This title makes it feel like it's an Apple feature, but really it's just a Shortcut someone put together.
It basically just turns down the volume, texts your location to an emergency contact, and opens your camera. It doesn't upload the footage in realtime to a central server as other apps do.
Can you clarify this, does iCloud or Dropbox actually receive video in real time as it's being recorded, or does it only start uploading after the recording is done? Because in the latter case, I doubt it will do much good -- unless perhaps sleeping an iPhone during a recording saves what has been recorded so far and uploads it in the background, which I'm also not sure of.
There’s probably an opportunity here: If there was an app that did streaming video to a server already, the developers could easily add a shortcut to it which started a stream to a server, and you could hook it up to Siri via the Shortcuts app.
Surely there must be apps that offer this functionality already? I'm not app-savvy enough to come up with any examples but I know many years ago there was a lot of talk about Bambuser.[1]
This is cool - I think smartphones are are best defence against violent police oversteps. Now everyone has a camera with them and we are seeing the results. Democratisation of surveillance.
Nope, the law is. Siri wont protect you from being killed. Nor adjusting your behavior. Only the law can be used to overturn this program. But don't hold your breath. They are still killing 4 per day, without any oversight.
Indeed it is. Why install CCTV cameras when everyone is their own camera-person. Solves the low quality camera problem and multi-angle footage. However...
> Democratisation of surveillance.
Mixed with social media, it's now more like self-surveillance. This is just the start and Nextdoor neighbourhoods take this to dystopian levels. But one clever man once compared this to 'Stalin's Dream'. If that's his dream, then it will soon be everyone's nightmare.
Doesn't matter if your device is designed in such a way that it can stream content in a clandestine way, so that it's hard to verify whether it is or not, while sleeping. Of course you can always bypass things like this by starting the whole interaction by grabbing the phone and placing it somewhere else, but that would imply intention which may be even more damaging in a future court case if it could be proven from the phone that it was removed (which you can if it was already recording and streaming) -- and I'd like to think that most people can agree across party lines that police shootings do happen in the "heat of the moment" rather than as planned out homicides.
It also sure wouldn't hurt with mandatory police cameras, it would help police as well as long as they behave, and auditing an official like that shouldn't be controversial.
There’s been a good number of responses to this very point over the last 24 hours. Here’s one from a journalist, Daniel Dale, whose perspective I really like because he’s Canadian, and therefore is less wrapped up emotionally in American politics.
Deadly force isn't the only way police commit violence against impoverished Americans, or against Americans who aren't white (regardless of economic class). You don't have to be murdered by the police for your life to be effectively ended when they make up BS about assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, etc.
Completely agree. Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate(in fact it shows the opposite) it does show that they are discriminated against at a higher rate. Pulled over more, etc.
If I understood the data correctly, African Americans are pulled over more, then after being pulled over they are killed at the same rate as other groups.
That still implies they are killed at a higher rate. The population we're concerned about isn't "people who have already been pulled over".
> Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate
Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.
When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are disputing the causes of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the disparity itself.
I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning why that is and whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.
Yes. You're going to have to direct me to a quote, I don't know what you're referring to. What I see is:
2015:
> A 2015 study found that unarmed blacks were 3.49 times more likely to be shot by police than were unarmed whites. [...] Another 2015 study concluded that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
2016:
> According to The Guardian's database, in 2016 the rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. [...] Another study published in 2016 concluded that the mortality rate of legal interventions among black and Hispanic people was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher than that among white people.
2018:
> A 2018 study found that minorities are disproportionately killed by police but that white officers are not more likely to use lethal force on blacks than minority officers.
2019:
> A 2019 study in the Journal of Politics found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this was "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force." A 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be killed by police than whites and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.
----
I see exactly one study in this section that disputes the disparity itself, and that study was widely criticized and ended up issuing a correction:
> A 2019 study in PNAS concluded from a dataset of fatal shootings that white officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers [...] The study was widely criticized by other academics, who stated that the study's conclusion could not be supported by the data. [...] PNAS issued a correction to the original article.
I don't see data from the FBI mentioned in the racial disparity section. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to.
Again though, you don't need to do a complicated study to find the disparity itself. You can literally just add up the number of deaths for each race and then divide by population numbers in the US for black/white communities. You'll get higher per-million numbers for black communities than for white ones. I'm not sure how someone could dispute that, unless you're arguing that the Guardian is under-reporting white deaths or something[0]. If you want to debate the causes behind that disparity, then that's a separate conversation.
> Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide
victims and off enders. Th e victimization rate for blacks (27.8
per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per
100,000). Th e off ending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost
8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000) (table 1)
From the article
> A 2015 study by Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that there was no racial bias in the use of lethal police force between black and white suspects in similar situations. The study did, however, find that blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of force.
> A 2016 study published in the journal Injury Prevention concluded that African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos were more likely to be stopped by police compared to Asians and whites, but found that there was no racial bias in the likelihood of being killed or injured after being stopped
See my other comment[0], you're making two separate claims here. Why blacks are disproportionately killed by police is a conversation that might be worth having, but it doesn't change the fact that they are disproportionately killed.
As an analogy, a truck driver might be less likely to crash or be killed on any specific drive than I am. However, a truck driver also drives a lot more than I do, so a truck driver is still more likely overall to die in a vehicle crash than I am.
In the same way, even if we lived in a world where blacks were less likely to be killed in an individual police interaction, that doesn't change the fact that a black person is still more likely overall to be killed by a police officer than I am.
Which is why we're seeing calls by protestors to reduce overall police presence in cities and to instead migrate various police responsibilities onto social workers with more directly applicable training.
Naming issues aside, reducing the amount of time the 'truck driver' spends on the road is one of the biggest goals of the "defund the police" movement. But again, that's a separate discussion.
You could very reasonably use a different denominator, but in that case the study would be measuring different things.
"Black people are X percent more/less likely to be killed than white people by police", is a different statement than, "Black people are X percent more/less likely to be killed than white people by police during a police interaction."
The first statement just draws attention to a very straightforwardly observable data trend, the second tries to figure out why the trend exists. It posits that the reason black people are killed at a higher rate might be because they have disproportionately higher numbers of police encounters.
And from there, people can ask why that trend exists, and so on, and so on.
I mean, wearing a body cam all the time is an overkill. That being said, your link does not prove that. The number of people killed by the police is just the tip of the iceberg. There would be an order of magnitude more people being seriously harmed (paralyzed, blinded, etc.) by the police than killed. There would be an order of magnitude more people mildly harmed (bruises, cuts, chipped tooth, etc.) than than seriously harmed.
By the time you get to incidents like police's violent arrest of SNL's Jay Pharoah [0], complete with knee on the neck (fortunately not long enough to kill him), you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people being affected and treated like this every year.
Police killings are a lot like fear of letting kids walk to school, fear of planes, fear of skydiving. I think there is a term for it but I'll just say it's common misconceptions that have been painted wrongly by news and word of mouth.
Murder rates have gone down since 70's and at their lowest point, but with the introduction of national and world news it makes people think murders have gone up, so they don't let their kids walk to school. Some people have an irrational fear of flying because of news. People have fear of skydiving because they watch too many movies and think a parachute will fail, when the data shows the exact opposite. 99% of are deaths not related to parachute failing.
So I see the police killings as a world that has gotten smaller, video camera's in everyones pocket and social media that has painted a picture of world that doesn't exist. It strikes fear into people and the psychological issues will be felt for decades.
Except deaths resulting from your examples are generally not state-sponsored and then covered up by the very same people that are supposed to protect us.
Except there's a huge difference between malfeasance and state-sponsored racism. The former can look like the latter if you ignore statistics and you focus only on emotion.
No, it doesn't work to pull a Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings™ on this. It's not just that they murder, it's that they get away with murder. Once that happens the entire police dept is enabling terrible behavior.
I don't get how people don't understand the distinction. If one airplane crashes that doesn't mean there is an institutional airline safety problem. But if you don't even bother to do an honest investigation about what happened, then we absolutely have an institutional problem.
I think we're having two different conversations here. 1). Are police killings worthy of worrying about? and 2). Do we have a problem with police killings; at large, in the in the ethnic communities, and are police held accountable?
In regards to point 1). The parent comment is expressing worry about a statistically insignificant event (framed properly (unarmed, non-justified, non-suicide)) and the following response frames the fear as statistically insignificant. I think this is undeniable and the reason why data is important. Again, this isn't a conversation about whether this is an institutional problem; it's about whether we should live in constant fear of airlines because one airline crashes.
While 2). is a bit more difficult to breakdown. Yes, I think an easy case can be made about cops needing more accountability (for the sake of police generally and society). but do we need institutional change broadly (accountability +) because the police system is racist against people of color? ....Well, that's a claim. That's where data is important and feelings are no longer relevant.
