At about the same time a thousand different people noticed that Texas DPS released a video of Sandra Bland’s arrest that has a number of suspicious moments on it. And no, I do not mean a jackass officer pulling over and then roughing up a young woman for no apparent reason at all. I mean that quite a few cars and pedestrians seem to rewind and go by twice while the audio track rolls on seemingly uncut. You can see several examples below from about 32 to 34 minutes. Check it out before someone at Texas DPS wises up and takes the video down.
If video got spliced out, that would indicate they cut something from the audio and needed to shrink the vid to make it fit. But in this case someone spliced extra video in. Why would you do that? The most obvious would be if you needed to add some extra dialogue in post. In support of that point, notice that the hiccups mostly happen after they start talking and before he arrests her. In that case an audio expert – god knows the internet has a few – will probably ferret out the bogus dialogue by the end of the day. Any other ideas? Discuss in the comments.
***Update***
I have a confession to make. I hate watching internet videos. If a something important comes out I usually wait for transcripts and descriptions by writers whose judgment I trust. I can’t remember the last time I watched an important presidential speech or Daily Show clip in a web browser (James Bond trailers, ok). For people who suffer from the same condition that I do, low tech cyclist has a helpful comment.
Cars go ‘poof’ and disappear at 32:38, 33:06, 33:25, 33:55, and 33:59. And they’re the same cars we see repeating their trips down that road several times – the two white cars and the grey car on the right, headed away from us, are pretty easy to identify on their multiple repeats.
Ergo someone is both cutting and pasting. This is one shady ass video.
Bobby B.
Splicing dialogue in? What kind of police force would have the resources and sheer will…oops, Texas.
JPL
It makes me question whether or not any video from the dashcam or the jail can be trusted.
The stop was bogus.
dmsilev
The fascinating questions of “who” and “why” come to mind. Also, isn’t tampering with evidence a criminal offense?
Joey Maloney
Re-using video segments? What kind of idiots would think they could get away with…oops, Texas.
low-tech cyclist
Between 32:38 and 32:39, a car simply blinks out of existence as it’s coming even with the cars stopped on the right.
serge
Amazing…cars just disappear and then reappear.
MomSense
Those bastards are trying to cover up what they did to Sandra Bland.
JPL
The police had to know that the dashcam video could be used against them and Sandra’s death, conveniently means she can’t sue the department.
@MomSense: yup
debbie
Or maybe to make it look like he gave her more of a chance to back down in some sick effort to make the cop look more reasonable.
MattF
But the notion that no one would notice or care is the real WTF. Do police tamper with evidence? Um… could be… it’s just possible…
Ryan
Holy smokes! I would have never noticed cars appearing twice within two minutes if it hadn’t been mentioned. The audacity is astonishing.
opiejeanne
I haven’t been able to watch it yet, just can’t handle it. The whole story is just so terrible.
MomSense
@Ryan:
It’s like the Chinese government using Top Gun footage on a live broadcast.
ETA Can’t remember where I saw this last night, but someone said that the black borders on the side of this video are not consistent with other dashcam videos from this department. They were wondering if those borders were added to conceal what the officer was doing to Bland after he pulled her out of the car.
Another Holocene Human
@JPL:
This.
Gimlet
Makes you wonder about this video too
Video shows Bland was alone in her cell before she died, he said.
But Elton Mathis, Waller County district attorney, said Friday that no cameras were in the jail cell where she was found dead. Cameras monitoring the hall outside her cell show no one entered or left it between the time she last spoke with deputies through an intercom system and when her body was discovered
Belafon
@opiejeanne: If nothing else, turn the sound off and forward to about the 32:25 mark. The cars alone will make you angry.
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev:
Let’s Be Cops
Albequerque cops were stealing evidence out of the evidence room (cash, guns) and they, gosh darn it, despite losing several convictions, just don’t know who coulda done it. Mm.
different-church-lady
I thinks I sees the problem…
Ryan
@MomSense: Good to know, and now that you mention it, I do remember hearing about the Top Gun footage. Thanks for the laugh.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: Dave Chappelle: just sprinkle some crack on him
low-tech cyclist
Cars go ‘poof’ and disappear at 32:38, 33:06, 33:25, 33:55, and 33:59. And they’re the same cars we see repeating their trips down that road several times – the two white cars and the grey car on the right, headed away from us, are pretty easy to identify on their multiple repeats.
Lavocat
Given what I know of the arrogance and hubris of police officers in general, NOTHING would surprise me. Remember, it’s not that these guys think that they are ABOVE the law. No, these guys think that they ARE THE LAW and, therefore, they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want and make it all okay after the fact.
After all, WTF else are police unions for anyway?
Murder a black woman for a spurious traffic offense? Watch how quickly the apologists step forward and rationalize every last thing the cops did. Including murdering an innocent black woman.
It’s not just Texas, folks. It’s AMERICA.
debit
@JPL:
Fixed that for you.
Gimlet
Now that they have been caught at it, other PDs will learn from their mistake. By that I mean they will improve their editing skills not that they will quit editing evidence.
Luther Siler
How the fuck are these idiots dumb enough to think they can get away with this in 2015? It’s easier to get away with the actual murder than with altering video and then putting it where people can see it.
HRA
I have not read the comments and will do so after. I did earlier read about the tape being tampered. I am not normally a conspiracy theorist. The first foremost thought after reading that piece was she was setup and they were waiting for her. Of course, the question now would be who and how. Later!
SuperHrefna
@Gimlet: Yes, they could easily have spliced that footage too. What do you think the chances are of us getting to see the unexpurgated footage of any of these cameras?
dr. bloor
@Joey Maloney:
When you go to school in a state where you learn about Jesus riding dinosaurs in your science class, anything seems possible.
If that’s the “cleaned up” version, the potential content of what’s on the cutting room floor boggles the mind.
Mike J
It’s time for the feds to go all Jade Helm on their asses.
different-church-lady
Look, before you folks go all Zapruder film on this, I can say from professional experience that it is very much within the realm of possibility for these kinds of video glitches to happen all the time, especially with lousy gear operated by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
The key will be how the PD responds: will they say, “Our video transfer was glitchy, sorry, here’s the real deal.” Or will they go, “Gosh, we just don’t know how that happened!”
In the meantime resist the urge to follow the rabbit down the hole. Madness that way lies.
rikyrah
Because…ALL Lives Matter…right?
……………………………..
Black Woman Locked In Psych Ward For 8 Days Because Cops Couldn’t Believe She’s A Businesswoman
Author: Kerry-Anne March 24, 2015 1:41 pm
An African American business woman from Long Island was drugged and locked in a hospital psych ward for eight days because first police, and then doctors could not believe her high-powered career was real.
The hideous ordeal began last September as 32-year-old former Citigroup banker Kam Brock drove her BMW through Harlem. The NYPD pulled her over, accused her of being high on marijuana and impounded her car. No weed was ever found in the vehicle.
The next day, she went to pick up her vehicle and confronted officers about her treatment. She was forcibly sedated, cuffed, and sent to Harlem Hospital. On arrival, she was locked up in the psych ward as an ‘Emotionally Disturbed’ person.
“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out,” Brock recalls. “I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”
But this was only the beginning of her nightmare. As the New York Daily News reports:
Kam Brock’s frightening eight-day ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ ordeal at the mental facility included forced injections of powerful sedatives and demands she down doses of lithium, medical records obtained through her suit filed in Manhattan Federal Court show.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/03/24/black-woman-locked-in-psych-ward-for-8-days-because-cops-couldnt-believe-shes-a-businesswoman/
Gimlet
@SuperHrefna:
Now that they are caught at it, they must name the person responsible and retrieve any cut footage from the car AND the station as well as his report on what he saw.
This will get much more interesting as the people involved get named and more details are added.
Baud
So much for my hope yesterday that the local authorities were really treating this as a murder investigation as they said.
I have to jump off, but do we know the source of this video. All of a sudden it was on YouTube and being reported on, but did an official channel release it publicly? In other words, is there a person that can be held directly accountable for this attempt to manipulate the evidence?
Emma
@rikyrah: Jesus Mary and Joseph, and throw in the Holy Spirit for good measure. I can’t… God almighty. Some days even the cynic in me feels overwhelmed.
Another Holocene Human
@Luther Siler: They done fucked up now.
Kill a Black kid and you have an army of white supremacists waiting in the wings to help you.
Insult the internet’s intelligence, however….
It makes me sad that so many people approve of cops killing people but I’m glad they’re this stupid.
rikyrah
the video was edited, but we’re supposed to take their word about what happened to Sandra Bland.
Man…
GET DA PHUCK OUTTA HERE.
THEY MURDERED HER.
Tim F.
@different-church-lady: I hear your skepticism and get where you are coming from. The thing that did it for me was how the blips only seem to happen at the same time as events which will effect that cop’s civil and criminal liability.
MattF
@different-church-lady: I guess one question is what was actually transferred and how it was transferred– e.g., was it all-digital? Talk about the ‘cutting room floor’ may be entirely misguided.
debbie
@rikyrah:
It’s not like there are only a few African American business-people in New York City. I don’t even know what can be done about this anymore. If the cops haven’t wised up by now, I’m not sure they ever will.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@low-tech cyclist:
Weird it looks like video game lag, in real life,… 0o
Oh, I get it, they spliced the dead time in so the officer could have a monolog and justify what he did. They didn’t hide anything; they added their own commentary in to the video to try and set the narrative.
opiejeanne
@Belafon: Wow. Just. Wow. Just watching the same cars disappear and reappear and reappear over and over at that point is stunning. do they really think we wouldn’t notice?
