When the FBI and DHS fusion centers started building vast, unregulated, facial recognition databases, they shrugged elaborately and said that there weren’t any standard protections for doing so, and that they were just experimenting, and it wasn’t going to be used operationally until the legalities were all sorted out.
The US government, and others, have plotted to bypass protections regarding search and surveillance, by finely parsing the words of the 4th amendment and weaseling around them – but, mostly, by just ignoring it. Privacy is for the rich and powerful, not for hoi polloi.
I’ve been a proponent of cop-cams for years. I would now like to officially reverse my position.
There’s an article at the failing <i>New York Times</i> that breaks down how police report their time spent. The whole thing is worth a read so I’m going to comment obliquely on it, rather than quoting extensively from it. [nytimes]
If you follow police misconduct, you will know that there’s a sort of ODESSA, or roman catholic church-like informal shuffling system for bad cops. A sort of protection program that allows a cop to be noisily fired for being a violent brute, and quietly re-hired by another department, given a badge and a gun, and sent back out to do it again.
The counter-reaction to “defund the police” movements has been distressingly predictable: the assumption is that, without police, current policing practices would stop functioning and therefore it’s a bad idea. Basically, it’s a declaration that the status quo is the only way that can ever possibly work, and it ignores the fact that there was a time where civilizations did exist without policing as it is done, today.
I can’t recall which of you introduced me to this musician/song, but – thank you.
The news is full of stories of cops gone wild. That’s as it should be – every day – until they start to realize that they exist on the forbearance of The People.
This is how to bring police departments to heel:
What’s wrong here?