> Police killings are one of the leading causes of death for young men in the United States.[5] A study by Esposito, Lee, Edwards predicts that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women die as a result of police use of deadly force.[5] The same study predicts the risk is highest for black men, as approximately 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.[5]
The Wikipedia link you're citing does not have data that refutes OPs claim. It mentions several studies that seem to refute it, but in the next sentence(s), shows further studies which refute those.
It records it if you have the Siri Shortcuts app installed and download that user script.
The article points out the Siri command is only for iPhones, but it could also be a Google Routine or an Alexa skill, or there are standalone apps for all three platforms that do the same thing.
Dead is a defeatist attitude. If a countryfolk thinks their country is dead because there are unsolved problems, then the country is dead for real. Defeatists didn't end slavery, end jim crow, win the right to vote. We've been far worse, and we'll get a lot better because there are countryfolk like the ones creating this tooling to fight police brutality.
No, but the people in charge then created the Jim Crow laws, which extended beyond the slavery states.
> end Jim crow
But not its continued influence – not yet. Meanwhile, it's having a resurgence; white supremacist violence is the biggest form of domestic terrorism, and even the President was revoking anti-discrimination legislation as of last week (not in the sensible way that would've had benefits elsewhere, but in the impulsive "I don't like this" way).
If a macro is one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against police brutality, then something is seriously wrong. No, defeatists don't tend to solve problems, but no unacknowledged problem was ever solved.
If you want to solve a problem, start by confronting its extent.
Very, very true. I mean, look at the presidential position; it’s attracted literally the worst person I’ve ever seen in a position of power in a ‘free’ country. :/
Least desirable person, indeed - and that person was chosen by the people. It’s what facepalms were invented for.
Do you really think you can toss bombs like "please check some civilized countries", or "how un-civilized and rotten $country is", and not start a flamewar?
A good rule of thumb; if you're writing about politics, and it takes less than a minute to write, and you're not correcting something specific (preferably with a link), don't say it.
Yes this seems super sad as someone from outside the USA. I admit I know little, but I get the impression the police are more self-governing in the US, where as in the UK/Australia there are independent bodies with teeth that can deal with complaints, and even do major investigations across the entire force, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_the_New_...
Would a federal level watchdog help? Would it even be possible?
Downvote reasons? Happy to edit the question if it's offensive, dumb, or whatever.
Deadly force is just the most extreme of many problems with the police. Consider the hierarchy of problems: deadly force is a subset of police brutality, which is a subset criminal police behavior/lies, all of which are encouraged by a system that rarely punishes bad cops.
Care to elaborate? I get that gun control is indeed an issue worthy of its own debate, but how do you go from discussing police brutality to legally armed civilians being the root of evil?
Not OP - but the absurd prevalence of privately owned guns means that the police go into every interaction thinking that the person on the other side could be armed and could kill them on a whim. They're not even wrong about that. We have more privately owned guns than people of sufficient age to own them.
The police in other countries can take a much more relaxed attitude toward their interactions with the public because there's almost no chance of the person shooting them.
> police go into every interaction thinking that the person on the other side could be armed and could kill them on a whim.
They could be, but are very unlikely to be. Despite the huge number of privately guns owned in America, the vast majority of cops will never be shot at nor have valid reason to shoot at somebody. Cops who constantly fear for their lives are operating under a warped view of reality.
I think it's a culture problem for cops. They hang out on cop forums, cop chat rooms or facebook groups; they read cop newsletters and generally socialize with other cops. These groups have the effect of amplifying stories about violence against cops, because those stories are sensational and of obvious interest to cops, and that amplification in turn gives rise to a warped perspective on how risky their job actually is.
The "only the police" almost makes it sound like that is what is being discussed around gun control laws.
The cops in the US are definitely more jumpy than I'm comfortable with - their natural reaction to a car door closing and someone (or is it just me, I look like a rake with an afro) stepping towards them is to touch their gun, because they treat every person as possibly armed & dangerous.
And it's not like I was in a high crime area either, all I needed was to know my way to SJC having missed 85.
Would the Police have shot Brianna Taylor if her boyfriend wasn't shooting at the cops? Sure, no-knock warrants were a problem. But Kenneth Walker's gun didn't make the situation any better.
I'm not "victim blaming" Kenneth Walker or Brianna Taylor here. Its absolutely the cops fault for messing up the no-knock warrant. But in a country with 2nd amendment, cops have the difficult job of entering homes vs armed neutral parties.