This is on par with a video recording that purported to show that the defendant in a murder trial was at a party at the time of the shooting, based on the date and time in the lower left. unfortunately, whoever inserted the date for the defendant wasn’t slick enough to make the clock keep time. I was on the jury. More than one of us spotted this before the DA pointed it out to us.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
I remember reading about what they did to Ms. Brock. I don’t even know what to say. Terrifying.
Another Holocene Human
@Emma: Black women’s emotional states are assessed differently. I’m seeing it right now at work. It’s fucking BULLSHIT. Also, how do these asshats walk around calling themselves professionals. They told my coworker who was scared about possibly losing her job, her car, and her home that she was in a manic state and had bipolar disorder. Being upset and stressed about upsetting things in life is not bipolar mania. I’ve known more than my share of people with bipolar in my life, how do these supposed pros not know what it looks and sounds like?
SuperHrefna
@debbie: I don’t the the problem is that the cops haven’t wised up. I think the problem is active malice towards African Americans. The only conclusion I can draw from their actions is that we have a police force who do not think they are here to protect and serve African Americans.
opiejeanne
@different-church-lady: I don’t think what I just saw is something that happens as the result of a glitch.
Tim F.
@rikyrah: Yeah, that one really floored me. I hope the good city of NY pays through the fucking nose for that. The new mayor would probably be inclined to step in and get some accountability, except that he is already one sideways glance away from a shooting war with NYC’s asshole police union.
Another Holocene Human
Meanwhile the white males at work are allowed to be:
super angry
explosively yell at people with little provocation
instigate fights
and nobody threatens to Baker Act them, tosses them off the job, or sends them in for mandatory assessment except for that one guy who actually made an articulated threat and he was allowed to return to work after completing CBT hours
mtiffany
@different-church-lady: Going to agree with you.
The proximity of the ‘looping’ events to one another could very well be a buffering issue — does anyone know what kind of A / V equipment this recorded with?
Also agree with that we’ll know what went down by how the PD characterizes it: “glitch” or “gosh golly gee, derp?”
Gimlet
@SuperHrefna:
It’s more widespread than that, think Ferguson, Mo – cops, prosecutors, judges, politicians…
SuperHrefna
@Gimlet: Yeah, it’s a whole establishment that thinks it can just write off a huge part of our population. I wish I could see a non violent solution to this but I don’t.
Another Holocene Human
@SuperHrefna: They’re not, and this can be proven talking to cops or cop families or reading their disgusting forums.
They think they are there to keep “those people” “contained” in “their neighborhoods”. They don’t care about Black-on-Black crime because “let them all kill each other”, “less animals” (oh yes, they use terms like this).
For what? Over 20 years? community leaders in minority-majority neighborhoods have been fighting City hall to try to get more police involvement in investigating major crimes, to improve police-community relations, and to stop the relentless harassment of young people and adults on the streets and in their cars by police. But nothing has changed.
Chicago has such a high murder rate in part because the city has not invested in murder investigations and so the same criminal freaks reoffend. It raises the fear factor and then cops blame the community for failing to cooperate. But they aren’t taking murderers off the street. Who wouldn’t be scared? Doing scientific tests costs $$$$, they spend that for young white pretty female murder victims, not for Black folk in the ghetto. Screw you and your family if you get killed. Must have been “at the wrong place at the wrong time”.
But Chicago did have extraordinary rendition and shit like that to terrify residents. Philly and NYC are jealous.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@mtiffany:
Wouldn’t the audio loop at the same time?
Another Holocene Human
And now you hear police leadership claiming that stop’n’frisk prevents crime and other ridiculous statements like that. Another way to blame the community for crime being high instead of looking at:
hiring cops from other ‘hoods to break heads instead of building relationships, the relationships that help prevent and solve crimes
cutting budgets to investigate crimes to they can move the money to counter-terrorism and other shiny objects
not assigning anywhere near the necessary number of detectives because they’re needed in the financial district or the money is needed for more layers of admin or to go to buy sports arenas for private entities
horrid jail and prison practices that fuel recidivism in these communities
unemployment, disinvestment, and trashing the school system
industrial pollution
boatboy_srq
@Luther Siler: All the volk who agree with them watch Fox for the news and the ‘truth’ that the Liebrul Media won’t provide. They’re not looking for accuracy, but for affirmation; and they’re either persuaded that everybody tinkers with media (which makes their doing it OK) or that what they see on the tube is Gawd’s Hawnest Truth – and by that I mean not that the entire group believes one or the other but that the individual members of the group are likely to hold one of those two complementary beliefs. It’s the same mindset that agrees when wingnuts spout off about how NASA is a cover for shoveling federal funds into the irresponsible hands of Those People and that the moon landings / Skylab / ESS / Hubble / etc are all either special effects or sets on a backlot someplace, and their proof is that Disney built its own Mission Control set for Armageddon. Present this video to that group of people and you’ll have a hard time getting them to see those cars disappear.
@different-church-lady: There’s still a disconnect in the public consciousness between cameras and digital-v-film. digital photography and video are too new to have dispelled the idea that once the camera is rolling every frame picks up whatever was in front of the lens at that time without error. They’re still expecting that analog experience and the mishandling of background you’re describing isn’t easily understood; the idea that cars disappear from the video is taken to mean that frames were removed or spliced in when it’s technically equally possible that the cars were removed from the frame. No suggestions here on what was or was not done; just noticing that people still don’t grasp digital imaging the way they do film photography and filmmaking.
opiejeanne
@debbie: Torii Hunter played for the Angels in Anaheim for several years and had a nice home in an expensive community near the beach. He was stopped one day at his front door by a cop wanting to find out what this black man thought he was doing in this community, because no way could an African American be able to afford a house worth a couple of million (back then). This was his second home, he and his family lived in Texas.
After Torii identified himself and convinced the cop that he in fact did live there, the cop then told him that he was a big fan of the Angels. I was stunned by the lie, since Torii was one of the most identifiable players on the team at the time, probably THE most identifiable. A lot of the other players are hard to recognize without their caps on, at least for me, but Torii is distinctive and any actual fan of the team would have known him on the spot. Or maybe he thought that black players get minimum wage.
different-church-lady
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Not necessarily — in the digital age sometimes picture and sound go on their own separate ways, in unpredictable fashions. A fair amount of my income in the previous decade was derived from people paying me to find out why and to make it stop.
Another Holocene Human
@debbie: Baker Acting women who are upset because they annoy the cops is a practice of long standing.
The law is meant for good purposes, but it can also be a weapon in the hands of an abusive spouse, a dirty cop, etc.
And then while you’re trapped in stir, they’re fucking with all your assets and stuff to make it even harder to fight them when you get out.
ETA: don’t forget the state mental hospital’s complicity in all this
different-church-lady
Let me make a categorical statement before I go off to work and disappear from the thread: I am in no fashion attempting to defend the PD nor dismiss the seriousness of the situation. I’m just making observations and trying to help things stay real.
cmorenc
@JPL:
Let’s start with three key propositions:
1) the officer’s escalating response to Ms Bland during the encounter was unwise, unjust, and unprofessional – he got caught up in a power-trip contest with Ms Bland and lost his shit along the way, and regardless of whether the video was edited in other respects or for whatever reason – the aforementioned key aspect of the encounter is clearly preserved in the available video.
2) the officer’s true reasons for pulling Ms Bland over may well have included the offense of “driving while black” under the pretext of the unsignaled lane change violation.
3) Even assuming for momentary discussion that the officer was somehow justified in arresting Ms Bland and taking her into custody, that provides NO excuse for why she should have been kept in custody for three days, nor why she died in custody.
THAT SAID, Ms.Bland was an idiot to have behaved in such a rudely confrontational manner with the officer, even assuming that the officer’s own handling of the situation was improper and unjustified and well, idiotic and unprofessional – which indeed, it was. Some of you got upset that I said Ms Bland’s own behavior was unwisely rude and idiotic in a previous thread – and let’s assume it’s true that it’s less likely the officer would have pulled me, a 60-something white guy over in the first place and if he did, it’s less likely the officer would have steered the encounter with me in such a badly confrontational manner. NEVERTHELESS, I guarantee that even as a 60-something white guy, if I started getting abrasively rude with an officer, I am likely to provoke whatever inclinations that officer may have to go off on a power-trip with me and evoke a result that is harsher than lenient on me (including a free ride in the back of his car if I persist with it). The reality of the momentary situation with any traffic stop is that you’re playing on the officer’s turf during the field encounter, regardless of whether in a court of law you have rights that in principle should prevail in the end, and lots more experience than you have in shaping the encounter to prevail over you in court (which is why the recent trend toward requiring police to wear body cams is your friend, provided you handle yourself wisely in the encounter). That advice doesn’t of course mean you need to give consent to a search, nor to answer questions designed to lead you to incriminate yourself. But it does mean that it’s wise to always maintain a deferentially respectful attitude toward the officer, even where you think he doesn’t deserve such. Don’t help the officer dig any holes for you ! If I was smoking and an officer asked me to put out the cigarette because he doesn’t like the second-hand smoke – arguably I’m in my car and have a right to smoke there, but is that the smart thing to get caught up in a confrontation about with the officer? NO. If the officer is being an asshole toward me, and he’s wearing a body cam – I want the recorded video to show he’s being the asshole, not me.
