That's not how real-world police departments work, at least where I live. The police are lazy. They receive many complaints, and ignore most of them. Coming to the police with allegations and no evidence simply doesn't go anywhere.
Audit logs I provide won't be enough for criminal prosecution. They would be enough evidence to cause my local police to investigate, as well as adequate cause for a warrant to Google.
If I take the issue to court, I can either prove I didn't do the 'crime', or argue there is insufficient evidence. But police officers testimonies carry a lot of weight, so that is not a fruitful path.
It is still unclear to me what you are exactly saying.
I made a complaint on an officer once and the next day his supervisor (who is Chief of Police now) called me up and said,
"... are you suuure you want to go through with this? Because if we investigate and can't prove any wrong-doing, we will charge you with filing a false complaint!"
Now, I didn't back down and got a letter from them saying, "we investigated and, although we are not going to tell you the outcome for privacy reasons if there was anything we would have given the appropriate punishment," or something along those lines.
I think that a civilian-oversight board (and I am fine with making them have security clearances) that can look into these once a year to make recommendations to the City Commission is not too much to ask for considering this is paid for with tax money and currently has little to no oversight.
The police didn't act in a crazy fashion at all. They responded to a complaint, collected evidence, checked it against vehicle owner records. Then they visited the owner of the vehicle, gathered some more information. When an arrest warrant was issued (by the court, not by the police) months later, the police telephoned the author of the article to advise her about it and make arrangements for her to come to court.
I've said repeatedly that I don't think there was any point in bringing a prosecution. since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities. The police didn't do anything abnormal in this case.
You also reminded me that I never heard back from any of the misconduct investigations I started against the various officers. I will FOIA now and update. There was one incident where I was walking out of jail and two officers from another jurisdiction, operating outside of their legal authority, cuffed me up, without any arrest warrant and put me in jail and I was held for over three years on that one alone. I want to see what the reports on that one say. I also filed one against the sheriff as I found an old law which says it is a crime if the sheriff does not provide detainees with three hot meals a day, and yet we only got one a day. It is literally a crime. But how do you report a police officer committing a crime? It is practically impossible, especially when he is the guy in charge.
Edit: Law is here https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2004&C... "The Warden of the jail shall furnish each prisoner daily with as much clean water as may be necessary for drink and personal cleanliness, and serve him three times a day with wholesome food, well cooked and in sufficient quantity."
It's near impossible to even charge a cop or a prosecutor with a crime. I had cops and prosecutors commit crimes against me, but I ran into dead ends every which way I tried to even file police reports etc. Not a single police agency will take a report against an officer or a prosecutor. And in theory you can report crimes directly to a prosecutor's office, but again, they won't take reports against police officers (who are the ones that keep them in business) nor other prosecutors.
I don't know what the solution is.
Chicago has an agency specifically to report police misconduct, but it seems to get shut down every couple of years due to rampant misconduct inside the agency.
Evidence could be extremely obvious, for example an IP addresses logging into a victim's account. It happens all the time.
Or it could be a trumped up accusation and an unconstitutional warrant.
We simply don't have the information. An honest an intelligent article would have articulated this question as the Crux of the matter, opposed to obfuscating it and claiming the warrant was unconstitutional.
I'm personally very opposed to a police corruption and overreach, but also hate skewed articles that mislead. Real reform needs to come from a place of accuracy opposed to hype and misinformation.
there is a police conduct complain procedure. but it can only be used within 30 days of the incident, not an option when you are in enthralled in proccedings. also mountain view PD for example hides the complaint forms from you, and only provides them on demand. Also many Califiornia PD use an anti constitutional clause on the complaints forms, which states that any complaint can land You in jail if found unfounded. And almost every complaint will end up unfounded when filed, still worth it cause it stays in the police officers file indefinitely and if those complaints add up the officer will not be trusted by courts. Point is everybody is discouraged to complain about police misconduct. Myself, i can't dedicate my life fighting this one incident.
I'm not talking about not-reporting, i'm talking about the uselessness of reporting... you report, the police does nothing. Who are they going to sue? You did what you had to do, the police will do nothing, and suing the police for not investigating 5000 different people from all around the world... well.. good luck with that.
I'm not talking about not-reporting, i'm talking about the uselessness of reporting... you report, the police does nothing. Who are they going to sue? You did what you had to do, the police will do nothing, and suing the police for not investigating 5000 different people from all around the world... well.. good luck with that.
So, get police to come out for X when you haven't done X. Then do X and police should ignore it cause last time they had evidence of X it turned out to be wrong?
Police should always investigate. They should have history of previous investigations, but that should not stop them from future investigations.
Legal requests should go through Legal channels. You can have all the evidence you want, but do you really want the justice system involved to be administered by a registrar? No. You don't. You want it to go through the actual Justice system.
If you should be upset with anyone, it's your local police who didn't escalate the case further.
Unlikely. In the case you describe without additional evidence they would have no basis for an arrest (otherwise you could have anyone arrested arbitrarily by accusing them of same). The police would likely only involve themselves if they actually succeeded in running you down. Even if there were video surveillance available they aren't going to go get a warrant and review the tapes because some guy came in accusing someone. It's simply not how that works.
The police (in the USA) are reactive and respond after crimes are committed, not before (unless they are responding to social disorder requests, which is generally unrelated to crime). Even then they choose which crimes they deem worthy of responding to (the classic example being rape victims being dissuaded from proceeding with making a police report).
Most people have a mistaken mental model of how police actually function. Most police officers are about as non-proactive as you can get (except near the end of the month when the traffic ticket quotas are due).
To be clear, your actual experience is why you are so convinced that this exercise is pointless, because you're sure the cops will very helpfully tell you how to file a complaint should you ever need to, because you do not demonise them?
Trying to get a prosecution against a cop is almost impossible. For starters, the primary body you must report a crime by a cop to is the police station where he works, as generally they will have jurisdiction over the issue. And they are going to laugh you out of the station. What's your next move? Go to the prosecutor and complain? ROFL.
Believe me, I've tried all of these avenues. I should scan the letters I've received from these agencies, they're hilarious. Basically they'll come back and say that they have a policy of not investigating crimes by their officers and officers from other jurisdictions. I've even taken this through the courts. If the crime was committed as part of an investigation into a suspected crime, then the courts ruled that it is acceptable and not actionable.
The news articles you see where the cops actually got indicted are the million-to-ones. Even Kim Foxx (State's Attorney for Cook County - i.e. Chicago) has stated in interviews that even if she gets an indictment against a cop, getting a conviction is almost impossible.
Apologies for my ignorance but how is this going to police the police? I read the original blog post, there was lots of inferences/could and might be's/etc made but little in the way of proof of anything. What's to stop the police saying it was just circumstance that provided your results?
I'm not here defending the police, or denigrating the project, just playing devils advocate. What happens if the police just ignore you?
Yeah, why not have the police just make arrests and have the courts hold hearings? Have people who actually handle criminal investigations handle this!
Audit logs I provide won't be enough for criminal prosecution. They would be enough evidence to cause my local police to investigate, as well as adequate cause for a warrant to Google.
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