Albuquerque's police chief thinks cops have a 5th Amendment right to leave their body cameras off
Albuquerque's police chief thinks cops have a 5th Amendment right to leave their body cameras off
Harold Medina made that argument during an internal investigation of a crash he caused last February.
Medina offered two puzzling excuses for leaving his camera off. He "cited intermittent conversations with his wife, who was a passenger in his unmarked patrol vehicle at the time of the collision," Ortiz says. "He claimed there was a right to privileged communication between spouses, which specifically exempted him from mandatory recording requirements." But the relevant policy "does not provide for nonrecording based on spousal privilege."
Even more troubling, Medina said he "purposefully did not record because he was invoking his 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate." Since "he was involved in a traffic collision," he reasoned, he was "subject to 5th Amendment protections."
If you are on duty, and acting as an agent of the state, your bodycam is on. If you've invited your wife into your patrol car while on duty, your bodycam is on. If you're "involved in a traffic collision" while on duty your bodycam is on.
You fascist fuck.
Yep, the on duty part makes his claim irrelevant. Or, rather, it doesn't count as self incrimination. The entire point of the cameras is to cover on duty activity, and is no different than a cctv in a parking lot at the police station because the patrol vehicle is public property, not his.
It's more than that. When you accept the responsibility of acting as an agent of the state, your actions are those of the state. And we the people have a right to know what actions the state is taking, especially in policing, where those actions are far too often against us.
Going beyond that, bodycams protect everyone, both the public and the officers. Having spoken to police officers about bodycams, the good ones love them, because if someone decides to make a false complaint against an officer, they have bodycam footage to defend themselves with. One officer told me that the number of complaints went down after the introduction of bodycams, because the department would say, "Okay, we'll pull the footage" ... and a good number of those complaintants would suddenly vanish.
The only cops who don't want bodycams are the ones who would be incriminated by that footage.
If you need your fifth amendment rights to be a cop you don't need to be a cop. Simple as.
He is a real piece of shit, not your normal cop piece of shit, extra shitty shitty. Like a turd that makes it cry a little as it is on its way out.
Like the orange dude running for prez?
If he's wrong (and I think he is) then doesn't his turning off his camera become obstruction of justice? If not, what would this be considered?
he should be charge for the use of public resources for personal use and reprimanded outside of everything related to the crash and the camera is the property of the department and not him and is unrelated to his rights. His mouth is his and he can keep it shut if he wants to invoke his rights.
This is the same dude that got himself a 100k police cruiser because he wrecked his.
If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear.
I think Albuquerque's police chief can go fuck himself.
My workplace's IT staff can see what I'm doing on my work computer, even when it's texting my wife. That's fine, it's their computer; anything I do with it is under their banner and they bear some responsibilities around it, and therefore my using it for personal stuff is a privilege I need to be cognizant of the realities around. A cop's work vehicle is no different. The camera isn't there to protect his wife, it's there to protect society against him and he doesn't get to pick and choose when he's subject to that oversight.
You don't have to use technology in a potentially incriminating way? So you won't force people to use their biometrics to unlock their phones?
Fuck this guy. Seriously.
Abq and him deserve each other.