The wealthiest nation on the planet has to abandon accountability to save a few bucks.
Clown country.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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And give double that money to Elon. He needs it for a solid gold hot tub or something.
Citizens should up their shooting of DEA agents in response. Who's going to see without the body cam? Seems American institutions need to go back to learning by trial and error.
Well they're going to go with the 'a cops word is always believed' crap.
Not if you don’t leave any cops to testify.
Body cams were never a solution to anything. I remember multiple police murders recorded on body cams were the officer was acquitted by the jury. Police murder is basically legal in US*. Recording it doesn't change anything. As for police brutality in general they simply learned to shout "stop resisting" when beating people up. Without basic accountability the recording are useless.
*It's enough if police officer thinks he is in danger to make killing legal. Pretty much if he's scared he can shoot. Body cams can't prove he wasn't scared.
Body cams aren't the solution, but they do help a lot. When cops have zero oversight, they commit way more atrocities, on average.
You should read this: https://prismreports.org/2024/07/16/complex-troubling-history-police-body-cameras/
"Long before body cameras were introduced to the public and found themselves in mainstream conversations about police reform, they were first peddled to police departments by tech companies and major corporations.
With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create “highly controllable evidence” against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating “comprehensive digital archives” of attendees at protests for social change"
"It was the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that would forever change the public conversation around police accountability and allow body cameras to take center stage. Almost immediately, body cameras were no longer being pitched behind closed doors to police departments, but were rather presented to the public as an invaluable tool for police “reform” and increased “transparency.”"
I'm curious about the "highly controllable evidence" part. Perhaps this conversation isn't attainable without getting into vast generalizations, however, in my experience officers generally activate their cameras when they respond to a crime and don't turn them off until they are no longer investigating the crime. This is generally when the defendant has already been interviewed and is custody in a police vehicle. If there are subsequent interviews, they turn back on their cameras.
I know my experience is not universal, but body cameras seem to be a great way to maintain transparency in investigations since defendants and prosecutors will both have video/audio of the investigation.
In another comment I posted a link to another study that shows police does not provide footage from most of police shootings. Yes, most of the time the camera is recording but most of the time only police can see the footage. That's what they mean by "highly controllable evidence”. When it exonerates the officer they give to the TV stations in a matter of hours. When it doesn't they hide it and you have to fight them in courts for years to see it.
Anyone can record in public at any time anyway. There's no reason to not have police body cams even if they aren't as effective as they should be. The police will always have body cameras if they want them, and they don't want them. If the police don't want to wear them, that tells me that they probably should even if we need to work on getting public access to the footage.
With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create “highly controllable evidence” against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating “comprehensive digital archives” of attendees at protests for social change"
Did you read this part? It pretty much contradicts everything you said.
Yes, I read it but I don't see any evidence to think that their stance is correct. Just because somebody writes something doesn't mean it is correct or even accurate. There's no citation for anything except one study demonstrating that the footage is not used to convict police officers very often, which is the real problem.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-body-worn-cameras-and-law-enforcement
"Across these evaluations, researchers looked at a range of outcomes, including use of force, citizen complaints, arrests, and assaults on officers. Four of the body-worn camera programs evaluated were found to have no, limited, or even negative effects."
https://cebcp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/BWCpaperLumetal.pdf
"Prosecutors, however, rarely bring cases against the police (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993), and it remains to be seen whether this will change much as a result of BWCs. In their study of the use of BWCs in the courts, Merola et al. (2016) found that nearly all (93.0%) responding prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions that use BWCs use them primarily to prosecute citizens. Not surprisingly, 80.0% of responding prosecutors in Merola et al.’s survey support BWC use by the police, and 63.0% feel cameras will assist prosecutors more than defense attorneys"
I know that probably no amount of research and evidence will change your mind but those are pretty easy to find so I just leave it here for other people to see.
I can't tell if you are agreeing with me or not. I just said the real problem is that it's not used to prosecute police officers enough. Are you disagreeing with me citing one study that said four programs potentially had some negative outcome?
If body cameras are good for police, why do police not want to wear them?
Ok, this part may not be easy to understand. There were looking at use of force, citizen complaints, arrests and assaults on officers. The theory is that thanks to the use of body cams there will be less cases of use of force, less citizen complaints and less assaults on officers. The study says that in some of the evaluated body cam programs they found that those statistics didn't change or that they got more cases of use of force, citizen complaints and so on. Basically, it's not clear if the cameras help reduce police violence at all.
