TheAgitator.com
Morning Links
Friday, April 23rd, 2010- Amazing how often police departments “lose” dash cam video when it doesn’t support the cops’ version of events.
- Something else to worry about.
- NYPD apparently cut through locks, seized hundreds bikes to make the city safe for Obama’s visit. Because . . . something about pipe bombs. Oh, and happy Earth Day.
- Interesting article on the centuries-old struggle to stay in tune.
- Early results of Obama’s promise to be the most transparent administration in history are in, and . . . he’s even less transparent than the Bush administration.
I think the only way to stop that is to make police accounts inadmissable if video evidence should exist but doesn’t.
I wouldn’t live in NYC if I was being paid one million dollars a year. I am not just being rhetorical. That city has no regard for its citizens rights.
(Two million, maybe I’ll negotiate!)
I agree with Billy-Jay, with one addition: if the video evidence goes missing after a misconduct complaint is filed, then there should be a summary judgement against the police, along with additional (and hefty) fines/penalties/criminal charges for the destruction of the evidence.
Nothing will change until it’s clear that the consequences for destroying video evidence are worse than the evidence being brought to light.
On the other hand, there should also be serious penalties for filing charges against cops that are clearly disproven by the video evidence. For all I know, there already are (my personal experiences with cops is limited, and completely devoid of horror stories so far).
Reagrding the dashcam video…
Don’t be so hard on these cops. Lying has been a way of life for them since the beginning of time as it would be for anyone else who isn’t subject to any accountability and who are employed by corrupt officials who routinely cover up any abuse of power or violation of law.
You can’t expect a profession that enthusiastically embraces arrogance, deception, and the use of violence against the innocent to instantly grasp the concept of something so foreign to them as integrity.
In fact, it’s probably unrealistic to think they’ll ever change. I’m pretty certain that they see the problem as being not with them, but an unfair system that permits any old Joe Buttcrack they arrest to have access to official police video evidence. They haven’t found a way of getting around that nuisance, but sure as the sun rises in the east, they will. The purpose of evidence is to convict, not exonerate. To them, that’s Justice 101.
Less transparent than W. Damn, that is something to be embarrassed about. I can’t wait to hear Keith Olberman hold Obama accountable.
You won’t have to wait long. Basically, the article says Obama’s directive is being ignored. To paraphrase, “Obama tried to make government more transparent, but the government wouldn’t cooperate, so it’s not Obama’s fault.”
I don’t know if the nyc bike story is true, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. The notion that the NYPD was doing this to secure the area is bullshit, as cutting through a metal (ie creating sparks) and putting those bikes into a truck when you suspect there might be a pipe bomb is just fucking stupid.
I should go into business manufacturing dash cameras for police. Not only does quality control seem to be of little concern, but lack of reliable operation is practically a desired feature!
“he’s even less transparent than the Bush administration.”
Of course he is. Obama has allot to hide to cover Bush’s ass to keep him from being prosecuted for war crimes among other things…..like the Patriot Act.
More anti-Obama douchebaggery from the AP, I see.
Here’s the key graf from that piece, in case you all missed it
For those of you who have problems with calendar math, FY09 runs from October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009. So not only is the AP not giving any allowance for the fact that it takes a good amount of time for a new administration to take effective control of the executive branch — clearing out the old guard from the previous administration, appointing new people, issuing new directives and restructuring based on them — they actually count over three and a half months when Obama wasn’t even president as part of the time he was “breaking his promises”.
I mentioned this in an earlier thread, but bringing it here. They didn’t “seize” any bikes. They stole them. Please don’t use a word with a legal meaning to cover what the police did.
Police may seize illegal items found in the course of a legal investigation. If I came and took your bike, I would be stealing it. If they take a bike without a legal reason, it’s simply stealing. “Obama’s coming and it might be a pipe bomb” isn’t a legal reason.
Words matter, and people will start understanding how government abuses authority when we start calling it what it is.
