Three interesting articles related to this class appeared in the New York Times over the last few days. The first article went viral Sunday, trending as one of the top stories on reddit, and receiving media attention from popular blogs like Gawker. In the article, Michelle Alexander, a law professor from Ohio State University, claims that police in some departments across the country regularly lie in court. Very bold and important claims from Alexander and others in the article.
The second article compares and contrasts US data protection laws with those from the European Union (EU). You may be surprised to see how countries in the EU have much stricter laws on information privacy than we have here in the US. For a great example of the differences between data protection in the US compared to the EU, look at how a country like Germany has treated Google Map street view.
The third article details a potential move by the Federal Trade Commission to limit the tracking capabilities of mobile phones in order to safeguard personal information. This directly relates to some of the material we read in the Gillion and Monahan excerpt from Supervision. It's very interesting and worth a read.
The first article, "Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath", is especially relevant considering recent events. Christopher Dorner, a former police officer and Navy Seal, posted a manifesto on facebook, condemning the Los Angeles Police Department and its self-proclaimed transparency. He openly discusses the racism, discrimination, and corruption present and lists specific events to support his claims. He also threatens to kill numerous officials within the LAPD. He currently evades arrest for his involvement in three killings. His measures are extreme and I neither agree nor approve of his approach. However, he has successfully thrust not only the LAPD, but all of public law enforcement into the spotlight. What will happen now?
ReplyDelete-Salena Tiet
He wasn't a Navy SEAL, but he is definitely a dangerous individual who has brought a lot of attention to the LAPD. With recent events, it is unfortunate that many are taking a negative view of law enforcement without knowing much about the situation. Public perception of law enforcement is mostly negative, and events that can be considered "Dorner fallout" are not doing much to help that perception improve. Law enforcement is and will always be under tight scrutiny so it is no surprise. I wonder what everyone thinks of the fact that they are using drones to search for him? Judging from the comments under this article, many people have some problems with this type of surveillance.
ReplyDeletehttp://now.msn.com/christopher-dorner-is-first-drone-target-on-us-soil
I'll be commenting on the first article. I was almost discouraged from reading the entire article after reading the first few lines, which I perceived as containing significant bias. But I continued reading as I've read Alexander's "The New Jim Crow", a very interesting book touching on the Drug War and the culture and effects it produced nationally. Incidentally, the article relates back to many of the themes she discussed in her book.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Alexander probably generalizes the actions of police officers greatly in this and there is probably great variance between police departments in their incidence of lying, I still think it's a pertinent issue within law-enforcement to discuss. If the issue of lying stems from the systematic downward pressure and structural incentive to produce 'numbers', then I believe a greater share of contemporary criticism of policing should be directed towards those who pressure and enable these incidents to occur.
Additionally, what micro-level actions should be taken? Should officers wear audio recorders? Video recorders? If yes to any of these, where would the funding come from to pay for the technology, training, gathering and analysis of data, etc when local municipalities are strapped for cash?
I wonder what the levels of prevalence are among departments. Do police departments with better managers/leaders or a larger budget have lower levels of incidence? What about entities where the police chiefs are less politically-attached? How much of the lying that occurs stems from drug arrests that are incentivized through funding by the federal government? What initially seemed to me like the typical anti-police propaganda that's prevalent online, evolved into relevant discourse on the larger forces that indirectly cause these occurrences of police misconduct. I think this broader critique of policing, with its understanding of interacting institutional forces, is much more relevant and appropriate than the typical all-police-officers-and-departments-are-inherently-bad rhetoric that's floating around online.
And Salena, if you read the available internal LAPD correspondence, court documents, and character insights from his ex-girlfriend and co-workers, you'll probably find it much harder to believe Dorner's claims. This example touches a little on the last line of my previous paragraph: perhaps Dorner knew a large part of the public possesses a preconceived notion that police departments/officers are largely brutal, corrupt, etc, and would be quick to accept his claims as truth, regardless of how erroneous or false (if at all) his claims are.