Here's what happens when a black man drives a Jag:
[Terence] Jones says he remains "bothered and upset" that he was prosecuted
for filing a false police report when he complained he was racially
profiled in a 2007 traffic stop in Woolwich Township.
Jones, who is African American, had faced up to 18 months in prison;
his restless nights dragged on longer than a year until his trial in
December.
Visibly angered, Superior Court Judge M. Christine Allen-Jackson had
called the case "chilling" when she found him not guilty. It was over,
and Jones sobbed in relief. ...
A videotape of the stop, recorded by a camera in the police car, was
never played for the grand jurors. It shows Patrolman Michael
Schaeffer, who is white, pulling Jones over on a blustery night and
asking why Jones was exiting an industrial park. ...
Jones believes the tape saved him.
"It would have been my word against the police officer's," he said. "I might have been doing 18 months in jail."
Or, as field negro says, he might be dead.
And here's what happens when you give unchecked authority to wage a war on (some) drugs:
Officer Jeffrey Cujdik told store owner Jose Duran that police were
in search of tiny ziplock bags often used to package drugs. But, during
the September 2007 raid, Cujdik and fellow squad members seemed much
more interested in finding every video camera in the West Oak Lane
store.
"I got like seven or eight eyes," shouted Officer Thomas Tolstoy,
referring to the cameras, as the officers glanced up. "There's one
outside. There is one, two, three, four in the aisles, and there's one
right here somewhere."
For the next several minutes, Tolstoy and other Narcotics Field Unit
officers systematically cut wires to cameras until those "eyes" could
no longer see.
Then, after the officers arrested Duran and took him to jail, nearly
$10,000 in cash and cartons of Marlboros and Newports were missing from
the locked, unattended store, Duran alleges. The officers guzzled sodas
and scarfed down fresh turkey hoagies, Little Debbie fudge brownies and
Cheez-Its, he said.
What the officers didn't count on was that Duran's high-tech video
system had a hidden backup hard-drive. The backup downloaded the
footage to his private Web site before the wires were cut. ...
Duran's video bolsters allegations by eight other Philadelphia store
owners who said that Cujdik and other officers destroyed or cut wires
to surveillance cameras. Those store owners also said that after the
wires were cut, cigarettes, batteries, cell phones, food and drinks
were taken.
You get the point. Without cameras, some cops can and will lie your ass into prison or a grave, while covering up their own crimes. I don't want to characterize the percentage of cops who are bad, because it's not relevant. It happens, that's a fact.
Cameras can protect you. But you have to have a camera on you, because you can't count on a police car dashboard camera or a surveillance camera. One idea I have had for a while is a rig involving cameras in your cellphone and wristwatch that would upload video and sound to a server on the web with a press of a button, as Mr. Duran's cameras did, so there would be no tape for them to destroy. Worst case scenario, if you wound up dead someone would be able to watch how it went down. I don't think cell phone data networks are fast enough yet to do that, but it is a product I would definitely think would take off when it is feasible.
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