18 ms·

Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

409 points by mychele 5y ago

pope_meat 5y ago
That's pretty clever, they know that an individual with a video can be dealt with a lot easier than a viral video where the whole public gets to see the behavior. I'm glad some precincts burned down last summer. I'm glad a bunch of cops quit, and the ones remaining are all on edge, maybe negative reinforcement works on them too xD
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"I'm glad some precincts burned down last summer. I'm glad a bunch of cops quit, and the ones remaining are all on edge, maybe negative reinforcement works on them too xD" Be careful what you wish for..... Edit: You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police?
  - lucideer 5y ago
    I don't follow; what need the gp be careful of? (I do see the post is now flagged but presume that's users disagreeing & abusing the flag button as it's within guidelines; I see what users may disagree with but still don't see what they should be "careful" about)
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I copied/quoted the part from the GP that stood out to me. I was just gobsmacked that the GP was glad precincts were burned down. I'm weary of mob and vigilante "justice".
      - lucideer 5y ago
        Ah; the edit makes more sense. We're each entitled to our own perspective, but fwiw, I think you'll struggle to find any cohort less accountable than the police. Whereas "the mob", being traditionally a phrase used broadly by established powers to derogate the opposition, is almost by definition always the cohort held most to account in any given situation. Furthermore, perhaps one of the biggest false assumptions many seem to have about abolition movements is that there isn't reasoned proposals for (existing or new) accountable institutions to fill potential voids left by abolition.
        BitwiseFool 5y ago
        Understandable. I'm coming at this from a "violence begets violence" perspective and my fear is escalation.
        lucideer 5y ago
        I agree. I've just seen evidence of police being the primary source of escalation too many times.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    > Edit: You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police? Considering cops currently face accountability that approaches 0, yes.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I just don't how see burning down precinct buildings leads to anything better. A controversial opinion, it seems.
      - SauciestGNU 5y ago
        Well, it may not be the most constructive way of dealing with police abuses, but it's one of the vanishingly few consequences police have faced for their malfeasance and unfettered violence.
      - cforrester 5y ago
        It's not the burning that directly leads to something better. It's more like a natural consequence caused by failing to adequately address people's need for something better; people who feel powerless in their quest for justice will treasure morsels of that justice whereever they can get it, such as direct attacks on the public institutions suppressing them. The good that can come from it is motivation: it's more clear than ever that gradual reform is not occurring, and something has to change at a fundamental level. Enabling people to get justice civilly will sharply reduce the number of people resorting to incivility.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    USA police have shot and killed roughly a thousand people a year for many decades. Over that time period three police have been convicted of murder. [0] I can't imagine a less accountable mob. If nothing else, a greater percentage of any mobile vulgus would feel guilty and turn themselves in. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/police-officers-convicted-fatal-shootings-are-exception-not-rule-n982741 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/police-officers-convicte...
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police? To the currently politically powerful who disproportionately control what is done by government, no. To people on the other side of that power imbalance? Well, who do you think the mobs are, and why do they use that mechanism instead of the formal political system to attempt to impose accountability? Obviously, not a desirable durable state of affairs, the desirable condition is to resolve the power imbalance in the formal systems. But if you can't convince those who control those systems that the systems they control will be forcibly rendered irrelevant if the imbalance in them persists, that is unlikely.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      But those who are powerless can also suffer at the hands of the mob. In fact, they're more likely to do so than the powerful are.
gumby 5y ago
Would be simpler to simply play 4’33” on a continuous loop. For those who’d not know the song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″
- babyshake 5y ago
  I don't think it would be possible to verify this when making a copyright claim. But along these lines, if you could play a loop of audio that would not be recognized by people around you or not recognized as music but could be recognized by an algorithm, then you could use this strategy without anyone knowing.
  - frumper 5y ago
    verification doesn't seem to be very high on the priority list of copyright claims
  - ttt0 5y ago
    YouTube striked white noise with a copyright claim: https://www.neowin.net/news/youtubes-algorithms-strike-white-noise-with-copyright-claims/ https://www.neowin.net/news/youtubes-algorithms-strike-white...
scotuswroteus 5y ago
Isn't that video evidence that the police officer is violating the copyright?
- posguy 5y ago
  This would constitute a public performance of a song, I doubt he paid for a license.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    You don't need a public performance license to personally consume music in public. Public performance licenses would be for things like playing a song in a restaurant you run, or in a retail store.
    - tnel77 5y ago
      Cops are bad, so you are wrong.
    - akersten 5y ago
      He's not personally consuming - he's playing the music in public for the purposes of performance (the audience) and broadcast (he knows it is being recorded)! This is willful and flagrant infringement.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        Eh, knowing that something is being recorded is not broadcasting.
      - SpaceManNabs 5y ago
        That might be hard to prove unless there is an unofficial department email going around on tips and tricks to avoid pesky recorders. Sorry for the cynicism.
        mannerheim 5y ago
brundolf 5y ago
Maybe this kind of thing will finally force some preventative measures for DMCA-trolling
mattlondon 5y ago
A Barbara Streisand track would have been more appropriate!
- moate 5y ago
  I love that the article mentions a different cop who played a Sublime track. Whoever was making the video should have put on "April 29, 1992".
bmsleight_ 5y ago
If it is a well known song - maybe the audio coudl be subtracted - noise cancellation style to remove the rogue song.
- recursive 5y ago
  If it was recorded by a microphone in a space, then that won't work. Time and frequency inaccuracy in playback by speaker, sound reflections, and inaccuracies in recording by microphone all contribute to a signal. The original can be recognized, but simple subtraction will never remove it.
  - cellularmitosis 5y ago
    But keep in mind the goal isn’t perfect removal. You only need to disrupt the audio hashing algorithm.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    This is untrue, things like Fourier transforms can account for those variables.
    - recursive 5y ago
      I'd love to see a demonstration of this. (not of a FFT, but use of one to remove one signal from another)
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        They might have done this to extract instruments, and if you can extract one then maybe you can just subtract it from the main recording. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030201607.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030201607.h...
        recursive 5y ago
        Identifying the fundamental pitches of notes in a chord is a far cry from subtracting them out of a recording.
goodcanadian 5y ago
The irony being . . . I just watched it on YouTube.
015a 5y ago
To some degree I understand the cop's position. The internet is an insanely dangerous echo chamber. The vast, VAST majority of police interactions are not that. The vast majority of police interactions are well-meaning officers maintaining public order. This doesn't excuse the interactions which are unrighteous and deserve to be exposed, possibly including the interaction that these people were protesting. The officer here was, to my view, the more sane one. He said you could record. If something happened bad enough to justify publishing the video to expose the interaction, a little Taylor Swift music shouldn't stop that dissemination of information. What it can do is dampen Ambient Outrage; a citizen surveillance state of uploading every police interaction out there to social media for Internet Crazies to get angry about because Cops Are Just Evil, where there is no nuance, no context, just outrage and ad dollars for the protestors behind the uploads. Its memey and sad that this is the lengths officers have to go to. That's it. But if it works, especially in a situation when the officer flat-out says "yeah you can record, that's fine" (good on him!); I think their underlying rationale is perfectly sound.