In the UK, cops can go in with nothing but a baton and be fine, because the UK citizenry don't have as many guns as US citizens do.
--------
There's a huge and fundamental difference between UK cops and US cops if only because of the 2nd Amendment issue. Each encounter with the citizenry, even if they are neutral, can end up deadly due to our huge proliferation of guns.
That stress in of itself could be making our cops more trigger happy, because US Cops enter life-or-death situations in higher frequency than other countries.
It isn't Kenneth Walker's responsibility to "make the situation better". It is the police's responsibility to not create an unnecessary life-threatening situation in the first place.
You're arguing that people should be deprived of the ability to defend themselves so that the police don't have to worry about the repercussions of trampling on their civil rights, and that somehow this will result in less trampling.
Ban no-knock raids (which have dubious legality anyway) and situations like this wouldn't happen. Better yet, end the war on drugs altogether. Kenneth Walker keeps his right to self-defense, Breonna Taylor lives, no officer gets shot, the constitution remains unviolated, and nobody goes to jail for victimless crimes. Everybody wins. It is astounding to me that people argue "disarm Kenneth Walker so the police can fuck up his (wrong) house stress-free" is a better solution than that.
right. its not like our second amendment even allows us to protect ourselves from incompetent/evil cops. it only allows for you to shoot other civilians and prey you're in the right. if you even dare try to defend yourself against some plainclothed cops, you'll simply be killed in a heartbeat, or now deal with courts for ages and most likely be charged with something.
You're allowed to defend yourself, with arms and lethal violence, against unlawful police. There's a Supreme Court case about it called John Bad Elk versus US wherein police were trying to arrest John Bad Elk for shooting guns on his own land, which was legal, and when the police made to draw on him he shot them, killing at least one officer, and was found to have acted within the law.
A more recent and more famous example is the rapper Tupac who witnessed police beating up a guy for no reason. Tupac grabbed a gun and told them to stop, and when the police shot at him, he shot back wounding one, and wasn't found to have committed any crime. Randy Weaver shot and killed a federal agent and was exonerated at trial.
These are just examples from memory. I'm sure if you looked you'd find many more. It may not be wise to shoot out with the police, and you'd better be certain you're right, but you're absolutely permitted to use your guns on the police and kill them in some circumstances.
This is categorically false. People can and have prevailed with a self-defense defense against killing police officers who failed to identify themselves as police.
Also, Indiana for example explicitly legalizes home defense against "public servants"[1].
How? How many criminals are members of the NRA? The 2nd Amendment was created precisely as a counter to a tyrannical government. The ACLU fights over the first amendment, the NRA fights over the 2nd — and you can’t have one without the other. Both organizations are valuable. Free speech and free association is an illusion unless there is a means to back it up. If the UK tomorrow decided that everyone had to go to concentration camps, how exactly would that effort be opposed? One of Hilter’s earliest efforts was to disarm civilians. The Soviets also did the same thing. Now why would they do that? To stop gun violence? Of course not, it was to prevent rebellion. Imagine if the students in Tiananmen Square were heavily armed.
This. I watch in disbelief as people totally disregard statistics in leu of mass hysteria. There are some 370MM interactions with police every year in the US and the overwhelming majority of them happen without incident. Moreover something like 8 "unarmed" black men died in 2019 vs 50 "unarmed" white men.
Those who disagree, tell me: the ratio of incarcerated males to females is something like 9:1. Similarly a far greater number of men die at the hands of police than women. Is the justice system biased against men?
And if we extend this myopic logic, is there a huge problem of racism in the black community? Because black on white crime (including violent crime) is something like 10x the rate of white on black crime. Is there a systemic problem with racism in the black community?
The entire country has gone insane.
Edit: if there's something wrong with my reasoning, please feel free to point it out. Silent downvotes only reinforce the stigma, yes, stigma that is now associated with the same rational inquiry that I'm paid to perform each day as a research scientist.
Edit 2: I can't find a source for the 370MM number and I suspect it was generous with the definition of interaction...here's another source that gives just shy of 70MM - still high enough that what's going on is blowing things way out of proportion. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pbtss11.pdf
This data which was pointed here is not correlate well with what you tell: "Police killings are one of the leading causes of death for young men in the United States.[5] A study by Esposito, Lee, Edwards predicts that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women die as a result of police use of deadly force.[5] The same study predicts the risk is highest for black men, as approximately 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...
