8 ms·

Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right to Leave Body Cameras Off

232 points by heavyset_go 2y ago

jcrawfordor 2y ago
1. The way I see it, Medina is either lying or an idiot. His signature is on the approval for SOP 2-8 which mandates the activation of OBRD; so did he sign it without reading it or willfully ignore it? Neither is acceptable of the chief of police. Besides, he has had extensive interaction with the disciplinary process and must understand the principles of e.g. Garrity protections. 2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs. 3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads. 4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process. Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.
sbsudbdjd 2y ago
They do have a fifth amendment right. Which they can exercise by quitting the force.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hitsurume 2y ago
  Yep, the police are public servants. When you're on the clock, you work for the people.
- anjel 2y ago
  The Police Chief advocating for his subordinates 5th am rights seems outside his job description. "Who's ox is being gored here" and why?
shove 2y ago
Anyone who has ever talked to a cop for more than a few minutes learns really quick they have a terrible grasp of the law.
excerionsforte 2y ago
Having to write a police report that can be used to self incriminate is also against the fifth amendment too with this logic then.
jawns 2y ago
In general, courts have held that Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination pertain to testimonial evidence, not broadly to any possible evidence that might be incriminating. The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature. The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock. Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.
- dylan604 2y ago
  The fact that the 5th protects from self-incriminating, WTF is a police chief saying officers are doing that would be incriminating? Like what an absolute asshat of a position to take.
  - jrs235 2y ago
    Right?! Any police officer that pleads the 5th for turning off a body cam should be fired on the spot for, I hope it's policy, violating policy.
    - conductr 2y ago
      The question I always ask is, why is there even an off button? It defeats the entire point of the camera as it’s meant to keep cops honest and not abusing the inherent power of their position.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
mrandish 2y ago
This makes zero sense. If I have a traffic camera in my car or an action cam on my bicycle helmet, there is no fifth amendment right to suppress that evidence in court. So, what in the fifth amendment makes this any different for a law enforcement officer? I'm actually generally sympathetic to law enforcement officers. Most (but not all) cops are good cops. And it's a hard job. But it should be a hard job. After all, law enforcement is granted an unprecedented, exclusive power no one else has, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force. With great power comes great responsibility (and accountability). Law enforcement officers are employees of the state (which represents the people). When "we the people" collectively hire a few individuals to exercise violent force on our behalf, it's reasonable that we also require digital accountability, including GPS, video and audio recording as a term of that employment.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  I’m not saying I agree but their argument seems to be that the body cameras being required to be running violates their 5th amendment rights. Your traffic camera was your choice to have running. Nobody required you to have one running. It’s not a good argument but not wildly surprising either.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    It is kind of surprising. I'm not being paid by public money. If I was, I would expect my communications to be public record, within established law. Why are police different? They are paid by public funds.
  - mrandish 2y ago
    Police are employees and the cameras running is a term of their employment. To me, it seems no different than a delivery truck driver having a traffic camera on in the truck being a term of their employment. No one is forcing them to be employed in this job and they don't have a "right" to arbitrarily dismiss reasonable conditions of employment (like "wear a uniform", etc) and, in effect, force their employer to keep employing them despite not fulfilling their employment contract.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
They’re employees performing a paid job. Not random citizens.
coffeecloud 2y ago
If cops wanted to win the trust of the public and work alongside their fellow citizens to keep their communities safe, they would welcome to use of body cams and hold themselves accountable to a high standard of integrity. Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  I mean, that would just put them in the category of most employees. Building systems that assume altruism and selfless intent is profoundly silly, when self interest tends to override those things.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    Both you and the person you are responding to have valid points. You can't rely on altruism or rules alone. They must work together. Some positions require a certain level of idealism and self-accountability that can't be captured by system of rules. Police and doctors are two examples.
- notjulianjaynes 2y ago