- akersten 5y ago
  > when the officer flat-out says "yeah you can record, that's fine" (good on him!); The fact that he plays the copyrighted track is evidence that his statement about "oh, sure, of course you can record ;)" was not made in good faith. I give the officer zero benefit of the doubt here. Transparency is necessary in all police interactions in public, not just the ones that are "bad enough to excuse a little Taylor Swift." Cops can cry me a river about the internet outrage machine.
  - DennisAleynikov 5y ago
    the playing of the song doesn't make the recording of the video any less factual or truthful. it would just be harder to publish on youtube itself and there are other social medias
  - 015a 5y ago
    You are conflating the Court of Public Opinion with the Court of Law. The Court of Public Opinion is the court that drives teens to suicide through internet bullying, that accused the wrong man of bombing the Boston Marathon, and killing students at Sandy Hook, even suggesting Sandy Hook didn't happen. That's the internet. The standards for evidence on the internet are low, and tempers are high. Transparency in "all" public police interactions isn't necessary, just like transparency in "all" doctor interactions isn't necessary in order to judge doctor competency. Its an infuriating distraction; it gives you an excuse to be angry about everything. And moreover; media outlets fuel this outrage machine by purposefully omitting context and nuance in order to drive clicks. You believe you're using a critical eye to analyze these situations. You're not. This is undeniable, because it is difficult even for the people there, at the scene, to analyze a complex situation like these critically, to have all the information, and understand if the right call was or was not made, let alone someone sitting in a dark room in their basement a thousand miles away getting all of their information from Buzzfeed and The Verge. Its the job of the Court of Law to look past the Taylor Swift; they're held to a higher standard, just as officers themselves are. That doesn't mean mistakes aren't made. But those mistakes are not an excuse to break the system and raise tensions in every police interaction. This will only lead to more violence.
LinuxBender 5y ago
Perhaps a work around would be to post without audio and add text captions, fully accepting that if the people in the video are wearing masks, the captions could turn into bad lipreading memes.
- lucideer 5y ago
  Given the tools available now to do speech replacement/ deepfakes / etc. I wonder is there anything open-source available for song-replacement. This is actually a problem I've seen on multiple (more innocuous) occasions: so-called "content-creator" youtubers casually mentioning that they had to throw away clips or rerecord sections during editing after realising there was copyrighted background noise. So I'd say there's definitely a market.
  - 988747 5y ago
    But if you do "song-replacement" then the video is now edited, and loses all credibility.
    - lucideer 5y ago
      There's a reasonable argument that deepfakes are challenging our ability to rely on video evidence in general, but saying any editing at all removes credibility is pretty out there. Almost every video on the internet has been edited in some way.
      - pc86 5y ago
        Are there deepfakes out there that can withstand even a cursory technical interrogation? Most of them are extremely obvious once you've seen two or three.
        nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        Depends what you mean by "technical". There are deep fakes that are good enough to fool some humans. There are deep fakes that are good enough to pass by some AI detection. Then there are some deep fakes that can not pass either. By definition this is unquatifiable problem since you won't know how many deep fakes you aren't detecting since you aren't detecting them.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Very upsetting the mindset of a police officer (sergeant!) who will harass someone while listening to a pre trial hearing for an officer who murdered a man having a mental breakdown, and then upon being recorded will attempt to interfere with that recording. Police officers are given extraordinary powers by society and yet they can act like spoiled brats (or worse). Not cool!
- moate 5y ago
  It's almost like there is a systemic problem within the department...
- ipnon 5y ago
  It seems like the police officer was remaining calm and collected while the protestors were mocking him, interrupting him, and calling him an "asshole."
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    Good on the protestors for calling him out on being an asshole, filming it, and getting the publicity this deserves so we can have a public debate about the manchildren our government protects through qualified immunity. If the officer really wanted to engage with the protestors, all he had to do was not play the song. The cops care more about protecting themselves than protecting the citizens they aren't even sworn to protect. https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      >If the officer really wanted to engage with the protestors It is painfully obvious that he did NOT want to do that. The protestors wanted to engage with him and nitpick on whatever order he had given them. They are acting hostile and trying to land the officer in question in trouble. Yeah he kind a does it to himself by trying to play the music so the video won't end up on Youtube, but I can only see this as anti police folks having bad blood. When the protestors do anything that prevents their surveilance / recording by the police (like in Hong Kong when they were shining blinding lasers into officer's eyes and into recording equipment that was touted as genious use of technology and civil disobedience. Now that a cop tries something similar they are touted as trouble makers and assholes for simply not wanting to be recorded. Yes it is a public place and you are allowed to record them but you don't have to bring your phone into their face.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cj 5y ago
> keep video off YouTube That, and it also trips up algorithms that scan live feeds (e.g. Facebook Live, Instagram Live) to make live streaming the encounter more difficult. (citation: my virtual fitness instructor who gets booted off of Facebook Live mid-workout when certain songs are playing)
ortusdux 5y ago
IIRC, a while back that the MPAA was pushing for a law that would require video cameras to stop recording if they detected a specific trigger. The intent was to prevent people from filming in movie theaters, similar to the EURion watermarking constellation found on most bank notes. I can't imagine how things would have turned out if that technology had become standard and inevitably abused.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  that more or less happened. all BD players required to implement audio fingerprinting
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    What is BD in this context?
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      I assume blu-ray disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
      - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
        I am surprised I never heard of this before. It's a watermark not a fingerprint. The audio would have a watermark embedded in it, and if the player finds the watermark it requires the disk to have encryption. That would be pretty neat if it wasn't awful.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    I'd lean towards "less", a unique fingerprint provides completely different functionality than a kill sound. The only connection is the MPAA liked both.
- 5y ago
calgoo 5y ago
This sounds like a great ml app idea: Remove music from audio while keeping the other voices. I wonder how hard it would be to keep them separate.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Spleeter [1] does a really good job of it. It can separate out the vocals, accompaniment, drums, bass, and piano. It does a really phenomenal job at it, though there can be a bit of reverb in the vocals if there's a lot of reverb in the base. Splitting out individual vocalists is a lot harder, and I haven't found any pre-trained models that manage it. There's a lot of speaker separation [2] models, but they are trained on separate sentences overlapping. [1] https://github.com/deezer/spleeter/releases https://github.com/deezer/spleeter/releases [2] https://paperswithcode.com/task/speaker-separation https://paperswithcode.com/task/speaker-separation