Gimlet
@Another Holocene Human:
the money is needed for more layers of admin or to go to buy sports arenas for private entities
In today’s fascist society the prime directive is that taxpayer revenue is a cash cow for the private sector. All necessary public activities will get token funding.
opiejeanne
@Gimlet: Now I’m depressed, and there’s no bacon in the house for breakfast. It’s 6:20am, thank goodness we have a 24 hour market.
Another Holocene Human
@Gimlet: Ain’t that the truth.
Patrick
A crazy cop who should not be a cop in the first place. A Department that apparently have had accusations of racial bias in the past. An arrest for failing to signal your turn?! Gosh, remind me never to drive in Texas.
Having said all that, now what? Grand Juries have a terrible record with justice when a cop is involved.
shell
Was there or is there going to be an autopsy. If its now considered a suspicious death, isnt that mandatory…
shell
NYC found out that was bogus.
Another Holocene Human
@Patrick: The difference between white America and Black America is that “My Cousin Vinny” is a comedy.
dr. bloor
@cmorenc:
1. As a fifty-something-year-old white guy who’s collected a few tickets over the years, I can assure you that nothing short of drawing a gun would get YOU the treatment that she got in the video.
2. One of the people in that interaction is allegedly trained and regularly paid to exercise good judgment, restraint, and professionalism. Guess which one?
Please, PLEASE stop perpetuating the white-guy stupidity.
opiejeanne
@Another Holocene Human: Cut the budget for the state University so you can give that money to your buddy who needs a new stadium for his team.
mtiffany
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Audio data and video data are captured as separate ‘streams.’ Audio data is ‘simpler’ and ‘smaller’ which means it’s easier and quicker for a computer to capture, encode, and store, while video data is more ‘complex’ and there’s more of it so that makes it more computationally expensive to capture, encode, and store.
Another Holocene Human
@shell: facts do not enter skulls that thick
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: Where do you work that “white males” (or anyone else) are allowed to act the way you describe (other than the obvious example of the police vs the public)?
OzarkHillbilly
@cmorenc:
I find it interesting how easy it is to blame a person for reacting to a provocation in an aggressive manner from the comfort of ones computer. Had this conversation with a buddy of mine over Michael Brown recently and it is just BS rationalization for an end result coming out of a situation that never should have happened in the first place.
The COP has the training, he is supposed to react coolly and with restraint to any verbal provocation thrown his way. I once took a fucking swing at a cop___(I didn’t know he was there)___ and not only did I not get arrested, he stood and listened to me vent for about 10 mins.
Most everyone can be provoked given the wrong time wrong place and some asshole pushing all the right buttons.
Betty Cracker
@cmorenc: I get what you’re saying. My parents told me to yesir/nosir cops, and I told my own child that too — it’s the best hope to emerge unscathed from an encounter with any armed potential lunatic. But I don’t get why you’re saying it now and why you feel the need to repeatedly criticize Bland’s behavior. She’s dead. That’s the salient point here. There is really no other.
debbie
@opiejeanne:
Pity more people didn’t focus on this and take action after Henry Gates was hassled on his own front doostep. How can there still be White people who can’t imagine that Black people can find success?
OzarkHillbilly
@BobS: Every jobsite I ever worked on.
greennotGreen
When all I saw was the cell phone video, I thought it was possible that Bland was a disturbed young woman, but the dashcam video clearly shows the cop ridiculously escalating what should have been a routine traffic stop. However, almost all the commenters and reports – and the cop if I understand him correctly – seem to be saying he stopped her for a failure to signal a lane change, but his U-turn to follow her came after she breezed right through a stop sign. (Look at the first part of the video when the cop is driving off after the red car leaves.) She was new to town, maybe she didn’t see the stop sign, so if he didn’t tell her that actual good reason he stopped her, no wonder she was annoyed. This was bad policing from the get-go.
Another Holocene Human
@dr. bloor:
YES!!!!! In my profession we would be SO FIRED well before what these cops do, and that’s backed up by arbitrators as well who routinely reinstate cops for horrid stuff and uphold firings of our people because we’re “unreliable” “liars” “should have [counterfactual]”. But my profession is a popular one for African-Americans so NO FUCKING SURPRISE HUH*. Even the racist white people no especially the racist white people on the job feel the pay and working conditions are attributable to the fact that a Black male is the stereotype of our profession. It’s fucking true, though, I have proof, but it’s the South and won’t matter. I could make a lot of hay out of that back in Boston. I know Boston is racist but come on, let’s not kid ourselves. This place is a CORRUPT SHITHOLE and the white elites in charge have NO SENSE OF SHAME.
*we also SERVE a lot of disadvantaged people and we are not engaged in upholding the white power structure, rather, we make it a little less galling and dysfunctional, hence no need to pay us off for our service to TPTB like correctional officers or cops
JPL
@dr. bloor: Actually the comment is accurate. From a young age, teach your child that all cops are assholes, and you must accept that. So much for police are your friend concept.
I did teach mine that there are good police officers and bad police officers. You have to say the same thing, yes sir.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: da dirty Souf
but like OzarkHillbilly said, to some extent in every job I’ve had, though up North I think there’s less tolerance for being a screaming, whining, pain in the ass … the other white guys will cuss you out
BobS
@OzarkHillbilly: What sort of jobsites?
dr. bloor
@JPL:
Yeah, I practice it myself and I certainly taught the same to my son. So fucking what? The problem is that in the current context, the comment is a fucking non sequitur. If that’s the takeaway message for you here, you’re a broken human being.
JPL
A new and complete video is suppose to be released soon. A downloading error caused the video released yesterday to skip.
Okay techies, does that make sense?
Another Holocene Human
@debbie: Oh, that’s not disbelief. That’s resentment.
JPL
@dr. bloor: true
Another Holocene Human
@Betty Cracker: cmorenc has been trolling on this issue for the last two days
opiejeanne
@dr. bloor: Thank you.
As a side note, there have been white males who have been shot by the cops for little or no provocation, but not anywhere near the numbers that black individuals experience. “Experience” is not the right word but I’m punchy from lack of sleep. San Diego cops went on a shooting spree in the early 2000s, and a young white man known to my friends (I met him once) was killed coming home from a community theater meeting, and had a prop gun in the back of the car. The cops claimed he reached back to the back seat for his wallet and they thought he was reaching for that gun, didn’t know it was fake. Yeah, right. No one believed the cops’ story but nothing came of the investigation. The victim was the organist at a United Methodist Church which doesn’t make him innocent of anything, but there were a lot of people who knew him very well because of that as well as his other social activities.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: I’m referring to how they treat coworkers, not how they treat the public.
Although there are some stories, there, too!
cmorenc
@dr. bloor:
I truly GET that the officer behaved very badly, and agree completely with points #1 and #2. But if you think Ms. Bland herself handled herself wisely in this encounter, you are giving very stupid advice to black folks and white folks alike in how to handle yourself in an encounter with police, even when they (the police) show inclinations toward having a bad power-tripping attitude. Ask yourself: what did Ms. Bland have to gain by feeding the confrontational aspects of this encounter, assuming the officer was being something of an asshole, including from the get-go in even stopping her in the first place? We sure as hell now know what worst-case outcome she had to lose.
JPL
@cmorenc: What led to the confrontation was she didn’t put out her cigarette.
It’s that simple.
OzarkHillbilly
@BobS: Construction. Actual fighting is now a fireable offense, but not when I started. My first day on a jobsite I saw an electrician kick a ladder out from under a phone man. Truth be told, it’s OK for black people to yell and scream too, but in all my years I only worked with one black carpenter.
ThresherK
Speaking of tetchy videos, anyone else vomit in their mouth over today’s front-page NYT article about the “anti-abortion activist”?
It seemed to go out of its way to leave a shiteton of stuff off the paragraphs on the front page (aka the pps that matter).
japa21
First of all, I am the quintessential technological idiot so I jhave no right to comment on the validity of the video or audio vs video streams, etc.
But it seems that one of the arguments being made is that dialogue may have been added to make the cop look better and that certain video was rerun to cover the additional time. My only question regarding this (and I can neither watch nor listen while at work) is wouldn’t any background noise be a tell? IOW, does the background noise during the “added time” seem consistent with everything else for the situation?
The Thin Black Duke
@cmorenc: You’re full of shit, man.
opiejeanne
@OzarkHillbilly: I think it’s a way of making it someone else’s problem and reassuring oneself that it won’t happen to them.
I saw this first hand and ugly with a murder case that was close to home, a girl whose parents were from Vietnam was murdered in her home while they were at work. She was 13. My older daughter was in a class with her.
People made ridiculous hurtful comments that the dad was in the Asian Mafia and it was payback for some deal gone wrong (he was an engineer, the mom worked at Mervyns), that the kid was murdered by an Asian gang, etc.
White people telling themselves fairy tales that it can’t happen to them or their kids because it was an Asian thing.
Jordan Rules
@BobS: I’ve seen it in sales in both the IT and media industries FWIW.
opiejeanne
@debbie: It boggles the mind.
Now, I’m an old-ish white lady and I will admit that I have had a crush on Torii since I first laid eyes on him, but at the time he was the face of the team. His face was hanging from banners all over Anaheim as well as on the front of the stadium.
I suppose people from South Orange County don’t ever go to Anaheim if they can help it (except to the games) so the cop may not have seen those banners on the streets, but if he ever watched a single game at home or at the stadium, he couldn’t have avoided seeing Torii everywhere.
