Honestly I have reported more than a few posts that rant about hang ing all gun owners. Or that gun owners need to be killed and have their firearms taken by force. etc... Facebook refuses to see that as hate speech but it clearly should be. Its also potentially inciting violence against a group of people whose majority is law abiding. I have also reported posts that are even more inflammatory and discriminating against a lot of different groups especially the NRA but others as well. FB has given me responses each time that its not hate speech and that if I don't want to see it then I should just hide it. Yet if I were to post a rant about killing anti-gun people it would be pulled nearly instantly for inciting violence etc. Their algorithm is heavily skewed. I think this more than anything is what Cruz was trying to get at. That the bias of what is allowed leans heavily to liberal view points but is exceedingly heavy handed on conservative viewpoints.
Umm the Speech or Debate Clause(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause) means that a congress person as long as they are on the floor of either the senate or the house cannot be charged with a crime for reading something into record.
Any member of Congress who shares information with the public from a Wednesday briefing could be prosecuted for a crime.
I posted a quick thought about this on twitter and thought I should come here and say a little more.
1) I agree that taking a photo of a license plate should not be wrong and that as a publicly visible thing I have no expectation of privacy.
2) License plate readers are a great tool for Law Enforcement purposes... While driving down the road they don't need to be trying to type in a license plate of a vehicle near them. (Something that officers do a lot... The number of Felony warrants on vehicles is amazing)
3) I also believe that the issue is not really with photographing the plate. It is in creating a database of those images with location data, frequency etc that is the root of the issue, and where the privacy violations occur. To combat this privacy issue I think that there should be legislation that should allow the database to tally the number of plate hits but no additional information about the plate. And that way the ALPR systems are doing their original job of making the officer safer in his job and making as small of a privacy issue as possible.
Will the above solution ever occur? I highly doubt it and if it did I guarantee that the private companies providing the ALPR services would fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Dallas did an upgrade in 2007 that led to a lot of issues. Including no vehicle or suspect data or delays in receiving it.
On one occasion as a rookie, less than a week out of the academy. At the beginning of a 10 hour shift I pulled over a car for running a stop sign. The computers yielded no information for the car or the driver. So, I wrote him a citation for running the stop sign and sent him on his way. About 8 hours into my shift, the servers crashed and had to be reset, they were back in a couple of minutes and officers were inundated with all the data requests they had made that day. The very first piece of data that I had requested was that car and its driver... Felony warrant out of DALLAS for Aggravated Assault on a Police officer... I had done a standard traffic stop on a guy that had a pretty good record of assaulting a police officer, thankfully I was not added to the list but it still causes me nightmares thinking about it.
If the new system they have is anything like the last upgrade it will be at least 2 months before officers can even trust the computer to give them accurate information. Or to actually be able to file reports using it an not just writing them by hand to be entered at a later date.
The problem that you are pointing out here is known by police and again there are actually procedures for it. Large numbers of officers being the safest way, for everyone involved. drugged induced psychosis/exited delirium are supposed to be handled by 5+ officers so that you can safely control the arrested person. (Just remember its not always possible to get enough officers to do a 5 man takedown) I also want to submit this situation to you this is pretty much a recurring nightmare that officers have.
I am not going to say that officers don't make mistakes... because they do. and in the following story I followed procedure completely and everything was done exactly right.
I am going to share the incident that caused me to question being an officer. I was on patrol with my trainer (yes I was a rookie at the time probably a month out of the academy) a request by another officer for assistance came out over the radio, to assist with an occupied stolen vehicle. As we catch up to the other squad car he executes a standard traffic stop. Amazingly, the driver decides to pull over, but this is still a felony stop so verbal commands to the driver and his 2 passengers are given over the PA. As the cover element our job was to deal with the driver. The driver was a kid in his late teens 17-18 years old, about 5'10 and 130 lbs. Not wearing a shirt, and has gang tats on his back and chest. As he steps out of the vehicle he abruptly reaches for his waist band after having been ordered to keep his hands straight out the the side. Thankfully, this event doesn't end with a dead kid right there, he realized that the motion he made of reaching for his waist band was a very stupid move to make. From there the arrest was uneventful except for having to de-cock the hammer on my duty pistol which actually locked back during his movement. 1/16th of an inch longer pull on my duty pistol and the kid would have died right then, as an additional note with both my trainer and the officer we were covering had to de-cock as well.