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    I immediately thought of spleeter too as I've had great success in experiments to strip out unwanted music overlays (eg podcasts that insist on adding their end of show theme tune whilst guests are still speaking!) I haven't tried speaker separation, but it seems there are some models from SpeechBrain on HuggingFace that seem to handle this: https://huggingface.co/models?filter=Speech%20Separation https://huggingface.co/models?filter=Speech%20Separation
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  If you know what song is playing, then it's somewhat trivial to remove it from the audio, no ML needed.
randyrand 5y ago
Do people not remember that you can post copyrighted music on youtube? it’s generally allowed. They just get any money from it.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Rights holders have automated the DMCA take down process on platforms like YouTube.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Depends on the rights holder. I have a random 43-second clip from Cyberpunk 2077 with some jazz playing in the background uploaded to YouTube. Within minutes of uploading, UMG made a copyright claim on it, meaning that YouTube can show ads on my video despite my channel not being monetized and UMG will get that ad revenue. However, it doesn't actually impact my channel's standing in any way. And I guess a side benefit is that you can actually listen to the full track by clicking the automatically added link in the description. It does allow me to either mute or replace the song if I don't want UMG claiming my video, but most likely it will just completely destroy the audio in the entire video. (https://youtu.be/7_C14lT4Tzw https://youtu.be/7_C14lT4Tzw if anyone's actually curious)
marsdepinski 5y ago
Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties?
- dctoedt 5y ago
  > Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties? Yes, but under current law, states can ignore the royalty requirement with impunity: "[C]opyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act." [0] Police departments are almost certain to be held to be state entities, I'd think, and therefore immune from individual personal liability for copyright infringement liability. And the doctrine of "qualified immunity" might shield the police officer from personal liability for infringement as well. But I haven't looked into this specific issue. (Usual disclaimer: I'm an IP lawyer but not your lawyer.) [0] https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/ https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/
  - asdff 5y ago
    I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government.
    - dctoedt 5y ago
      > I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government. For this purpose, city- and county governments and their various departments are regarded as subdivisions of the state.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      In this case the definition of state that applies is "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory". In other words, any government generally.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
moron4hire 5y ago
I've been seeing videos on TikTok and such of cops using tape to cover up people's security cameras at their homes when approaching the front door. I don't care why the cop is there, that should be at least a firable offense on the first occurance.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  The irony is that body cameras for police are sold to departments as devices that keep the "lying public" from accusing cops of doing things they didn't do. They have no problem shoving cameras in other people's faces, but if someone records cops, then it's the end of the world.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    If you can't see the difference either you are naive or you are pushing agenda. One is a random guy recording the cops then being able to cut it and edit it how he pleases to spread any info they want. Other is full recording of what happened from the officer's point of view.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      > Other is full recording of what happened from the officer's point of view. Ironically, the security cameras on people's private property that cops are choosing to put tape over before possibly committing crimes are closer to "full recordings" than what body cameras offer. Body cameras are sold with features that cops and their bosses like, like features that exist for the purpose of keeping the public from accusing cops of violating their rights or worse. That means that many body cameras are designed to only record short 30 to 60 second segments of video after a cop feels that "something bad" might happen to them. Many of the cameras also come with convenient on and off switches, too, and some come with features that allow cops to delete videos.
      - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        I completely agree that it should be illegal for body camera footage to be deleted or tampered. In an ideal world it would be uploaded to some central server with hashes to confirm it is the original footage, but I've said my piece on the US police force recruitment, training, and up keep so many times I'm not going to go into this anymore.
pan69 5y ago
Then you upload it somewhere else and share that.
throwawaycities 5y ago
Maybe the officer will have a great YC application answer for the time he hacked a system. Lots of people here upset with the officer’s tactic, but he didn’t interfere with any right to record. If anyone is at fault it is YouTube for preemptively taking down videos containing copyright that fall within the Fair Use Doctrine…of course that is YouTube’s legal right also, they don’t have to host anything. If it were my video, and if it were actually important to share online for one reason or another, I would look at it like an opportunity to request a limited license from the copyright holder to post the video…then they would have a great YC application also.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Its not that the tactic is scummy. Its that police officers use tactics to prevent recordings of themselves being uploaded and spread. The fact that they explicitly go out of their way to avoid accountability is bad. It is bad because, given the privileges we give police, a strong force of accountability is needed. This situation is worsened by the fact that this happened at a hearing where police conduct was the subject. There already are doubts in that community about police conduct. If they close ranks, that suggests there is indeed something wrong. Certainly, it means the relationship between police and the community is becoming more and more adversarial, and police aren't trying to bridge that gap. That is simply bad.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    I completely disagree. Police are people too and as much as you are allowed to film them I can't imagine another country where people are shoving their phones into the faces of the officers. Just take couple steps back and there is no problem. I won't argue about the police actions in US. I've said my piece on the matter.
- sixothree 5y ago
  He _did_ interfere with their ability to share the video.
peeters 5y ago
Is there some kind of centralized review system for police departments in the US? I try to be cognizant of confirmation bias, but the amount of news I read about this particular force makes me think it's particularly bad even among US forces. As a Canadian the most prominent in my memory is when the Alameda county sheriff's office outright lied about circumstances involving Masai Ujiri (president of the Toronto Raptors) and one of their deputies at the 2019 NBA Final. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_in...
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  Nope, and it’s why police regularly get away with abuses of power that would have (rightfully) landed me in prison if I tried it while deployed in Afghanistan.
- sixothree 5y ago
  This country was founded on checks and balances. And currently the people who have the most control over whether we are allowed to live and how we do that have zero checks whatsoever. This needs to change.
wcarss 5y ago
30 Rock was ahead of the curve on this one! Some of the episode Operation Righteous Cowboy Lightning[1] has the central characters singing an argument to each other to the tune of 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel, to stop a reality tv show that's following them from being able to air the footage, due to the copyright burden it would cause on them. Of course reality is far more tragic. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lig...
ryanmarsh 5y ago
Keep psychologically abusing police (getting in their face and antagonizing them) instead of holding legislators and officials accountable and see if society gets better or worse.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  > instead of holding legislators and officials accountable or perps. A good idea for an experiment. We could try different things in different places (states?) and see what is what. I suppose the cops playing Taylor Swift could pay the ASCAP mafia or whoever and be above board. Generally, I'd say that if the public wants to watch all police activity, they'll have to get used to sausage being made. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, life isn't as clean and sanitary as you might think from a cubicle.
