Gangsters in Blue

“But, your Honor, I didn’t mean to shoot him!  I was just reaching for my other potentially lethal weapon to use on this prone unarmed man!”

Meanwhile, as Glenn Greenwald writes in “Rules of America’s rule of law,” Bradley Manning faces 52 years for leaking documentation of U.S. war crimes.  (By this standard, those who filmed the Oscar Grant shooting should probably feel lucky that they weren’t prosecuted.)  More prominently, Lindsay Lohan faces 90 days in the slammer essentially for self-destruction and other victimless crimes, and the public laughs at her.

Yeah, I support gun control.  Let’s start with taking them away from the police and the courts, who clearly have shown themselves unfit to play with such big toys, and then let’s talk about the Second Amendment.

Filed under: Gun Control, Law Tagged: bradleymanning, guncontrol, justice, oscargrant, police

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

More here.

Hat tip: Robin Hanson.

Addendum: Tom Bell offers legal commentary and an interesting idea, a bumper sticker which serves as legal warning.

A standard story:

In the bad old days, police gave lip service to law, but actually often looked the other way, issued street justice, planted evidence, or lied under oath, all to implement their own sense of who should be punished, to gain payola, or to bow to the necessities of political influence. While this situation continues in much of the world, in our great nation, ta da, heroic legal activists appealed to our better natures, and shamed us into constraining the police, judges, etc. to actually follow the legal principles to which they give lip service. Sure sometimes we find a few bad apples, but now we mostly do just apply the law neutrally.

This heroic myth is now colliding with rapidly falling costs of recording our interactions with police, and with each other. When such clear evidence is usually available, we will have to either actually follow our legal principles, or be obvious about not doing so. Surely we wouldn’t just make it illegal to record interactions with police, right?

In far idealistic mode, many are tempted to accept this standard story, and assume that any laws against recording one’s interactions with police must be a temporary error, surely to be overturned when the good voters become aware of the outrage. We’d never so transparently turn our backs on our core legal principles, right?  Consider:

In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized. …

A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. … In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the state’s electronic surveillance law – aka recording a police encounter – the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. ..

The selection of “shooters” targeted for prosecution do, indeed, suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate. … Recordings that are flattering to the police – an officer kissing a baby or rescuing a dog – will almost certainly not result in prosecution even if they are done without all-party consent. …

A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing. On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III’s motorcycle was pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic stop. …

Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop. Happily, even as the practice of arresting “shooters” expands, there are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested “shooter,” the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen.

And this is all about the official rules. I’m pretty sure that unofficially, police have ways of punishing you for trying to record them, even if you are legally allowed to do so. Consider also:

An obvious enabler of police corruption is the fact that internal affairs units, tasked with exposing corruption, usually report to the same police chief that would be embarrassed by such exposure, and who may also be corrupt. An obvious solution is to make internal affairs more independent, e.g., reporting directly to a city council or even a governor.

This isn’t some temporary lack of adaptation to a new tech; the obvious solution has been possible, and ignored, for a long long time.  Now ask yourself honestly, in near mode, what you think will usually happen in ten years to someone who tries to visibly record their interaction with police.

Added 16June: New from the Post:

The decades-old wiretap law has suddenly become a fresh battleground for civil libertarians and bloggers who consider Graber’s prosecution and a series of similar arrests a case of government overreach.

Count me as one of those bloggers.

Boston cops are using the Massachusetts electronic surveillance laws to arrest and prosecute citizens who use their cellular phones to record abusive arrests. Though they haven't been successful in prosecuting the acts, it hasn't stopped the arrests -- presumably the point isn't to secure convictions, but rather to chill the recording of illegal police activity. However, police have convicted citizens who secretly recorded their own abusive arrests, charging them with illegal wiretapping.

Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.

Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.

"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'' Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested.''

The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.

