9 ms·

California agency blocks release of police use of force, surveillance training

186 points by glitcher 6y ago

stx 6y ago
I would argue freedom of information is more important than copyright claims. If you do work for the government it needs to be able to be pretty open what is done. I can see that there might be some exceptions but I would not think copyright is one of them.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
It’s funny how copyright and privacy are often used to block inconvenient disclosure. Same in medical. They sell data back and forth but as soon as you request something that’s inconvenient, they use patient privacy as excuse to not disclose.
Shivetya 6y ago
I would go further. I would suggest demanding that all training of police officers be subject to auditing similar to how a college course can. Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically distributed material. Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.
- loceng 6y ago
  I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    > I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly We should do this too in classrooms for students. Record all the looney-tune things professors pump our youth full of. This way we can have a public record of anything anyone might disagree with and find reason to get upset about at any time. That will keep everyone in check...
    - loceng 6y ago
      The solution to countering the worry you stated through sarcasm is to organize, know who your trust network of reasonable people are, and rally towards educating. If there was such one or many trusted network hierarchies plugged into systems like Twitter, where people could filter based on these networks for their guidance, then things would be much cleaner than they currently are.
    - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
      We don't give college students guns and the lawful permission to commit violence
      - Alupis 6y ago
        We certainly give them permission to change laws and politics, based off impressions and experiences gained during education. We should ensure that education isn't polluted and warped, and what better of a way to do that than to record all of it. This way, if some students start demanding awful policies be enacted, we can review their experiences in the classroom and find where the blame should be placed!
        GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
        I'm unsure if you're being sarcastic. If not, I'll reiterate my point: College students don't have lawful authority to commit violence. Lampooning the college system as something even nearing the system of abuse in the policing system is deeply troubling.
- vkou 6y ago
  No amount training in the world is going to matter when there is no accountability after-the-fact. Or when your training is directly at odds with the the job that you are expected to do by your boss. The police, as they exist today, are largely unsuited for dealing with the majority of issues they get called out for. No amount of training is going to fix that. No amount of training is going to turn them into mental health experts, or social workers. No amount of training is going to empower them to do something useful about the pants-less gentleman yelling outside my apartment at 2 am, or about the tent city down by the overpass. [1] Training is, however, a great substitute for actual reforms, that you can point at as a 'see, we are doing something'. [1] What they should actually do about the tent city is an open political question, but doing a monthly sweep, where they arrest and release the occupants, and throw all their belongings in the trash is probably not a good long-term plan. No amount of training is going to stop that, either.
  - snoshy 6y ago
    What the public is discovering with the recent spotlight on this subject, is that the current system of police behavior is the result of a complex web of misaligned (and frequently malicious) interests having their sway over police departments and the law. I disagree with your characterization here, because I don't believe improved training materials are at odds with all of the other overhauls needed throughout the system. Separately, EFF has a secondary concern here: they are interested in increased transparency around electronic surveillance practices used by the police. Information like this could be useful for mounting a legal defense by drawing attention to outdated/disproven police practices.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  The very nature of policing needs to change. Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police. Mandatory regular empathy training. Mandatory training to quickly distinguish between real and imagined threats, and to abort quickly force escalation if a threat turns out to be imaginary. Clear rules of engagement for use of tools like batons, Tasers, and firearms. Detective units need punishment for declining to pursue cases when resources and evidence are available. There should never be a rape kit backlog. Reward good behavior. Officers should be proud of statistics like "greatest % of arrests this month without injury to the suspect." Police simply don't need to handle everything. Welfare checks, mental health emergencies, and drug emergencies need a social worker involved and on the front lines. Policing is an extremely hard job. Police academies are not preparing officers for it correctly because police departments have no incentive to actually conduct policing correctly. It all starts with political oversight and breaking down the blue wall of silence.
  - coffeemaniac 6y ago
    > Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police. I see this suggested a lot, and I want to reiterate that having studied these sports -- being able to subdue an opponent without hurting them is a point of pride already. All reputable instructors will instill this. We can't allow the excellent reputation of these sports to influence our understanding of how police operate. Police are not good-faith participants in the goal to injure fewer people via policing. If you teach them more BJJ, they'll use those skills to establish a dominant physical position. A practitioner of BJJ will take this opportunity to de-escalate the situation and escape without injuring anyone else or themselves. A police officer will take this opportunity to use weapons like mace and tasers, or stomp on necks and gouge eyes. They only escalate and when given the opportunity, they brutalize with impunity. I believe we can influence the the amount of harm done by police by removing the tools they have available to do that harm. Take away all their weapons, and I believe they will more wisely evaluate how they decide to engage with citizens. Hold them legally responsible for any injuries sustained in the process of an arrest and they'll need to purchase insurance -- officers who do more harm will be uninsurable (or the expense of the insurance will make them unhireable).
- deelowe 6y ago
  Didn't California just significantly reduce the police's budget. They need to increase the budget, if they want better training. Most people don't realize how poorly funded the police is and how much this has contributed to the current issues. Give a man to a gun and never teach him how to fight, guess what he uses at the smallest hint of a threat?
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    there is sufficient money in policing, how it is being used is another matter
    - deelowe 6y ago
      I don't think there is. A fair bit of police hardware is allocated, not purchased. My understanding is that the discretionary budgets for things like training is fairly thin. This is why police have so much military hardware. They were able to get these things for free due to 1033.
gentleman11 6y ago
Puts the company in a weird position where they want to charge for access to their material, but laws are requiring them to release it publicly. Assuming good intent, it would make their business model challenging
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  I don't really see how this is any different than books. Anyone can pick a book up and read it for free at the library, and intellectual property laws guide most entities to either lawfully borrow, rent or purchase a copy, and not bootleg it.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    It’s like the musician challenge where piracy and streaming made it harder to charge for the music itself, so bands began relying on live performance out of necessity
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Shaking down some kid for violating copyright or trademark law doesn't scale and is bad PR. Lawyers would have a field day if municipalities started bootlegging their clients' intellectual property en masse.
acheron9383 6y ago
While I don't disagree with the California law, it is reasonable for a company to hold copyright over it's materials and products. I'm not sure a California state law can just hand wave away a federal statue and break the copyright, presumably violating the contract the police agencies made in the past with these companies. If they do so, the companies will probably sue the state, and they may win a bunch of taxpayer money. To me, it seems like the California agency is the one in the wrong here, they need to be using training courses that are able to comply with the above law, rather than just slapping up a "we cant comply sorry" message.
- annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Sorry the police and government generally do not have free reign over us. In an era of so much police brutality its perfectly reasonable to ask how they were trained and what the training materials consist of. Lots of things at the library are under copyright but I can check them out and read them for free. Why should police training materials be different?
thelock85 6y ago
Making the association to K-12 public education, taxpaying parents cannot easily access all of the curriculum their student has/is/will engage with in a K-12 public school. The legislation (if any) and auditing process varies by state, but from a business perspective, K-12 publishers do not want to be on the hook for any real-life outcomes. Their customer is the school/school district, not their constituents. Being able to see everything would open the cultural (relevance) and academic (rigor) floodgates of advocacy. In addition to protecting the business model, I imagine these training companies do not want their educative materials associated with real-world police misconduct, or subject to any standards around what should or should not be taught.
throwaway_USD 6y ago
If you want to claim a copyright, then good luck with the in the private market, but if you want that big, fat juicy government contract (i.e. taxpayer dollars) there should be concessions.
soledades 6y ago
A sample of what this kind of training can look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM
Melting_Harps 6y ago
Well, all the more reason to applaud hacker groups like DDoSecrets for file dumps like Blueleaks that are revealing how much utter BS and how much institutionalized corruption exists in Law Enforcement. Moreover, I'm pretty disappointed Jack Dorsey let someone at his company just ban their account [1]. A lot of good was done in having them publicly advertise what they had released. Hopefully this has a Streisan effect instead. 1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-account-over-blueleaks-police-data-dump/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-accoun... I'm gla

186 points by glitcher 6y ago

stx 6y ago

I would argue freedom of information is more important than copyright claims. If you do work for the government it needs to be able to be pretty open what is done. I can see that there might be some exceptions but I would not think copyright is one of them.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

It’s funny how copyright and privacy are often used to block inconvenient disclosure. Same in medical. They sell data back and forth but as soon as you request something that’s inconvenient, they use patient privacy as excuse to not disclose.