- rocqua 5y ago
  What should legislators and officials change?
  - Forbo 5y ago
    End qualified immunity, for starters.
kklisura 5y ago
Would it be possible do make an AI that would mute or remove the song, while preserving the rest the sounds?
- Diederich 5y ago
  Pretty sure no AI required, especially if the (near) exact audio that was being played was available.
NazakiAid 5y ago
Quite funny that this ends up making the video more popular because of the Streisand effect. Would be scary if police always had this technique though when recording as maybe it would end up becoming more normalised so the Streisand effect wouldn't happen.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The actual video is available on YouTube if you want to watch for yourself, Taylor Swift music included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc Apparently the strategy doesn't work.
- lucideer 5y ago
  > Apparently the strategy doesn't work. Yet. Take-downs are carried out somewhat arbitrarily. The point is that there's no guarantee it will continue to be available.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Good example of the Streisand Effect. This YouTube channel currently has 89 subscribers. Most of their videos have less than a hundred views. Without this attempt by the officer likely nobody would have seen, heard, or cared about some argument over where a banner should or should not be placed.
- bugfix 5y ago
  You can upload it to YouTube, but you can't monetize it. I've seen some videos of people following officers around with a camera and harassing them trying to get some sort of response, so they can post the video on their Instagram/YouTube and make money from ads.
spoonjim 5y ago
This is the action of someone who has already planned in advance how to suppress the evidence of their abuse of authority.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Interesting article for two reasons, how the practice originated and what it implies. The practice seems to be somewhat wide spread (in the distance between departments case). That might be because it came from a Facebook group or forum where Law Enforcement officers exchange tips. The second is the choice of artist (Swift) who has been in a pretty visible battle with ownership of her music. I suspect that if the officers who use this technique thought about it, they might find that using Disney tunes would be more effective in terms of triggering DMCA takedowns. What it implies, and is explicitly stated in the referenced video, is that a law enforcement officer is explicitly attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right (as adjudicated by the courts). While the doctrine of qualified immunity would likely shield them from prosecution, it is still a violation of your civil rights and should certainly merit disciplinary action on the part of the police department.
- Simulacra 5y ago
  "explicitly attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right " I disagree. It's YouTube that is denying your first amendment right. You have the right to record the officer, but you have no right nor control over what the officer can do. There is absolutely no law against playing a taylor swift song, as distasteful as it may be. He's not stopping the person filming. There is explicit, and there is reality, and this just doesn't rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
  - cforrester 5y ago
    I can't speak to the actual legality, but I strongly feel that a less-dysfunctional system would account for the intent of the officer. It is undeniably an attempt to suppress widespread dissemination of video documentation of their actions, by taking advantage of a known flaw in the technology most commonly used to do so. At the very least, this should be a fireable offence on the first infraction, akin to tampering with their body camera.
    - A-Train 5y ago
      And I disagree with you. The police officer is not doing anything wrong he is only utilizing a strange loophole. Is an actor wearing a reflective hat is breaking law by preventing paparazzis of using the photos in tabloids? Why should they make it easy to post the video on youtube which is a commercial platform that has nothing to do with any kind of law. The video of the police officer can be manipulated too to show limited context. If he was breaking the law the video can be used in the court no problem. They can also write an article or describe it on twitter. I think the issue is that people are entitled and intoxicated by their "freedom" and publicity. It is not enough if what people say is consumed it must be mass consumed. The freedom of mass publicity is limited by DMCA takedown.
paulpauper 5y ago
Should have played a Prince song..gone in 3,2,1...
nashashmi 5y ago
Calm down people. A while back the headline was music weaponized to prevent broadcast. It’s not a weapon. The officer is using music to prevent videos from being put online. I really don’t see the problem in this.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  The problem is less about the specific act of stifling the virality of police recordings and more about what this says about the mindset of this cop and police culture in general.
  - nashashmi 5y ago
    The mindset is not isolated to police culture. It is also present in construction inspection and pretty much anywhere the job is enforcement of policies. You do the little you can to enforce rules in the most effective way possible with the least opinions being raised at the methods you used to get there. “How do I do my job and create the least amount of fuss?”
    - cellularmitosis 5y ago
      This isn’t a very apt comparison. Construction inspectors don’t generally engage in practices which directly fly in the face of recent Supreme Court rulings. They also aren’t trusted with the power to legally murder you if you don’t do what they say. There also hasn’t been a recent nation-wide uproar over the behavior of construction inspectors, so I wouldn’t expect them to be more introspective than usual of how their actions will be interpreted with regard to recent current events.
      - nashashmi 5y ago
        I think those are social justice warrior points blind to the actual tasks and responsibilities of an officer. It’s a list of all the things they should not be allowed to do. Enforcers of policy in any field have some commonalities. One of them is I will check on another but I won’t like someone checking on me. Unless they are just like me ie responsible for doing checks. There is an understandable amount of leeway put into these things. Inspectors try not to be total jerks. And try not to push rules to extremes. And when they do, they do it with a camaraderie, like if you improve on the following I will let go everything else. Similar to police officers. But the average joe who is not versed in such things like young unseasoned citizens have stranger expectations.
cratermoon 5y ago
They police and federal law enforcement did this in Portland during the BLM protests last summer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
theshadowknows 5y ago
This seems like a great use case for a mobile app that can use ML to "clean" content from video like that
throwaway29303 5y ago
Hrm. Upgrades.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
squarefoot 5y ago
Would adding some other instrument (shittyflute?) playing while the cop doesn't talk qualify as creative work, or render the video different enough for their algorithms, so that it has more chances not to be flagged? Anyway, a possible solution would be to swap the audio with a fsk encoding of a timecode plus decentralized hard to take down p2p address in which the users can find the original audio. A browser plugin could automate everything by finding the audio track then play it in sync with no apparent difference from the original.
DesiLurker 5y ago
all the DMCA technicalities aside this is a completely bad faith move by police.
justshowpost 5y ago
Preventing mostly peaceful reparations with free music. Police is improving, I'd say.
chaz6 5y ago
In my job I would be warned if I listened to music whilst I am supposed to be working, and if I failed to heed the warnings I would eventually be dismissed. Why do police offers in the USA get given so much leeway when they are supposed to be the pinnacle of upstanding members of society?
Mikho 5y ago
Imagine reflexes of small criminals on the streets when they hear somewhere around Taylor Swift music :)
cannabis_sam 5y ago
This particular police officer should unequivocally be fired and barred from any law enforcement work for the rest of their lives… Corrupt and destructive individuals should just simply not be admitted into positions of authority. Any position where they can enact their hate and evil onto people, is a disgrace to all of us.
DaedPsyker 5y ago
I'm not aware of a specific ml model for this, but I know there is some adjacent ones that pull just the lyrics. Perhaps someone needs to publicly release one to counter this type of behaviour.
davidhbolton 5y ago
I do wonder if there could be some nifty filtering tech that would allow the two voices to be isolated and the higher-pitch one (Taylor Swift) and music be removed.