The second part (which you ignored) says that the cameras are actually used mostly to prosecute citizens, not police. Basically, thanks to the cameras police can easily prove offenses and convict people. Just like the first article said, police us body cams to surveil and prosecute people. Prosecutors like cameras because they make their job easier. You can deduct from this that police also likes cameras. Your claim that "police does not want to wear cameras" is baseless. There's probably some opposition at first but once they et used to them it's just another tool used to oppress people.
There's a reason some cops turn off their body cams before certain encounters, it's because some places do hold them accountable. At least there's a public record
There's always a small chance police officer will be held accountable but in vast majority of cases the system simply doesn't work. Body cameras are part of that system. They are used to create evidence the police can control and use in their favor. In most cases they simply hide the recordings (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras?c_src=33685809.57194).
In darkness freedom dies.
If asked about how DEA agents died, people will say "Dunno", and there will be no camera to say otherwise.
Losers. I guess the citizens should just record them at all times. For record sake.
You should've anyway. Redundancy is best.
Especially since they regularly refuse to release body cam footage.
I don't need my computer to refuse to provide data before backups are a good idea.
“Dea says crime is warranted for stopping more crime”
It was just so inconvenient having to remember to cut them off before flagrantly breaking the law
With them being able to turn it off at any time they felt like it anyway, it's not like body cameras were fulfilling their (dishonestly) stated purpose of improved transparency.
Still a very bad sign that they no longer feel the need to even PRETEND to care, though..
"There's no corruption here", said the corrupt regime.
What do you mean? They obviously have nothing to hide…
Turns out the current administration is not huge on accountability. I'm shocked.
And find a way to have it automatically sync to the cloud, with automatic release if certain reporting in parameters aren’t met
~~the ACLU Mobile Justice app does this~~
Holy shit they shut it down a month after dorito stain took office what the fuck
That app has been junk for several years. I think there was a change in permissions in one of the Android versions that made it useless, they never updated it.
Bad timing, but I'm guessing they ran out of funding to continue app development, since now they have so much legal battles to do. The app was already broken, buggy, and barely functional for the past 5 years.
Yeah. The current best option is probably a regular video + cloud sync like Google Photos.
Or YouTube live
Hopefully they don't start carrying something that jams signals to disable the ability for something to sync to a cloud.
If that ends up being the case, "evidence" of crimes isn't going to help anyone being victimized much. 😓
They've already had devices to capture cellular connections for a while now, I'd imagine jamming bands would be even easier.
Signal jammers are available for purchase online and depending on purpose are affordable and compact.
That said; often they are illegal for civilians.
We need a contraption where a cable is connecting your body cam to a friend following you, and the recording is synched through the cable to a storage device they hold. Then if SHTF, the friend can run with the footage they have and give it a reputable journalist or ACLU.
I feel like if you found a way to do a mesh net (ive been really into Meshtastic as of late, but the data throughput of LoRA would not cut it), and have other members of the mesh sync the file (encrypted and compressed) that would work. Share the unlock code with a friend or a small group, that way you always have backups on other people's devices.
I would wonder if there's a self hosted option out there for video streaming (there's this?) that you could set up to mirror with a few friends, that way if your home every gets searched you've got a friend with copies that can get it to a journalist/lawyer
I also, too, find lora Radio to be interesting. I think it has many applications to deal with tyranny. I could see them outlawing it at least for civilians.
Lora is in the 915mhz ISM band in the USA. This part of the spectrum is full of high power transmissions, Lora runs on such low power that it's signals are pretty much below the noise floor. The FCC doesn't have the teeth to regulate what they already are supposed to regulate, they aren't going to bother with Lora. As far as communicating doing anything illegal or soon to be illegal shit, Signal is more reliable.
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Mob rule. And not the angry crowd of people type. The Organized Crime type.
America is going to resemble every 1990s russian gangster's wet dream in half the time.
It’s so you won’t see them sprinkle crack on the dead black man like Salt Bae.
Turns out it shows more evidence of corruption.
A reminder to all that if there is no body cam footage when there should be, that is reasonable doubt. You have to assume the officers did the worst actions possible, and did so maliciously.
Well yeah, now they can plant evidence against people opposing the ruling administrations policies.
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