  Two things: 1. I agree. 2. Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams in company vehicle and I wasn't comfortable with both the micromanaging that would invite, nor becoming training data. Police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us working stiffs. If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. Everyone would be against body cams. Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.) In the world we live in I am for police body cams, I think. Best worst option.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. That's the thing though, if the cop's use of violence up to killing a suspect was justified, then the body cam would not matter. So if you want that authority, then you have to expect proper oversight. The longer that oversight is avoided, the more intense that effort gets. If you don't like, don't shield those that are causing the problems. In summary, at this point with their history, fuck'em if they don't like the oversight.
kevwil 2y ago
That town needs a new Chief and a new Mayor.
- gonzo41 2y ago
  That town sounds like the kind of place where dissenting views could face a lot of serious consequences because the corruption has captured everything.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    It's like it's the plot to a movie from the 1980s. That's how ridiculous it is
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      Hot Fuzz is a 2007 movie roughly going the same plot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Fuzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Fuzz
- yimmothathird 2y ago
  [dead]
sandworm101 2y ago
Um, the 5th gives you the right not to talk. It doesn't give you the right not to be recorded should you choose to talk. A cop has every right not to admit crimes into a government microphone. That is something different than saying that cops can disable microphones just in case they say something.
trhway 2y ago
yep, when the police first stopped and attacked Tyre Nichols they had body cams on and thus only tasered and "slightly" roughed him up. When he ran away for his life and was later caught and methodically beaten do death by the police we have only security camera video from a nearby pole. If not for that video, Tyre would have died while supposedly "attempting to grab police gun" as those 5 or so police guys wrote in their falsified reports.
amelius 2y ago
Can't we treat it legally similarly to the event data recorders that are installed in new cars?
alphabettsy 2y ago
The Mayor’s standards for what he considers a hero are extremely low. This police chief has no business leading other officers if this is the kind of example he sets. I understand the instinct to protect oneself, but undermining public trust to avoid a traffic citation and a substantiated complaint from a police review board should be beneath the chief of police or any officer.
jmbwell 2y ago
Love this stuff from the “if you’re doing nothing wrong you should have nothing to fear” crowd.
duxup 2y ago
Local body cam video in my area more often than not quickly resolves accusations of police misconduct, in favor of the police. Claims that someone was “just minding their own business” shows them with a weapon and such. I do not understand the resistance from some police.
- p_j_w 2y ago
  >I do not understand the resistance from some police. The police don’t care if the bodycam will exonerate them, because in the absence of a bodycam they will exonerate themselves and no one will do anything about it.
tptacek 2y ago
An annoying reminder to people: Reason is making this a national news story, but it's more meaningfully a local news story. For residents in much of the country, if you simply engage in local politics --- in most places, very few people seriously do this! --- you can get policing officials fired for saying ridiculous stuff like this. Residents probably have more say in how policing functions than they do in almost any other public policy matter (maybe, depending on your state, excepting public schooling). Our PD wanted to roll out Flock cameras villagewide, and citizen involvement commissions ratcheted down the deployment to a handful of cameras, which are not authorized for use for stopping even stolen vehicles, just violent crime suspects and stolen license plates. The PD wanted it to be otherwise, but it does not take a lot of public pressure to rein them in: the ABQ city council is the boss, not the police chief. I'm not saying Reason is wrong; they're clearly right, and this person is a moron. But I'm strongly urging people to engage locally on stuff like this, rather than bloodying their foreheads on national politics. Or, worse, convincing themselves that there's nothing at all to be done about it; that's what people like this ABQ Chief are counting on.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Every place is different and has different pressure points. The police in other places that have stronger political positions will have more leeway.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I was going to write a guarantee that engaging in local politics will be more effective than writing about it on a message board, but engaging with local politics often is exactly that: message board discussions with your neighbors. So a first step I'd offer to finding those pressure points: figure out where your neighbors talk about policy (and other stuff), and post.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Agree with your point, but do want to point out I've lived in places where not toeing the local party line results in real life harassment, even stalking of people's kids, from friends of elected and non-elected officials. Sometimes that local party line is that police are infallible, and if you ever disagree with what they want to do, that must mean you're criminal and hate police, and are made a local pariah when you're personally called out by the police chief. People have been driven out of town for voicing support for BLM, for example, not to mention the harassment that comes from participating in school board meetings if you disagree with the board. Not even sure what my point is here, other than saying that sometimes engaging in local politics isn't safe for everyone. I made a post about it here on HN in the past, but I watched a single mother get doxxed and harassed because she disagreed with the mayor on policy. The mayor did the doxxing. YMMV of course.