409 points by mychele 5y ago

That's pretty clever, they know that an individual with a video can be dealt with a lot easier than a viral video where the whole public gets to see the behavior. I'm glad some precincts burned down last summer. I'm glad a bunch of cops quit, and the ones remaining are all on edge, maybe negative reinforcement works on them too xD

BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"I'm glad some precincts burned down last summer. I'm glad a bunch of cops quit, and the ones remaining are all on edge, maybe negative reinforcement works on them too xD" Be careful what you wish for..... Edit: You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police?
- lucideer 5y ago
  I don't follow; what need the gp be careful of? (I do see the post is now flagged but presume that's users disagreeing & abusing the flag button as it's within guidelines; I see what users may disagree with but still don't see what they should be "careful" about)
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I copied/quoted the part from the GP that stood out to me. I was just gobsmacked that the GP was glad precincts were burned down. I'm weary of mob and vigilante "justice".
    - lucideer 5y ago
      Ah; the edit makes more sense. We're each entitled to our own perspective, but fwiw, I think you'll struggle to find any cohort less accountable than the police. Whereas "the mob", being traditionally a phrase used broadly by established powers to derogate the opposition, is almost by definition always the cohort held most to account in any given situation. Furthermore, perhaps one of the biggest false assumptions many seem to have about abolition movements is that there isn't reasoned proposals for (existing or new) accountable institutions to fill potential voids left by abolition.
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        Understandable. I'm coming at this from a "violence begets violence" perspective and my fear is escalation.
        lucideer 5y ago
        I agree. I've just seen evidence of police being the primary source of escalation too many times.
- brewdad 5y ago
  > Edit: You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police? Considering cops currently face accountability that approaches 0, yes.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I just don't how see burning down precinct buildings leads to anything better. A controversial opinion, it seems.
    - SauciestGNU 5y ago
      Well, it may not be the most constructive way of dealing with police abuses, but it's one of the vanishingly few consequences police have faced for their malfeasance and unfettered violence.
    - cforrester 5y ago
      It's not the burning that directly leads to something better. It's more like a natural consequence caused by failing to adequately address people's need for something better; people who feel powerless in their quest for justice will treasure morsels of that justice whereever they can get it, such as direct attacks on the public institutions suppressing them. The good that can come from it is motivation: it's more clear than ever that gradual reform is not occurring, and something has to change at a fundamental level. Enabling people to get justice civilly will sharply reduce the number of people resorting to incivility.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  USA police have shot and killed roughly a thousand people a year for many decades. Over that time period three police have been convicted of murder. [0] I can't imagine a less accountable mob. If nothing else, a greater percentage of any mobile vulgus would feel guilty and turn themselves in. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/police-officers-convicted-fatal-shootings-are-exception-not-rule-n982741 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/police-officers-convicte...
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You may hate the cops, but do you really think that mobs will be more accountable than the police? To the currently politically powerful who disproportionately control what is done by government, no. To people on the other side of that power imbalance? Well, who do you think the mobs are, and why do they use that mechanism instead of the formal political system to attempt to impose accountability? Obviously, not a desirable durable state of affairs, the desirable condition is to resolve the power imbalance in the formal systems. But if you can't convince those who control those systems that the systems they control will be forcibly rendered irrelevant if the imbalance in them persists, that is unlikely.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    But those who are powerless can also suffer at the hands of the mob. In fact, they're more likely to do so than the powerful are.

gumby 5y ago

Would be simpler to simply play 4’33” on a continuous loop. For those who’d not know the song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″

babyshake 5y ago
I don't think it would be possible to verify this when making a copyright claim. But along these lines, if you could play a loop of audio that would not be recognized by people around you or not recognized as music but could be recognized by an algorithm, then you could use this strategy without anyone knowing.
- frumper 5y ago
  verification doesn't seem to be very high on the priority list of copyright claims
- ttt0 5y ago
  YouTube striked white noise with a copyright claim: https://www.neowin.net/news/youtubes-algorithms-strike-white-noise-with-copyright-claims/ https://www.neowin.net/news/youtubes-algorithms-strike-white...

scotuswroteus 5y ago

Isn't that video evidence that the police officer is violating the copyright?

posguy 5y ago
This would constitute a public performance of a song, I doubt he paid for a license.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  You don't need a public performance license to personally consume music in public. Public performance licenses would be for things like playing a song in a restaurant you run, or in a retail store.
  - tnel77 5y ago
    Cops are bad, so you are wrong.
  - akersten 5y ago
    He's not personally consuming - he's playing the music in public for the purposes of performance (the audience) and broadcast (he knows it is being recorded)! This is willful and flagrant infringement.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Eh, knowing that something is being recorded is not broadcasting.
    - SpaceManNabs 5y ago
      That might be hard to prove unless there is an unofficial department email going around on tips and tricks to avoid pesky recorders. Sorry for the cynicism.
      - mannerheim 5y ago

brundolf 5y ago

Maybe this kind of thing will finally force some preventative measures for DMCA-trolling

mattlondon 5y ago

A Barbara Streisand track would have been more appropriate!

moate 5y ago
I love that the article mentions a different cop who played a Sublime track. Whoever was making the video should have put on "April 29, 1992".

bmsleight_ 5y ago

If it is a well known song - maybe the audio coudl be subtracted - noise cancellation style to remove the rogue song.

recursive 5y ago
If it was recorded by a microphone in a space, then that won't work. Time and frequency inaccuracy in playback by speaker, sound reflections, and inaccuracies in recording by microphone all contribute to a signal. The original can be recognized, but simple subtraction will never remove it.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  But keep in mind the goal isn’t perfect removal. You only need to disrupt the audio hashing algorithm.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  This is untrue, things like Fourier transforms can account for those variables.
  - recursive 5y ago
    I'd love to see a demonstration of this. (not of a FFT, but use of one to remove one signal from another)
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      They might have done this to extract instruments, and if you can extract one then maybe you can just subtract it from the main recording. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030201607.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081030201607.h...
      - recursive 5y ago
        Identifying the fundamental pitches of notes in a chord is a far cry from subtracting them out of a recording.

goodcanadian 5y ago

The irony being . . . I just watched it on YouTube.

