How about this... we'll pay them something extra for wearimg a camera, but then officers are personally liable for any wrongdoing. No more qualified immunity, and settlements are paid by the officer and not a fund of public money. If the cops don't like that they can go get their own liability insurance and they pay the premiums with that camera bonus.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Officers should carry professional malpractice insurance just like doctors and lawyers. Just like doctors and lawyers, if the officer has too many malpractice claims, their insurance premiums rise. The cost of those premiums should be on the officer.
This will result in good cops being readily insurable and able to afford their insurance payments, while bad cops will price themselves out of being cops. Our country loves capitalism. What is more capitalist that this?
Absolutely. But the cop mafia, err, sorry, the cop union will never go for that...
Also they get a pay cut in the same amount of this increase if they also choose to carry a gun.
You’re thinking about indemnification. The thing that makes taxpayer cough up when cops fuck up.
Americans demand police stop murdering people.
We'll talk about pay when you can play nice
I say no camera, no qualified immunity.
How about no.
I don't think directly linking to the Wayback Machine is such a good idea. They're a non-profit with significant operating costs, and if you use them as a mirror for sites like the NYT instead of as just an archive, then those sites will start to see them as such, which in the best case scenario means blocking them from further archiving and in the worst case scenario means suing them for copyright infringement that no longer falls under the archival exceptions of copyright law.
EDIT: Also, they (understandably) block users who make too many requests too quickly, and if the link includes referrer metadata it's conceivable they'll do the same for Lemmy.World as a whole.
It's a potential problem, so please tell me how you'd post links to paywalled news.
One option might be to paste the article text into the post body. Or put it in a comment, if that doesn't work for some reason?
If it's readable on the Wayback Machine, then that might mean they're actively cooperating with archiving efforts by lowering their paywall for specific crawlers. But if we use that to get around the paywall, they might see it as the IA abetting piracy.
Brief excerpts are considered "fair use" and permissible, but republishing entire articles or even extended excerpts would be a copyright violation.
Yes, of course. Likewise, archiving is an exception/limitation to copyright law where you are allowed to store and even redistribute content, but that falls apart quickly when you become a competitor to the original publisher.
What I'm saying is that by using the Wayback Machine as a paywall-bypassing mirror, all that is accomplished is to shift the liability onto them. I like the Internet Archive, so I don't think that's the solution. (And frankly, I'm not really comfortable with helping people bypass the NYT's paywall either, in this day and age of truth decay.)
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a factual news story that was reported on only by paywalled sources. Perhaps the Business Insider version of this story, which I don't think is paywalled, or its licensed Yahoo News mirror, could have been used instead, possibly with a link to the NYT version in the comments?
Lemmy is a link-aggregation site, but tiny potatoes compared to bigger link-aggregators like Reddit and Twitter, and this page of bad-cop news is barely a tater tot even on Lemmy. Nobody's sent a cease-and-desist letter to Reddit, let alone Lemmy, and I've been doing this for decades and never been blocked by the archival sites.
Your worries are about hypotheticals that haven't even been threatened. I'm goiing to worry about bad cops instead.
??? Wow, hostile. You're the one who brought up fear of copyright violation when I suggested including the content in the post itself, so IDK why suddenly you're saying "Nobody’s sent a cease-and-desist letter to Reddit, let alone Lemmy".
IDGAF about Lemmy, relatively speaking.
You're abusing the Internet Archive, which is already under siege from publishers, and gets more important with every website that goes down or bad cop that tries to erase the past, is all.
I like your suggestion of seeking similar coverage from a different source, instead of the archive sites. That would be preferable, but would take serious time. Consider yourself invited to pitch in!
Non-hostility verified by adding a smiley-face. :)
Oh no. So maybe dont post them at all? Those sites can go fuck themselves. Theres plenty of ads but i have to subscribe too. To each and every one of them. Soon im gonna buy more “news” subscriptions then beer in a month.
There's the crux — unless you're a library, a corporation, or a rich bastard, nobody can afford to buy a subscription to every publication on the web, or even every publication they read. I sure can't.
A 'micropayment' system would be an answer and provide support for independent media. You purchase a subscription to many or most news sites, and those sites are paid incrementally based on what sites you visit and articles you read.
Newspapers hate that idea, though. They don't want a few dollars from each of many people; they want bigger dollars from smaller audiences, I guess.
“If I don’t get to beat some brown without repercussions, then I want to be paid for restraint!” - these cops probably.
The police in the us is such a fucking joke. The country would probably work better if it was dissolved.
In acid preferably.