The Privacy Loophole in Your Doorbell (politico.com) 150
Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home. From a report: The week of last Thanksgiving, Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Ohio, picked up his phone and answered a call. It was the local police, and they wanted footage from Larkin's front door camera. Larkin had a Ring video doorbell, one of the more than 10 million Americans with the Amazon-owned product installed at their front doors. His doorbell was among 21 Ring cameras in and around his home and business, picking up footage of Larkin, neighbors, customers and anyone else near his house. The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of "suspicious activity" between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Larkin cooperated, and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame. He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning.
They asked for more footage, now from the entire day's worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras -- whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself. As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin's case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people's own expectation of privacy for the devices they own -- a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn't fully grappled with. Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate. "It really takes the control out of the hands of the homeowners, and I think that's hugely problematic," said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.
In the debate over home surveillance, much of the concern has focused on Ring in particular, because of its popularity, as well as the company's track record of cooperating closely with law enforcement agencies. The company offers a multitude of products such as indoor cameras or spotlight cameras for homes or businesses, recording videos based on motion activation, with the footage stored for up to 180 days on Ring's servers. They amount to a large and unregulated web of eyes on American communities -- which can provide law enforcement valuable information in the event of a crime, but also create a 24/7 recording operation that even the owners of the cameras aren't fully aware they've helped to build.
They asked for more footage, now from the entire day's worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras -- whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself. As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin's case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people's own expectation of privacy for the devices they own -- a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn't fully grappled with. Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate. "It really takes the control out of the hands of the homeowners, and I think that's hugely problematic," said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.
In the debate over home surveillance, much of the concern has focused on Ring in particular, because of its popularity, as well as the company's track record of cooperating closely with law enforcement agencies. The company offers a multitude of products such as indoor cameras or spotlight cameras for homes or businesses, recording videos based on motion activation, with the footage stored for up to 180 days on Ring's servers. They amount to a large and unregulated web of eyes on American communities -- which can provide law enforcement valuable information in the event of a crime, but also create a 24/7 recording operation that even the owners of the cameras aren't fully aware they've helped to build.
What other camera companies lack (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:What other camera companies lack (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many many more have purchased Ring since Amazon bought them. Stop using Ring.
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Ubiquiti is no better anyway; while storage is local, if you want to use the phone or tablet app authentication is done by Ubiquiti, making it trivial for them to respond to a warrant. I have found no paid apps that are any better than Ubiquiti for my iPad, so you end up stuck.
That said, I like the camera quality much better than the floodlight cameras. I have a few cameras with similar optics and they are fine for things that are close by or during the day, but at night the real cameras make a difference
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I don't fully know the details.
But as I understand it, if you are using an Apple HomeKit Hub, and the very cheap iCloud upgrade to store your videos....that is all encrypted and just between you, your devices and the encrypted cloud storage which I do not think is even Apple accessible?
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Uh huh. I don't think power supply is the big stumbling block for most people. The doorbells are enough of a pain in the ass to install that most people are going to get an electrician to do it. There's going to be a very narrow slice of the market that is willing to maintain an always-on video recording system but are not willing to search amazon for a wifi camera and a $5 socket to plug adapter.
Re:What other camera companies lack (Score:4)
Most of us can't fathom trying to retrofit cat 5 cables through our roofs to the soffit just to POE power a camera.
I've run CAT 5 and coax cables through the attic of my house, built in the 70s, but thankfully a ranch, to the family room and all the bedrooms so I can fathom trying to do it out to the soffit, which is why I'd be loath to actually do it out to the soffit -- yuk. :-)
"Expectation of Privacy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Expectation of Privacy" (Score:4, Funny)
But this is the USA. The only country in the world where a judge tells you what you expect.
Especially the Supreme Court -- telling women what to expect, when they're expecting. :-)
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Not your servers, not your data. (Score:2)
Re: Not your servers, not your data. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a data deletion policy that doesn't happen by a number of days, but it happens by an AI that randomly decides what footage to delete.
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Re: Not your servers, not your data. (Score:2)
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Just don't tell the cops or they can force you to hand over the data. Deleting it can get you obstruction of Justice charges.
