This title makes it feel like it's an Apple feature, but really it's just a Shortcut someone put together.
It basically just turns down the volume, texts your location to an emergency contact, and opens your camera. It doesn't upload the footage in realtime to a central server as other apps do.
Can you clarify this, does iCloud or Dropbox actually receive video in real time as it's being recorded, or does it only start uploading after the recording is done? Because in the latter case, I doubt it will do much good -- unless perhaps sleeping an iPhone during a recording saves what has been recorded so far and uploads it in the background, which I'm also not sure of.
There’s probably an opportunity here: If there was an app that did streaming video to a server already, the developers could easily add a shortcut to it which started a stream to a server, and you could hook it up to Siri via the Shortcuts app.
Surely there must be apps that offer this functionality already? I'm not app-savvy enough to come up with any examples but I know many years ago there was a lot of talk about Bambuser.[1]
It records it if you have the Siri Shortcuts app installed and download that user script.
The article points out the Siri command is only for iPhones, but it could also be a Google Routine or an Alexa skill, or there are standalone apps for all three platforms that do the same thing.
This is cool - I think smartphones are are best defence against violent police oversteps. Now everyone has a camera with them and we are seeing the results. Democratisation of surveillance.
Doesn't matter if your device is designed in such a way that it can stream content in a clandestine way, so that it's hard to verify whether it is or not, while sleeping. Of course you can always bypass things like this by starting the whole interaction by grabbing the phone and placing it somewhere else, but that would imply intention which may be even more damaging in a future court case if it could be proven from the phone that it was removed (which you can if it was already recording and streaming) -- and I'd like to think that most people can agree across party lines that police shootings do happen in the "heat of the moment" rather than as planned out homicides.
It also sure wouldn't hurt with mandatory police cameras, it would help police as well as long as they behave, and auditing an official like that shouldn't be controversial.
There’s been a good number of responses to this very point over the last 24 hours. Here’s one from a journalist, Daniel Dale, whose perspective I really like because he’s Canadian, and therefore is less wrapped up emotionally in American politics.
Indeed it is. Why install CCTV cameras when everyone is their own camera-person. Solves the low quality camera problem and multi-angle footage. However...
Democratisation of surveillance.
Mixed with social media, it's now more like self-surveillance. This is just the start and Nextdoor neighbourhoods take this to dystopian levels. But one clever man once compared this to 'Stalin's Dream'. If that's his dream, then it will soon be everyone's nightmare.
Nope, the law is. Siri wont protect you from being killed. Nor adjusting your behavior. Only the law can be used to overturn this program. But don't hold your breath. They are still killing 4 per day, without any oversight.
Deadly force isn't the only way police commit violence against impoverished Americans, or against Americans who aren't white (regardless of economic class). You don't have to be murdered by the police for your life to be effectively ended when they make up BS about assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, etc.
Completely agree. Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate(in fact it shows the opposite) it does show that they are discriminated against at a higher rate. Pulled over more, etc.
If I understood the data correctly, African Americans are pulled over more, then after being pulled over they are killed at the same rate as other groups.
That still implies they are killed at a higher rate. The population we're concerned about isn't "people who have already been pulled over".
Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate
Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.
When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are disputing the causes of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the disparity itself.
I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning why that is and whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.
Yes. You're going to have to direct me to a quote, I don't know what you're referring to. What I see is:
2015:
A 2015 study found that unarmed blacks were 3.49 times more likely to be shot by police than were unarmed whites. [...] Another 2015 study concluded that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
2016:
According to The Guardian's database, in 2016 the rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. [...] Another study published in 2016 concluded that the mortality rate of legal interventions among black and Hispanic people was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher than that among white people.
2018:
A 2018 study found that minorities are disproportionately killed by police but that white officers are not more likely to use lethal force on blacks than minority officers.
2019:
A 2019 study in the Journal of Politics found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this was "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force." A 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be killed by police than whites and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.
----
I see exactly one study in this section that disputes the disparity itself, and that study was widely criticized and ended up issuing a correction:
A 2019 study in PNAS concluded from a dataset of fatal shootings that white officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers [...] The study was widely criticized by other academics, who stated that the study's conclusion could not be supported by the data. [...] PNAS issued a correction to the original article.
I don't see data from the FBI mentioned in the racial disparity section. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to.
