I think it’s very hard to give police the powers they actually need to do their jobs, without there being some scope for abuse. The power to arrest someone, subdue them, even shoot them in some cases, are necessary, as far as I can see. And there will always be gray areas where it’s very hard to prove police misconduct, or where there’s an argument to be made about what really happened or how justified the police were in roughing some guy up or tazing him or shooting him or whatever. It’s hard for me to see how the police would do what we expect them to do, without also having the ability to push people around in a way that’s plausibly deniable. (Though I don’t really know all that much about day to day police work, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation.)

What we need is to create the right incentives for the police and their supervisors, all the way up to mayors and police chiefs and prosecutors. We want those people to want to avoid having the police abuse their power. We want the police union and the other policemen to have a strong incentive to not have that stuff happening. (One clear indication that this isn’t happening now is the push to arrest people for filming the police. Another is the utter lack of interest in prosecuting even the worst police abuses.)

What would help would be if society would start recognizing that detaining someone without an articulable facially-legitimate reason for doing so is kidnapping, whether or not the person doing it is a cop. A cop who can articulate what he reasonably believes to be legitimate cause to arrest someone would not become a kidnapper merely because the information upon which he based his belief happened to be incorrect, but a cop who can’t articulate why he’s arresting someone, or who articulates a cause which is patently unreasonable, is a kidnapper and should be regarded as such. Note also that a cop who threatens to illegitimately detain someone should be regarded as a person who threatens to kidnap another, since that’s precisely what such a cop would be doing.

Can the cops be charged with filing a false police report for lying on their own reports?

Sure! But… Not by you. Only by the state. Good luck with that. See… the crime against filing a false report isn’t against YOU, it’s against the State. If you want to make it about YOU, then it’s a Civil Matter.

Hence the segue to Civil Lawsuits.

I love this sort of intimidation as if the attorney doesn’t realize what happens to those that do file complaints. Really need to somehow split the IA/IG out of the police and then incentivize them to be extremely proactive and dilegent .. ja ja ja pipe dreams

I am actually more curious if there has been any consequence to the officer who clearly lied on the police report about his fear that the camera was a weapon of some sort. This is a pretty clear-cut case of him making that up, since he is recorded calling it a camera. Contrary to what the police attorney (Keefe?) claims, what the cop claims the priest did afterwards does not change the fact that he knew that the camera was a camera and he lied about that on the police report.

“Manship did not answer this officer and had held his arms high over his head so that this officer could not see what he was actually holding and then
bladed his body in a aggressive manner.”

Look out, copper! That Priest is gunna go all biblical on you! Better arrest him after you’re done harassing the store keeper about his decorative license plates!

This guy has a store, which, I assume as part of the decor… has a bunch of license plates screwed up on the walls.

Is that even illegal? Sure, putting the wrong plates on your VEHICLE is frowned upon, but lots of people use them for decoration.

The things were screwed to the wall! If he was SELLING them, with the intent that they would be used on cars illegally, you’d think they’d be in a paper sack behind the counter…. or otherwise out of view.

According to the report, the only charges against the store owner was some mickey mouse “Failure to return Cancelled or Abandoned Plates” Woo! I feel safer already!

Sure looks like harassment to me!

#4 marco73

Eventually, a test case on filming/recording police in public performing their official duties is going to wind up in the Supreme Court. Since the current court has sided with police/prosecutors consistently, I’d be willing to bet they come up with some lame-brained excuse to ban filming police anytime.

Yup. I agree. They will say something to the effect that cops are the good guys, so there is no reason to record them and they can’t perform their job if they know their every move will be scrutinized by adversarial critics. If they can ban cameras in courtrooms, they almost certainly can ban the recording of cops.

No they aren’t because nobody but a few people who read this site and maybe the local news where it happened will ever hear about this. Until this shit makes lead story on CBS evening news or Bill O’Reilly gets outraged about it nothing is ever going to change.