The video recording are making areas safer and insurance premiums lower that said
The issue I would say is Ring will send all the video including something that you may have done which then gives the police a reason to investigate you. When you have your own video storage you can give them just the stuff pertaining to what they need. Not the video of your 15 year old daughter and her handsy ex-boyfriend who suffered a ball crushing accident last week
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Re:Not your servers, not your data. (Score:5, Interesting)
This hand-over was in response to a warrant. If the cops drive around and see you have cameras, they'll get a warrant to get the video from you too, and then you either have to comply, hire a lawyer to fight the warrant, or refuse to comply (and probably go to jail for contempt of court).
There's really nothing news-worthy here, and nothing special about Ring (or any cloud) vs. locally-managed cameras. The only real difference is that Ring/Nest/Arlo/etc. probably aren't going to fight a warrant, and I guess that when the video is cloud-hosted, the cloud provider has to deal with the time/expense of complying.
The only thing that's changed over time is that in the past, most people didn't spend the time and money to set up home surveillance systems. Now that you can buy devices at the big-box stores (hardware, electronics, discount) and install them easily, they're just a lot more widespread. Cops mostly just used to try to get video in business areas (where there were more cameras) and now they can get it from residential areas too.
Re:Not your servers, not your data. (Score:5, Insightful)
A difference with Ring, though, is that they are all too willing to make footage available to police, sometimes even without a warrant. They readily make it to known to law enforcement who has cameras and where. Self-hosting is bit more "security through obscurity" model, but at least the police have to approach you directly, rather than back-channel to Ring, to get what they want.
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Oh certainly, Ring has proven untrustworthy... but that wasn't the story here.
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This hand-over was in response to a warrant. If the cops drive around and see you have cameras, they'll get a warrant to get the video from you too, and then you either have to comply, hire a lawyer to fight the warrant, or refuse to comply (and probably go to jail for contempt of court).
"Sorry, officer, my server is down and it hasn't been recording anything since this time last year."
Re:Not your servers, not your data. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck with that. First, they probably won't believe it, so then probably would get a warrant to seize your equipment. If you lied, you're liable to be charged with obstructing an investigation and lying to the police - judges don't like people trying to evade their warrants.
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Good thing I don't live in the mighty US of A, then.
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Eh, I'm not aware of countries where judges treat being lied to as a fun day for the liar.
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There are countries where the police asks nicely, they only need footage from a certain camera which is known to cover the affected area during a certain limited period, and needing a judge to have to issue a warrant for that is virtually unheard of, because people would be happy to help, knowing that the police is not going to overstep their boundaries.
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Nice and vague (useless). Perhaps a list of such?
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Re:Not your servers, not your data. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the cops drive around and see you have cameras, they'll get a warrant to get the video from you too....
There is a HUGE difference between cops taking time, money, and effort to drive around and manually inspect houses for the existence of cameras, and having a one-stop shop for blanket warrants.
There is a HUGE difference between cops having to get warrants for multiple, independently owned houses, and cops getting a single warrant that specifies multiple victims.
There is also a HUGE difference between a cloud-hosted service throwing up its hands at the first sight of a warrant and failing to even notify you, vs you knowing exactly what, when, where, why, and how the warrant was issued. You then at least have the ability to decide whether or not to fight the warrant. With something like Ring, the videos are not on your property (regardless of what Ring's terms of service might say), so you have no legal right to contest the warrant.
There is also the HUGE difference between law enforcement knowing for a fact that Ring has your videos versus the entirely plausible reality that your cameras are for live viewing only (most of my internal cameras are setup this way), so there's nothing to turn over. If they show up with a warrant that says, "all recordings of [live-view-only camera areas]," I can politely tell them those cameras don't record anything, good bye, have a nice day. You surrender that option the moment you opt to transmit all of your footage to a 3rd party that absolutely does record everything.
In all cases, it's far less likely that local authorities will end up at your house with warrants for your particular videos than it is that they will end up at Ring with a single warrant that covers many private properties in one fell swoop.
I can go on and on about the stupidity of giving companies a live stream of your cameras. It's absolutely mind-boggling that people are so stupid (this isn't ignorance; it's blatant stupidity).