If I had fired my use of force was completely justified, given he was committing a felony, he had been given loud verbal commands over a loud speaker, which he decided to ignore for a moment, and the action he decided to make was possibly very deadly, when an officer already has you at gun point and you are being ordered to exit a vehicle any action that is seen as agressive is going to be met with force, especially if you no longer can see his hands.
So if you want to belive that is That's 'He pointed his finger at me so I shot him' logic, and should in no way be considered a reasonable response to false claims, cops or not. So be it but you have to realize a couple of other things with this. Who's choice was it to steal a car? Who's choice was it to willfuly make an overt gesture towards their waist band, that officers could not see? Who's choice created the events that led to a direct confrontation with officers?
"As a former LEO this could have been very beneficial."
You know in the very first comment of this thread I only stated that something would be beneficial, what I guess I left out was that I don't care for a lot of things in this. The penalty is too high would be my biggest complaint, it doesn't need to be a felony but something that says filing a false complaint is wrong and illegal maybe similar to the "filing a false police report" statue which is a class C misdemeanor, (same level as a speeding ticket).
Also, I don't like lowering the investigative standard. No one is going to have all the facts to piece together any complaint made so making it difficult for other agencies to investigate is wrong.
And think of it this way... if you want to leave patrol and be a detective you can pretty much forget it with a complaint, even a bogus one. You will be stuck for the most part where you are in patrol, because you are possible damaged goods and no other section is going to want to deal with the issues if it comes out that the complaint really should have been sustained against you. And forget changing departments as well most will not want to hire an officer that has had a complaint for the same reason.
So, if you are say 25 years old have been on the dept for 4 years or so you should be about to get a choice of duties beyond patrol. Maybe vice, arson, homocide, CAPERS(Crimes Against PERsons), SWAT, DUI Squad, burglary, Criminal Evidence Division... etc... and you get a complaint, you might have only the property room as a possible new assignment, depends on the complaint. Patrol is something that some people love others want to make detective, and get out of. But there are very few officers that make it to retirement as a patrolman.
You would be surprised. Some positions time in position, some require a clean record, and others require both. And even if a complaint has no merit it is still on the officers record and can come up when you are interviewing for a promotion or a new duty.
Remember a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous things an officer does on a daily basis, which is why they are so alert when they do them. More officers are killed during a traffic stop than any other activity.
My tip for dealing with cops is to remember that covert/concealed movements will always be regarded as dangerous to a officer so always wait to be asked to do something, Or tell the officer that you are doing it. Its thankfully not rocket science.
Also remember this if you ever want to get sympathy/empathy from the officer don't ever just start yelling at the officer, especially when pulled over on a traffic violation... There is a special way to handle those people and it starts with the officer taking his time looking for every single violation on a car or that you made. Arguing with a cop is stupid everywhere, cops do sometimes have discretion and other times don't.
There is a city near me that is NOT civil service protected and its officers have a mandatory citation policy set by the chief. If you are pulled over you will receive a citation every time (including officers... there is no professional courtesy even).
But anyways cops become dicks because of the situation. Its honestly not personal. At the end of the day most officers just want to help people and make the community better, unfortunately becoming jaded comes with the territory of being an officer. And ultimately they want to go home safely to their families, and in every situation they are involved in has at least on firearm present.
I agree that there are departments that need to be cleaned up but I still hold that the complaint system is flawed. Especially, in a very large city, its flawed because my situation above could have gone the other way, if I hadn't written a detailed and exacting report, or if I hadn't had the time to write a detailed report. I got lucky that it was a slow day and I could take my time. If it had been an ordinary day the summary above would have been about the length of the entire report. There are several reasons most of them come back to lack of man power, a couple of others come back to drug issues.