riiii 2y ago
Then apply full on adverse inference to those cases.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
Well if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear, doesn't he?
bmitc 2y ago
Yep, that's a reasonable argument that people aren't going to have issues with. It would be news to almost anyone that the fifth amendment protects against not having to film yourself in the process of performing your civic duties so that you can commit crimes. It's not far from claiming that grocery and retail thief's have a right to ask stores to turn off their security cameras so that they can steal from them.
rqtwteye 2y ago
Medina is special. It’s hard to understand that this guy hasn’t been fired already. Instead they just gave him a 100k SUV. It always amazes how low the standards for police are in the US and the things they get away with.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Uvalde re-elected all the shitheads that let their children die and actively prevented parents from intervening. Americans don't care if innocent people die in their pursuit to ensure that "bad" people suffer, and it really is the suffering that matters. Americans don't seem to be satisfied with a bad person merely sequestered away from society. It's funny, for people who believe in Godly judgement and actual Hell more than most developed countries, they sure love taking it upon themselves to do the punishing. I guess they forget that god explicitly says they aren't supposed to do that.
thyrsus 2y ago
Alburquerque: #7 in the country for police shootings in 2020. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/10/05/cities-where-police-shoot-the-most-people/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/10/05/cities-where... More recent data here: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
They have a right to not be hired/remain employed if they're not going to comply with workplace rules and regulations.
more_corn 2y ago
Narrator’s voice “They don’t.”
cushpush 2y ago
>where he rams into the side of a gold 1966 Mustang driven by 55-year-old Todd The gall to fuck up Todd's day and say footage is optional
calmbonsai 2y ago
No. If you have additional authority you also have additional accountability. When acting as an agent of the government, you don't have the same set of rights (both more and less) as one would have when acting in a commercial (agent of a corporation) or individual capacity. These are all very distrinct and (somewhat reasonably) well demarcated legal roles. These fundamental principles (with varying levels of default qualified immunity) have been established across many sovereigns for centuries. This person is a moron.
monster2control 2y ago
Simple response. Nope. They don’t. They are employees, and the body camera's falls under employee/employer contract law. They don’t have to be a cop. But if they want to be, they have to follow the rules of their employer.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  ...including until the employer changes the rules.
mpalmer 2y ago
(not a lawyer!) Even if he is right (I firmly believe he is not) and police have a right not to incriminate themselves via body cam footage, this would only preclude courts from using footage as evidence of a cop's crimes. But what if the footage also contains evidence that a criminal defendant is innocent? Chief Medina throws the baby out with the bathwater. Of course the solution is not to turn off body cams. They serve a massive public good apart from catching police malfeasance - though that's good too. The police do not have a constitutional right to prevent bad PR or boxing cops in on the facts with video.
WillAdams 2y ago
A police officer on duty, or in an official vehicle has zero expectation of privacy aside from being on break (say to go to the bathroom). They are expected to fill out a duty log as a part of their job which may be used in an evidentiary capacity, and any failure to ensure that an issued piece of equipment is not used in support of that is a dereliction of duty.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
They have a right not to choose to be cops.
dbg31415 2y ago
The cop doesn't have to tell us he's guilty in his own voice. But the camera he's wearing, as part of his job, should stay on and be allowed in court. Remember that any cop shortages are really just a shortage of honest cops.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
doesn't that imply that someone who's being filmed by their body cam has the right to switch it off as well?
treebeard901 2y ago
Makes it difficult to lie on police reports and in court if they have video evidence saying otherwise. The police making this argument should be taken as a general admission that by turning the cameras off, they intend to do something illegal. Otherwise the fifth amendment argument would be irrelevant. Solution: Since the third party doctrine removes fourth and fifth amendment protections from everyone, just have Facebook or Google run the body cameras.

