Posted on 05/17/2013 6:30:08 AM PDT by Altariel
A woman says that she warned police she was filming a fatal encounter between six of them and another man. She says police took her phone before she could post the video to the Web. There are now suggestions the footage was deleted.
Cell phones seem to be causing the police increasing unease.
It's quite easy for ordinary people to film officers in the line of duty, and sometimes that duty can seem to be excessively dutiful.
This seems to be the view of Maria Melendez, who says she used her phone to film a case of what appeared to be fatal police brutality, only to have it confiscated without a warrant. Worse, reports are now emerging that some of the footage may have been deleted by the police.
As The New York Times reports, Melendez was leaving the Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, Calif., in the early hours of May 8 when she witnessed an altercation.
She says she saw six sheriff's deputies hitting a man with a club and kicking him.
She took out her cell phone and told the deputies what she was doing. It's unclear whether she thought this might get them to stop. If that was the case, this doesn't seem to have happened.
She says the man screamed and cried for help for a total of eight minutes. He finally fell silent, and the police then allegedly tied him up and dropped him twice on the ground.
It was only then, Melendez said, that they enacted CPR. David Sal Silva, 33, died less than an hour later.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
Never tell police you are recording them
Almost all police vehicles have cameras....so they already consent to be recorded
Also, if so close to hospital, their cameras should also be recording
I expect her rationale was that if she told them they were being recorded, they would have pangs of conscience and stop beating the man brutally.
She failed to consider that if they do not fear their actions being recorded by a righteous and holy God, they will certainly not fear them being recorded by one of His creatures.
This should be a felony. In fact, if any aspect of the man’s death is a crime, then deleting the footage is evidence tampering which is also a crime. Officers who blatantly cover up their own criminal actions deserve to be charged under title 18, sec. 241 and 242 official oppression, and deprivation of rights under color of authority.
And I'm sure someone will say "there's an app for that!"
If asked, just tell them the memory card is on it’s way to 9News.
Don’t forget the RICO act if more than one officer colluded to cover up their crimes.
Absolutely.
Parenthetically, I wonder when the last time this portion of the US code was actually used as the basis for any criminal charges against an LEO?
It comes down to he said, she said. There have always been people in rough neighborhoods willing to attest to non-existent police brutality. Cell phones with video recording capability simply provide the basis of an authoritative-sounding narrative. She may have recorded a video, or she may be lying. However, the bottom line is that without a video, Internal Affairs has bupkis.
The admitted confiscation of the phones is conclusive proof of corruption and obstruction of justice if the video was deleted.
Under the law, given this scenario, all reasonable conclusion will be made against those who took the phones and erased the video.
If the cops did nothing wrong, they would not have confiscated the phones.
Not when “he” erased the video.
If he was doing nothing wrong, he would have no problem permitting her to record him, as evidence that “he” was within the law.
One solution to this is to demand a law which, similar to refusing a breathalyzer, gets you the same penalty as if you took the test and failed.
If a cop, destroys evidence then he should be immediately convicted of the accused crime.
If presumed guilty is good for us only seems fair to use the same logic on them. Destroy evidence you are guilty.
We must hold people who are given power over us to at bare minimum the same standards/punishments we face. In reality, as they are given power, and if they abuse it, the jail time should be quadrupled.
The confiscation of the phone may not show anything. To my knowledge, there's no electronic trail of what's done on the phone if it does not involve communications. The way flash memory works is that there's no way to figure out whether something was recorded and deleted or if no recording was made in the first place. And if something was deleted, there's no way to find out who did it or when.
If there was nothing amiss, why confiscate the phones?
You can’t possibly be so ignorant as to think the cops were not attempting to obstruct justice.
The phones might have been confiscated as the witnesses took them out to record the events. Unless squad car or other video shows otherwise, there's no proof that the cops confiscated them after recordings were made. I'm not saying that these cops necessarily have clean hands. I'm just saying that based on what I've read, I don't know if there's a case for disciplinary and/or criminal charges.
You are lying and being intellectually dishonest.
Did you serve on the jury in the O.J. murder trial?
I have first-hand knowledge.
Android phones at least for some reason keep hidden files of the group of thumbnails created every time you decide you want to look at pictures and video. This would show at least that there was some kind of movie there.
As to flash memory, it's invariably treated like a DOS hard drive, and the same tools you can use to (sometimes) recover "deleted" files from a DOS hard drive can be used on USB flash drives and the flash memory in a phone as well.
A second strategy for recovering something stored and deleted would be to try to recover the file at the level that the flash memory controller wrote it, not at the level that DOS wrote it. That would be very specialized work to be done by the manufacturer.
I can assure you I'm telling the truth about what I really think. As to whether a criminal homicide actually occurred, only the cops at the scene and the witnesses can truly know. I can't lie about what I saw, since I wasn't a witness.
On the OJ case, I think he's as guilty as sin. But that's just my view. The common thread through my opinions on both of these cases is my inclination to believe the testimony of law enforcement. The difficulty with witness testimony in rough neighborhoods is that many individuals living there are not only of dubious character, they are friends or relatives of the kinds of the criminals who live there. They don't only not snitch on the local criminals - they also actively stand up for them. And for area civilians that might speak up for the police in such cases, doing so is viewed as equivalent to snitching, meaning that they are painting a "beat or kill me" sign on their backs.
I have first-hand knowledge.
Android phones at least for some reason keep hidden files of the group of thumbnails created every time you decide you want to look at pictures and video. This would show at least that there was some kind of movie there.
As to flash memory, it's invariably treated like a DOS hard drive, and the same tools you can use to (sometimes) recover "deleted" files from a DOS hard drive can be used on USB flash drives and the flash memory in a phone as well.
A second strategy for recovering something stored and deleted would be to try to recover the file at the level that the flash memory controller wrote it, not at the level that DOS wrote it. That would be very specialized work to be done by the manufacturer.
Thanks for the tips. I had thought that flash drives were a special case and that everything deleted went to bit heaven. My experience is that stuff deleted from flash cards or USB flash drives don't show up in the recycle bin.
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