(Minimum wage for pro baseball players is about $550,000, but that’s not the minimum wage I meant)
Snarki, child of Loki
@JPL:
IOW, behave much like one would in the presence of a dangerous, rabid, animal.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: I understand that, I’m just wondering what kind of jobsite that kind of behavior is as common as you indicate, especially for “white males” only? I’ve worked in several hospitals since the 1980’s where it wouldn’t be tolerated. Prior to that I worked as a paramedic, for a small excavating contractor (about a dozen employees), and a single summer in a factory – I never saw the kind of behavior you suggest is common (exclusively) among “white males”.
mtiffany
@shell:
Especially during the police slowdown and crime dropped. So we were right about the notion that keeping criminals off the streets reduces crime, it just turns out we were mistaken about the identity of the criminals.
japa21
@opiejeanne: Right there is the problem. A person (more often black than white) can be executed for reaching for something because the officer sees it as a potential threat. A potential threat is to be seen as the same as an actual threat.
A prop gun is on the back seat. A person in the front seat reaches toward the back seat to get an objetc. The officer believes he may be reaching for the gun (not being aware it is a prop gun). Therefore, because, while the person’s body is twisted and the person’s hand has still not reached the “gun” that person is a threat and can be shot.
Did the officer wait until the person’s hand was on the gun, which would change it from a potential threat to likely threat? Apparently not. Did the officer wait until the person picked up the gun and started turning back toward the officer, which would have changed it from likely threat to actual threat? No.
The justification bar for use of deadly force has been lowered so far that a person reaching up to scratch his ear is now sufficient reason to shoot, as there might be a hairpin behind the ear which the peerson can then grab and shove into the officer’s eye and into the brain.
Yes, white folks also get shot for unjustified reasons. And yes, proportionally the number of blacks shot far outnumbers the whites. In both cases, it is getting (correction, has gotten) out of control.
Chris
@Emma:
The only thing the cynic in me is absolutely certain of is that he hasn’t seen everything yet.
raven
@The Thin Black Duke: No, cmorenc is a motherfucking genius, just ask him.
gwangung
@cmorenc: So basically, you’re justifying a police state.
Again, fuck that.
bemused
It’s not only the cars appearing, disappearing, appearing over and over. Go back to 25:00 and the same thing happens with man walking by police vehicle.
opiejeanne
@japa21: You missed what I said. No one believed the guy reached into the back seat for his wallet. The cops claimed that, but no one believed them. People who knew him said it was not his habit to put it there.
And i did mention that blacks get that treatment far more than whites do
Rafer Janders
@cmorenc:
Sandra Bland is not a professional detainee. She had no obligation not to be rude and confrontational after she was pulled over for no good reason. The police officer, meanwhile, was a supposed professional, paid by the taxpayers and issued with a uniform, weapons, and great responsibility by the State of Texas. It’s his professional responsiblity to remain calm no matter what people are saying to him.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
This is why I feel like breaking noses every time some oblivious idiot goes “but what about black on black crime?” in response to allegations of racism in America.
It doesn’t mean what you think it means, nitwits…
Tim F.
@JPL: Yes, that is always possible. Digital can do all kinds of screwy things. If the ‘new’ video looks fine then most people will probably shrug and move on. Obviously a conspiracy theory never really dies, but doctoring something like that cleanly enough to convince professionals is not that easy. Cops would need to outsource expertise on that level and that is implausibly risky for everyone involved. Especially if you consider the scrutiny they’re facing now.
Rafer Janders
@cmorenc:
I once told an NYPD lieutenant, in front of his sergeant and five of his men, that he was a useless lazy asshole.
What happened to me? Nothing, because (a) insulting a cop isn’t a crime, and (b) more important, I’m a white middle-aged professional in a suit.
boatboy_srq
@SuperHrefna: Bland’s traffic stop wasn’t winnable. Moving over was enough to trigger the “failure to signal”; staying in her lane would have been “obstructing traffic; speeding up would have of course broken the limit. The moment he was on her bumper it was over and the only question was how it would end.
sigaba
@JPL:
Not really, no. Errors in copying tend to just ruin a video, not make it loop and drop frames cleanly. Also you wouldn’t expect downloading problems to make such clean audio edits…
But this is for the DA to determine.
japa21
@opiejeanne: Okay. That makes sense, but the basic point remains the same. Police are treating a potential threat as a real threat and justifying their use of dealy force on that. Even if he had been reaching for his wallet, the argument is the same.
sigaba
@japa21: “My only question regarding this (and I can neither watch nor listen while at work) is wouldn’t any background noise be a tell?”
They can take background noise from somewhere near the time they add new dialogue and loop it underneath any NEW sound they wanted to record, that way it sounds like it’s recorded contemporaneously.
Just go outside, have the cop wear a microphone like the one he had on at the stop, have him read the new lines, and you lay it right in. A child could do it (and they do).
(I happen to be a professional motion picture sound designer. I do this particular trick all the time. It’s how we match ADR into sound recorded on set.)
ThresherK
@opiejeanne: Dang, when did that happen?
I remember Torii when he was at New Britain, ages ago. (I knew how to spell “Torii” before he made the majors, along with Rock Cats teammates “Mienktiewicz” and “Cuddyer”.)
Surprised that I didn’t hear about this incident, even though I’m on the other coast. And also a bit saddened that these incidents are common enough that this one may have blended in with the others.
japa21
@opiejeanne: Don’t have an edit button at work, so I’ll just add to the last comment that I was agreeing with you regarding your comment of white vs black shootings. What is screwy about what the police agrued, if he wasn’t reaching for his wallet, and I have no reason to doubt your word, is that it would have made more sense for the officer to claim he was reaching for the gun without the wallet argument. It was a stupid thing for the officer to do.
Rafer Janders
@cmorenc:
She’s NOT REQUIRED to handle herself wisely or not in an encounter with police (short of violence or threats thereof). It’s THEIR JOB to be cool, calm and professional.
japa21
@sigaba: Thanks.
Another Holocene Human
Every time I see cmorenc,
I am reminded of cimorene.
cimorene was a poster on online media fandom who thought she shit pure gold. When others didn’t share her opinion of her earth-shattering contributions, she retreated for a while, and then disappeared.
It must hurt cimorene’s feelings a great deal that E.L. James has made a fortune selling clearly inferior fanfic.
The weird thing about it is that I could imagine the old C. Moren making all of the new C. Moren’s comments.
cmorenc
@gwangung:
No – rather, I’m giving sound analysis and advice regarding basic human behavior dynamics, as applied to police traffic stops. As to citizens taking on the fight against a creeping police state – the advice to “pick your battles (and battlefields) wisely also applies. So you think you’re going to win (or even make incremental progress) in the battle against a creeping police state by being an asshole yourself toward asshole cops during a traffic stop? Ghandi certainly didn’t win his fight against the British Colonial state that way – and proved there are ways to successfully firmly confront unjust oppression without turning into an asshole yourself. That’s also not how Martin Luther King successfully fought against a far more racist and lethally inclined southern law enforcement establishment than the one Ms Bland was confronted with.
rikyrah
@boatboy_srq:
truth
Davebo
The Houston Chronicle is now reporting on the edits to the video.
This will get interesting.
Steve From Antioch
Do any of these alleged splices happen during interaction of officer and Bland or are they all later after she out of sight?
Also, if you think the video was edited, do you also believe jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel beams?
Chris
@Rafer Janders:
Yeah, this is the key.
People are yelled at and insulted like this cop was EVERY FUCKING DAY, in every fucking profession. Sometimes by customers, sometimes by coworkers; oftentimes it’s not deserved, sometimes, frankly, it is. Usually, these people don’t react by picking a fight or calling the cops.
It’s only when the person being insulted is a cop that suddenly, for reasons beyond understanding, a big chunk of the public considers it normal and appropriate for the insultee to overreact.
Davebo
@cmorenc:
Invoking Ghandi in a discussion of US civil rights and police should have a law named after it.
cmorenc’s law?
Gian
@opiejeanne:
wasn’t it a CHP officer in San Diego who arrested a firefighter tending to a car accident victim for refusing to follow orders a while back?
(yes) http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/02/05/chp-fire-department-make-peace-in-chula-vista-after-testy-exchange-arrest/
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: How long has it taken them to catch Black serial killers like The Grim Sleeper?
And all that time plenty of cops would have ignorantly told you that Black men aren’t serial killers?
What about Anthony Sowell? Obvious case of police neglect.
If the victim is (especially) a Black prostitute, They. Don’t. Care.
eta: DC Arsonist, feds found him fast ONCE THEY WERE LOOKING for decades he was torching Black hoods in DC and nobody in power gave a flying fuck
Davebo
@Steve From Antioch:
The edits occur while the officer is explaining to dispatch that basically he did absolutely nothing wrong and Bland was the only one at fault for escalating the encounter.
Another Holocene Human
@Gian: In Boston, a white cop shot a black cop pursuing a suspect in the back.
Think he got off, too. Fog of police pursuit, whocouldanoode, poor lighting, etc.
Oh, and a Staten Island loser cop shot and killed a highly decorated Black cop in New York just like two years ago or something and I’m pretty sure he got off. That one was disgusting beyond belief.
bemused
The hassle of arresting Bland hardly seems worth it to a presumably busy officer who has much more serious issues to deal with every day. All he had to do was issue a ticket, tell her where and how to pay it and go on to catch much bigger fish. Police deal with people who talk back or argue all the time but he lost his temper with her and escalated a minor situation into taking her to the ground. He should have known better.
Steve From Antioch
@mtiffany:
Yep.
the Conster
“I will light you up”. That’s a power tripping psychopathic bully who is way out of control, and Sandra’s fate was sealed in that moment. If the video was deliberately edited, I can’t imagine leaving that in which means worse things were taken out. No one except racist fascists seeing this can believe that we don’t have a huge fucking cop problem, and that anything that cops say has to be immediately dismissed.
