Citizen Recording Of Police Proves Officer Lied About Arrest
from the who-watches-the-watchers dept
Reason.com alerts us to an LA Times article covering a recent trial in which a private citizen's cellphone video proved officers lied about an arrest, resulting in the acquittal of a young man accused of carrying a concealed firearm.According to police reports after the arrest:
Deputy Levi Belville testified that he saw Gipson in the side yard run and toss a loaded revolver onto the roof of a detached garage. The deputy said he ordered Gipson to stop and that the suspect walked back to Belville, who then detained him.However, the cellphone video depicted a very different chain of events:
The footage did not show Gipson running, tossing a gun or walking back to the deputies to be detained. Instead, the grainy video showed deputies arriving and walking past Gipson, who was standing against a wall of the house near the rear of the yard. One of the deputies, Raul Ibarra, returned to Gipson and escorted him to the back of the yard.This new footage led to a change in the way the officers describe the events. This inconsistency in the officer's testimony led jurors to acquit Gipson of the charges.
Jurors said they did not find Belville's trial testimony credible and believed he changed his account of the arrest after being confronted with the video. They also questioned why a deputy with more than 10 years' experience would walk past a man who had just thrown a gun without immediately detaining him or warning colleagues.Even as police and governments around the country are fighting the practice of the public recording the actions of the police, stories like this show the power that such recordings have in administering a fair justice system. Without this video, the trial would have been based entirely on the officer's testimony of events rather than on hard evidence.
I will close with a few words from Gipson himself in response to these events, "I never thought an officer would lie."
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Police are there to protect us, HA!
We are recorded all the time just living our normal lives. I can share over 10,000 links to police stopping people from video recording their actions in what should be a 100% (no grey area) legal situation.
Even at the height of the communist regime in Russia they didn't arrest people most times. They just took the video recording device.
Why are we letting our country become a police state?
Just one example
http://www.teaparty.org/article.php?id=1247
Police should not feel any threat to being videoed nor should they be allowed to do anything they don't want recorded.
The video from OccupyWallSt.org at http://youtu.be/jYaA-34c-vI just shows my point.
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Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
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Re: Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
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Re: Re: Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
Anyone with some street knowledge knows that drugs seized are invariably used by the cops themselves with two exceptions: first, they keep just enough as evidence to ensure the highest-possible-degree conviction; second, when the seizure is too high-profile for them to get away with it.
I suppose a potential third exception is the apocryphal "honest cop", but those are quickly identified and marginalized by their peers -- the guy sitting there directing traffic or "overseeing" a road-closed blockade is usually some honest schmuck the corrupt cops want out of their way while they terrorize and exploit the general populace.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
RIP reason.
The 'net derp is strong in you.
For the record, I do believe that it's wrong for any law to criminalize recordings of police officers as they perform their duties and tasks. They are public officials, paid by public taxes performing their job in public.
I also believe that the US is becoming a police state because people are allowing it in the name of safety, children, fighting terrorism or whatever.
However, the sort of idiocy you are spouting does not help anyone. In fact it makes it easier to shake off valid criticism of law enforcement because it gets drowned out by the moronic "all cops are corrupt" screaming.
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Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
Just make sure you don't try to email that to anyone.
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Re: Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
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Re: Police are there to protect us, HA!
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you're not a terrorist, are you zach?
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Re:
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ask their spokesman mike "HUSSEIN" masnick.
the truth is: we need to be constantly watched, but only if those eyes belong to the good men of law enforcement and homeland security.
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I feel insulted. A commy OR a terrorist? Why can't I be both?
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a) a Traveler;
b) a terrorist; or
c) Irish?
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Freedom of speech was such an important tenet of the idea in the creation of America they made it the first right!!!!!
First Amendment – Establishment Clause, Free Exercise Clause; freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly; right to petition
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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Re: Re: Re:
> tenet of the idea in the creation of America
> they made it the first right!!!!!
The Bill of Rights is not listed in order of importance. The Founders made that clear in their writings and the courts have reinforced it for 200+ years.