Shivetya 6y ago

I would go further. I would suggest demanding that all training of police officers be subject to auditing similar to how a college course can. Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically distributed material. Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.

loceng 6y ago
I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly.
- Alupis 6y ago
  > I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly We should do this too in classrooms for students. Record all the looney-tune things professors pump our youth full of. This way we can have a public record of anything anyone might disagree with and find reason to get upset about at any time. That will keep everyone in check...
  - loceng 6y ago
    The solution to countering the worry you stated through sarcasm is to organize, know who your trust network of reasonable people are, and rally towards educating. If there was such one or many trusted network hierarchies plugged into systems like Twitter, where people could filter based on these networks for their guidance, then things would be much cleaner than they currently are.
  - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    We don't give college students guns and the lawful permission to commit violence
    - Alupis 6y ago
      We certainly give them permission to change laws and politics, based off impressions and experiences gained during education. We should ensure that education isn't polluted and warped, and what better of a way to do that than to record all of it. This way, if some students start demanding awful policies be enacted, we can review their experiences in the classroom and find where the blame should be placed!
      - GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
        I'm unsure if you're being sarcastic. If not, I'll reiterate my point: College students don't have lawful authority to commit violence. Lampooning the college system as something even nearing the system of abuse in the policing system is deeply troubling.
vkou 6y ago
No amount training in the world is going to matter when there is no accountability after-the-fact. Or when your training is directly at odds with the the job that you are expected to do by your boss. The police, as they exist today, are largely unsuited for dealing with the majority of issues they get called out for. No amount of training is going to fix that. No amount of training is going to turn them into mental health experts, or social workers. No amount of training is going to empower them to do something useful about the pants-less gentleman yelling outside my apartment at 2 am, or about the tent city down by the overpass. [1] Training is, however, a great substitute for actual reforms, that you can point at as a 'see, we are doing something'. [1] What they should actually do about the tent city is an open political question, but doing a monthly sweep, where they arrest and release the occupants, and throw all their belongings in the trash is probably not a good long-term plan. No amount of training is going to stop that, either.
- snoshy 6y ago
  What the public is discovering with the recent spotlight on this subject, is that the current system of police behavior is the result of a complex web of misaligned (and frequently malicious) interests having their sway over police departments and the law. I disagree with your characterization here, because I don't believe improved training materials are at odds with all of the other overhauls needed throughout the system. Separately, EFF has a secondary concern here: they are interested in increased transparency around electronic surveillance practices used by the police. Information like this could be useful for mounting a legal defense by drawing attention to outdated/disproven police practices.
nerdponx 6y ago
The very nature of policing needs to change. Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police. Mandatory regular empathy training. Mandatory training to quickly distinguish between real and imagined threats, and to abort quickly force escalation if a threat turns out to be imaginary. Clear rules of engagement for use of tools like batons, Tasers, and firearms. Detective units need punishment for declining to pursue cases when resources and evidence are available. There should never be a rape kit backlog. Reward good behavior. Officers should be proud of statistics like "greatest % of arrests this month without injury to the suspect." Police simply don't need to handle everything. Welfare checks, mental health emergencies, and drug emergencies need a social worker involved and on the front lines. Policing is an extremely hard job. Police academies are not preparing officers for it correctly because police departments have no incentive to actually conduct policing correctly. It all starts with political oversight and breaking down the blue wall of silence.
- coffeemaniac 6y ago
  > Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police. I see this suggested a lot, and I want to reiterate that having studied these sports -- being able to subdue an opponent without hurting them is a point of pride already. All reputable instructors will instill this. We can't allow the excellent reputation of these sports to influence our understanding of how police operate. Police are not good-faith participants in the goal to injure fewer people via policing. If you teach them more BJJ, they'll use those skills to establish a dominant physical position. A practitioner of BJJ will take this opportunity to de-escalate the situation and escape without injuring anyone else or themselves. A police officer will take this opportunity to use weapons like mace and tasers, or stomp on necks and gouge eyes. They only escalate and when given the opportunity, they brutalize with impunity. I believe we can influence the the amount of harm done by police by removing the tools they have available to do that harm. Take away all their weapons, and I believe they will more wisely evaluate how they decide to engage with citizens. Hold them legally responsible for any injuries sustained in the process of an arrest and they'll need to purchase insurance -- officers who do more harm will be uninsurable (or the expense of the insurance will make them unhireable).
deelowe 6y ago
Didn't California just significantly reduce the police's budget. They need to increase the budget, if they want better training. Most people don't realize how poorly funded the police is and how much this has contributed to the current issues. Give a man to a gun and never teach him how to fight, guess what he uses at the smallest hint of a threat?
- Shivetya 6y ago
  there is sufficient money in policing, how it is being used is another matter
  - deelowe 6y ago
    I don't think there is. A fair bit of police hardware is allocated, not purchased. My understanding is that the discretionary budgets for things like training is fairly thin. This is why police have so much military hardware. They were able to get these things for free due to 1033.

