accountability aspect of body cameras.
Maplewood Police Chief Paul Schnell, who spearheaded the request, said the police departments knew the request was a longshot.
"We had hoped we could have moved forward," Schnell told the Associated Press on Monday. Now, the group will focus on working out a legislative solution, "which we knew all along was our ultimate goal," Schnell said.
The story notes that there are situations where many people would likely want the privacy of the people on the other side of the camera respected in sensitive situations. But the larger issue is whether the police departments themselves should be the ones calling the shots here, as Chief Charlie Beck plans to do in Los Angeles. Giving the police department themselves the authority to decide whether body camera footage should be released provides incentives for the police to both withhold footage from the public that paints its officers in a negative light and release footage that could bias the public against suspects.
The American Civil Liberties Union has model legislation that would create an environment for police to use body camera footage for accountability purposes, while also protecting the privacy of everyday citizens when necessary. Maybe Minnesota's legislators will consult it if they plan to pass a new law.
The post Police Body Camera Footage to Remain Public in Minnesota—for Now appeared first on Reason.com.
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