015a 5y ago

To some degree I understand the cop's position. The internet is an insanely dangerous echo chamber. The vast, VAST majority of police interactions are not that. The vast majority of police interactions are well-meaning officers maintaining public order. This doesn't excuse the interactions which are unrighteous and deserve to be exposed, possibly including the interaction that these people were protesting. The officer here was, to my view, the more sane one. He said you could record. If something happened bad enough to justify publishing the video to expose the interaction, a little Taylor Swift music shouldn't stop that dissemination of information. What it can do is dampen Ambient Outrage; a citizen surveillance state of uploading every police interaction out there to social media for Internet Crazies to get angry about because Cops Are Just Evil, where there is no nuance, no context, just outrage and ad dollars for the protestors behind the uploads. Its memey and sad that this is the lengths officers have to go to. That's it. But if it works, especially in a situation when the officer flat-out says "yeah you can record, that's fine" (good on him!); I think their underlying rationale is perfectly sound.

akersten 5y ago
> when the officer flat-out says "yeah you can record, that's fine" (good on him!); The fact that he plays the copyrighted track is evidence that his statement about "oh, sure, of course you can record ;)" was not made in good faith. I give the officer zero benefit of the doubt here. Transparency is necessary in all police interactions in public, not just the ones that are "bad enough to excuse a little Taylor Swift." Cops can cry me a river about the internet outrage machine.
- DennisAleynikov 5y ago
  the playing of the song doesn't make the recording of the video any less factual or truthful. it would just be harder to publish on youtube itself and there are other social medias
- 015a 5y ago
  You are conflating the Court of Public Opinion with the Court of Law. The Court of Public Opinion is the court that drives teens to suicide through internet bullying, that accused the wrong man of bombing the Boston Marathon, and killing students at Sandy Hook, even suggesting Sandy Hook didn't happen. That's the internet. The standards for evidence on the internet are low, and tempers are high. Transparency in "all" public police interactions isn't necessary, just like transparency in "all" doctor interactions isn't necessary in order to judge doctor competency. Its an infuriating distraction; it gives you an excuse to be angry about everything. And moreover; media outlets fuel this outrage machine by purposefully omitting context and nuance in order to drive clicks. You believe you're using a critical eye to analyze these situations. You're not. This is undeniable, because it is difficult even for the people there, at the scene, to analyze a complex situation like these critically, to have all the information, and understand if the right call was or was not made, let alone someone sitting in a dark room in their basement a thousand miles away getting all of their information from Buzzfeed and The Verge. Its the job of the Court of Law to look past the Taylor Swift; they're held to a higher standard, just as officers themselves are. That doesn't mean mistakes aren't made. But those mistakes are not an excuse to break the system and raise tensions in every police interaction. This will only lead to more violence.

LinuxBender 5y ago

Perhaps a work around would be to post without audio and add text captions, fully accepting that if the people in the video are wearing masks, the captions could turn into bad lipreading memes.

lucideer 5y ago
Given the tools available now to do speech replacement/ deepfakes / etc. I wonder is there anything open-source available for song-replacement. This is actually a problem I've seen on multiple (more innocuous) occasions: so-called "content-creator" youtubers casually mentioning that they had to throw away clips or rerecord sections during editing after realising there was copyrighted background noise. So I'd say there's definitely a market.
- 988747 5y ago
  But if you do "song-replacement" then the video is now edited, and loses all credibility.
  - lucideer 5y ago
    There's a reasonable argument that deepfakes are challenging our ability to rely on video evidence in general, but saying any editing at all removes credibility is pretty out there. Almost every video on the internet has been edited in some way.
    - pc86 5y ago
      Are there deepfakes out there that can withstand even a cursory technical interrogation? Most of them are extremely obvious once you've seen two or three.
      - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        Depends what you mean by "technical". There are deep fakes that are good enough to fool some humans. There are deep fakes that are good enough to pass by some AI detection. Then there are some deep fakes that can not pass either. By definition this is unquatifiable problem since you won't know how many deep fakes you aren't detecting since you aren't detecting them.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Very upsetting the mindset of a police officer (sergeant!) who will harass someone while listening to a pre trial hearing for an officer who murdered a man having a mental breakdown, and then upon being recorded will attempt to interfere with that recording. Police officers are given extraordinary powers by society and yet they can act like spoiled brats (or worse). Not cool!

moate 5y ago
It's almost like there is a systemic problem within the department...
ipnon 5y ago
It seems like the police officer was remaining calm and collected while the protestors were mocking him, interrupting him, and calling him an "asshole."
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  Good on the protestors for calling him out on being an asshole, filming it, and getting the publicity this deserves so we can have a public debate about the manchildren our government protects through qualified immunity. If the officer really wanted to engage with the protestors, all he had to do was not play the song. The cops care more about protecting themselves than protecting the citizens they aren't even sworn to protect. https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    >If the officer really wanted to engage with the protestors It is painfully obvious that he did NOT want to do that. The protestors wanted to engage with him and nitpick on whatever order he had given them. They are acting hostile and trying to land the officer in question in trouble. Yeah he kind a does it to himself by trying to play the music so the video won't end up on Youtube, but I can only see this as anti police folks having bad blood. When the protestors do anything that prevents their surveilance / recording by the police (like in Hong Kong when they were shining blinding lasers into officer's eyes and into recording equipment that was touted as genious use of technology and civil disobedience. Now that a cop tries something similar they are touted as trouble makers and assholes for simply not wanting to be recorded. Yes it is a public place and you are allowed to record them but you don't have to bring your phone into their face.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cj 5y ago

> keep video off YouTube That, and it also trips up algorithms that scan live feeds (e.g. Facebook Live, Instagram Live) to make live streaming the encounter more difficult. (citation: my virtual fitness instructor who gets booted off of Facebook Live mid-workout when certain songs are playing)

ortusdux 5y ago

IIRC, a while back that the MPAA was pushing for a law that would require video cameras to stop recording if they detected a specific trigger. The intent was to prevent people from filming in movie theaters, similar to the EURion watermarking constellation found on most bank notes. I can't imagine how things would have turned out if that technology had become standard and inevitably abused.

jiveturkey 5y ago
that more or less happened. all BD players required to implement audio fingerprinting
- cwkoss 5y ago
  What is BD in this context?
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I assume blu-ray disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
    - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
      I am surprised I never heard of this before. It's a watermark not a fingerprint. The audio would have a watermark embedded in it, and if the player finds the watermark it requires the disk to have encryption. That would be pretty neat if it wasn't awful.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I'd lean towards "less", a unique fingerprint provides completely different functionality than a kill sound. The only connection is the MPAA liked both.
5y ago

calgoo 5y ago

This sounds like a great ml app idea: Remove music from audio while keeping the other voices. I wonder how hard it would be to keep them separate.