Chuchundra, you might have missed the part where it increased over FY09. If what you’re saying is true (basically: blame Bush) then we would still expected a decrease as Bush people are weeded out.
Obama’s exec branch is less transparent than Bush’s. Admit it, get over it, move on.
Dashcam: The cop complains about how the arrest is making WORK for him. The cop is abusing you (partly because he doesn’t know the law) and complaining that now he’ll have to write a report. So wrong on so many levels.
True, but another non-mutually-exlusive option is to simply enforce laws that we have. The cop perjured himself and should be charged for it. There’s no BS “immunity” here, either.
The courts usually rule that the state can’t steal anything because you, your things, the Earth and the sun exist at the whim of the state and all the state has to do is think there’s a safety issue to whack you. And no agent of the state can be held individually responsible (most are union proetected).
At most the people will have to write a check on behalf of the state to bike owners.
I’m sure we’re not far from cops executing people on the sidewalk because people on the sidewalk could be terrorists.
Michael, the article states that the number of exemptions increased from FY08 to FY09. There’s no discussion of the number of denials increasing or decreasing over the course of FY09.
Moreover, there’s no data about the number of denials as a ratio to the number of requests. If there was a large increase in requests, as might be the case with a new administration coming in, that could explain a bump in denials. Or not. Who knows? Certainly not the hack who wrote this article.
And this was buried at the very end of the article.
Jan Swafford (author of the temperment article) wrote an excellent biography of Charles Ives, who was both an innovative composer and capitalist.
The NYPD will take any excuse to stick it to the cyclists. There have been plenty of these unannounced bike seizures that didn’t coincide with presidential visits.
Further to what Billy-Jay and GR wrote, I would just add that there should a default presumption that video evidence from any source that is ‘lost’ or ‘accidentally destroyed” while in the control of police or prosecutors supports the defendant’s case and that any affidavit testifying to the contents of the video be inadmissable without the video itself.
Moreover, there’s no data about the number of denials as a ratio to the number of requests.
I haven’t looked at the data myself, but a commenter at Dispatches for the Culture Wars linked to this information and claimed it showed the percentage of requests getting denied went up, not just absolute numbers.
Also I think Michael Chaney’s point still stands. Unless there’s a much higher rate of FOIA responses in those last three months of Bush’s term, it doesn’t really seem likely that those 3 months of Bush’s term are swamping out a decrease from Obama for an net increase in rejections in FY2009.
I may have a more favorable opinion of Obama than a lot of people here, but this is an area that he should be criticized.
“the article says Obama’s directive is being ignored. To paraphrase, “Obama tried to make government more transparent, but the government wouldn’t cooperate”
The gov. wouldn’t cooperate with the President of the U.S.?? Treasonous!
And for all you folks that gave me the negative marks on my previous post, you should know I voted for Obama. I believe he can and should do much more than he has to make our government more transparent and Bush/Cheney should be held accountable for war crimes and the Patriot Act.
Regarding this administration’s lack of transparency;
I think many young folks that imagine the way things should be, and then get that confused with the way things are, set themselves up to be disappointed.
We are still at war in Iraq, allthough it looks clear now we’ve won.
We are still at war in Afganistan. I think we’ve done as well as we can.
This country is further in debt than our current tax system can handle, we
will be raising taxes soon.
GITMO is still open!
Pot is still against the law.
It appears Obama has lied to investigators about the selling of his senate
seat.
Israel, our best ally and keeper of the holy land is at it’s weakest political
position since it’s war in 1973. The European left is engaged in an
effort to weaken Israel, and the American left, now in power is not
standing in the way. Israel refuses to sacrafice it’s security and the
left will make it pay. Obama has made Arab dreams of driving them
into the sea, a real possiblity. Israel does have a great influence
with regular Americans, and the government. Liberals are super
jealous of that influence, and wish they had it.
In other “whoops, we lost the footage” news: http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0410/727719.html
(This is related to a police beating last month at the University of Maryland)
The best part is that the footage was “automatically deleted by the system”, then — through magic, no doubt –reappeared with a Nixonesque gap in the footage.