Gian
@ThresherK:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-draw-guns-at-home-of-la-angels-player-torii-hunter/
(It wouldn’t let me cut and paste. Torii triggered the alarm to the house in Newport beach. the phone calls went to his wife’s cell phone in Texas, she didn’t answer, cops went to the potential burglary, and didn’t recognize him or believe him without taking him at gunpoint to get his ID.
Torii handled it with such class that his reported “meltdown” this year is baffling.
NobodySpecial
@cmorenc: Your definition of ‘success’ is less than successful.
Another Holocene Human
@Rafer Janders: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/no-complaints-about-this-traffic-cop/
Steve From Antioch
@Davebo: that was my understanding too from when I looked at them yesterday
Another Holocene Human
@bemused: Are cops still judged on “collars”?
debbie
@cmorenc:
When placed in the context of other African Americans’ encounters with the police, I wouldn’t have expected her to act any differently. She was expressing her indignation at the likelihood of what would likely come next.
sigaba
@Tim F.: While I am not a fan of conspiracy theories I really don’t see how it would be complicated or require “outside help” to edit this video. You can get Premiere Pro on subscription for under $20 a month.
And frankly if they did hire outside help you probably wouldn’t see the looping video and dropped frames. You can clean that stuff up with mattes if you know what you’re doing.
This is why I hate dash cams and bodycams, in the end it’s just this crazy persuasive piece of evidence that could be fabricated, you can’t use this kind of technology to keep an eye on police for abuses if they’re allowed to actually look at it and handle it before anyone else.
Another Holocene Human
@mtiffany:
For once I wish we had those obnoxious BB emoticons because that stick figure rolling on the floor and laughing fits right here like cheese on macaroni.
bemused
@Another Holocene Human:
I did wonder if there was a “quota” in that district.
Gian
@Another Holocene Human:
do you recall the cops in Milwaukie literally gave a naked terrified victim back to Jeffery Dahmer because “gay lovers spat”
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: It’s not exclusive behavior, it’s exclusive in terms of management tolerating it.
Everybody else gets pulled aside, handled, written up, labeled a troublemaker, etc.
Another Holocene Human
@Gian: Yeah yeah, gay lives were trash back then. Several (I’ve got three in mind right now) serial killers of young or teen gay males got away with it for years, bodies buried in the back yard, under the house, or in a storage unit, because the cops did NOT give a SHIT about missing gay men/boys.
rikyrah
New DayVerified account
@NewDay Reverend @jamalhbryant was just with #SandraBland’s family, reflects on what he saw in Texas. http://cnn.it/1IebBht
J R in WV
@JPL:
No! That’s as stupid as editing the video in the first place!
Another Holocene Human
Jailbirds outside my house right now cutting tree branches. Pretty sure they’re not prisoners, but it’s exploitation all the same. Some might be in for something violent, in which case why are they out on a min sec crew, others are in for not paying a fine or a fee. So the local gov’t steals their labor at well under min wage. But if you don’t go on crew or don’t have a min. wage work release job to go to you’re stuck at the jail will the assholes who stay in all day and daytime TV as entertainment.
I hate this shit.
cintibud
@cmorenc: The reason you are gettings such pushback is quite simple – you are ignoring the effect of race, which is the real problem, not the lack of civility.
The last 4-5 times I got stopped for speeding, I was just given a warning. They had me dead to rights – 10+ miles over the speed limit and I did not deny it. I was polite. I am also a middle aged white man. Had I been rude I probably would have received a ticket. Had I been black I would have probably received a ticket if I was polite. If I was rude (in this case “uppity”) I may have been “lit up” or worse. Your blindness to that reality is frustrating at least and is really pointless in this thread unless you are trolling.
Kay
@cmorenc:
But you’re just lowering the bar and pushing the duty off on the public. I think he was triggered by her refusal to put out the cigarette. I think that’s where he made the decision to arrest. We’re now all supposed to parse that? What might set an individual officer off on a certain day? HE was annoyed that she wasn’t kissing his ass immediately and he turned that around to asking her why she was annoyed. Why is he allowed to ask questions that have not one thing to do with the stop? Where does this end?
It just starts to sound more and more like an abusive relationship where the whole burden is on the public to not frighten or enrage these guys- “if we could just comply fast enough and completely enough we’ll meet the policeman’s personal needs”.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: And where is that again? What type of business, how large, etc?
Steve From Antioch
And in this context “ergo” means, “I don’t know anything about the equipment being used, how video/sound files are buffered and synced, so I am just going to jump to the conclusion that matches my prejudices….”
Patricia Kayden
@JPL: The stop was bogus and now we have a doctored police cam. Hope the Feds are taking over the investigation into Ms. Bland’s stop, arrest and incarceration. This is ridiculous.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
I think history will eventually record the era of the post-civil-rights backlash that continues to this day (war on drugs, high incarceration, police violence, the defunding of the inner cities, etc) as Jim Crow 2.0 – all the old tropes of the segregation era recreated under slightly less blatant conditions, the same way the old Confederate system was allowed to basically rebuild itself after a few short years of Reconstruction, as long as it didn’t call itself slavery.
At least, I can only hope the history books will eventually be written that way.
rikyrah
@JPL:
Get da phuq outta here with that bullshyt.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: Read, if you haven’t already: http://newjimcrow.com/
mtiffany
@sigaba:
People are working on methods of making it difficult to tamper with / easier to detect tampering that does occur with digital video evidence. Forcing police depatments to use the technology however…
I think that moment, when the technology to prevent tampering with digital evidence is readily available, we’ll know who the problem people are because they’ll be the ones resisting its mandatory adoption by the police.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: I don’t have to tell you who I work for. You’re just another asshole on the internet, just like me. If you don’t believe me now, you won’t believe me two seconds from now.
Another Holocene Human
@mtiffany: Police are dumb. They resisted video-taping of interrogation rooms for years.
They also refuse to learn best practices from other departments, especially overseas. Not-invented-here disease. Hey, Japan has a much lower crime rate, maybe we could learn from how they avoid tampering with persons of interest when they do interrogations? Nahh, too much work.
Another Holocene Human
Also, they need to fucking stop putting an IQ ceiling on police. IQ is not a proxy for personality disorders, in fact, people with higher IQ tend to exhibit less anti-social behavior, not more, because IQ is roughly a test of frontal lobe functioning which is involved with planning, which reduces impulsive behavior, which is a factor in anti-social (criminal) behavior.
They deliberately hire people with less frontal lobe functioning, then act shocked, shocked! when their bully-boy cops break heads.
They should also require more education hours prior to becoming a cop. They should know the law better than they do and be more skilled in de-escalation techniques. Also not destroying evidence would be great.
low-tech cyclist
@different-church-lady:
Point well taken, and thanks for sharing your expertise!
Steve From Antioch
@rikyrah:
Ergo, this conspiracy reaches the highest levels !!!!!!!!!!
Chris
@Kay:
Exactly.
Warning the public that they should be polite and deferential to cops is like telling the public to be polite and deferential to known Crips and Bloods members because if you don’t they might just blow your head off. It might be good short-term advice. Although I think it’s naive to think that this will do any good for black people who’re pulled over – it can’t hurt their chances, but cops who have decided to be assholes and that it’s your turn to be their pinata today are going to be assholes whether or not you’re polite and deferential.
But the less short term solution is to do something about the fucking cops, who’re the ones actually responsible for this kind of mess – just like if they were Crips and Bloods, the real solution would be to lock them the fuck up, because people need to be able to walk down the street without the risk of having their heads blown off.
Going beyond the “cops => criminals” analogy, they’re also something fairly horrific about the fact that we’re instructing people to treat the cops with the same “don’t make them angry! You won’t like them when they’re angry!” caution that would normally be reserved for gangsters, abusive husbands, or mad gun-wielding asylum escapees. That, in itself, is an admission that law and order in this country has completely broken down.
Kay
@cmorenc:
What’s going to happen is they’re going to lose all discretion and their entire existance will be rule-bound down to the slightest detail to ensure equitable treatment because they can’t ask the public to get better at figuring out all the details and nuance of their job. I don’t think it was over the line for her to ask why she has to put out a cigarette. That’s my individual view. Am I supposed to figure his out? How? I don’t have to do that with any other working person I encounter. I don’t have to anticipate a reaction to everything I say or do and adjust. Why doesn’t he adjust and figure out a productive, professional way to deal with people he perceives as somehow disrespecting him. The ordinary standard for dealing with the public is “suck it up, they’re all different and you’re not going to love all of them”.
boatboy_srq
@JPL: Humph. Garbled video with clear and ungarbled audio to match? Really. hmmm. rikyrah’s response goes for me too.
TS
@Kay:
This defines so well the way that too many folks today describe how an encounter with the police must be carried out. I had never thought to put it into the terms of domestic abuse – but that is exactly what it is. If a policeman gets upset and abuses you – well it is your fault because you made him upset.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
Oh, sure, there are people who already say this.
But the consensus among white people, who are still the majority and the dominant group, has for years been basically that MLK ended racism, and that while yes, there may still be some problems for black people in America, that’s just a few lingering effects of the old (and gone!) system, and they’ll be gone soon enough. And as near as I can tell, the general history books people read about in school do very little to contradict that.