Police fight cellphone recordings (via Interesting People)

(Image: Marathon Monday, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from cherrylet's photostream)

• The Hand-Me-Down Style in American Punditry. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-10-22). Tom Frank has devoted his latest Wall Street Journal column to Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which he rereads in an effort to illuminate the Birthers, Glenn Beck, and the other usual suspects. Not content to recycle an article already written by seemingly every other pundit in... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Sara Kruzan: Life Without Parole for Killing her Pimp. Feministing (2009-10-23). *Content is triggering* This story speaks for itself. From the free Sara Kruzan action page at change.org: "Life without parole means absolutely no opportunity for release," said Senator Yee. (of California) "It also means minors are often left without access to programs and rehabilitative services while in prison. This sentence... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Dragnet against Domestic Terror Targets "Food Not Bombs" Group. Phil Leggiere, Don't Tase Me, Bro! (2009-10-21). From Law and Disorder Radio: The government has stepped up its surveillance of a range of individuals and organizations, including volunteer-based groups. After providing free vegetarian food in hundreds of communities worldwide, Food Not Bombs has found itself a part of the domestic terrorism dragnet. Co-founded by Keith McHenry and... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009. Mike Gogulski - nostate.com, Anarchoblogs in English (2009-10-21). To all who pledged to support me in this matter, I would ask that you republish the below information as broadly as possible, and without delay. Also available in MS Word 2003, PDF, and MS-Word exported filtered HTML formats. REVISION HISTORY v1.0 – 20090906 Original version, real names, episodes 1-9,... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Live Free or Go To Jail: Irony, Logic and the Government. Kelly W. Patterson, Anarchoblogs in English (2009-10-15). I've been working to put together another blog that will be based on ideas to eliminate many personal expenses and make money in non-tradition ways in order to lower your tax burden without starving or going to prison. Having settled on some variation of "Live Free or Die" as a... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Crisis And Opportunity. DarianW, Anarchoblogs in English (2009-10-16). We might be living in a very different world five years from now. If we want this to be a better world, we have to put our hands into history. Notions of stability, freedom, and personal identity are tied up with authoritarian ideas. This must be broken. A weakened political... (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• Pro-Choice on Everything. Kerry Howley, Kerry Howley (2009-10-20). I think choice-loving libertarians have an obligation to foster a more liberal and feminist culture. Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy strenuously disagree. Our combative exchange in the November issue of Reason is now online. (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)
• [TX] Officer Welty sex assault of a family member. Behind The Blue Wall (2009-10-23). Rapists in uniform. (Cont'd.) (Linked Friday 2009-10-23.)

With the passing of the smoking ban, Virginia demonstrates that, when it comes to individual liberty, its ongoing urbanization renders it just another Mid-Atlantic nanny state like New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. I don’t need to rehash the libertarian arguments against smoking bans in private establishments. I will, however, note the following:

• Despite an email sent out by a minority of Republicans in the legislature, this ban passed with bipartisan support.
• Republicans are the worst advocates of libertarian policy imaginable. They’re all too eager to go along to get along. And if they do have some moderate libertarian positions, they usually shoot their consistency in the foot by being moral policemen to the max (see my thoughts on the Blackburn vs. Stoch race).
• We erroneously and self-righteously frame this issue in simplistic terms of “rights” and “freedom” and “liberty”, a language that nanny staters learned long ago to turn around on us. Nobody is against “freedom” or “liberty” or “rights”, so this approach does not capture the essence of the controversy. If this were about abstractions like “rights”, there are far more egregious government intrusions that would have been rejected long ago. No, we are against bans on peaceful behavior because they are enforced by men trained to hurt and kill us – period.

It’s time to stop pretending our self-important, philosophical civics lessons wrapped in political activism work. Our outrage at the state, heartfelt as it may be, is not nearly enough to constitute the necessary resistance, nor is the rhetoric it produces adequate to the task of appealing to our fellow man. We have to start showing people that this is not a game: passing superfluous and intrusive laws pits men trained in violence and suppression against peaceful people. Confront the nanny staters directly with the means they’ve chosen to promote their agendas and ask them why they want to threaten, hurt, and even kill us and our fellow human beings. The stakes are too high to treat this as a friendly debate about ideas.

From the Vancouver Sun:

Victoria must pay tethered teen $30,000

Friday, November 28, 2008

VICTORIA – Willow Kinloch has been granted half of the $60,000 she won in a lawsuit after being tethered in Victoria police cells, with the payment of the rest hinging on an appeal of her case by the City of Victoria.