MereInterest 5y ago
Spleeter [1] does a really good job of it. It can separate out the vocals, accompaniment, drums, bass, and piano. It does a really phenomenal job at it, though there can be a bit of reverb in the vocals if there's a lot of reverb in the base. Splitting out individual vocalists is a lot harder, and I haven't found any pre-trained models that manage it. There's a lot of speaker separation [2] models, but they are trained on separate sentences overlapping. [1] https://github.com/deezer/spleeter/releases https://github.com/deezer/spleeter/releases [2] https://paperswithcode.com/task/speaker-separation https://paperswithcode.com/task/speaker-separation
- nmstoker 5y ago
  I immediately thought of spleeter too as I've had great success in experiments to strip out unwanted music overlays (eg podcasts that insist on adding their end of show theme tune whilst guests are still speaking!) I haven't tried speaker separation, but it seems there are some models from SpeechBrain on HuggingFace that seem to handle this: https://huggingface.co/models?filter=Speech%20Separation https://huggingface.co/models?filter=Speech%20Separation
heavyset_go 5y ago
If you know what song is playing, then it's somewhat trivial to remove it from the audio, no ML needed.

randyrand 5y ago

Do people not remember that you can post copyrighted music on youtube? it’s generally allowed. They just get any money from it.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Rights holders have automated the DMCA take down process on platforms like YouTube.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Depends on the rights holder. I have a random 43-second clip from Cyberpunk 2077 with some jazz playing in the background uploaded to YouTube. Within minutes of uploading, UMG made a copyright claim on it, meaning that YouTube can show ads on my video despite my channel not being monetized and UMG will get that ad revenue. However, it doesn't actually impact my channel's standing in any way. And I guess a side benefit is that you can actually listen to the full track by clicking the automatically added link in the description. It does allow me to either mute or replace the song if I don't want UMG claiming my video, but most likely it will just completely destroy the audio in the entire video. (https://youtu.be/7_C14lT4Tzw https://youtu.be/7_C14lT4Tzw if anyone's actually curious)

marsdepinski 5y ago

Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties?

dctoedt 5y ago
> Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties? Yes, but under current law, states can ignore the royalty requirement with impunity: "[C]opyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act." [0] Police departments are almost certain to be held to be state entities, I'd think, and therefore immune from individual personal liability for copyright infringement liability. And the doctrine of "qualified immunity" might shield the police officer from personal liability for infringement as well. But I haven't looked into this specific issue. (Usual disclaimer: I'm an IP lawyer but not your lawyer.) [0] https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/ https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/
- asdff 5y ago
  I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government.
  - dctoedt 5y ago
    > I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government. For this purpose, city- and county governments and their various departments are regarded as subdivisions of the state.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    In this case the definition of state that applies is "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory". In other words, any government generally.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago

moron4hire 5y ago

I've been seeing videos on TikTok and such of cops using tape to cover up people's security cameras at their homes when approaching the front door. I don't care why the cop is there, that should be at least a firable offense on the first occurance.

heavyset_go 5y ago
The irony is that body cameras for police are sold to departments as devices that keep the "lying public" from accusing cops of doing things they didn't do. They have no problem shoving cameras in other people's faces, but if someone records cops, then it's the end of the world.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  If you can't see the difference either you are naive or you are pushing agenda. One is a random guy recording the cops then being able to cut it and edit it how he pleases to spread any info they want. Other is full recording of what happened from the officer's point of view.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Other is full recording of what happened from the officer's point of view. Ironically, the security cameras on people's private property that cops are choosing to put tape over before possibly committing crimes are closer to "full recordings" than what body cameras offer. Body cameras are sold with features that cops and their bosses like, like features that exist for the purpose of keeping the public from accusing cops of violating their rights or worse. That means that many body cameras are designed to only record short 30 to 60 second segments of video after a cop feels that "something bad" might happen to them. Many of the cameras also come with convenient on and off switches, too, and some come with features that allow cops to delete videos.
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      I completely agree that it should be illegal for body camera footage to be deleted or tampered. In an ideal world it would be uploaded to some central server with hashes to confirm it is the original footage, but I've said my piece on the US police force recruitment, training, and up keep so many times I'm not going to go into this anymore.

pan69 5y ago

Then you upload it somewhere else and share that.

throwawaycities 5y ago

Maybe the officer will have a great YC application answer for the time he hacked a system. Lots of people here upset with the officer’s tactic, but he didn’t interfere with any right to record. If anyone is at fault it is YouTube for preemptively taking down videos containing copyright that fall within the Fair Use Doctrine…of course that is YouTube’s legal right also, they don’t have to host anything. If it were my video, and if it were actually important to share online for one reason or another, I would look at it like an opportunity to request a limited license from the copyright holder to post the video…then they would have a great YC application also.

rocqua 5y ago
Its not that the tactic is scummy. Its that police officers use tactics to prevent recordings of themselves being uploaded and spread. The fact that they explicitly go out of their way to avoid accountability is bad. It is bad because, given the privileges we give police, a strong force of accountability is needed. This situation is worsened by the fact that this happened at a hearing where police conduct was the subject. There already are doubts in that community about police conduct. If they close ranks, that suggests there is indeed something wrong. Certainly, it means the relationship between police and the community is becoming more and more adversarial, and police aren't trying to bridge that gap. That is simply bad.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  I completely disagree. Police are people too and as much as you are allowed to film them I can't imagine another country where people are shoving their phones into the faces of the officers. Just take couple steps back and there is no problem. I won't argue about the police actions in US. I've said my piece on the matter.
sixothree 5y ago
He _did_ interfere with their ability to share the video.

peeters 5y ago

Is there some kind of centralized review system for police departments in the US? I try to be cognizant of confirmation bias, but the amount of news I read about this particular force makes me think it's particularly bad even among US forces. As a Canadian the most prominent in my memory is when the Alameda county sheriff's office outright lied about circumstances involving Masai Ujiri (president of the Toronto Raptors) and one of their deputies at the 2019 NBA Final. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_in...

jdgoesmarching 5y ago
Nope, and it’s why police regularly get away with abuses of power that would have (rightfully) landed me in prison if I tried it while deployed in Afghanistan.
sixothree 5y ago
This country was founded on checks and balances. And currently the people who have the most control over whether we are allowed to live and how we do that have zero checks whatsoever. This needs to change.

wcarss 5y ago

30 Rock was ahead of the curve on this one! Some of the episode Operation Righteous Cowboy Lightning[1] has the central characters singing an argument to each other to the tune of 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel, to stop a reality tv show that's following them from being able to air the footage, due to the copyright burden it would cause on them. Of course reality is far more tragic. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lig...

ryanmarsh 5y ago

Keep psychologically abusing police (getting in their face and antagonizing them) instead of holding legislators and officials accountable and see if society gets better or worse.

kingsuper20 5y ago
> instead of holding legislators and officials accountable or perps. A good idea for an experiment. We could try different things in different places (states?) and see what is what. I suppose the cops playing Taylor Swift could pay the ASCAP mafia or whoever and be above board. Generally, I'd say that if the public wants to watch all police activity, they'll have to get used to sausage being made. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, life isn't as clean and sanitary as you might think from a cubicle.
rocqua 5y ago
What should legislators and officials change?
- Forbo 5y ago
  End qualified immunity, for starters.

kklisura 5y ago

Would it be possible do make an AI that would mute or remove the song, while preserving the rest the sounds?

