US Police Arrest People Who Take Pictures of Cops

[General Zod]

I never said that Sith is trying to stop people from being able to listen to him. He admits straight up that he doesn't mind being recorded and I'm not going to say he's lying about that. I'm merely pointing out the problem with a policy such as that, if you can't reasonably talk to the people involved, then it's difficult to hear the people involved. Relevant information that can both condemn and help the police is not going be captured and all you're going to get is video that can be taken out of context.

And most people don't use the same definition of "conversational distance" that you do, a fact you seem to blithely ignore.

[Alphawolf55]

I'll admit 30-50 feet was a bit much, but it's irrevelant to my point. My only point was that if his limits are whether observers can talk to the participants, there's a problem with that. Now if he was just making a arbitrary point about distance and didn't literally mean 'Could talk to participants" and meant more like "Distance in which you could punch cop" then I can understand and apologize for taking him so literally.

[General Zod]

I'll admit 30-50 feet was a bit much, but it's irrevelant to my point. My only point was that if his limits are whether observers can talk to the participants, there's a problem with that. Now if he was just making a arbitrary point about distance and didn't literally mean 'Could talk to participants" and meant more like "Distance in which you could punch cop" then I can understand and apologize for taking him so literally.

It's pretty clear that he was just making an arbitrary point about distance.

[Uraniun235]

I never said that Sith is trying to stop people from being able to listen to him. He admits straight up that he doesn't mind being recorded and I'm not going to say he's lying about that. I'm merely pointing out the problem with a policy such as that, if you can't reasonably talk to the people involved, then it's difficult to hear the people involved. Relevant information that can both condemn and help the police is not going be captured and all you're going to get is video that can be taken out of context.

If it seemed like I was condemning Sith in some way I apologize.

If you really needed to capture the audio you could use a directional microphone. Although if I remember right there are states which prohibit recording conversations without the consent of all parties involved.

[Alphawolf55]

Yeah but those are the same states that have a problem with video taping them and who really carries those around? I was just assuming we're talking about bystanders with crappy video camera cell phones.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Again, that's irrelevant to the point. The point is, that Sith considers any distance where you can reasonably speak to the participants too close, but that also means that any distance where you can reasonably hear the participants is too close. It doesn't matter if that's 5, 10, 15 or 20 feet. If the limit is that you can't be expected to have the ability to hear/ talk you aren't going to get the full story even with them on video. Like I said I'd considered 10-15 feet fair, that's close enough that you could reasonably talk to someone but still leave space for you not to be able to touch them.

Police also have the right to feel safe and be safe. I'd say any bystanders need to be outside 21 feet. The average officer takes anywhere from 1.5 to 2 seconds after recognizing a threat to take an unsighted shot at a target from the holster. Most people can cover 21 feet in approximately 2 seconds when charging. The courts agree on this.

[SVPD]

KS pretty much covered it in regards to filming it. I'd really say 30 feet rather than 21 because some experts feel 21 feet is overly optomistic to respond to danger and the officer's attention is focused on his subject, not the filmer.

As to why it isn't a serious issue, it may be a serious issue in the few departments and states its occuring in, but there isn't a single statistic in the article to explain how frequently this occurs, and based on the poor quality of that article, I'd be willing to bet that in at least some of those situations things are not as they'd have us believe. In any case, however, 38 of 50 states don't have laws that allow this and only 3 of the other 112 seem to have it going on. I don't see it as a serious issue outside of where it is going on because I see no way this is going to survive court challange, nor any way it can extend to tose other states without changes to their laws that I have no reason to think are going to occur.

[SVPD]

Oh, as for the cruiser cameras and sudden malfunctions: They do happen. I've had it happen to me before and a DUI got to plead down because of it. Police cars get driven hard and maintenance budgets are limited. The cameras and recorders themselves are quite reliable but the belt microphones get exposed to all the weather and abuse the officer does. The car itself may not be in anywhere near as good a shape as the camera either. That's what happened in my case. I had an older car that was just apparently too much trouble to do maintenance on and the alternator started going during the stop. The camera shut down when it sensed low voltage. Frankly, I was lucky the car ran well enough to get back to the station; apparently it had been dying a slow death over a few hours and the battery was about flat as a result too.

The old video casette ones weren't worth a damn. You were lucky if those worked more than 1/3 of the time either. If these departments with a lot of malfunctions are using video tape models, which would be ancient by now (but a possible budgetary measure in big departments where hundreds or thousands of digital models might be needed) then a lot of the malfunctions are probably legit.

In other words, if there's going to be strict rules in places about Chicago for camera 'malfunctions' then there also need to be strict rules that proper maintenance had better be performed in the first place.