Multiple Reports: Atlanta Cops Walk Out in Protest

Thank you for the mention sir.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro -

There is unlikely to be a SCOTUS decision on this because workplace video for the most part is not covered by federal law, but by state law. In fact, the lack of such a SCOTUS ruling based on some sort of civil rights in the face of state permissiveness in video monitoring tell us there is no such legally established right, except in a few areas (bathroom, changing room, break room, union meetings, ect). We also get back to bank employees who are also filmed all the time in their normal work environment. I understand that man y police don't like it but I have never seen any case law that states it is violating the officer's rights.

https://www.upcounsel.com/video-surveillance-laws-by-state

The fact that you, and as far as I can see quite a bit of the policing community, don't know the law on this, or even the source of law on this but speak as if they do is part of the problem. We start wondering in what other ways are the police acting based on ignorance of the law while trying to uphold it?

You keep bringing up some myth around always on video monitoring. No one is asking the police to do that. I'm willing to be that those cameras can be turned off or otherwise deactivated while in the restroom. It's just not a thing. If you have some evidence of police being asked to have cameras on, even in the bathrooms, I'd like to see it because that would be problematic. Even more damning, many cameras have to be manually switched on but that doesn't stop police complaints about them.

Once again, that statistics you bring up are self fulfilling prophecies. Once someone gets a felony on their record the chance or recidivism goes through the roof. Once we take a non-violent offender and lock them up and sink their ability to make a living, we going to see quite a bit of them again, and perhaps in a violent capacity, as they get more desperate.

This gets into the problem with police thinking they are "law enforcement". I'm willing to bet very close to 100% of all citizens break the law in some way or another each year. From civil infractions on up. If police think of themselves as law enforcement they will be constantly initiating negative contacts with the community that have little benefit to society as a whole. It also gives police broad power on when to initiate (or ignore) such contacts and that doesn't seem to be going well either.

My entire conversation with you has really reinforced my belief that policing is fundamentally broken and needs foundational change and that change has to start with ripping out the cultural cancer at the root of policing.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro -
Let's take a step back and talk about our legal system because no one is saying that state laws are not bound by federal issues when they exist. State laws are only bound by federal law (including SCOTUS decisions) when there is a nexus with federal law, including constitutional law. If there are no federal issues at play, federal courts will not step in as they will determine they don't have jurisdiction over any questions of law.

Generally outside of Constitutional protections on search and seizure and some federal laws around PAII and healthcare records, privacy laws are state laws. For example, can you record someone in a public place with your phone camera? State law. The case you mentioned had to do with search and seizure, a federal issue. However, for the most parts employer monitoring of employees is not a fourth amendment issue, the body of law exists almost entirely at the state level.

Any issue where a police officer is in a position where a 4th amendment case is at play, it likely is at play regardless of the presence of body cameras. That is to say, if the camera is attached to the officer and recording something then the officer is seeing it as well. If it is a fourth amendment issue for the camera to see it then it is also a fourth amendment issue for the officer without the camera. This is completely different from unmanned cameras used for surveillance which runs into federal law.

For the most part the laws around body camera usage are state laws. You're not going to find a lot of federal case law around it because the federal courts are going to kick out any cases that come to them for lack of jurisdiction.

Now you keep going to serious crime against other people, really bad crimes, but that's not the majority of police interaction with the public. However, time and time again we see a serious charge stemming out of the police interaction from benign violations. For example, a traffic stop that goes bad or someone selling loose cigarettes. You can make the argument that the citizen was wrong in the interaction, but that doesn't matter. The net societal effect is that we have a situation of a minor issue that became a major issue and resulted it what may have been a perfectly productive member of society transformed into a non productive one.

As far as your argument about taking law enforcement completely out of an area, that's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is changing the focus of law enforcement, not removing them completely. Unfortunately, many of the policing community are resisting such a change and that is the cancer in the culture.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - I am not ignoring the idea that body cameras are a government function and I've already addressed it. From my last post: "That is to say, if the camera is attached to the officer and recording something then the officer is seeing it as well. If it is a fourth amendment issue for the camera to see it then it is also a fourth amendment issue for the officer without the camera." You're only other argument is that there is a "reasonable expectation of privacy" under the fourth amendment of people not being under cameras at work but we've already gone over that and it is clearly not true outside of bathrooms, breakrooms, union meetings, etc. Government employees have tried to make the case that since their employer is the government, that any monitoring is protected under the 4th amendment but generally such claims have failed (for example ONTARIO v. QUON https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1332.ZS.html)

Once we move beyond those issues the laws become state in nature. If you look around about consent on videotaping, those are also state in nature. That's where for the most part that body of law resides.