The city had applied for a stay, or suspension, of payment until the appeal is heard, perhaps sometime next spring. But Justice Mary Saunders of the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Thursday that Kinloch is entitled to $30,000 now.

Kinloch’s case dates to 2005 when she was 15. A B.C. Supreme Court jury came up with the award earlier this year following a decision that officers had violated Kinloch’s charter rights.

Kinloch had been picked up by police in the downtown area for being drunk and was taken to police cells.

She spent about an hour screaming and banging on the walls before two officers tried to take her home to the apartment she shared with her mother.

The apartment intercom was broken and officers wouldn’t let Kinloch yell up to a window, so she was brought back to the police station. She did not want to return to a cell, and police described her as uncooperative. She ended up being bound at the ankles, tethered and left in the cell for four hours.

Kinloch is now in Thailand.

Here’s to hoping Ms. Kinloch is safe, given the unrest in Thailand at the moment.

See also:
The further education of Willow Kinloch
Victoria, BC citizenry to pay $60,000 to brutalized teen (includes video)

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Tags: bondage, Canada, crime, education, Gangsters in Blue, justice, law, lawsuit, money, rights, tax

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If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been witnessing a huge leap forward towards a police state over the past week. In addition to the preemptive raids, extralegal break-ins, illegal detentions, disappearing citizens, news media harassment, and general displays of unprovoked violence by law enforcement, we’ve witnessed a very aggressive strategy of mass arrests. Here’s some choice documentation on their strategy for trapping and processing as many people as possible - protestors or not.

While apologists for cops may represent indiscriminate arrests as necessary, it’s actually incredibly sloppy police work. They just declare a “national security event” and suddenly there is no need for self-discipline or judgement whatsoever. Why should people take cops’ authority seriously when they prosecute their jobs so carelessly? If national security is truly at stake, why sweat a few broken windows?

Imagine if this was their response to any suspected crime: just arrest everybody near the scene! Why not just arrest everybody in the city, or the state - surely if everybody’s under arrest, there’s nobody to get in the way of the convention. Cities are a lot safer if you get rid of the people, law enforcement seems to think.

Yet isn’t this the modus operandi of any totalitarian state? By denying everybody freedom and granting police maximum prerogatives to detain, surveil, and otherwise harass citizens, a government blurs the distinction between being under arrest or being free. People under despotic governance experience a sliding scale of captivity, to be moved up or down at the discretion of unaccountable bureaucrat/captors.

It is important to correctly recognize this trend towards a police state. The myths of freedom, civil rights, and the rule of law must be maintained. So instead, the government institutes the police state on demand - invoking it when necessary, and then dispersing it without a trace and shrugging, “what fascism?” You’re never free, really - you just enjoy perpetual probation until the next time the government flips the switch. Under arrest? That’s a relative term; just check the threat level.

This is exactly how police states arrive historically - in easily ignored, irregular spurts. Those are perfect opportunities to train officers in their new attitudes towards citizens, gather data on the effectiveness of tactics, and experiment with new strategies for oppression. The trick is always for the people to wake up before the slow metamorphosis passes the point of no return.

Sadly, it’s clear to me that we’ve probably missed our last chances to reverse these trends. With the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act granting the legal cover for whatever our rulers want to label as “terrorism” and impenetrable secrecy about anything else, there’s no recourse in “the system” for citizens to air legitimate grievances. Meanwhile, any direct action is dealt with in the most brutal manner possible (yes, they could be more brutal - but that would impact the efficiency of their actions).

So if we’re in a police state now, what do we do? Obviously, there was a point at which the citizens of Germany in the ’30s gave up on speaking out. There was a point at which the Soviet citizens stopped protesting the Bolshevik treachery. Throughout history, people who found themselves under a totalitarian government had to face a terrible fact: that the modes of democratic society were no longer tenable.