The last few years do seem to be breaking through that consensus some, which is encouraging.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
I work in the entertainment industry. My current job is fine, but abusive behavior, up to and including actual physical abuse (like throwing ceramic mugs at people) is infamously common. And, yeah, 90 percent of the people in charge who get away with that shit are “white guys.”
Kay
@Chris:
I don’t approach it as “polite and deferential”. I approach it as “answer the questions you absolutely have to and don’t consent to anything beyond that which is strictly necessary to effectuate the specific reason for the stop” – there’s no chit-chat or smiling or being pleasant duty- in fact, chit chat has a point for police officers and it has nothing at all to do with them caring about how long you’ve been In Texas.
I keep flashing back on that police encounter in DC, where they went to the wrong address and were harassing that black man who worked in the neighborhood and the white woman came out and without any bowing and scraping and anticipating their needs, wants and desires asked them a series of questions – badge number, why are you in this neighborhood, what were you investigating, etc. They answered the questions and there was no elaborate analysis on whether she showed enough deference.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t want to know who you work for – however, you could provide a few more details than you have. My own experience dating back to the 1970’s is certainly not definitive, but as I’ve noted it does not corroborate your assertions. And obviously, I am somewhat skeptical that the behavior you describe is tolerated by any business anywhere in the country in 2015, unless it’s some small place where the boss’s son is acting that way.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Would that be celebrities acting badly, or is that common behavior for employees in general? The initial assertion of Another Holocene Human seemed to indicate it was peer-to-peer behavior.
cmorenc
@cintibud:
I’m not being blind AT ALL to the effect of race in traffic encounters – I will get to some very personal familiarity with that in a moment. But your notation that a black person would likely receive a speeding ticket where a white person might not, and if the black person acts rude or “uppity” about it, they’re far more likely to wind up being harshly (or even lethally) treated than a white person utterly FAILS to explain what advantage there is to either the white person, or most especially the black person, in behaving in rudely confrontational manner with the officer, even if the officer is being a bit of an ass himself. Especially in this age of increasing requirements for police to wear bodycams (or record encounters from dashboard video) – it’s to your advantage to be the one to be shown behaving with dignified respect during the encounter, and the officer to be the one behaving with martinet power-tripping bad (or even racist) attitude. If you’re going to fight unfair prejudicial treatment by police, pick favorable battlefields and help create favorable conditions. Don’t fight the battle on favorable turf to the police.
My brother-in-law is a retired highway patrolman, and frankly some of the stories he’s told me about how he and fellow officers handle people they stop whom they consider giving them an unnecessarily difficult time – scare the hell out me – not so much for my brother-in-law and his police bretheren, but for the civilians who were stopped. I also learned from his stories how not to needlessly push policeman’s buttons. Sometimes, the people he stopped DID give him an unjustifiably scary time – but I could tell that sometimes he probably reacted that way because they simply pissed him off, and so did his fellow officers.
boatboy_srq
@Kay: It boils down to badge-carrying bigoted jerk makes a questionably-necessary-at-best traffic stop. The stopped motorist hits jerk’s bigotry on two counts (black and female). Stopped motorist is already convinced that all LEOs are bigoted jerks, which doesn’t help the situation. Situation devolves from that point as bigoted jerk (apparently even from the “edited” video) proceeds to validate all the motorist’s preconceptions of what racist sexist authoritarian a##h0les LEOs are.
Kathleen
@BobS: That type of behavior was somewhat common in an organization I worked in, but in my case the offending parties were females.
sigaba
different-church-lady:
I’m completely willing to accept that this was some sort of honest technical mistake.
However, that sortof changes the game for dashcams, doesn’t it? We have these cameras, and we use them as evidence in trials all the time, we send people up the river with them. And now you’re telling me, “actually, these dashcams when we download them, they can actually glitch and drop all kinds of sound and audio data, and they do this in such a way that’s completely unnoticeable to someone casually watching a recording, and can even give them a false sense of the meaning of an event.” I wouldn’t generally consider such a recording system as rising to the level of evidence…
I mean, before these things are let out, the cop who made them usually has to watch them and then vouch for its authenticity, and this absolutely has to be done if it’s used in discovery, when exactly did that happen in this case? Or did they just dump it with no attribution or authentication? “This video is our side of the story. If you find any inconsistencies, we’ll just change our story until the media shuts up.”
@mtiffany: @
I don’t think the police should actually be administering their chest cams and dash cams, they should be under the control of a public advocate or ombudsman. Cops shouldn’t be able to see what’s recorded on them, they shouldn’t know if they’re recording, they shouldn’t know when the data is downloaded.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
It is common behavior for management. I experienced it myself with someone at the VP level who was in no way, shape or form a celebrity or even a high-level exec (though fortunately he stopped short of actual physical action like throwing things). And I work for a Giant Evil Corporation that makes family entertainment and has a culture of cooperation and friendliness — it’s much worse at studios that don’t have that kind of corporate culture.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Also, too, another possible scenario for Ms. Bland’s death came up yesterday — possible medical neglect. If she had an unexamined head injury or suffered a seizure and they left her to die, that would give the department one heck of an incentive to try and claim she committed suicide rather than admit they denied her medical care.
And, yes, ignoring a dying woman would be fucking murder in my book.
Tom F
@Betty Cracker: His comment is a valuable one, in the sense that it is a clearly articulated example of what is probably the majority view of these situations:
– cops are potentially homicidal psychopaths,
– the best way to interact with them is by cowering,
– if you don’t, what happens to you is largely your fault.
Police state mentality.Makes it easier to ignore the racial component, too.
Randy P
I can’t watch the video. Hearing about the incident on the first place already sickened me.
I’m tired of being sickened and outraged. Who actually has some ideas on something to actually do about this kind of crap? This kind meaning cops doing bogus arrests and/or shootings and then covering up and being exonerated. I need to DO something, at the very least contribute to somebody who has a path forward. Any thoughts?
retr2327
@dr. bloor: In fairness, this isn’t a matter of “white-guy stupidity.” It’s talking about two different issues at the same time:
1) how should we expect our cops to behave, given that they are trained (or should be) to handle confrontations like this without screaming “I’ll light you up” like some out-of-control toddler having a tantrum? A legal question, largely.
2) how should you behave if you get pulled over by an office? A matter of practical advice, legal issues be damned. And a recognition that we live in a less-than-perfect world, even while we try to improve it.
guachi
I’ve recorded enough TV shows digitally from my cable broadcasts (over 10,000) to have similar glitches occur.
When there are errors and artifacts it’s almost always the video that has obvious problems even if the underlying audio is perfectly fine. End up with some out of synch A/V for a bit. Since you can’t see faces in most (all?) of the jumps, there’s no real way to see if the A/V is out of synch (i.e., lips moving like a bad cartoon)
Hopefully, a new video will clear things up. Not that it will placate those who immediately just knew that the police were covering up something.
boatboy_srq
@cmorenc: What we’re seeing isn’t a lack of respect. It’s an expectation from LEOs that there are types of people they face: perps and victims; or for drivers, the evil wrongdoer and the innocent quivering in abject fear of the righteousness of the badge. If you’re not one then you’re the other. Match that to the LEOs’ expectation of anyone not white and male that there are no innocent POCs just perps that haven’t been caught yet. And fold in the expectation that, if you’re (depending on situation) POC, female, LGBT, whatever, that all LEOs are trained to see you as Other and there’s no way to prove your innocence at the scene (so why bother). There’s no advantage to behaving badly: but when you already expect the LEO to behave unjustly because of who/what you are, there’s no perceived DISadvantage because you’re already scr3w3d and your own behavior doesn’t matter.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): I’m not surprised that management bullying subordinates is real (obviously more so in some industries than in others as you’ve explained), but the initial assertion was of “white males” essentially avoiding consequences for borderline assault and battery on their co-workers, which seems more than a little exaggerated.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@BobS:
So because you, personally, haven’t been bullied, it must not exist? And if a black person or a woman tells you they were bullied by a white guy and the white guy got off, that person must be an outlier no matter how many of them tell you the same story?
You’d think that all of these “individual” stories would add up for you after awhile, but I guess someone who deliberately doesn’t want to understand never will.
retr2327
@cmorenc: “Ask yourself: what did Ms. Bland have to gain by feeding the confrontational aspects of this encounter, assuming the officer was being something of an asshole, including from the get-go in even stopping her in the first place?”
A question that deserves more consideration than you’re giving it, perhaps. Let me suggest an answer: preserving her self-respect in the face of what she (rightly) perceived as frequently racist world? Obviously, she had a great deal to lose.
Interestingly, CNN was playing a tape of her Facebook posting about racism, ostensibly to explain why she might have committed suicide. That argument was B.S., but it certainly shed some light on why she might have wanted to stick up for her rights as she saw them (i.e., not putting out the cigarette, not getting out of the car, etc.). A tragedy, for sure.
ruemara
@different-church-lady: As video professional of 10 years & a digital specialist for nearly 20, that’s not a glitch. Nor can you just wise up in editing to fix this kind of footage to not have problems.
Rafer Janders
@cmorenc:
So your brother-in-law is basically a gangster, you’re saying.
In my line of work I also encounter people who give me a hard time every so often — and yet curiously, I never respond by assaulting them.
japa21
@cmorenc: Here’s where you, in my opinion, go off the rails. It may be a good idea to be polite and deferential to police officers you interact with. Good survival technique.
But you initial comment, that started all of this, definitely gave the impression that Bland was, somehow, complicit, in what happened to her. You are making the assumption that if she had been polite and deferential nothing would have happened.