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It's not clear from the Wikipedia article on Search Warrants in the US [wikipedia.org] but I doubt if any judge would be willing to sign a blanket warrant of that scope or that it would hold up on appeal. You'd probably need to obtain a different one for each property you wanted to search, and send the requests to multiple judges to save time.
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Point one - many judges have issued bogus warrants, including blanket. Point two - more likely.
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You'd probably need to obtain a different one for each property you wanted to search, and send the requests to multiple judges to save time.
Constitutionally, that's the way it's supposed to work. Unfortunately, we have many, many courts in the U.S. for which the Constitution is light comedy. Never underestimate judicial corruption, as it's rampant. It's a small percentage of corrupt courts in the larger scheme, but it's still too large a number in absolute terms.
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Whatever the case, I have no plans to put any of my identifiable data in a cloud without first encrypting it.
Good luck for whoever wants to get that data from the cloud provider.
I host my own cloud like service on my synology device, and it can record IPcams as well. With full secure remote access, etc.
Again, I can decide on my own data retention policy, on a whim, at any time.
And lastly, am not in the US. And last I checked, in my jurisdiction, they can't demand data from individuals who are not involved i
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Not an Actual Repeat Article, but Same Discussion (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon Admits Giving Ring Camera Footage To Police Without a Warrant or Consent (Intercept.com) - July 13, 2022
Amazon's Ring and Google Can Share Footage With Police Without Warrants (or Your Consent) (Cnet.com) - July 30, 2022
Here's the rundown:
1. If you use Ring, you accept everything about their releasing video to law enforcement which on their website. (https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001318523-Law-Enforcement-Legal-Process-Guidelines).
2. There's no loophole. A warrant is a warrant. If they get a warrant for full access to your camera system (not just exterior cameras), that's what they get. The warrant itself might be overly broad, but that's on the judge. That gets sorted out after the fact in court.
Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy.
There is no question. Any company storing any data can be served with a legal requirement (subpoena, court order) to release that data for use in an investigation. Ring stores videos on their servers and thus will get subpoenas. It's their data. It doesn't matter who owns the cameras, what matters is who stores the data. If you don't want your video accessed by law enforcement, obscure your cameras and store your video locally.
Re:Not an Actual Repeat Article, but Same Discussi (Score:4, Informative)
... and encrypt your data at rest with a complex boot-time passphrase.
So far they are just stealing hardware with single power supplies.
Once you have redundant power they can put it on a cart with a UPS trivially and then hotplug on a DMA bus.
It takes a specialist to pull a single PS unit without interrupting power but those are rare so far.
Attacks only get better over time so weigh your options carefully.
Re:Not an Actual Repeat Article, but Same Discussi (Score:5, Informative)
It takes a specialist to pull a single PS unit without interrupting power but those are rare so far.
They are not that rare. Any law enforcement agency with a computer crimes unit will have the equipment to do it. Hell you can buy the kit yourself. For example: https://wiebetech.com/products... [wiebetech.com]
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AI sits in a dead-end closet watching the door. Powers off if anyone approaches.
Not the full context (Score:2)
There's no loophole. A warrant is a warrant. If they get a warrant for full access to your camera system (not just exterior cameras), that's what they get. The warrant itself might be overly broad, but that's on the judge. That gets sorted out after the fact in court.
IANAL, could some of the lawyers comment on this?
I don't think that's the full context.
The police could only get a warrant after the owner gave them footage showing that the video evidence was relevant. If the owner hadn't done that, it's likely that the police could not have gotten a blind warrant: the police have to show that there is evidence that they need. With no other justification, there is no reason to believe that the video evidence would be relevant and judges won't hand out a warrant for a fishi
Re:Not the full context (Score:5, Informative)
police could only get a warrant after the owner gave them footage showing that the video evidence was relevant
Kinda. It helped the police. It made the warrant easier to get. That's how police often open up investigations-- they kindly ask to enter your home and then everything in the home is in plain sight and they can investigate further.
Had the resident said, "No, I won't give you the video," the police could simply go to the courts and say, "Hey, this guy has security cameras pointed directly at the suspect home. We need a warrant for this date at this time span" and they'd probably get it. Narrowly tailored requests are considered reasonable. After that get that "taste", they can then get a warrant for ALL the video.