Again though, you don't need to do a complicated study to find the disparity itself. You can literally just add up the number of deaths for each race and then divide by population numbers in the US for black/white communities. You'll get higher per-million numbers for black communities than for white ones. I'm not sure how someone could dispute that, unless you're arguing that the Guardian is under-reporting white deaths or something[0]. If you want to debate the causes behind that disparity, then that's a separate conversation.
Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide
victims and off enders. Th e victimization rate for blacks (27.8
per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per
100,000). Th e off ending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost
8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000) (table 1)
From the article
A 2015 study by Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that there was no racial bias in the use of lethal police force between black and white suspects in similar situations. The study did, however, find that blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of force.
A 2016 study published in the journal Injury Prevention concluded that African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos were more likely to be stopped by police compared to Asians and whites, but found that there was no racial bias in the likelihood of being killed or injured after being stopped
I mean, wearing a body cam all the time is an overkill. That being said, your link does not prove that. The number of people killed by the police is just the tip of the iceberg. There would be an order of magnitude more people being seriously harmed (paralyzed, blinded, etc.) by the police than killed. There would be an order of magnitude more people mildly harmed (bruises, cuts, chipped tooth, etc.) than than seriously harmed.
By the time you get to incidents like police's violent arrest of SNL's Jay Pharoah [0], complete with knee on the neck (fortunately not long enough to kill him), you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people being affected and treated like this every year.
Police killings are a lot like fear of letting kids walk to school, fear of planes, fear of skydiving. I think there is a term for it but I'll just say it's common misconceptions that have been painted wrongly by news and word of mouth.
Murder rates have gone down since 70's and at their lowest point, but with the introduction of national and world news it makes people think murders have gone up, so they don't let their kids walk to school. Some people have an irrational fear of flying because of news. People have fear of skydiving because they watch too many movies and think a parachute will fail, when the data shows the exact opposite. 99% of are deaths not related to parachute failing.
So I see the police killings as a world that has gotten smaller, video camera's in everyones pocket and social media that has painted a picture of world that doesn't exist. It strikes fear into people and the psychological issues will be felt for decades.
Except deaths resulting from your examples are generally not state-sponsored and then covered up by the very same people that are supposed to protect us.
Except there's a huge difference between malfeasance and state-sponsored racism. The former can look like the latter if you ignore statistics and you focus only on emotion.
No, it doesn't work to pull a Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings™ on this. It's not just that they murder, it's that they get away with murder. Once that happens the entire police dept is enabling terrible behavior.
I don't get how people don't understand the distinction. If one airplane crashes that doesn't mean there is an institutional airline safety problem. But if you don't even bother to do an honest investigation about what happened, then we absolutely have an institutional problem.
I think we're having two different conversations here. 1). Are police killings worthy of worrying about? and 2). Do we have a problem with police killings; at large, in the in the ethnic communities, and are police held accountable?
In regards to point 1). The parent comment is expressing worry about a statistically insignificant event (framed properly (unarmed, non-justified, non-suicide)) and the following response frames the fear as statistically insignificant. I think this is undeniable and the reason why data is important. Again, this isn't a conversation about whether this is an institutional problem; it's about whether we should live in constant fear of airlines because one airline crashes.
While 2). is a bit more difficult to breakdown. Yes, I think an easy case can be made about cops needing more accountability (for the sake of police generally and society). but do we need institutional change broadly (accountability +) because the police system is racist against people of color? ....Well, that's a claim. That's where data is important and feelings are no longer relevant.
The Wikipedia link you're citing does not have data that refutes OPs claim. It mentions several studies that seem to refute it, but in the next sentence(s), shows further studies which refute those.
Police killings are one of the leading causes of death for young men in the United States.[5] A study by Esposito, Lee, Edwards predicts that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women die as a result of police use of deadly force.[5] The same study predicts the risk is highest for black men, as approximately 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.[5]
I think this is an outstanding idea. But if it's to be credible, the recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user, and immediately available to law enforcement.
Heads I win, tails you lose is not credible. It's just riot bait.
As a practical matter, though, being able to pick and choose only the most inflammatory and out-of-context audio/video pretty much ruins this as a real source of truth.
I thought the police were largely required to wear body cams plus have dash cams in the US. If that is true then there is no need to share the footage, since law enforcement should already be in possession of recordings of an incident.
This title makes it feel like it's an Apple feature, but really it's just a Shortcut someone put together.
It basically just turns down the volume, texts your location to an emergency contact, and opens your camera. It doesn't upload the footage in realtime to a central server as other apps do.
It does push it to iCloud or Dropbox though.
