Press is a thing people do, not a credential people have. All people should have freedom to observe and report on (to the extent they wish or do not wish to) actions of the state. Restricting that should have severe punishment.
The reason they have special protection is because the constitution grants them special protection. The question of who is "the press" in this day and age where anyone can publish anything is certainly up for debate though.
We already have tons of statutes for all sorts of assault/battery with modifiers if they are done using lethal weapons.
Police have already been demanding that "hate crime" laws (which are historically limited to who you are, not your profession or your choices) be amended for extra harsh punishment for attacks on police officers (despite many other existing statutes with similar purposes).
In the end, prosecutions of police with harsher statutes don't matter unless the conviction rate goes up. Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
Ranking victims by status is a dangerous game.
I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't
> There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.
Supreme court in citizen's united, internal quotation marks omitted. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
> protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others' writings, or tried to get both sides of a story.
9th circuit in Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/01/17/12...
interfering with the evidence of, or the report of a crime? for the purpose of evasion of prosecution? tampering with a witness?
What do you _mean_ that's not included in the parent post? What else do you think the parent is saying if not exactly that?
If we follow the logic of making punishments harsher (say, adding years of prison to a violent cop), what then do we as a society expect is supposed to happen when said cop finally attempts to reintegrate into society after doing their prison sentence? We can't keep "wishing away bad guys" as if real life was a movie that conveniently ends at a happy ending.
If anything, a revamp of the current system needs to _do away_ with special protections and other dis-equalizer factors.
For the matter of police violence specifically, I feel that the courts are not even the best medium for change. For example, why is the topic of police training largely absent in these discussions?
In pre-body cam days Seattle PD got caught video taping protests or demonstrations. The current policy prevents that.
Thus, Seattle cops generally have their cams turned off while dealing with demonstrations or protests.
Social media platforms, take note!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2020/06/03/new-bill... (direct source at https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1267267244029083648)
Obviously lame excuse by the PD as the delete button can do the same.
And conveniently, you don't know if you'll be under investigation or accused of a crime until it's too late to turn the camera on.
Sorry, that excuse doesn't fly. This concern should be addressed by controlling the custody of the footage, not by preventing it from being captured in the first place. In reality, body cameras protect good cops.
Parent post did not mention qualified immunity it doesnt seem.
> Right now, convictions of officers for actions done while in uniform are astronomically low. We need to work the other parts of the problem (gathering evidence, getting police to stand witness against other police, getting DAs to actually charge and push for convictions, firing of officers for conduct unbecoming an officer, etc).
it didnt say the low rate was due to qualified immunity
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...
Ending qualified immunity doesn't do anything to help the application of criminal penalties against police who violate the law, it only restores the civil liability for those actions.
The ACLU says, "There is a long history of law enforcement compiling dossiers on peaceful activists exercising their First Amendment rights in public marches and protests, and using cameras to send an intimidating message to such protesters: “we are WATCHING YOU and will REMEMBER your presence at this event.”"
I don't remember anything like that happening, at least not recently. Do you? The FBI behaved that way towards MLK, certainly, but it didn't have anything to do with body cameras.
In any case, I haven't argued, and won't argue, that police officers, or even the department itself, should have access to the footage except when necessary to defend themselves. Ideally it would be encrypted with a key held by an oversight board with substantial civilian representation.
Both?
I don't believe anyone was asked do pick. It's a false dichotomy.
I didn't name check it, but if you check my post history there's a reason I didn't call for an outright repeal of QI -- I don't yet know what the effect of that would be or what measures might replace it.
I'm all for removing QI (and outlawing indemnification of LEOs in employment contracts) and replacing QI with something like professional insurance, but from my understanding the problem isn't that "QI prevents cases from being brought to court", but that DAs don't actually bring cases to court which could beat the QI standard.
Also, in my understanding, QI is simply protection against civil actions, not criminal prosecution. To repeat - I think the core problem is more that DAs don't bring the cases, not that the law is insurmountably high.
If more police were tried in criminal cases, that would make it far easier to build evidence for a civil case which could overcome the QI standard. OJ Simpson was acquitted in the murder trial, but lost his entire wealth in the subsequent civil trial to his in-laws.
My list was not comprehensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
"Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine in United States federal law that shields government officials from being sued for discretionary actions performed within their official capacity, unless their actions violated "clearly established" federal law or constitutional rights. Qualified immunity thus protects officials who "make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions", but does not protect "the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law"."
Is the bill of rights not "clearly established"? They've had long enough.
To me the phrasing seems clear, it's a lack of political will that's the issue. Not the law.
https://reason.com/2020/05/19/qualified-immunity-supreme-cou...
Plus, I've seen little textual basis for qualified immunity at all.