I guess the ultimate reason I provided my experience above is that this comment board is full of people that have either had bad dealings with or just a natural hatred of the police officer. There are a few bad cops out there that make it much more difficult for the good cops to do their job. A visible officer doing his job in a the proper way will never make the news. Hell, officers that go above and beyond barely make the news. Good cops don't make great ratings... but reporting on a bad cop makes a career, for a reporter.
I knew a fellow officer that did absolutely nothing wrong but was crucified by the media, and hung out to dry by the city:
The officer in question was sitting near an intersection about 2.5 miles from a major hospital. A blacked out SUV runs the stop sign. The officer turns on his lights and attempts a traffic stop. The SUV continues to the hospital running through a total of 4 red lights and 3 more stop signs. When the vehicle finally stops at the hospital. The driver who is about 6'4 and weighs about 260 lbs with a very muscular build, jumps out of the vehicle and runs toward the squad car. As a former officer I can safely state that after following someone for 2.5 miles with lights and siren on there is a heightened state of alert on the part of the officer. And the location for trouble doesn't matter that much. The officer loudly orders the driver to stop, and to see his hands. When the driver doesn't immediately respond and stop his movement towards the officer, the officer has no choice but to see it as a threat and drew his duty pistol. At gun point the driver becomes compliant and follows the officers instructions. The officer places the driver into handcuffs for officer safety reasons, and does a pat down for weapons, at this point other officers begin arriving (yes he played lone wolf... his only honest mistake). At this point the officer is able to find out what the cause to the traffic violations was. the drivers mother-in-law, was terminally ill in the hospital and was not expected to live more than a few more minutes and the driver was racing to get his wife and children to the hospital to say goodbye. As I know the officer I can say that he has several times escorted people to the hospital for such occurrences, and the driver only needed to stop when the officer turned on his lights, he would have likely gotten a warning from the officer and an escort. Instead the driver, his wife and children were detained. Now the reason that this officer was crucified for doing his job and following procedure. The driver was an NFL player and decided to involve the media in the situation, and the city instead of protecting him, gave his home address the the media.
All situations have points of view, and our media is about ratings not necessarily about truth or unbiased facts. I also would bet that even in situations that an officer made a mistake and was in the wrong that they are still a very small percentage of the time. If you compare the number of calls for service, traffic stops and observable crimes to the number of complaints the percentage is a very small fraction of a percent. And the media would have us believe that it is much higher.
As a former LEO this could have been very beneficial.
While I had no complaints, I have to say that there are many officers that have had false complaints made against them several times. In fact in one of those occurrences, I was interviewed on an incident that I wrote the report for. The complaint was that another officer used excessive force.
The incident was the arrest of 3 people with significant amounts of "Cheese" (Heroine + Tylenol PM) they also had the scales, baggies etc. so the arrest was for manufacturing of a controlled substance. One of the three individuals decided to be stupid and balled his fists and raised them to a fighting position. The officer in question was very close to the idiot and executed a simple leg sweep and the loud verbal command to get on the ground, there was no further use of force on anyones part the officers or the arrested persons. The arrested persons head hit the concrete and we called for EMS to evaluate his injuries. Everything was completely by the book and following procedures. In fact the reason that I wrote the report was because the officer that was originally the lead officer, and the one that used the leg sweep cannot write his own use of force report. My point is that some of the biggest PITA arrests are not the ones that most people think, they are actually the ones that are the more mundane.
Some, people think that if they make a complaint against an officer that they will have a way to get out of the punishment for their crimes. Its a stupid thought, as a proper report and following procedures will remove any doubt what is going on and I believe that the bill in this article was meant to make the complaints like that less likely. Criminals seem to think that if they can disparage the officers credibility then they can get off with no sentence or a lighter one. When in reality they should be larger sentences for perjury or something similar.
And if you look at things from an officers point of view, you meet people constantly on the worst days / moments of their lives. Most officers that I know, and the biggest reason that I wanted to become an officer is to help people, to make a difference in another persons life.
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Honestly I have reported more than a few posts that rant about hang ing all gun owners. Or that gun owners need to be killed and have their firearms taken by force. etc... Facebook refuses to see that as hate speech but it clearly should be. Its also potentially inciting violence against a group of people whose majority is law abiding.