Can you clarify this, does iCloud or Dropbox actually receive video in real time as it's being recorded, or does it only start uploading after the recording is done? Because in the latter case, I doubt it will do much good -- unless perhaps sleeping an iPhone during a recording saves what has been recorded so far and uploads it in the background, which I'm also not sure of.
Dropbox immediately uploading photos/videos is the only reason I have it on my phone, more or less for this reason.
Any app in particular?
There’s probably an opportunity here: If there was an app that did streaming video to a server already, the developers could easily add a shortcut to it which started a stream to a server, and you could hook it up to Siri via the Shortcuts app.
Surely there must be apps that offer this functionality already? I'm not app-savvy enough to come up with any examples but I know many years ago there was a lot of talk about Bambuser.[1]
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bambuser/id963132997
It records it if you have the Siri Shortcuts app installed and download that user script.
The article points out the Siri command is only for iPhones, but it could also be a Google Routine or an Alexa skill, or there are standalone apps for all three platforms that do the same thing.
This is cool - I think smartphones are are best defence against violent police oversteps. Now everyone has a camera with them and we are seeing the results. Democratisation of surveillance.
It's a neat idea until a law is passed forcing you to hand over a "IoT device" to the sheriff in charge.
Doesn't matter if your device is designed in such a way that it can stream content in a clandestine way, so that it's hard to verify whether it is or not, while sleeping. Of course you can always bypass things like this by starting the whole interaction by grabbing the phone and placing it somewhere else, but that would imply intention which may be even more damaging in a future court case if it could be proven from the phone that it was removed (which you can if it was already recording and streaming) -- and I'd like to think that most people can agree across party lines that police shootings do happen in the "heat of the moment" rather than as planned out homicides.
It also sure wouldn't hurt with mandatory police cameras, it would help police as well as long as they behave, and auditing an official like that shouldn't be controversial.
I think voting for the right people is probably more effective.
Only if you believe change comes top-down.
This is a candle best burnt at both ends.
8 years of Obama didn't do much for police brutality.
They kept on pushing the bodycams though... now, the police force use it to their advantage
There’s been a good number of responses to this very point over the last 24 hours. Here’s one from a journalist, Daniel Dale, whose perspective I really like because he’s Canadian, and therefore is less wrapped up emotionally in American politics.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/politics/fact-check-trump-oba...
Indeed it is. Why install CCTV cameras when everyone is their own camera-person. Solves the low quality camera problem and multi-angle footage. However...
Mixed with social media, it's now more like self-surveillance. This is just the start and Nextdoor neighbourhoods take this to dystopian levels. But one clever man once compared this to 'Stalin's Dream'. If that's his dream, then it will soon be everyone's nightmare.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529921
Nope, the law is. Siri wont protect you from being killed. Nor adjusting your behavior. Only the law can be used to overturn this program. But don't hold your breath. They are still killing 4 per day, without any oversight.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/us/us-police-floyd-protests-c...
Re: the ‘democratisation of surveillance’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
It is a very strange world where we need technology to protect us from those who protect us.
I am black. If I was in the United States I’d have a dashcam and would wear a bodycam if possible.
The data doesn't seem to back up your claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_...
Deadly force isn't the only way police commit violence against impoverished Americans, or against Americans who aren't white (regardless of economic class). You don't have to be murdered by the police for your life to be effectively ended when they make up BS about assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, etc.
Completely agree. Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate(in fact it shows the opposite) it does show that they are discriminated against at a higher rate. Pulled over more, etc.
If I understood the data correctly, African Americans are pulled over more, then after being pulled over they are killed at the same rate as other groups.
That still implies they are killed at a higher rate. The population we're concerned about isn't "people who have already been pulled over".
Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.
When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are disputing the causes of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the disparity itself.
I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning why that is and whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.
Did you read the `Racial patterns` section and look at the data from the FBI?
Yes. You're going to have to direct me to a quote, I don't know what you're referring to. What I see is:
2015:
2016:
2018:
2019:
----
I see exactly one study in this section that disputes the disparity itself, and that study was widely criticized and ended up issuing a correction:
I don't see data from the FBI mentioned in the racial disparity section. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to.
Again though, you don't need to do a complicated study to find the disparity itself. You can literally just add up the number of deaths for each race and then divide by population numbers in the US for black/white communities. You'll get higher per-million numbers for black communities than for white ones. I'm not sure how someone could dispute that, unless you're arguing that the Guardian is under-reporting white deaths or something[0]. If you want to debate the causes behind that disparity, then that's a separate conversation.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
Should it not be -> number of deaths by race DIVIDED BY police interaction by race?