232 points by heavyset_go 2y ago

1. The way I see it, Medina is either lying or an idiot. His signature is on the approval for SOP 2-8 which mandates the activation of OBRD; so did he sign it without reading it or willfully ignore it? Neither is acceptable of the chief of police. Besides, he has had extensive interaction with the disciplinary process and must understand the principles of e.g. Garrity protections. 2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs. 3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads. 4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process. Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.

sbsudbdjd 2y ago

They do have a fifth amendment right. Which they can exercise by quitting the force.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hitsurume 2y ago
Yep, the police are public servants. When you're on the clock, you work for the people.
anjel 2y ago
The Police Chief advocating for his subordinates 5th am rights seems outside his job description. "Who's ox is being gored here" and why?

shove 2y ago

Anyone who has ever talked to a cop for more than a few minutes learns really quick they have a terrible grasp of the law.

excerionsforte 2y ago

Having to write a police report that can be used to self incriminate is also against the fifth amendment too with this logic then.

jawns 2y ago

In general, courts have held that Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination pertain to testimonial evidence, not broadly to any possible evidence that might be incriminating. The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature. The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock. Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.

dylan604 2y ago
The fact that the 5th protects from self-incriminating, WTF is a police chief saying officers are doing that would be incriminating? Like what an absolute asshat of a position to take.
- jrs235 2y ago
  Right?! Any police officer that pleads the 5th for turning off a body cam should be fired on the spot for, I hope it's policy, violating policy.
  - conductr 2y ago
    The question I always ask is, why is there even an off button? It defeats the entire point of the camera as it’s meant to keep cops honest and not abusing the inherent power of their position.
    - wkat4242 2y ago

mrandish 2y ago

This makes zero sense. If I have a traffic camera in my car or an action cam on my bicycle helmet, there is no fifth amendment right to suppress that evidence in court. So, what in the fifth amendment makes this any different for a law enforcement officer? I'm actually generally sympathetic to law enforcement officers. Most (but not all) cops are good cops. And it's a hard job. But it should be a hard job. After all, law enforcement is granted an unprecedented, exclusive power no one else has, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force. With great power comes great responsibility (and accountability). Law enforcement officers are employees of the state (which represents the people). When "we the people" collectively hire a few individuals to exercise violent force on our behalf, it's reasonable that we also require digital accountability, including GPS, video and audio recording as a term of that employment.

colechristensen 2y ago
I’m not saying I agree but their argument seems to be that the body cameras being required to be running violates their 5th amendment rights. Your traffic camera was your choice to have running. Nobody required you to have one running. It’s not a good argument but not wildly surprising either.
- Loughla 2y ago
  It is kind of surprising. I'm not being paid by public money. If I was, I would expect my communications to be public record, within established law. Why are police different? They are paid by public funds.
- mrandish 2y ago
  Police are employees and the cameras running is a term of their employment. To me, it seems no different than a delivery truck driver having a traffic camera on in the truck being a term of their employment. No one is forcing them to be employed in this job and they don't have a "right" to arbitrarily dismiss reasonable conditions of employment (like "wear a uniform", etc) and, in effect, force their employer to keep employing them despite not fulfilling their employment contract.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

They’re employees performing a paid job. Not random citizens.

coffeecloud 2y ago

If cops wanted to win the trust of the public and work alongside their fellow citizens to keep their communities safe, they would welcome to use of body cams and hold themselves accountable to a high standard of integrity. Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.

MattGaiser 2y ago
I mean, that would just put them in the category of most employees. Building systems that assume altruism and selfless intent is profoundly silly, when self interest tends to override those things.
- colordrops 2y ago
  Both you and the person you are responding to have valid points. You can't rely on altruism or rules alone. They must work together. Some positions require a certain level of idealism and self-accountability that can't be captured by system of rules. Police and doctors are two examples.
notjulianjaynes 2y ago
Two things: 1. I agree. 2. Once quit a job when they tried to install ai powered driver facing dash cams in company vehicle and I wasn't comfortable with both the micromanaging that would invite, nor becoming training data. Police should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us working stiffs. If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. Everyone would be against body cams. Imagine your server in a restaurant wearing a body cam. (I keep giving bad people good ideas.) In the world we live in I am for police body cams, I think. Best worst option.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > If they actually did though (and/or didn't have the authority to use violence up to killing people) none of this would even matter. That's the thing though, if the cop's use of violence up to killing a suspect was justified, then the body cam would not matter. So if you want that authority, then you have to expect proper oversight. The longer that oversight is avoided, the more intense that effort gets. If you don't like, don't shield those that are causing the problems. In summary, at this point with their history, fuck'em if they don't like the oversight.

