Crazed Rabbit
02-06-2011, 02:23
Taping as in recording the audio of police officers (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23cnceavesdropping.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=chicagonewscooperative) in public in the trash heap of corruption known as Illinois.
Or, how the Chicago PD aims to send a sexually assaulted woman to jail for fifteen years for recording the cops trying to stop her from filing a complaint against the cop who assaulted her.
Christopher Drew is a 60-year-old artist and teacher who wears a gray ponytail and lives on the North Side. Tiawanda Moore, 20, a former stripper, lives on the South Side and dreams of going back to school and starting a new life.
About the only thing these strangers have in common is the prospect that by spring, they could each be sent to prison for up to 15 years.
“That’s one step below attempted murder,” Mr. Drew said of their potential sentences.
The crime they are accused of is eavesdropping.
...
“Before they arrested me for it,” Ms. Moore said, “I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.”
Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer.
...
Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his organization “absolutely supports” the eavesdropping act as is and was relieved that the challenge had failed. Mr. Donahue added that allowing the audio recording of police officers while performing their duty “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”
The police have realized that video and audio is exposing their criminality, and naturally they strike back (http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras) by punishing those who could expose them. Like gangs trying to intimidate witnesses into silence.
A law [allowing secret recording of conversations with police] like that is likely to face fierce opposition from law enforcement organizations. Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, says he sees no problem with arresting people who photograph or record on-duty cops. Pasco says his main concern is that activists will tamper with videos or use clips out of context to make police officers look bad.
“There’s no chain of custody with these videos,” Pasco says. “How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.”
But Carlos Miller, proprietor of Photography Is Not a Crime, says that’s no reason to prevent people from taking video in the first place. “If a video has been altered or edited, that’s a pretty easy thing to discern,” he says. “That’s going to come out in an investigation. And just because a video has only been in police custody doesn’t mean it hasn’t been altered or edited. Police can edit videos too.”
Or delete them entirely. In the College Park case, a campus police surveillance camera was pointed at the area where Jack McKenna was beaten. But there’s no security video of the incident. Campus police say the camera coincidentally malfunctioned at the time of the beating. A local news station reported that the officer in charge of the campus surveillance video system is married to one of the officers later disciplined for McKenna’s beating.
...
Pasco, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police, says cases where video contradicts police testimony are rare. “You have 960,000 police officers in this country and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens,” he says. “I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report.”
Carlos Miller says it would take him just a few minutes to pull 10 such incidents from his archives. He mentions the case of Fort Lauderdale police officer Jeff Overcash, who was forced to resign just a couple of days prior to our conversation. Overcash had claimed in an arrest report that a man was drunk, belligerent, and resisting arrest. Cell phone video taken by the man’s girlfriend showed the officer was wrong on all three counts.
“Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist,” Pasco insists. “It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”
Michael Allison, who has some reason to mistrust authority figures, says he won’t accept the sort of plea bargain Illinois prosecutors have offered in similar cases. “Under no circumstances,” he says. “I’ll go to prison before I plead guilty to a crime for exercising my rights. Not even a misdemeanor.”
I ask Pasco if he believes someone like Michael Allison should go to prison, potentially for the rest of his life. “I don’t know anything about that case,” Pasco replies, “but generally it sounds like a sensible law and a sensible punishment. Police officers don’t check their civil rights at the station house door.”
CR
Or, how the Chicago PD aims to send a sexually assaulted woman to jail for fifteen years for recording the cops trying to stop her from filing a complaint against the cop who assaulted her.
Christopher Drew is a 60-year-old artist and teacher who wears a gray ponytail and lives on the North Side. Tiawanda Moore, 20, a former stripper, lives on the South Side and dreams of going back to school and starting a new life.
About the only thing these strangers have in common is the prospect that by spring, they could each be sent to prison for up to 15 years.
“That’s one step below attempted murder,” Mr. Drew said of their potential sentences.
The crime they are accused of is eavesdropping.
...
“Before they arrested me for it,” Ms. Moore said, “I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.”
Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer.
...
Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his organization “absolutely supports” the eavesdropping act as is and was relieved that the challenge had failed. Mr. Donahue added that allowing the audio recording of police officers while performing their duty “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”
The police have realized that video and audio is exposing their criminality, and naturally they strike back (http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras) by punishing those who could expose them. Like gangs trying to intimidate witnesses into silence.
A law [allowing secret recording of conversations with police] like that is likely to face fierce opposition from law enforcement organizations. Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, says he sees no problem with arresting people who photograph or record on-duty cops. Pasco says his main concern is that activists will tamper with videos or use clips out of context to make police officers look bad.
“There’s no chain of custody with these videos,” Pasco says. “How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.”
But Carlos Miller, proprietor of Photography Is Not a Crime, says that’s no reason to prevent people from taking video in the first place. “If a video has been altered or edited, that’s a pretty easy thing to discern,” he says. “That’s going to come out in an investigation. And just because a video has only been in police custody doesn’t mean it hasn’t been altered or edited. Police can edit videos too.”
Or delete them entirely. In the College Park case, a campus police surveillance camera was pointed at the area where Jack McKenna was beaten. But there’s no security video of the incident. Campus police say the camera coincidentally malfunctioned at the time of the beating. A local news station reported that the officer in charge of the campus surveillance video system is married to one of the officers later disciplined for McKenna’s beating.
...
Pasco, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police, says cases where video contradicts police testimony are rare. “You have 960,000 police officers in this country and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens,” he says. “I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report.”
Carlos Miller says it would take him just a few minutes to pull 10 such incidents from his archives. He mentions the case of Fort Lauderdale police officer Jeff Overcash, who was forced to resign just a couple of days prior to our conversation. Overcash had claimed in an arrest report that a man was drunk, belligerent, and resisting arrest. Cell phone video taken by the man’s girlfriend showed the officer was wrong on all three counts.
“Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist,” Pasco insists. “It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”
Michael Allison, who has some reason to mistrust authority figures, says he won’t accept the sort of plea bargain Illinois prosecutors have offered in similar cases. “Under no circumstances,” he says. “I’ll go to prison before I plead guilty to a crime for exercising my rights. Not even a misdemeanor.”
I ask Pasco if he believes someone like Michael Allison should go to prison, potentially for the rest of his life. “I don’t know anything about that case,” Pasco replies, “but generally it sounds like a sensible law and a sensible punishment. Police officers don’t check their civil rights at the station house door.”
CR