By volunteering the video, the resident basically helped the PD skip the first warrant step. Of course, the BIG problem was the warrant granting access to the entire camera system and not just "all cameras pointing at the suspect house and public right-of-way".
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The homeowner is fucked not because he has the cameras but because he uses the Ring system. There's already a streamlined procedure in place for the police to subpoena Ring: "Which homes have Ring cameras in the area?" Remember that the company isn't interested in actually protecting anyone's privacy, they're just concerned with their own legal liability... which is resolved by the standard TOS and the most pro forma of subpoenas.
At this point some intern at Ring has probably created a password protected
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If you don't want your video accessed by law enforcement, obscure your cameras and store your video locally.
Storing things locally doesn't give you any special power to resist a subpoena. You can quash a subpoena only if you can show the courts (including appeals courts), that the subpoena violates someone's constitutional rights.
Same thing goes for banks, by the way. They may want to keep all their transactions private, but if there is reasonable suspicion to believe the money is dirty, they have to turn over the relevant records.
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No, it doesn't, but you can explicitly set up your system to only retain footage from a few days in the past and overwrite footage from further back in a FIFO fashion. Ideally, this restriction would be physical, due to storage device size, in order to make data recovery impossible. You're required to hand the authorities what you have. The trick is to design the system not to retain too much.
i.e. if you were a crime victim 3 days ago, you can pull the device to retain footage. But if you weren't a crim
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No special powers, but it gives you the option to try.
Fine. (Score:2)
Hey, if they want to pay for it, they can install 24/7 surveillance cameras all over the outside of my house.
Be my guest.
Rest of the warrant (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd love to see the rest of the warrant, where the police explain their probable cause, rather than the single page that Politico posted.
Re:Rest of the warrant (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm wagering that they had the cause for external footage, but that there was never any distinction pressed by any party along the way between cameras pointed toward other property versus the camera owners own property, particularly interior.
Basically, cloud hosting sensitive security material is not safe to do, and you'll have to at least self-manage the portion of surveillance you care about being private.
So I may shrug and say 'sure' to my doorbell camera, but for any theoretical camera footage that covers the interior of my house? I'm going to go ahead and self host that and do off premise backup with encryption out of the hands of the storage provider. If they come with a warrant to investigate me personally, so be it, but I don't want my private house to just be casually slurped into an investigation of my street.
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Or they had no idea he had so many other cameras, etc. associated with the account, asked the judge for "all vids from this account and this time period" and judge said "sure", again not knowing there would be a ton of unexpected bycatch in the net they cast.
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Well, yes that was what I meant by "there was never any distinction pressed by any party along the way between cameras pointed toward other property versus the camera owners own property, particularly interior." Whether by virtue of being aware yet uncaring, or being oblivious.
Not News (Score:2, Interesting)
You know what else isn't news: search warrants exist. Even if the guy wasn't using Ring, if the police know that he's got a bunch of cameras, and can link that to a potential crime, they're likely to get a judge to sign a search warrant for the footage. It is the nature of police to take a maximal approach to data gathering. One's recourses are
Big Brother is watching (Score:4, Funny)
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C'mon, you know they are watching the son.
It's Not Your Doorbell (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither the doorbell nor the data they collect is yours. You merely get to see data before it is stored elsewhere and you may get to 're' see the data later.
I guess it is going to take a whole 3 generations before people understand what a 'cloud' is what that entails legally.
delete them (Score:2)
Download and delete your videos from Ring. Don't leave them in the cloud.
Re:delete them (Score:5, Insightful)
Cloud definition of delete: stop showing the item to the customer.
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You're a fucking idiot if you store any important data on the cloud.
Now watch ... (Score:2)
Much outrage (Score:2)
It isn't as if a court was powerless to subpoena what they believe is evidence either exculpatory or damning of crime. If you had any other kind of camera system and the officers/prosecutors/defense observed it appears to be pointed such that it would cover an area of interest in their investigation and the case they could get the court to compel you to turn it over.