Or maybe -> number of deaths by race DIVIDED BY police interaction by race but only for 911 emergencies (or something like that)
You can't look at percentage of population but percentage of who commit crimes.
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
From the article
How often is resisting arrest made up? Just curious about the actual data on that.
I mean, wearing a body cam all the time is an overkill. That being said, your link does not prove that. The number of people killed by the police is just the tip of the iceberg. There would be an order of magnitude more people being seriously harmed (paralyzed, blinded, etc.) by the police than killed. There would be an order of magnitude more people mildly harmed (bruises, cuts, chipped tooth, etc.) than than seriously harmed.
By the time you get to incidents like police's violent arrest of SNL's Jay Pharoah [0], complete with knee on the neck (fortunately not long enough to kill him), you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people being affected and treated like this every year.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV5KpbUPeSU
Police killings are a lot like fear of letting kids walk to school, fear of planes, fear of skydiving. I think there is a term for it but I'll just say it's common misconceptions that have been painted wrongly by news and word of mouth.
Murder rates have gone down since 70's and at their lowest point, but with the introduction of national and world news it makes people think murders have gone up, so they don't let their kids walk to school. Some people have an irrational fear of flying because of news. People have fear of skydiving because they watch too many movies and think a parachute will fail, when the data shows the exact opposite. 99% of are deaths not related to parachute failing.
So I see the police killings as a world that has gotten smaller, video camera's in everyones pocket and social media that has painted a picture of world that doesn't exist. It strikes fear into people and the psychological issues will be felt for decades.
Except deaths resulting from your examples are generally not state-sponsored and then covered up by the very same people that are supposed to protect us.
Except there's a huge difference between malfeasance and state-sponsored racism. The former can look like the latter if you ignore statistics and you focus only on emotion.
No, it doesn't work to pull a Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings™ on this. It's not just that they murder, it's that they get away with murder. Once that happens the entire police dept is enabling terrible behavior.
I don't get how people don't understand the distinction. If one airplane crashes that doesn't mean there is an institutional airline safety problem. But if you don't even bother to do an honest investigation about what happened, then we absolutely have an institutional problem.
I think we're having two different conversations here. 1). Are police killings worthy of worrying about? and 2). Do we have a problem with police killings; at large, in the in the ethnic communities, and are police held accountable?
In regards to point 1). The parent comment is expressing worry about a statistically insignificant event (framed properly (unarmed, non-justified, non-suicide)) and the following response frames the fear as statistically insignificant. I think this is undeniable and the reason why data is important. Again, this isn't a conversation about whether this is an institutional problem; it's about whether we should live in constant fear of airlines because one airline crashes.
While 2). is a bit more difficult to breakdown. Yes, I think an easy case can be made about cops needing more accountability (for the sake of police generally and society). but do we need institutional change broadly (accountability +) because the police system is racist against people of color? ....Well, that's a claim. That's where data is important and feelings are no longer relevant.
You’re conveniently forgetting the fact that most police killings doesn’t officially count as “murder,” and is effectively deemed legal by the courts.
Whether it's overkill or not depends on the effort of using one. If they get ever more convenient the balance will shift.
The Wikipedia link you're citing does not have data that refutes OPs claim. It mentions several studies that seem to refute it, but in the next sentence(s), shows further studies which refute those.
Which data? I see
I merely expressed how I’d probably react in that context. That’s a personal statement. There’s more to reality than numbers.
I suggest you give this a listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmgxtcbc4iU
It will be difficult to hear, but it's not as cut and dry as most people are making this out to be.
@mods can we get this headline changed? as other comments have pointed out, it's pretty misleading.
I think this is an outstanding idea. But if it's to be credible, the recordings need to be unmodifiable/undeleteable by the user, and immediately available to law enforcement.
Heads I win, tails you lose is not credible. It's just riot bait.
That would be a 5th Amendment violation, and possibly a privacy matter.
That's probably true, from a legal perspective.
As a practical matter, though, being able to pick and choose only the most inflammatory and out-of-context audio/video pretty much ruins this as a real source of truth.
I thought the police were largely required to wear body cams plus have dash cams in the US. If that is true then there is no need to share the footage, since law enforcement should already be in possession of recordings of an incident.
I was referring to personal recordings rather than those made by police bodycams.
Police body cams are somewhat widespread. But many on the left here, including BLM apparently, are against them. For example: https://fox17.com/news/local/black-lives-matter-nashville-re...