I have also reported posts that are even more inflammatory and discriminating against a lot of different groups especially the NRA but others as well. FB has given me responses each time that its not hate speech and that if I don't want to see it then I should just hide it. Yet if I were to post a rant about killing anti-gun people it would be pulled nearly instantly for inciting violence etc. Their algorithm is heavily skewed. I think this more than anything is what Cruz was trying to get at. That the bias of what is allowed leans heavily to liberal view points but is exceedingly heavy handed on conservative viewpoints.
Re: FUD ignores the Speech and Debate Clause
its called the Speech and Debate Clause..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause
Re:
Umm the Speech or Debate Clause(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause) means that a congress person as long as they are on the floor of either the senate or the house cannot be charged with a crime for reading something into record.
The above cannot be enforced...
I posted a quick thought about this on twitter and thought I should come here and say a little more.
1) I agree that taking a photo of a license plate should not be wrong and that as a publicly visible thing I have no expectation of privacy.
2) License plate readers are a great tool for Law Enforcement purposes... While driving down the road they don't need to be trying to type in a license plate of a vehicle near them. (Something that officers do a lot... The number of Felony warrants on vehicles is amazing)
3) I also believe that the issue is not really with photographing the plate. It is in creating a database of those images with location data, frequency etc that is the root of the issue, and where the privacy violations occur. To combat this privacy issue I think that there should be legislation that should allow the database to tally the number of plate hits but no additional information about the plate. And that way the ALPR systems are doing their original job of making the officer safer in his job and making as small of a privacy issue as possible.
Will the above solution ever occur? I highly doubt it and if it did I guarantee that the private companies providing the ALPR services would fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Not the first CAD issue
Dallas did an upgrade in 2007 that led to a lot of issues. Including no vehicle or suspect data or delays in receiving it.
On one occasion as a rookie, less than a week out of the academy. At the beginning of a 10 hour shift I pulled over a car for running a stop sign. The computers yielded no information for the car or the driver. So, I wrote him a citation for running the stop sign and sent him on his way. About 8 hours into my shift, the servers crashed and had to be reset, they were back in a couple of minutes and officers were inundated with all the data requests they had made that day. The very first piece of data that I had requested was that car and its driver... Felony warrant out of DALLAS for Aggravated Assault on a Police officer... I had done a standard traffic stop on a guy that had a pretty good record of assaulting a police officer, thankfully I was not added to the list but it still causes me nightmares thinking about it.
If the new system they have is anything like the last upgrade it will be at least 2 months before officers can even trust the computer to give them accurate information. Or to actually be able to file reports using it an not just writing them by hand to be entered at a later date.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
Nope PCP which is why it took so much to deal with him, and he is very agressive and unpredictable.
Re: Re: Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
The problem that you are pointing out here is known by police and again there are actually procedures for it. Large numbers of officers being the safest way, for everyone involved. drugged induced psychosis/exited delirium are supposed to be handled by 5+ officers so that you can safely control the arrested person. (Just remember its not always possible to get enough officers to do a 5 man takedown) I also want to submit this situation to you this is pretty much a recurring nightmare that officers have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23c7ovuSd2U
Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
I am not going to say that officers don't make mistakes... because they do. and in the following story I followed procedure completely and everything was done exactly right.
I am going to share the incident that caused me to question being an officer. I was on patrol with my trainer (yes I was a rookie at the time probably a month out of the academy) a request by another officer for assistance came out over the radio, to assist with an occupied stolen vehicle. As we catch up to the other squad car he executes a standard traffic stop. Amazingly, the driver decides to pull over, but this is still a felony stop so verbal commands to the driver and his 2 passengers are given over the PA. As the cover element our job was to deal with the driver. The driver was a kid in his late teens 17-18 years old, about 5'10 and 130 lbs. Not wearing a shirt, and has gang tats on his back and chest. As he steps out of the vehicle he abruptly reaches for his waist band after having been ordered to keep his hands straight out the the side. Thankfully, this event doesn't end with a dead kid right there, he realized that the motion he made of reaching for his waist band was a very stupid move to make. From there the arrest was uneventful except for having to de-cock the hammer on my duty pistol which actually locked back during his movement. 1/16th of an inch longer pull on my duty pistol and the kid would have died right then, as an additional note with both my trainer and the officer we were covering had to de-cock as well.