You could fight it on self incrimination grounds but if you are at least somewhat removed from the issue you certainly can be compelled to prov
The "Right" to privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can have an expectation of privacy, and it's legally defensible. For example, you can have that private conversation in a public place by keeping your voice down. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If somebody points a parabolic microphone at you from a distance and picks up the conversation, they are in the wrong. Similarly, a woman wearing a short skirt has a reasonable expectation of privacy. A pervert taking "upskirt" shots of her is going to wind up in jail.
Just because you're out i
...and people are suprised? (Score:2)
It amazes me how people not only voluntarily fill their house with gadgets that they already know collect personal info and send it to some company's servers, but they actually pay out of their own pockets for them .Even George Orwell didn't see that one coming. (In his book 1984, at least the government payed for and installed the spying devices).
Then after all, those same people get all outraged every time something like this happens. Then the next day they go out and buy another smart speaker or somethin
Feit (Score:2)
No subscription, Feit's cameras store footage on card in the camera, no cloud.
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No story here (Score:2)
Police ask citizen for security camera footage. Citizen agrees and hands it over.
Police obtain warrant for additional footage, and it is provided pursuant to the warrant.
What's the outrage supposed to be about again? Or is this some piece that Fox "News" originally wrote?
As pointed out already, if you weren't using a cloud-based security system, if the police saw that you have security cameras and wanted footage from it, they'd ask you for it, instead of Amazon. If you refuse
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...if you weren't using a cloud-based security system, if the police saw that you have security cameras...
Do you think there is no difference between police expending time, effort, and resources manually driving around town vs. police firing off an electronic document that is largely generated for them? The police will inevitably choose the path of least resistance.
This is exactly why I won't have one of these (Score:2)
While I do have security cameras, the footage from them never leaves my home and there is no frigging subscription to pay or find that my device is now useless because the company has decided to terminate the service.
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True, but Ring makes it way too easy, and they don't even have to tell you.
At least on self-hosted, they have to do the warrant paperwork. With Ring, they have a special sub site dedicated to providing data to law enforcement with nothing required other than initially proving they are law enforcement when getting their account on the site.
Don't talk to the police (Score:3)
We militarized our police and started teaching them a "warrior" mentality. That sounds cool and looks cool unless you stop and think about it. It means the public very quickly becomes the enemy. It puts police in an antagonistic role.
This is how you get things like fake confessions extracted after 16+ hours of interrogation. It's what ACAB means. The problem isn't public safety. It's the structure of our public safety organizations.
So... no Ring. What cameras do people recommend? (Score:2)
My wife has been making noises lately about wanting a doorbell cam/bell, mainly so she will know when someone is there - our house layout is such that people tend to come to our back door. Bonus points if she can tell the person she knows they're there and is on the way (she doesn't move particularly fast, and some delivery people seem to wait 2-3 seconds at most).
Surveillance abilities isn't particularly important, so I don't really care about video recording - but local storage would be my preference if i
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Closed circuit can't be subject to a warrant because it doesn't record anything unless you install the extra hardware. Same could be said for a webcam that just does local multicast without any recording.
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Maybe not for everyone but... (Score:2)
This may not fit everyone's needs, but I have cameras (not cloud hosted) and they all point exclusively outwards.
I don't do internal cameras. I know that some folks want/need internal cameras to monitor while away / check on pet sitter etc...
I review detections regularly then delete the data. Sure if the cops really wanted they could get a warrant and take my hub device and try and forensically recover the deleted data (assuming new videos didn't overwrite the old empty space)
But even with all that all my c
In cloud you trust (Score:3)
Store the files yourself! (Score:2)
What's the problem? (Score:2)
The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge.
The police went through the proper channels to get evidence. What is the outrage over this?
Security Cameras and Privacy (Score:2)
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There is also a far less expensive way.
A Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Linux DVR with a few $30 ONVIF Wi-Fi PTZ cameras from Amazon. No cloud storage and visible remotely at anytime with continuous loop recording for whatever period I specify with searchable video. It's been working great for 4 years.
Adding UPS power is trivial for individual cameras, Pi and Internet connections.
Judge is part of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Having your camera recordings in the cloud ("someone else's computer") allows this to happen. Police submitting overly broad warrants is another. The third part are the judges. They face no consequences for rubberstamping those warrants.
There need to be consequences. A judge who damages someone by approving such a warrant should be liable.
It may take a few more court cases... (Score:3)
but I would be surprised if this stood in the long-term.