But to admit to yourself the horrible truth, that we have lost our country, that is the truly difficult thing. Keep in mind, however, that it has always been through denial, self-deception, and lack of honesty on the part of the people that totalitarianism has gained a foothold. We must be courageous, pragmatic, and most of all careful. The rules have changed, and if we’re going to play this game we do well to use our time-outs to strategize, not simply to feel sorry for ourselves. In other words, as much as I hate to say it, we’re going to have to unlearn the bad habits of citizenship in a democratic republic.

The silver lining in the police brutality at the RNC this week is really that the activist movement might finally see themselves on the other side of the rubicon. As John Robb explains:

Very cool demonstration from Minnesota of how police forces have been militarized. In addition to the five fold growth in SWAT forces since the 90’s, there’s been a shift in attitude. All likely due to a misdirection of GWOT Homeland security $$ and thinking towards domestic protest. The side effect: the heavy handed approach here will cause a quick shift protest to the open source/disruption model if things deteriorate. Protest is dead. (my emphasis)

It’s time for the activist movement to modify their tactics to reflect the new environment. Flaunting our outrage in the hopes of media attention and citizen backlash has failed. Throwing our bodies on the gears of the machine has not slowed it, let alone stopped it. Protesting every violation of our rights just demonstrates in spades how vulnerable and dependent we are. Demonstrating and organizing just provide easy targets for agent provocateurs, infiltration, and extralegal, preemptive harassment.

Protest doesn’t work in a totalitarian police state. Acknowledging that condition is the first step towards fixing it. Whatever we’re going to do, it’s time to start doing it underground. It doesn’t have to be violent, but it does have to be realistic about the threat.

If you don’t read the FlexYourRights.org blog, you’re missing out on good legal information that can seriously help you out on police encounters. There’s even a video they’ve produced to train people on how to deal with the police. While I think it’s good operating procedure to behave as if none of your rights will be upheld by cops, knowing your rights gives you insight into police tactics and actions to which you are likely to be subject. And if you silently observe police behavior, rather than complaining about how bad the cops are on the scene, you may be more likely to simply get out of the situation or at least present evidence to a court that catches police off-guard. Remember: no information you provide on the scene can help you; save any argument you want to make for the judge.

Anyway, the latest FlexYourRights.org blog article deals with a predictable complaint: that helping people protect their rights impedes law enforcement work. As I’ve previously remarked, that’s a feature, not a bug. We should put up the maximum resistance possible to all authority, because it is our cooperation with and obedience to the state that enables and empowers it. However, since the state has a monopoly on the investigation and prosecution of legitimate crimes, should we always refuse to cooperate?

The first thing I’d say is that the maxim of conduct I’ve emphasized is my opinion; before adopting it, you think about it carefully. There are undoubtedly exceptions - my point is that, ideally (and when is a police encounter “ideal”?), you should be in control of the encounter rather than them. You should choose what to say rather than them directing the flow of information; you should choose whether you stay or go rather than them. When in doubt: shut up and trust nobody!

And what about cases where legitimate crimes necessitate the provision of information to investigating law enforcement officers? It is here that FLR.org has wise words:

The situations in which our advice to remain silent is more likely to make a difference is in cases in which the police suspect a crime may be afoot, but don’t have evidence and must intimidate the suspect into self-incrimination, i.e. “If you have drugs, we’re gonna find ‘em. You might as well just hand it over and we’ll go easier on you.” Again, this will have no effect on clearance rates for reported crimes, except, ironically, to the extent that this type of policing draws resources away from investigating unsolved violent crimes.

With regard to requests to search (which you should always refuse; if they have a warrant, they won’t ask!):

The crimes that take the biggest toll on our communities aren’t solved through warrantless searches. Police who are investigating a rape, robbery, or murder aren’t using consent searches to investigate their suspects. Overwhelmingly, consent searches are used to attempt to discover crimes that weren’t known until the search was conducted. They have absolutely no impact on clearance rates for reported crimes. (my emphasis)

This makes sense: when there is an actual crime being investigated, police already have powers that don’t require them to trick you into self-incrimination. Only when they are fishing for a bump in arrest rates will they try to engage you in a conversation without providing for your immunity or legal representation. So deny them the chance: do your part to put the kibosh on the proactive, intrusive, authoritarian police state!