kevwil 2y ago

That town needs a new Chief and a new Mayor.

gonzo41 2y ago
That town sounds like the kind of place where dissenting views could face a lot of serious consequences because the corruption has captured everything.
- dylan604 2y ago
  It's like it's the plot to a movie from the 1980s. That's how ridiculous it is
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Hot Fuzz is a 2007 movie roughly going the same plot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Fuzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Fuzz
yimmothathird 2y ago
[dead]

sandworm101 2y ago

Um, the 5th gives you the right not to talk. It doesn't give you the right not to be recorded should you choose to talk. A cop has every right not to admit crimes into a government microphone. That is something different than saying that cops can disable microphones just in case they say something.

trhway 2y ago

yep, when the police first stopped and attacked Tyre Nichols they had body cams on and thus only tasered and "slightly" roughed him up. When he ran away for his life and was later caught and methodically beaten do death by the police we have only security camera video from a nearby pole. If not for that video, Tyre would have died while supposedly "attempting to grab police gun" as those 5 or so police guys wrote in their falsified reports.

amelius 2y ago

Can't we treat it legally similarly to the event data recorders that are installed in new cars?

alphabettsy 2y ago

The Mayor’s standards for what he considers a hero are extremely low. This police chief has no business leading other officers if this is the kind of example he sets. I understand the instinct to protect oneself, but undermining public trust to avoid a traffic citation and a substantiated complaint from a police review board should be beneath the chief of police or any officer.

jmbwell 2y ago

Love this stuff from the “if you’re doing nothing wrong you should have nothing to fear” crowd.

duxup 2y ago

Local body cam video in my area more often than not quickly resolves accusations of police misconduct, in favor of the police. Claims that someone was “just minding their own business” shows them with a weapon and such. I do not understand the resistance from some police.

p_j_w 2y ago
>I do not understand the resistance from some police. The police don’t care if the bodycam will exonerate them, because in the absence of a bodycam they will exonerate themselves and no one will do anything about it.

tptacek 2y ago

An annoying reminder to people: Reason is making this a national news story, but it's more meaningfully a local news story. For residents in much of the country, if you simply engage in local politics --- in most places, very few people seriously do this! --- you can get policing officials fired for saying ridiculous stuff like this. Residents probably have more say in how policing functions than they do in almost any other public policy matter (maybe, depending on your state, excepting public schooling). Our PD wanted to roll out Flock cameras villagewide, and citizen involvement commissions ratcheted down the deployment to a handful of cameras, which are not authorized for use for stopping even stolen vehicles, just violent crime suspects and stolen license plates. The PD wanted it to be otherwise, but it does not take a lot of public pressure to rein them in: the ABQ city council is the boss, not the police chief. I'm not saying Reason is wrong; they're clearly right, and this person is a moron. But I'm strongly urging people to engage locally on stuff like this, rather than bloodying their foreheads on national politics. Or, worse, convincing themselves that there's nothing at all to be done about it; that's what people like this ABQ Chief are counting on.

ipaddr 2y ago
Every place is different and has different pressure points. The police in other places that have stronger political positions will have more leeway.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I was going to write a guarantee that engaging in local politics will be more effective than writing about it on a message board, but engaging with local politics often is exactly that: message board discussions with your neighbors. So a first step I'd offer to finding those pressure points: figure out where your neighbors talk about policy (and other stuff), and post.
heavyset_go 2y ago
Agree with your point, but do want to point out I've lived in places where not toeing the local party line results in real life harassment, even stalking of people's kids, from friends of elected and non-elected officials. Sometimes that local party line is that police are infallible, and if you ever disagree with what they want to do, that must mean you're criminal and hate police, and are made a local pariah when you're personally called out by the police chief. People have been driven out of town for voicing support for BLM, for example, not to mention the harassment that comes from participating in school board meetings if you disagree with the board. Not even sure what my point is here, other than saying that sometimes engaging in local politics isn't safe for everyone. I made a post about it here on HN in the past, but I watched a single mother get doxxed and harassed because she disagreed with the mayor on policy. The mayor did the doxxing. YMMV of course.