If I had fired my use of force was completely justified, given he was committing a felony, he had been given loud verbal commands over a loud speaker, which he decided to ignore for a moment, and the action he decided to make was possibly very deadly, when an officer already has you at gun point and you are being ordered to exit a vehicle any action that is seen as agressive is going to be met with force, especially if you no longer can see his hands.
So if you want to belive that is That's 'He pointed his finger at me so I shot him' logic, and should in no way be considered a reasonable response to false claims, cops or not. So be it but you have to realize a couple of other things with this.
Who's choice was it to steal a car?
Who's choice was it to willfuly make an overt gesture towards their waist band, that officers could not see?
Who's choice created the events that led to a direct confrontation with officers?
Re: Re: Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
"As a former LEO this could have been very beneficial."
You know in the very first comment of this thread I only stated that something would be beneficial, what I guess I left out was that I don't care for a lot of things in this. The penalty is too high would be my biggest complaint, it doesn't need to be a felony but something that says filing a false complaint is wrong and illegal maybe similar to the "filing a false police report" statue which is a class C misdemeanor, (same level as a speeding ticket).
Also, I don't like lowering the investigative standard. No one is going to have all the facts to piece together any complaint made so making it difficult for other agencies to investigate is wrong.
And think of it this way... if you want to leave patrol and be a detective you can pretty much forget it with a complaint, even a bogus one. You will be stuck for the most part where you are in patrol, because you are possible damaged goods and no other section is going to want to deal with the issues if it comes out that the complaint really should have been sustained against you. And forget changing departments as well most will not want to hire an officer that has had a complaint for the same reason.
So, if you are say 25 years old have been on the dept for 4 years or so you should be about to get a choice of duties beyond patrol. Maybe vice, arson, homocide, CAPERS(Crimes Against PERsons), SWAT, DUI Squad, burglary, Criminal Evidence Division... etc... and you get a complaint, you might have only the property room as a possible new assignment, depends on the complaint. Patrol is something that some people love others want to make detective, and get out of. But there are very few officers that make it to retirement as a patrolman.
Re: Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
Edit: Some positions time in position, some require a clean record
Some positions have different requirements, time in position clean record or both.
** Edited for clearity.
Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
You would be surprised. Some positions time in position, some require a clean record, and others require both. And even if a complaint has no merit it is still on the officers record and can come up when you are interviewing for a promotion or a new duty.
Re: Re: Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
Remember a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous things an officer does on a daily basis, which is why they are so alert when they do them. More officers are killed during a traffic stop than any other activity.
My tip for dealing with cops is to remember that covert/concealed movements will always be regarded as dangerous to a officer so always wait to be asked to do something, Or tell the officer that you are doing it. Its thankfully not rocket science.
Also remember this if you ever want to get sympathy/empathy from the officer don't ever just start yelling at the officer, especially when pulled over on a traffic violation... There is a special way to handle those people and it starts with the officer taking his time looking for every single violation on a car or that you made. Arguing with a cop is stupid everywhere, cops do sometimes have discretion and other times don't.
There is a city near me that is NOT civil service protected and its officers have a mandatory citation policy set by the chief. If you are pulled over you will receive a citation every time (including officers... there is no professional courtesy even).
But anyways cops become dicks because of the situation. Its honestly not personal. At the end of the day most officers just want to help people and make the community better, unfortunately becoming jaded comes with the territory of being an officer. And ultimately they want to go home safely to their families, and in every situation they are involved in has at least on firearm present.
Re: Re: The wording is wrong for this
I agree that there are departments that need to be cleaned up but I still hold that the complaint system is flawed. Especially, in a very large city, its flawed because my situation above could have gone the other way, if I hadn't written a detailed and exacting report, or if I hadn't had the time to write a detailed report. I got lucky that it was a slow day and I could take my time. If it had been an ordinary day the summary above would have been about the length of the entire report. There are several reasons most of them come back to lack of man power, a couple of others come back to drug issues.