This study seems very bad and polarizing. "One of the leading causes" is already weasel-wording (one of the ... how many? 100 leading causes?) and "young men" is also a rather unspecific limitation to the most violent/criminal demographic. Homicides aren't even in the top 10 leading (overall) causes of death in the USA, nr. 10 is suicide with > 40.000 per year while deadly force from police is 1/40th of that.
To be fair, homicides account for 14.7% of fatalities of male minors, which is significant (about twice as likely as cancer for that age range.) However only a small percentage of those homicides involve cops..
I don't think it's blowing it out of proportion to have a zero-tolerance policy toward police murdering the people they're arresting. The George Floyd incident is representative of how the police typically behave when you're merely suspected of committing a crime. That officer literally kneeled on the man's face until he passed out and died. Outrage at that is not "out of proportion" it's totally understandable.
One of these days the cops could sit on your neck or your child's neck until you pass out and die. Do you want to live in a society where that's tolerated, or can you agree that it's unacceptable for the police to murder people who are being arrested?
> don't think it's blowing it out of proportion to have a zero-tolerance policy toward police murdering the people they're arresting
Who is arguing this? Anywhere? Why are people being treated as though they're trying to excuse murder? That's dehumanizing.
>One of these days the cops could sit on your neck or your child's neck until you pass out and die
This may seem like a trivial dismissal, but one of us has a different approach to parenting, and I suspect it is shared by approximately 50% of the voting population. I would teach my children to cooperate with police under the circumstances in the Floyd video. I would also teach them not to do drugs in public.
No, this is not victim blaming, and I do believe that the force in this case was excessive and unnecessary. But I also advocate for teaching people to function in a society where their actions affect others and can create dangerous situations unnecessarily.
> Do you want to live in a society where that's tolerated, or can you agree that it's unacceptable for the police to murder people who are being arrested?
Why do you think anyone wants to live in such a society and why do you falsely imply it is tolerated in the USA? The responsible officers for the death of Floyd are already charged - and let's not disingenuously assume a known, violent repeat offender who is obviously on drugs is treated the same as me or you or one of our children.
> There are some 370MM interactions with police every year in the US and the overwhelming majority of them happen without incident.
And this is totally baffling for someone outside the US where crime rates are lower, people are almost never armed and civil liberties aren't so great. The police seem to be doing an amazing job in the USA overall and rare occurrences are being blown way out of proportion.
As un-civilized and rotten as the news portrays things to be, for 99% of the rest of us Americans, this isn't really a common problem. That's not to say it isn't a problem for the few that do experience it (and that problem absolutely needs to be fixed), but just want to point out that what you see publicized is not representative of the country as a whole.
It's more like it's a problem for the 30% or so of Americans who live in or near poverty, and the problem is amplified for that segment of the population that is also non-white because of the systemic racism problem we have.
That's one interpretation. Another is that a certain percentage of Americans live in areas where crime is not just more prevalent, but (unfortunately) it's also the only thing some people living there have ever known. Areas with higher crime rates also tend to have higher police involvement (and no, law enforcement doesn't solve crime, but it is necessary to respond and help victims of crime), and where you have more involvement, you'll have higher raw numbers of anything that follows a normal distribution (e.g., moral judgement of local law enforcement officers). We can do a lot to help skew that distribution toward better-trained, effective law enforcement, but it's still a distribution, and as much as it comes at the cost of real human lives, there will be outliers in every population.
I hope it's not for the sake of people of the USA. But Overall the picture drawn by media/people on different aspects of the society there, does not seem to be bright.
Worst of all, USA tries to render itself as a global heaven and better than every other country but still.
I left a country (Turkey) that's considered 3rd world by the rest of the West for Ireland a few years ago. But I wouldn't even consider exchange Turkey with USA.
That's how USA is seen from outside (at least by my perspective)
I think this is an outstanding idea. But if it's to be credible, the recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user, and immediately available to law enforcement.
Heads I win, tails you lose is not credible. It's just riot bait.
As a practical matter, though, being able to pick and choose only the most inflammatory and out-of-context audio/video pretty much ruins this as a real source of truth.
I thought the police were largely required to wear body cams plus have dash cams in the US. If that is true then there is no need to share the footage, since law enforcement should already be in possession of recordings of an incident.
It basically just turns down the volume, texts your location to an emergency contact, and opens your camera. It doesn't upload the footage in realtime to a central server as other apps do.