riiii 2y ago

Then apply full on adverse inference to those cases.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

Well if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear, doesn't he?

bmitc 2y ago

Yep, that's a reasonable argument that people aren't going to have issues with. It would be news to almost anyone that the fifth amendment protects against not having to film yourself in the process of performing your civic duties so that you can commit crimes. It's not far from claiming that grocery and retail thief's have a right to ask stores to turn off their security cameras so that they can steal from them.

rqtwteye 2y ago

Medina is special. It’s hard to understand that this guy hasn’t been fired already. Instead they just gave him a 100k SUV. It always amazes how low the standards for police are in the US and the things they get away with.

mrguyorama 2y ago
Uvalde re-elected all the shitheads that let their children die and actively prevented parents from intervening. Americans don't care if innocent people die in their pursuit to ensure that "bad" people suffer, and it really is the suffering that matters. Americans don't seem to be satisfied with a bad person merely sequestered away from society. It's funny, for people who believe in Godly judgement and actual Hell more than most developed countries, they sure love taking it upon themselves to do the punishing. I guess they forget that god explicitly says they aren't supposed to do that.

thyrsus 2y ago

Alburquerque: #7 in the country for police shootings in 2020. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/10/05/cities-where-police-shoot-the-most-people/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/10/05/cities-where... More recent data here: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago

They have a right to not be hired/remain employed if they're not going to comply with workplace rules and regulations.

more_corn 2y ago

Narrator’s voice “They don’t.”

cushpush 2y ago

>where he rams into the side of a gold 1966 Mustang driven by 55-year-old Todd The gall to fuck up Todd's day and say footage is optional

calmbonsai 2y ago

No. If you have additional authority you also have additional accountability. When acting as an agent of the government, you don't have the same set of rights (both more and less) as one would have when acting in a commercial (agent of a corporation) or individual capacity. These are all very distrinct and (somewhat reasonably) well demarcated legal roles. These fundamental principles (with varying levels of default qualified immunity) have been established across many sovereigns for centuries. This person is a moron.

monster2control 2y ago

Simple response. Nope. They don’t. They are employees, and the body camera's falls under employee/employer contract law. They don’t have to be a cop. But if they want to be, they have to follow the rules of their employer.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
...including until the employer changes the rules.

mpalmer 2y ago

(not a lawyer!) Even if he is right (I firmly believe he is not) and police have a right not to incriminate themselves via body cam footage, this would only preclude courts from using footage as evidence of a cop's crimes. But what if the footage also contains evidence that a criminal defendant is innocent? Chief Medina throws the baby out with the bathwater. Of course the solution is not to turn off body cams. They serve a massive public good apart from catching police malfeasance - though that's good too. The police do not have a constitutional right to prevent bad PR or boxing cops in on the facts with video.

WillAdams 2y ago

A police officer on duty, or in an official vehicle has zero expectation of privacy aside from being on break (say to go to the bathroom). They are expected to fill out a duty log as a part of their job which may be used in an evidentiary capacity, and any failure to ensure that an issued piece of equipment is not used in support of that is a dereliction of duty.

Brian_K_White 2y ago

They have a right not to choose to be cops.

dbg31415 2y ago

The cop doesn't have to tell us he's guilty in his own voice. But the camera he's wearing, as part of his job, should stay on and be allowed in court. Remember that any cop shortages are really just a shortage of honest cops.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

doesn't that imply that someone who's being filmed by their body cam has the right to switch it off as well?

treebeard901 2y ago

Makes it difficult to lie on police reports and in court if they have video evidence saying otherwise. The police making this argument should be taken as a general admission that by turning the cameras off, they intend to do something illegal. Otherwise the fifth amendment argument would be irrelevant. Solution: Since the third party doctrine removes fourth and fifth amendment protections from everyone, just have Facebook or Google run the body cameras.