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Troll ....
The "" Hard sell "" tactic you use , in an attempt to dictate , the win of an argument..... is so transparently propaganda motivated or just plain ....TROLL
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This guy needs to be forced to sit through a 24 hr. marathon of The Shield. Problem solved....
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well the best way to get that hard info is to waterboard him a little bit
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This will be a logistical nightmare.
We can probably finance it with a "Innocence certificate fee" but blimey, how are we going to handle the logistics?
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Virtual Water-board
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Re:
they said he was innocent why are you trying to punish him?
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Good Christians.
Honest Police Officers.
Caring Doctors.
REALITY CHECK.... people are people.
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except for the robots.
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We do have feelings you know, or at least reasonably accurate aproximations.
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Nothing To See Here Folks
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Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
WE really fight them half as much as we should.
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Re: Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
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Re: Re: Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Nothing To See Here Folks
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How many other time has this one cop lied?
How has this impacted the people that he lied about?
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A cop told me this, so it must be fact.
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Thankfully
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Can't record video
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From "Eight Keys to Eden"
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Re: From "Eight Keys to Eden"
True. But how many of you have spine sufficient to attempt to do so AND persevere until you KNOW that the change that must happen in America is underway?
Hint: How many of you have acted on your LAWFUL DUTY to refuse to support a society that would be party to the use of weapons of mass murder? (Hint: Read "The Nuremberg Principles", to which America is a signatory and has signed a treaty to fully respect those Principles and that all of its citizens are similarly obliged to refuse to support a society that would be party to mass murder.)
Then, access "The Tax Refusal" and learn about your imprescriptible right and duty in such regard and GET BUSY doing what ALL Americans should have done so long ago. Rant over.
Now, have a look at something positive with regard to helping the poor, get involved and maybe, just maybe, win a prize for doing so.
Thank you.
Daniel J. Lavigne, Founder
MedicAngel®
http://www.MedicAngel.com
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Gibson's comment..
What a naive, dumb f@#k! They will always protect their own.
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Everyone lies
You just need to pick a side whose lie you can support.
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Re: Everyone lies
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Re: Everyone lies
Everyone lies, but few lie all the time.
I have a rule about how to tell when someone is trustworthy. Once I have a good idea about what things I can trust a person about and what things I can't, I call them "trustworthy," since nobody is a saint.
With most people, it's doesn't matter much whether I can trust them or not. Cops are different, though, because they have so much power that it's dangerous to trust a cop when the trust is unwarranted. And unless I know the cop pretty well, I cannot trust them.
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Freedom of the press should protect filiming
I can't imagine these laws against it are constitutional
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Police Lie
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a "throw down gun"
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22throw+down+gun%22
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officers lie all the time
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Lying is part of every cop's bag of tricks
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We have departments that take an active role in going after citizens. The police department, the FBI, the CIA, etc... all dedicate their resources towards 'going after' and 'serving' citizens. None of them are dedicated to go after misbehaving government officials.
Sure, they can go after them, but that's not their primary focus. Their primary focus is not to protect the citizens from its government.
The courts are designed to do this, but the courts role is passive. They only respond to lawsuits and allegations, they never initiate anything. and citizens often don't have the resources to sue a government official or various government agencies.
We need a governmental agency that takes an active role in going after government crime and prosecuting it. It should ONLY be allowed to go after government officials and various government agencies, it should NEVER be allowed to go after regular citizens, because we have enough agencies that do that already. Allowing it to go after citizens would simply distract it from its primary focus, it should have no such authority to ever go after an ordinary citizen for anything. Only on-duty government officials and various government agencies.
The assumption, one that underlies our system, that an average government employee is somehow less likely to perform a criminal act than an average citizen needs to be scrutinized.
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These guys are actually not bad at doing what you're describing, but most of the time it's on a fiscal level rather than a legal or moral level.
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It's the way..
Don't forget that number of arrests and tickets are the way cops are rated for job performance. Helping people no longer counts.
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