Diederich 5y ago
Pretty sure no AI required, especially if the (near) exact audio that was being played was available.

NazakiAid 5y ago

Quite funny that this ends up making the video more popular because of the Streisand effect. Would be scary if police always had this technique though when recording as maybe it would end up becoming more normalised so the Streisand effect wouldn't happen.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

The actual video is available on YouTube if you want to watch for yourself, Taylor Swift music included: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc Apparently the strategy doesn't work.

lucideer 5y ago
> Apparently the strategy doesn't work. Yet. Take-downs are carried out somewhat arbitrarily. The point is that there's no guarantee it will continue to be available.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Good example of the Streisand Effect. This YouTube channel currently has 89 subscribers. Most of their videos have less than a hundred views. Without this attempt by the officer likely nobody would have seen, heard, or cared about some argument over where a banner should or should not be placed.
bugfix 5y ago
You can upload it to YouTube, but you can't monetize it. I've seen some videos of people following officers around with a camera and harassing them trying to get some sort of response, so they can post the video on their Instagram/YouTube and make money from ads.

spoonjim 5y ago

This is the action of someone who has already planned in advance how to suppress the evidence of their abuse of authority.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Interesting article for two reasons, how the practice originated and what it implies. The practice seems to be somewhat wide spread (in the distance between departments case). That might be because it came from a Facebook group or forum where Law Enforcement officers exchange tips. The second is the choice of artist (Swift) who has been in a pretty visible battle with ownership of her music. I suspect that if the officers who use this technique thought about it, they might find that using Disney tunes would be more effective in terms of triggering DMCA takedowns. What it implies, and is explicitly stated in the referenced video, is that a law enforcement officer is explicitly attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right (as adjudicated by the courts). While the doctrine of qualified immunity would likely shield them from prosecution, it is still a violation of your civil rights and should certainly merit disciplinary action on the part of the police department.

Simulacra 5y ago
"explicitly attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right " I disagree. It's YouTube that is denying your first amendment right. You have the right to record the officer, but you have no right nor control over what the officer can do. There is absolutely no law against playing a taylor swift song, as distasteful as it may be. He's not stopping the person filming. There is explicit, and there is reality, and this just doesn't rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
- cforrester 5y ago
  I can't speak to the actual legality, but I strongly feel that a less-dysfunctional system would account for the intent of the officer. It is undeniably an attempt to suppress widespread dissemination of video documentation of their actions, by taking advantage of a known flaw in the technology most commonly used to do so. At the very least, this should be a fireable offence on the first infraction, akin to tampering with their body camera.
  - A-Train 5y ago
    And I disagree with you. The police officer is not doing anything wrong he is only utilizing a strange loophole. Is an actor wearing a reflective hat is breaking law by preventing paparazzis of using the photos in tabloids? Why should they make it easy to post the video on youtube which is a commercial platform that has nothing to do with any kind of law. The video of the police officer can be manipulated too to show limited context. If he was breaking the law the video can be used in the court no problem. They can also write an article or describe it on twitter. I think the issue is that people are entitled and intoxicated by their "freedom" and publicity. It is not enough if what people say is consumed it must be mass consumed. The freedom of mass publicity is limited by DMCA takedown.

paulpauper 5y ago

Should have played a Prince song..gone in 3,2,1...

nashashmi 5y ago

Calm down people. A while back the headline was music weaponized to prevent broadcast. It’s not a weapon. The officer is using music to prevent videos from being put online. I really don’t see the problem in this.

cellularmitosis 5y ago
The problem is less about the specific act of stifling the virality of police recordings and more about what this says about the mindset of this cop and police culture in general.
- nashashmi 5y ago
  The mindset is not isolated to police culture. It is also present in construction inspection and pretty much anywhere the job is enforcement of policies. You do the little you can to enforce rules in the most effective way possible with the least opinions being raised at the methods you used to get there. “How do I do my job and create the least amount of fuss?”
  - cellularmitosis 5y ago
    This isn’t a very apt comparison. Construction inspectors don’t generally engage in practices which directly fly in the face of recent Supreme Court rulings. They also aren’t trusted with the power to legally murder you if you don’t do what they say. There also hasn’t been a recent nation-wide uproar over the behavior of construction inspectors, so I wouldn’t expect them to be more introspective than usual of how their actions will be interpreted with regard to recent current events.
    - nashashmi 5y ago
      I think those are social justice warrior points blind to the actual tasks and responsibilities of an officer. It’s a list of all the things they should not be allowed to do. Enforcers of policy in any field have some commonalities. One of them is I will check on another but I won’t like someone checking on me. Unless they are just like me ie responsible for doing checks. There is an understandable amount of leeway put into these things. Inspectors try not to be total jerks. And try not to push rules to extremes. And when they do, they do it with a camaraderie, like if you improve on the following I will let go everything else. Similar to police officers. But the average joe who is not versed in such things like young unseasoned citizens have stranger expectations.

cratermoon 5y ago

They police and federal law enforcement did this in Portland during the BLM protests last summer.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

theshadowknows 5y ago

This seems like a great use case for a mobile app that can use ML to "clean" content from video like that

throwaway29303 5y ago

Hrm. Upgrades.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

squarefoot 5y ago

Would adding some other instrument (shittyflute?) playing while the cop doesn't talk qualify as creative work, or render the video different enough for their algorithms, so that it has more chances not to be flagged? Anyway, a possible solution would be to swap the audio with a fsk encoding of a timecode plus decentralized hard to take down p2p address in which the users can find the original audio. A browser plugin could automate everything by finding the audio track then play it in sync with no apparent difference from the original.

DesiLurker 5y ago

all the DMCA technicalities aside this is a completely bad faith move by police.

justshowpost 5y ago

Preventing mostly peaceful reparations with free music. Police is improving, I'd say.

chaz6 5y ago

In my job I would be warned if I listened to music whilst I am supposed to be working, and if I failed to heed the warnings I would eventually be dismissed. Why do police offers in the USA get given so much leeway when they are supposed to be the pinnacle of upstanding members of society?

Mikho 5y ago

Imagine reflexes of small criminals on the streets when they hear somewhere around Taylor Swift music :)

cannabis_sam 5y ago

This particular police officer should unequivocally be fired and barred from any law enforcement work for the rest of their lives… Corrupt and destructive individuals should just simply not be admitted into positions of authority. Any position where they can enact their hate and evil onto people, is a disgrace to all of us.

DaedPsyker 5y ago

I'm not aware of a specific ml model for this, but I know there is some adjacent ones that pull just the lyrics. Perhaps someone needs to publicly release one to counter this type of behaviour.

davidhbolton 5y ago

I do wonder if there could be some nifty filtering tech that would allow the two voices to be isolated and the higher-pitch one (Taylor Swift) and music be removed.