gentleman11 6y ago

Puts the company in a weird position where they want to charge for access to their material, but laws are requiring them to release it publicly. Assuming good intent, it would make their business model challenging

heavyset_go 6y ago
I don't really see how this is any different than books. Anyone can pick a book up and read it for free at the library, and intellectual property laws guide most entities to either lawfully borrow, rent or purchase a copy, and not bootleg it.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  It’s like the musician challenge where piracy and streaming made it harder to charge for the music itself, so bands began relying on live performance out of necessity
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Shaking down some kid for violating copyright or trademark law doesn't scale and is bad PR. Lawyers would have a field day if municipalities started bootlegging their clients' intellectual property en masse.

acheron9383 6y ago

While I don't disagree with the California law, it is reasonable for a company to hold copyright over it's materials and products. I'm not sure a California state law can just hand wave away a federal statue and break the copyright, presumably violating the contract the police agencies made in the past with these companies. If they do so, the companies will probably sue the state, and they may win a bunch of taxpayer money. To me, it seems like the California agency is the one in the wrong here, they need to be using training courses that are able to comply with the above law, rather than just slapping up a "we cant comply sorry" message.

annoyingnoob 6y ago
Sorry the police and government generally do not have free reign over us. In an era of so much police brutality its perfectly reasonable to ask how they were trained and what the training materials consist of. Lots of things at the library are under copyright but I can check them out and read them for free. Why should police training materials be different?

thelock85 6y ago

Making the association to K-12 public education, taxpaying parents cannot easily access all of the curriculum their student has/is/will engage with in a K-12 public school. The legislation (if any) and auditing process varies by state, but from a business perspective, K-12 publishers do not want to be on the hook for any real-life outcomes. Their customer is the school/school district, not their constituents. Being able to see everything would open the cultural (relevance) and academic (rigor) floodgates of advocacy. In addition to protecting the business model, I imagine these training companies do not want their educative materials associated with real-world police misconduct, or subject to any standards around what should or should not be taught.

throwaway_USD 6y ago

If you want to claim a copyright, then good luck with the in the private market, but if you want that big, fat juicy government contract (i.e. taxpayer dollars) there should be concessions.

soledades 6y ago

A sample of what this kind of training can look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM

Melting_Harps 6y ago

Well, all the more reason to applaud hacker groups like DDoSecrets for file dumps like Blueleaks that are revealing how much utter BS and how much institutionalized corruption exists in Law Enforcement. Moreover, I'm pretty disappointed Jack Dorsey let someone at his company just ban their account [1]. A lot of good was done in having them publicly advertise what they had released. Hopefully this has a Streisan effect instead. 1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-account-over-blueleaks-police-data-dump/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bans-ddosecrets-accoun... I'm gla