4th amendment rights overrule the court's order here. The police have no reasonable cause to suspect that a crime has occurred within the home, thus no right to search it. Here's the problem - Ring were served, not the customer. As the custodians of the customer's privacy, they had a duty of care to fight the warrant as being too broad, and not just roll over and play dead. I'm sure that the fact that it's cheaper to just send an apology email to the customer than a lawyer to the courthouse has absolutely nothing to do with it. The customer should sue Ring for their legal negligence in this matter. Once that happens a few times, Ring will fight the warrants appropriately. The other thing that could help is making a lot of noise in the media.
Before anyone jumps down my throat about the customer contract allowing Ring to do that, I'd like to remind them that the Constitution is the highest law of the land, trumps all other laws, and the rights within cannot be abrogated except via voted amendments.
That'll be little comfort for victims in the meantime though.
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Or not necessarily even have to fight the warrants.
I suspect all Ring would have had to do to make both law enforcement and the owners happy enough would have been to offer up only the exterior footage when faced with such a warrant, with requiring the warrant *explicitly* ask for other footage if relevant.
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Without even looking, I will state that the warrant specified "ALL CAMERAS", I guarantee you. It's boiler-plate verbiage based on overly broad affidavits that cops have recycled for decades. The judge rubber-stamps it, the cops take everything, then (theoretically) discard what's not relevant post-case.
Ring won't fight a subpoena and sure as shit won't fight a warrant. It's vastly easier to have an intern dump everything from the account onto a thumb drive and ship it off. If they get sued by the customer (
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But they won't - and haven't.
Yet another reason (Score:2)
This is yet another reason why if I do set up a security camera, it will NOT connect to the cloud for any reason. If I need to access it remotely, I'll set up the tunneling myself.
Meanwhile, if the Hamilton PD and others don't start behaving better and more above board, they'll find that every citizen reports that their camera must be malfunctioning and has no footage when they poke their nose under the tent like that.
LoTek (Score:2)
When they think you're HiTek, go Low, and a door knocker is pretty Low.
whaja expect (Score:2)
Not MY doorbell. (Score:2)
People intentionally install these things that record everything back to the mothership and then they complain about their privacy rights... well you have the right to not buy the darned thing. Or is it just a rental?
Re:Repubican wet dream (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 1990s it would have been the crowd who flew don’t tread on me flags. You know the mostly harmless but paranoid people who dislike government and law enforcement. Today times are different though. I agree with the protesters. The last thing the cops need is paramilitary training. They need de-escalation techniques and community relations training. Most civilized countries require law enforcement to have a college degree. Here you get a few months of boot camp and a gun. Hair dressers require more training than cops.
Re:Repubican wet dream (Score:5, Insightful)
They need de-escalation techniques and community relations training
No they don't need a bunch of social-worker mubojumbo and other unscientific bullshit. They simply need their scope and objectives properly defined. They should be about public safety and investigative work and yes apprehending perps even when some level of violence is needed, but if a couple of guys with service pistols and dog can't handle it than its not a job for a cop.
Exactly no local sheriff's department or municipal police department should have SWAT team. If a situation requires 'special weapons and tactics' its no longer a policy matter. It is some kind rebellion or insurrection and it should be left to the state police, and if need be the national guard. The governors office and the state's AG should be accountable for all of it.
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No they don't need a bunch of social-worker mubojumbo and other unscientific bullshit. They simply need their scope and objectives properly defined. They should be about public safety and investigative work and yes apprehending perps even when some level of violence is needed,
https://www.foxnews.com/us/san... Yes I feel safer already.
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Well good job slashdot on mangling that link https://www.foxnews.com/us/san... [foxnews.com]
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Exactly no local sheriff's department or municipal police department should have SWAT team. If a situation requires 'special weapons and tactics' its no longer a policy matter. It is some kind rebellion or insurrection and it should be left to the state police, and if need be the national guard. The governors office and the state's AG should be accountable for all of it.
Some States have politics that would turn state-controlled SWAT teams into state-controlled thugs to enforce various laws of dubious value.
But at least your idea avoids the risk of turning those situations into miniature Waco debacles involving the FBI and military tanks, so that's a relief.