My favorite bit, though, is that the person in charge of the video system just *happens* to be married to one of the officers alleged to be involved in the beating. Sheer freak coincidence, I’m sure.
@Sky:”I believe he can and should do much more than he has to make our government more transparent and Bush/Cheney should be held accountable for war crimes and the Patriot Act.”
Should Obama be held accountable for the PATRIOT act as well, as he had no problem extending it? How about all the politicians, Republican and Democrats alike, that voted for it in the first place? It’s convenient to blame one person, or a couple of people, but it’s naive. You either have to accept that it was a blatant power grab and both parties are culpable because they both want more power…or that Bush is some sort of genius that managed to outwit all of Congress and get them to pass legislation that they wouldn’t have otherwise. And you have to be willing to give the Congress that so freely wrote off civil liberties a pass for their part. Presumably because you feel so bad for their gullibility that they deserve time to get it right?
It’s a fair point. Although I’d like to see the numbers for FY02 through FY07 as well to get an idea of what the trend is.
Also, the article states that there was a backlog of 120,000+ requests at the end of the FY08 and that had been knocked down by about half at the end of FY09. I can certainly imagine a lot of Federal employees getting stacks of these things dumped on their desk and whipping though them; Deny. Deny. Deny Approve. Deny.
Less transparent than W. Damn, that is something to be embarrassed about. I can’t wait to hear Keith Olberman hold Obama accountable.
Olberman, Glan Greenwald, Rachel Maddow etc have been far more assiduous in holding the President’s feet to the fire on various issues than the other side ever was to Bush. Sad, really, since you need pushback from within your own party. The Republican Party has exiled virtually every intellectual critic and left the tribal identity types in the majority. Maybe the Dems have just never been organized enough to have the same sort of purges.
Yeah, the ol’ missing dash cam. See, you don’t have to prove
bad faith if they have the video and don’t
turn it over. IF it’s destroyed, however, you have to prove bad faith
(intentional destructiuon). WHich is impossible.
YOu do the Math.
I got a lawyer kicked out of the FLorida Bar over this very
issue when she told me the prosecutor was going to
do “bad things” to me if we filed a motion to compel production
of the video. Come to think of it, the prosecutor resigned soon after,
too. Weird.
Thanks for the link on the tuning article. That was an excellent read.
In addition, it is a good example of the way that the internet/computers have changed the way information is communicated. With that article, not only did we have written information, but audible examples of the same which we could listen to when we wanted, or not listen to at all. A book can’t do that, nor can a recording. Even a video recording doesn’t have the option to go back and listen, or listen again, or to just not listen.
I dunno, that just kind of stuck out at me with that article.
Temper, temper!…
Radley Balko at The Agitator had this in his morning links today. It’s a terrific article from Slate magazine on The centuries-old struggle to play in tune.
"The anomalies of tuning are the musical equivalent of the uncertainty principle i…
Jay @ 24 “Should Obama be held accountable for the PATRIOT act as well, as he had no problem extending it?”
Absolutely.
P O Rose @ 22 “Regarding this administration’s lack of transparency;
I think many young folks that imagine the way things should be, and then get that confused with the way things are, set themselves up to be disappointed.”
What’s your definition of young?
“We are still at war in Iraq”
A war brought about and built on lies and terroristic threats by the Bush Administration. A war we should never have involved ourselves in. Those ragheads have been fighting for centuries and will continue to fight long after the Americans have left. If they want to kill each other let them! But do NOT waste any more taxpayer money on this war for oil!
You are sadly delusional Rose if you actually believe we have won this war.
Actually, musical harmonics are used to teach people about the uncertainty principle, since in many ways it’s analogous.
http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2010/03/hearing_the_uncertainty_princi.php
There’s at least one way to achieve perfect tuning in every key using a keyboard: the Justonic system. Take a look at http://www.justonic.com/