I guess the ultimate reason I provided my experience above is that this comment board is full of people that have either had bad dealings with or just a natural hatred of the police officer. There are a few bad cops out there that make it much more difficult for the good cops to do their job. A visible officer doing his job in a the proper way will never make the news. Hell, officers that go above and beyond barely make the news. Good cops don't make great ratings... but reporting on a bad cop makes a career, for a reporter.
I knew a fellow officer that did absolutely nothing wrong but was crucified by the media, and hung out to dry by the city:
The officer in question was sitting near an intersection about 2.5 miles from a major hospital. A blacked out SUV runs the stop sign. The officer turns on his lights and attempts a traffic stop. The SUV continues to the hospital running through a total of 4 red lights and 3 more stop signs. When the vehicle finally stops at the hospital. The driver who is about 6'4 and weighs about 260 lbs with a very muscular build, jumps out of the vehicle and runs toward the squad car. As a former officer I can safely state that after following someone for 2.5 miles with lights and siren on there is a heightened state of alert on the part of the officer. And the location for trouble doesn't matter that much. The officer loudly orders the driver to stop, and to see his hands. When the driver doesn't immediately respond and stop his movement towards the officer, the officer has no choice but to see it as a threat and drew his duty pistol. At gun point the driver becomes compliant and follows the officers instructions. The officer places the driver into handcuffs for officer safety reasons, and does a pat down for weapons, at this point other officers begin arriving (yes he played lone wolf... his only honest mistake). At this point the officer is able to find out what the cause to the traffic violations was. the drivers mother-in-law, was terminally ill in the hospital and was not expected to live more than a few more minutes and the driver was racing to get his wife and children to the hospital to say goodbye. As I know the officer I can say that he has several times escorted people to the hospital for such occurrences, and the driver only needed to stop when the officer turned on his lights, he would have likely gotten a warning from the officer and an escort. Instead the driver, his wife and children were detained. Now the reason that this officer was crucified for doing his job and following procedure. The driver was an NFL player and decided to involve the media in the situation, and the city instead of protecting him, gave his home address the the media.
All situations have points of view, and our media is about ratings not necessarily about truth or unbiased facts. I also would bet that even in situations that an officer made a mistake and was in the wrong that they are still a very small percentage of the time. If you compare the number of calls for service, traffic stops and observable crimes to the number of complaints the percentage is a very small fraction of a percent. And the media would have us believe that it is much higher.
The wording is wrong for this
As a former LEO this could have been very beneficial.
While I had no complaints, I have to say that there are many officers that have had false complaints made against them several times. In fact in one of those occurrences, I was interviewed on an incident that I wrote the report for. The complaint was that another officer used excessive force.
The incident was the arrest of 3 people with significant amounts of "Cheese" (Heroine + Tylenol PM) they also had the scales, baggies etc. so the arrest was for manufacturing of a controlled substance. One of the three individuals decided to be stupid and balled his fists and raised them to a fighting position. The officer in question was very close to the idiot and executed a simple leg sweep and the loud verbal command to get on the ground, there was no further use of force on anyones part the officers or the arrested persons. The arrested persons head hit the concrete and we called for EMS to evaluate his injuries. Everything was completely by the book and following procedures. In fact the reason that I wrote the report was because the officer that was originally the lead officer, and the one that used the leg sweep cannot write his own use of force report. My point is that some of the biggest PITA arrests are not the ones that most people think, they are actually the ones that are the more mundane.
Some, people think that if they make a complaint against an officer that they will have a way to get out of the punishment for their crimes. Its a stupid thought, as a proper report and following procedures will remove any doubt what is going on and I believe that the bill in this article was meant to make the complaints like that less likely. Criminals seem to think that if they can disparage the officers credibility then they can get off with no sentence or a lighter one. When in reality they should be larger sentences for perjury or something similar.
And if you look at things from an officers point of view, you meet people constantly on the worst days / moments of their lives. Most officers that I know, and the biggest reason that I wanted to become an officer is to help people, to make a difference in another persons life.