Maybe true, and maybe not. But the whole point in people’s reaction to you is that how she behaved, short of physically attacking the officer, is irrelevant. The police officer is supposed to be able to take verbal abuse and still behave in a professional manner. There was nothing she did, after being pulled over, that was either illegal or a physcial threat to the officer.
Sure be nice and polite. Good advice. But not being so does not minimize or exonerate the officer for his actions. Period. Full stop.
ruemara
@sigaba: zackly. Some wild sound, clean go and you’re good for the fix.
Omnes Omnibus
@cmorenc: Do you also lecture rape victims about what they were wearing?
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: See next thread over.
raven
@cmorenc: You must be stupid. . . or a troll.
cmorenc
@retr2327:
Being able to understand why Ms Bland made her choice to react the way she did (and your explanation is one I entirely agree and empathize with) – is not the same as agreeing that the choice was a wise or effective one in the circumstances. Sometimes, risking arrest in order to protest injustice is a constructive move, sometimes it is not.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: I didn’t say borderline assault and battery, I said screaming, acting really angry, and instigating. I didn’t say but I’ve also seen being consistently disruptive. There are people who are not white males who are disruptive as well but management considers them a problem to be solved–and sometimes terminated.
Physical assaults aren’t tolerated where I work, nor are for the most part threats.
No, I mean they get to throw their mental garbage around and it’s seen as normal … or if they cause the other person to lose their shit, somehow the other person is the problem person.
But if a person who is not a white male gets really angry they are: full of themselves, poorly behaved, crazy, a bad employee, over-reacting.
The minute one of them actually lays hands on someone, and I have seen this, then management doesn’t know them and they are on the unemployment line.
And I’m not even discussing management people who acted this way. UGLY stories there.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq:
See the whole category of arrests for walking while trans. Transwomen are just presumed to be prostitutes. Don’t need proof, the fact that they’re trans and in public is enough.
MomSense
@raven:
All of them, Katie.
White Trash Liberal
Amazing how these new commenters are not only experts on white voting patterns, but also a/v sync (looping is not sync, BTW) experts and proponents of the obey authority philosophy.
You new commenters are amazing contributors. Please do continue to enlighten us lesser mortals on all things Caucasian.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Is that what I wrote? I believe I acknowledged your description of bullying in the entertainment industry (it’s still too common in hospital residencies). However, a single episode of a thrown coffee mug is a far cry from “white males” commonly committing assault and battery on their co-workers- not their subordinates- and walking away with little to no discipline.
opiejeanne
@japa21: I know these things. I’m 65, I know the risks cops take all the time. I also know that the SD cops were on a tear that lasted for more than a year. Lots of questionable shootings. They were jumpy, obviously.
The point I was trying to make was being a white, neatly dressed male with short hair is no guarantee of safety, just less risk than breathing while black.
Another Holocene Human
@Randy P: Federal oversight of local PDs, with teeth, would really help. So far there has been severe political resistance to this. Instead, we give free gear and shit to local PDs to kill citizens faster.
On state level, it might help to force small town/jurisdiction cop shops to fold into larger ones.
Improving pay and benefits in smaller forces would actually help, as would having a cop record, you know like a trucker driver has, so hiring dep’t’s can avoid picking up dirty rejects (of course this would require the first agency to not lie through their teeth).
Make it illegal to reject applicants for being “too intelligent”.
Use independent prosecutors for cop crimes, instead of somebody beholden to them.
Enforce best practices for police forces, through the courts if necessary. Other professions must adhere to minimum standards, so should they. Cops in the US routinely do shit like taint evidence and witnesses and botch interrogations, and instead of getting punished our courts give them a fucking pass to do it some more.
Provide incentives for police forces to hire local people and have their demographics better reflect the community. While it’s probably not good to have a 100% local force (too many social ties between cops and criminals), there’s a demonstrable problem in having Southie bruisers policing Roxbury or Staten Island jagoffs policing Brooklyn.
We also have a prosecutor problem. We need to do something about that.
Another Holocene Human
@White Trash Liberal: Sadly, the C Moran has been around here for a while. Funny these sorts of threads prompt him to speak, though.
Another Holocene Human
@sigaba:
Yup, they should have to get in line and make a records request like everybody else. What a fucking conflict of interest.
Kropadope
@Belafon:
Wow, I’m no A/V expert, but how on God’s green earth did they think they cold get away with that?
Cacti
@Kay:
This.
Say no more to the cops than you are legally obliged to.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: The lawyer told me, unless the manager uses specifically racial language when denigrating these employees, we have no case with EEO. The other route is to prove a pattern of behavior. If I were more organized, maybe we would have nailed them on that already. Mea culpa. It can be tough to substantiate, especially when they are hiding a lot of stuff from you.
Kropadope
@rikyrah: Ever see “Changeling?”
Another Holocene Human
Bob’s just asking questions. After 7 years of disrespect, distrust and disgusting racial slurs being heaped on Barack Obama, he can’t possibly believe in 2015 that unconscious bias influences management decisions regarding worker behavior in a large, diverse workforce.
Another Holocene Human
Oh, I guess I forgot to mention the part where our direct supervisors are disproportionately white males and that a lot of the supes are personal friends with a lot of the white males getting away with this shit … and if not, they relate … ?
Yeah, so that, also, too.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: I read what you wrote – it was “instigate fights”. If you meant “instigate arguments”, or “instigate conflict”, you probably should have written that.
Anybody losing their shit in the workplace (especially cops) regardless of the provocation is in fact a “problem person”.
Are there instances where your mgt hasn’t terminated employees who were violent?
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: No, I mean I watched this guy INSTIGATE A FIGHT and if some bystanders hadn’t jumped in to pull the other guy back somebody would have been going home in a cruiser that afternoon.
He suffered NO CONSEQUENCES for that little stunt.
However, they tried to fire* a Black female who did the same thing to a coworker one morning. (She got a lawyer, they backed off.)
*it was one of those constructive termination situations, just proving how fucking stupid our management is
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: Oh, I believe that. I also believe you exaggerated your initial assertion.
opiejeanne
@ThresherK: 2011 or 2012, I think.
It was all over the local news, partly because other people didn’t believe the cop didn’t recognize him if he was a fan of the team. We lived in Anaheim, it happened in whatever town in the OC he lived in.
When he was packing up his house in California after the Angels let him go, a kid from the neighborhood stood in his driveway demanding his autograph on a baseball. Torii didn’t give it to him because he and his kids had lived there for nearly 4 years and not once had that kid or any other kid in the neighborhood come over to play with his kids. This was not a little child, this was a kid of about 13 or 14, if I remember correctly. The family tried to make A Thing out of it in the press and he answered them in the local rag (OC Register) with that explanation. A lot of my friends were outraged on Torii’s behalf.
Keith G
The second hand and amateur observations seem damning. Luckily, the Justice Department will be looking at this is very carefully. I would doubt that any criminal tampering with evidence will get a pass by them.
Another Holocene Human
Meh, I’m done. I can only take you deliberately misreading what I wrote so many times. I am talking about very specific stuff that happened on the job. Provoking IS against the rules, BTW, BobS, it’s just that some rules, and some employees, are more equal than others.
ETA: I am not exaggerating and you can fuck the hell off right now
NickM
I am a middle-aged white man. One night I was pulled over for speeding with my wife and two little kids in the car. For reasons not worth getting into, my wallet was in the trunk, and I had to get out to get it when the cop asked me for it. While I was back there, the cop started accusing me of laughing at him. “You think this if funny, huh? A big joke, huh?” He was totally psyching himself up — I was clearly not laughing at him – I was becoming fucking terrified and may have been chagrined at first but not laughing. I had to apologize for something I didn’t do, because I think I was seconds from getting beaten up.
Ultimately, he decided to let me go but not before the told me that if my kids weren’t in the car this all would have turned out differently. The guy was a total fucking psychopath. I can just imagine what would have happened had my kids not been in the car, or had it been “OK” in his mind to beat on me because I was black, etc.
All this to say that there are definitely psychopath cops looking for an excuse to beat someone up or worse, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for non-middle-aged white guys who basically look like the cops who pull them over.
Another Holocene Human
@opiejeanne: That’s gross. I remember a lot of guys would make their little kids ask for autographs to try to guilt players into giving them, so they could sell them as collectibles. I never cared for Roger Clemens but I never thought he was wrong for telling those folks to go fuck themselves.
opiejeanne
@Gian: I did not hear about that, but I no longer live in California so I don’t always get all of the news from there. Here, it’s almost always a slow news day because of the lower population, so we get reports on every little bitty thing that happens in Western Washington and a fair amount of what goes on in the interior.
opiejeanne
@opiejeanne: Found it, and I forgot the bit about his burglar alarm being the reason the cops showed up.
Torii’s run-in with a cop
opiejeanne
@Gian: Even he thought it was ridiculous when the one cop said he was a fan of the Angels.
Thanks, I found it after I got home from buying bacon for breakfast. Didn’t realize you had posted it already.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: You initially wrote “white males”, not ‘a white male’, obviously wanting to create the impression that the instances where all those “white males…instigate fights” is more widespread than the two instances of “very specific stuff” you subsequently cite (& where neither employee was terminated, as it turns out). Yeah, you were exaggerating.
Applejinx
Saw the vanishing cars.
How fucking dumb do they think we are?
Barry
@White Trash Liberal: “Amazing how these new commenters are not only experts on white voting patterns, but also a/v sync (looping is not sync, BTW) experts and proponents of the obey authority philosophy.”
