As so many of these incidents have happened over the last few days it seems like there should be a law that heightens the penalties when cops attack the press compared to the current penalties.
We already have tons of statutes for all sorts of assault/battery with modifiers if they are done using lethal weapons.
Police have already been demanding that "hate crime" laws (which are historically limited to who you are, not your profession or your choices) be amended for extra harsh punishment for attacks on police officers (despite many other existing statutes with similar purposes).
In the end, prosecutions of police with harsher statutes don't matter unless the conviction rate goes up. Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
Well a big problem not included in your post is that police officers can't face liability for violating people's rights in many cases because of qualified immunity.
"Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine in United States federal law that shields government officials from being sued for discretionary actions performed within their official capacity, unless their actions violated "clearly established" federal law or constitutional rights. Qualified immunity thus protects officials who "make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions", but does not protect "the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law"."
Is the bill of rights not "clearly established"? They've had long enough.
To me the phrasing seems clear, it's a lack of political will that's the issue. Not the law.
The standard of the Supreme Court has established for "clearly established" is very hard to meet. For most cases, there has to a prior court cases with facts that match closely with the case at hand. For example,
He didn't include ending qualified immunity under the list of things he thought have to change, even though it's one of the most important. Plus, all the things he included are social changes or executive policy changes rather than a specific legal change like ending qualified immunity. There are specific efforts to end qualified immunity [1], while his suggestions amount to "we need to change culture", which is completely true but not as actionable. It could be that he meant to include ending qualified immunity, but being specific doesn't hurt.
> He didn't include ending qualified immunity under the list of things he thought have to change, even though it's one of the most important.
I didn't name check it, but if you check my post history there's a reason I didn't call for an outright repeal of QI -- I don't yet know what the effect of that would be or what measures might replace it.
I'm all for removing QI (and outlawing indemnification of LEOs in employment contracts) and replacing QI with something like professional insurance, but from my understanding the problem isn't that "QI prevents cases from being brought to court", but that DAs don't actually bring cases to court which could beat the QI standard.
Also, in my understanding, QI is simply protection against civil actions, not criminal prosecution. To repeat - I think the core problem is more that DAs don't bring the cases, not that the law is insurmountably high.
"law that heightens the penalties when cops attack the press" seems to be talking about increased criminal penalties not civil liability.
Ending qualified immunity doesn't do anything to help the application of criminal penalties against police who violate the law, it only restores the civil liability for those actions.
Parent post did not mention qualified immunity it doesnt seem.
> Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
it didnt say the low rate was due to qualified immunity
To be fair, QI is a civil liability problem and I was mostly talking about the criminal trial problem.
If more police were tried in criminal cases, that would make it far easier to build evidence for a civil case which could overcome the QI standard. OJ Simpson was acquitted in the murder trial, but lost his entire wealth in the subsequent civil trial to his in-laws.
I concede that QI is a problem and should be addressed. So should contractual indemnification of officers by the department (which is a contractual way to bypass the doctrine of QI).
I don't think the press should have special protections over ordinary citizens. the penalty for any unwarranted use of force should be increased to whatever you would want for journalists.
Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.
IANAL, but it's my understanding that anything written and viewed by a third party is considered "published" wrt libel. so it's already trivially easy for an ordinary person to commit libel.
Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.
The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection. The question of who is "the press" in this day and age where anyone can publish anything is certainly up for debate though.
> The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection.
I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't
> There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.
> protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others' writings, or tried to get both sides of a story.
I mean I suppose the argument could be that they are afforded special protections because they are acting as press (i.e. at the protests primarily to document and report events). But the constitution protects peaceable assembly as well as the freedom of the press, so it's hard to see how this case would turn on that.
I don't really understand comments that ask for heightened penalties for [topic-du-jour]. In my mind, the justice system should not strive to be _more punitive_, but rather to be _fair_.
If we follow the logic of making punishments harsher (say, adding years of prison to a violent cop), what then do we as a society expect is supposed to happen when said cop finally attempts to reintegrate into society after doing their prison sentence? We can't keep "wishing away bad guys" as if real life was a movie that conveniently ends at a happy ending.
If anything, a revamp of the current system needs to _do away_ with special protections and other dis-equalizer factors.
For the matter of police violence specifically, I feel that the courts are not even the best medium for change. For example, why is the topic of police training largely absent in these discussions?
I'm not for this reactionary sort of rhetoric. Assault of a journalist shouldn't be worse than regular assault any more than assault of a cop should be worse than regular assault. Your job is not a shield. All people are equally deserving of protection, and qualifiers based on identity screw that ideal up massively.
This is a tough one. In Seattle police are directed to not use their body cams unless they are doing crime investigation stuff. The policy is designed to protect the privacy of people not under investigation or otherwise not involved in crime.
In pre-body cam days Seattle PD got caught video taping protests or demonstrations. The current policy prevents that.
Thus, Seattle cops generally have their cams turned off while dealing with demonstrations or protests.
The policy is designed to protect the privacy of people not under investigation or otherwise not involved in crime.
And conveniently, you don't know if you'll be under investigation or accused of a crime until it's too late to turn the camera on.
Sorry, that excuse doesn't fly. This concern should be addressed by controlling the custody of the footage, not by preventing it from being captured in the first place. In reality, body cameras protect good cops.
Policies like this have been adopted with support from the ACLU. Your flippantly dismissive attitude towards this view makes me think you aren't all that aware of why cities might have this policy:
(Shrug) When weighing theoretical abstract harms against everyday atrocities, I find it fairly straightforward to pick a side.
The ACLU says, "There is a long history of law enforcement compiling dossiers on peaceful activists exercising their First Amendment rights in public marches and protests, and using cameras to send an intimidating message to such protesters: “we are WATCHING YOU and will REMEMBER your presence at this event.”"
I don't remember anything like that happening, at least not recently. Do you? The FBI behaved that way towards MLK, certainly, but it didn't have anything to do with body cameras.
In any case, I haven't argued, and won't argue, that police officers, or even the department itself, should have access to the footage except when necessary to defend themselves. Ideally it would be encrypted with a key held by an oversight board with substantial civilian representation.
You could use a device with a four-hour rotating buffer of video, that burns a physical fuse when you keep a record. Failure to press the button within two hours of a serious incident could be grounds for dismissal of the supervising officer.
Very good point. I’m sure some hardware that uploads encrypted footage that’s only accessible with a warrant is technically possible - which would alleviate this concern. But that’s in a perfect world.
Lol, as if there are no public cameras, cars don't have dash cams, ATMs and stores don't have cameras, or that citizens have no expectation of privacy from one another
While I understand the sentiment, my understanding was that there is no evidence that body and actually improve outcomes even when they are actually used.