Quite frankly I don't know why we should take any privacy claims here seriously. Employers have been doing video recording of employees for years. All I have to say to law enforcement is suck it up buttercup, welcome to the world the rest of us live in. ;) If they think it is illegal, take it to court. Good luck.

I'm going to do a seperate post on the rest of your comments. To be honest the legal debate, while interesting is a bit off topic.

MSG Joseph Cristofaro - OK, let's get into the meat, because it also goes into how the current method of policing almost guarantees that 50k assaults on law enforcement officers you mention.

In fact, the term you use is quite frankly underlies the issue, "law enforcement". I'm going to give you two situations, one video tape and one I witnessed. One is an example of what I consider law enforcement and the other an example of good policing.

There are a fair number of videos I'm about to describe. I can't find the exact one, but I don't think it really matters as I don't think we will disagree on the details. The officer worked completely within the law. OK, guy is recording a traffic stop for a violation (himself being stopped). Officer orders him out of the car and citizen refuses. The officer uses the reasoning that he feels threatened, we could quibble about if that was reasonable, but the police have wide legal latitude here. The officer has a right to order the citizen out of the car and the citizen must comply. The citizen was obviously agitated, telling the officer to just give him the ticket and move on. In not complying the citizen is breaking a more serious law. It eventually leads to more police on the scene and an arrest.

OK, did the officer break any rules here? Not that I could see. Did the officer work within the confines of the law. Yeah, also as far as I could see. Was the result of the interaction good for society as a whole? I doubt it. We took what was a civil infraction and ended up with, um maybe a misdemeanor. Not 100% sure. That officer was there to enforce the law as his primary goal.

Let's go into the second example. It's what I think policing should be. That is to say officers consider their primary duty to protect the public (all of them), secondarily to protect property and use the law when necessary to do so. That's clearly not what the first guy did.

So my wife and I go to the vet for our cat and a vet-tec comes out and asks us to wait in the car as they were dealing with an issue. A short while later a lady comes out, starts talking to us and the more she talks the more erratic she got (at one point saying people like me get shot, I think because I was ignoring her and or had veterans’ plates). She was clearly having some issues, but I didn't judge her as dangerous, just perhaps having some mental problems and extremely agitated. But that "get shot" comment could have been taken as a threat (well it was, I just didn't take it as a serious threat).

A short while later a few police cars show up and they get out and start talking calmly to the women. Well she was shouting at them, refusing to leave and calling them every name in the book. The officers took it all in stride. At that point I'm sure she could have been charged with trespass, disturbing the peace, probably a few other things. If they did that, I think as soon as they touched her we would have had one of those 50k assaults on police officers you mentioned.

But that's not how they handled it. They spent a little time talking her down. She eventually got in her car and left. My wife and I were joking around with the police officers after the fact about the whole event. This result was likely the best result for society. They could have considered themselves "law enforcement" but instead I think they mostly considered themselves there to keep the peace and only move to the more serious tactics if given no other choice. It was an impressive display.

The officer in the first example could have gone that route. Yeah the citizen was kind of a d!ck, but I can tell you as a "normal" citizen, there are d!cks out there that I've had to deal with and for the most part if you ignore the d!ckishness and don't take it personal you can do your business and move on. Under the "law enforcement" mindset, police don't have to take the d!ckishness and I think the temptation is there not to and that’s likely what happened in the first video. That normally leads to escalating, sometimes then arrest, and sometimes then resisting arrest. It all spirals in a downward trajectory. The thought process that the first duty of police is to "enforce the law" instead of protecting citizens and then property is at the heart of the disconnect that I see (in general) between the policing industry and what the public expects it to be.

The underlying understood mission of an organization is a large factor in driving culture and behavior. If police feel their mission is primarily law enforcement, well that's what we are going to get.