Another thing I’ve observed is that the people who blame the victims and demand proof of accusations against the police will continue to defend the police, even as the evidence piles up.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@retr2327:
I don’t see any productive point of #2. There isn’t a sentient person who is not already painfully aware of the current state of the Police State and the risk of any interaction with cops. This is especially true for PoC. There’s a reason “The Talk” has been a thing for decades. The only reason I can see why people repeatedly bring #2 into these discussions is to: A.) justify police brutality, B.) victim-blame, C.) derail the conversation away from the real problem and allow themselves to not feel bad about doing so, or D.) All of the above.
I don’t mean that that is what YOU are doing in this case, I’m just spelling out why I think any attempt to bring #2 into these threads deserves a simple “fuck off” response, rather than giving them the air of legitimacy. In almost every case I have ever seen it’s just an attempt to derail via JAQ’ing.
opiejeanne
@Another Holocene Human: That still happens, people send their kids to get stuff signed with intent to sell . We have some baseballs that were signed by a couple of players, but I paid for the one signed by Vladdy. I ordered it from a memorabilia shop that was having him for a signing event, and I was really sad that we were unable to attend because he spent a lot of time with the fans who did show, about 100 of them.
I got Dino Ebel to sign the bill of my cap and the kid next to me who couldn’t get near the players got him to sign his ball, and then asked who he was. LOL. I told the kid that Dino was the best 3rd base coach in baseball. The kid was not impressed.
Chris
@Rafer Janders:
Exactly.
Those of us who are not trained in any way for the kind of stressful situations that cops are expected to handle manage, mostly, to go our entire lives enduring disrespect from the occasional asshole, shake it off like grown-ups, and get on with our lives. There is something seriously, deeply fucked up about the assumption that it’s normal or to be expected for cops to overreact to situations that we lowly civilians are for the most part perfectly capable of handling. And the attendant assumption that anyone in a uniform is automatically owed an abject ass-kissing attitude from anyone he interacts with, no matter how little he does to deserve it.
east is east
What an extremely upsetting video. This punk cop decided to destroy this poor woman for absolutely nothing.
cmorenc
@japa21:
Ms. Bland died with her rights on, else this incident of wrongful initial police behavior (the traffic stop) would never have attracted so much as a blip’s worth of anyone’s attention. And had she been released from custody soon after booking, it’s far less likely than more likely that the officer would have faced any repercussions for his power-tripping misbehavior and abuse around her arrest. Not at all that he should escape effective scrutiny and sanctions for the way he dealt with her, or that he inevitably would have escaped such, but rather a chillingly accurate evaluation of the probabilities of the most likely outcome, had she not ended up dying in jail. And the overwhelmingly vast majority of such cases where citizens are mistreated do not result in sufficiently dire outcomes to attract the degree of adverse public outrage and attention needed to force effective investigation and corrective redress. EVERY recent case that’s focused effective attention on police misconduct against people of color has been one in which the person died.
Out of the many daily injustices inflicted on people of color, which ones are worth putting up argumentative resistance to, and which are not? Which ones (and by what tactical responses) are most likely to yield constructive results – and which ones (or what percentage) of such incidents are worth the risk out of sheer principle, even if the possibilities for constructive payoff are minimal? Surely, many are, but many are not. It’s difficult to be sure to keep these sort of calculations in mind when confronted with a situation that pushes your buttons – that’s as true when you’re in the right about the general situation as when you’re in the wrong (as the arresting officer was). Maybe the officer was from the get-go out to engineer a situation that would result in her arrest – but maybe not. But what is true is that her reaction did significantly up the probabilities she would end up getting arrested, albeit wrongfully arrested – was this a hill worth her possibly dying upon, either figuratively (or as it turned out, literally?)
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@BobS:
Dude, if you want to take my discussion of a known pattern of industry-wide repeated behavior and translate it in your head into “one instance,” then there’s no hope for you. You are so deep in denial that you will never be able to recognize repeated patterns as patterns no matter how many people point them out to you.
Good day.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: That is completely crazy. That poor lady. I know she will have top quality representation & I look forward to her owning it all. Criminal charges can apply here, IMO. Multiple people should be fired at the absolute least.
Rafer Janders
@cmorenc:
I don’t know, but I’m sure you can whitesplain it for us. Who knows better than you, after all?
Paul in KY
@SuperHrefna: Too, too, too many cops are racist assholes. they also seem to recruit their racist asshole buddies onto the force.
The civilian leadership needs to weed them out, or they will kill & maim innocent people & also cause these cities to pay out mega-damages.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: If they pull you over for a BS reason (and they know it), they expect you to be a little pissed. That is NORMAL. Actually, being very deferential might give them the idea that you have something to hide (said by a white guy).
Paul in KY
@dr. bloor: Excellent point!
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: She was exercising her free speech rights to let the jerk police officer know that she (a law abiding, tax-paying American citizen) was irritated with his passive-aggressive BS ‘policing’.
BobS
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Again, I believe I acknowledged the problem you described in your industry (which you certainly know better than I do). With regard to the throwing of ceramic mugs, I didn’t realize that was a standard protocol in studios and executive suites, similar to all the “white males” guilty of a&b in Another Holocene Human’s workplace – please accept my apology. Also, does the entertainment industry attract as many people with borderline personality disorders as this comment section seems to?
retr2327
@Uncle Ebeneezer: You raise a lot of good points. And I especially appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt. But let me suggest one other possible reason why #2 might sometimes be raised (pure speculation).
I used to do a lot of rock climbing and kayaking, and one thing I noticed was that every time an accident happened, people always wanted to pick out something that the victim did “wrong.” And in that context, at least, the reason was pretty clear: to convince yourself that it “wouldn’t happen to me,” because “I wouldn’t make that mistake.”
It’s not clear if a similar mechanism is at work here, but it might be: the thought that a significant number of cops are just bombs waiting to go off is deeply disturbing, and it might be easier to deal with if we can point to something the victim did “wrong.”
Of course, if that kind of logic is at work, it would also suggest that, at some level, white liberals take some comfort in the thought that it wouldn’t happen to them . . . And, of course, it is less likely to, by far, but it’s by no means out of the question.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: @Davebo: I agree. How about ‘Cmorenc’s Fallicy’?
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Excellent point, Mneme.
snidelywonder
Video removed by User
Paul in KY
@Rafer Janders: a cop is sooooooooo close to being a gangster. A lot of them admire gangsters.
Paul in KY
@opiejeanne: Good for Torii! I wouldn’t have given the little prick an autograph either.
brantl
@mtiffany: Both audio and video are timestamped, and can be recalled. You need to learn the file structures.
brantl
@cmorenc: Being unwise, BUT LEGAL, is not supposed to get you KILLED. FLAT STOP. PERIOD. DO YOU GET THAT, OR NOT?
Snarki, child of Loki
I’m sure the DA will carefully examine the fonts and kerning of this video, and determine that the “edits” were only done to remove the frames where Elvis crossed the field of view, because privacy, people.
Paul in KY
@BobS: What kind of white-guy-type do you think typically ends up as an entertainment executive?! A hard-charging, emotional, entitled, asshole, that’s who.
dmbeaster
Its not just cars blinking in and out – the “glitch” or “upload error” is more serious than that.
The link in the post to the video is now dead, but is still available at this link posted in another comment above (Houston Chronicle article).
There is an obvious multi-second repeat of the tape starting at 32:38, again at 33:04, at 33:27 and 33:52. It is the same multi-second loop. The white car approaches from the left and turns left (and blinks in and out in some loops) followed by a darker car. An SUV approaches from the opposite direction, and a fourth car approaches from the left, waits for the SUV to clear, and then turns left. This sequence repeats several times, with the blinking car glitch occurring sometimes (but not all) at the beginning of each loop.
During the entire two minute plus time frame, the conversation of the arresting officer with apparently his superior continues without interruption or glitch. What is the alleged upload error or other technical glitch than can cause a multi second repeat of the same scene while the audio continues without interruption?
The Other Chuck
@retr2327:
Well it’s pretty appropriate there, since it’s going to boil down to operator error, equipment failure, or Acts Of God, and God is less busy doing those things than most people give her credit for. Not exactly the case with a cop, who has agency even when he’s a psychopath.
different-church-lady
@sigaba:
Great observations in that ‘graph.
If we, for the moment, assume it’s a glitch, then from a technological standpoint it could:
a) be part of the source “capture” (i.e. what people would think of as “the original tape” back in the analog day.),
b) introduced during some kind of copy and/or transcoding step from the original capture media
c) introduced when the video was distributed to the web.
From a biological standpoint, yes, a human being ought to be watching every frame of the thing before it goes out. Because this very release of the video is not being introduced into evidence I cannot say whether it needed to be looked at by the
assholeofficer in question. Even if they did have someone watch the hypothetical copy/transcode, people’s attention tends to wander of the course of 50 minutes. Perhaps nobody actually looked at it all the way through, or if someone did maybe their attention slipped at that point. Or perhaps it was only “spot checked”. If option C above was the step where the glitch happened then perhaps nobody watched all 50 minutes after uploading.I used to get paid great deals of money to take complicated high-definition videos with multiple soundtracks and get them properly stuck to esoteric playback machines. We had to make sure the masters were 100+% correct, because because once a glitchy video was distributed it was an expensive proposition to replace it. So I had to watch each show we did multiple times. These things were only 15 minutes long, but it got to the point where I had to do this biological verification in little two-minute chunks because I was so bored my attention would invariably wander, and I’d have to wind back to the last place I remembered paying attention and start from there.
In the end, none of this takes away from the fact that she shouldn’t have ever been in that jail cell to begin with.