No, it's not the public's job to catch criminals; it's our job to check the cops

Seriously, motherfucker: just do your damn job right and we won't HAVE TO record you fucking up.

San Francisco police want onlookers to turn their smartphone camera on suspected criminal activity — instead of police behavior.

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is reportedly developing a crime-reporting app, Fight Crime SF, that will allow citizens to submit photos and video of suspected criminal activity. The app doesn’t have a release date but is expected to be released to the public early this year, according to SFD spokeswoman Officer Susan Merritt’s statements in a recent issue of the police union’s journal.

“In early 2016, we will be introducing a new app for the public,” Merritt wrote. “It will be called Fight Crime SF. Members of the community will be able to send police video and pictures of crimes in progress or suspicious activity using this app.”

Police misconduct, especially when caught on video, has become a focal point of public criticism across the country. That also has been the case in San Francisco which is in the midst of an ongoing police brutality investigation.

"You should be able to access the world’s knowledge and information just like anyone else."

And the only way to make that happen, Mr. President, is to keep it out of the hands of corporations who will allow access only to those able to pay.




Full transcript here.

Silly Citizens: Open Records Are Only for the Rich

Fucking public, thinking that state agencies can be held accountable to the rabble.

John Cheves at the Herald:

Government agencies could charge hundreds of dollars for public records that are currently free or cost little under a bill that would rewrite the Kentucky Open Records Act.

"It looks like this innocuous little bill, but it's really a dagger through the heart of the Open Records Act and, as a result, government transparency," said Jon Fleischaker, a First Amendment lawyer in Louisville.

State Rep. Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, this week filed House Bill 548, although after he was questioned about it Thursday, he said he does not plan to seek a vote on it.

Shame on you, Derrick Graham.  I know the agencies are crying poverty, but that's the fault of the austerity budgets the lege and the governor have forced on them.

Don't balance the state budget on the backs of citizens who have already paid through their taxes for the documents state agencies produce.

Free the Files!

Big surprise: congressional repugs have blocked an FCC rule that would have forced television stations to post online the names of those paying for billionaire-backed campaign lies.

But there's a way around those motherfuckers, and you, personally, can do it.

Crowdsourcing to the rescue!

ProPublica:

Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”

These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.

But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome — it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station [3],” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.

Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)

We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves — and we want your help.

Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.

You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.

Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.

We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.

Rachel had a great segment on it last week:

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Find out more here.

Why Attending Boring City Council Meetings Is Never a Waste of Time

Do you know how many of your tax dollars are going to your local government officials, their corrupt friends, their idiot nephews and all the other hogs feeding at your local public trough?

If not, you can stop laughing at the ripped-off citizens of poor Bell, California. Because if you aren't attending meetings and reading budgets and asking questions and demanding answers, then you're just as vulnerable as Bell's taxpayers.

Robert Cruickshank at Calitics has a good local take:

So there's been a LOT of discussion in Southern California over the last week or so about the situation in the small city of Bell, one of the hundreds dozens of incorporated cities in Los Angeles County, where top city officials were making truly stunning salaries, nearing $800,000 in one case.

The story is being pushed hard by the right, which sees an opportunity to undermine both government and public employee unions - although these salaries weren't the product of a union contract, conservatives are ignoring that detail to imply that Bell is symptomatic of a bigger problem of "overpaid" public workers, so that we should simply impoverish everyone instead of making the relatively minor fixes to address the occasional abuse of the system.

But another story in the region has gone relatively underreported. Maywood, which borders Bell to the north, has laid off its entire police force and contracted with the LA County Sheriffs Department to police their city. In the SF Bay Area, San Carlos is considering a similar move. Here in Monterey, the Peninsula cities have been considering integrating their fire services, and already Pacific Grove has contracted with Monterey to oversee its fire services.

The real issues aren't that government is incompetent or that public workers are greedy, as the right-wingers would have us believe. Instead the truth is that California's city governments are in need of some fundamental reforms - including city consolidation - and that we need to do a better job of ensuring residents are fully engaged in the process of local government.

For more great details on how racism and segregation play a major part in the latest California clusterfuck, read the whole thing.

But right now I'd like to concentrate on the fact that you, personally, are responsible for the conduct of your local government officials.

First, you vote them in, whether by voting for them or by failing to rally your neighbors in support of their opponents, or by abdicating your citizenship by not voting at all.

Second, if you don't attend every council/fiscal court meeting, "work session," committee meeting and hearing, then when they cheat the taxpayers, it's your fault.

I cannot tell you what a difference it makes when actual voters show up at local government meetings. As a reporter, I attended far too many local government meetings at which I was the only non-official there. What that meant was that council members felt free to bar me from secret deliberations, demand I put public discussions "off the record," and refuse to let me see public documents.

But when actual voters were in attendance, it was much more difficult for them to justify such illegal behavior, and they usually didn't try.

Today, most newspapers can't afford to send reporters to every boring committee meeting - and believe me, they should bottle them as cures for insomnia - which means the elected and appointed officials on those committees are free to rip off the taxpayers - whether through extra payments to themselves, giving no-show jobs to friends and idiot nephews, or handing no-bid contracts to campaign contributors.

If you don't show up at those meetings to hold them accountable, then their corruption is your fault.

Show up at every single meeting. Get copies of your state's Open Records and Open Meetings laws, and carry them ostentatiously into the meetings. Challenge every attempt to make you leave or refuse to give you copies of the documents they are reviewing. Trust me - 999 times out of a thousand, their attempts at secrecy are illegal. Stand your ground, no matter what their corrupt "attorney" claims or threatens.

Have no doubt that YOU are the one with the power in that room. Every single elected and appointed official in your city or county works for you.

Don't ever let the fuckers forget it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

How Open is Your State Government? See the 2009 Sunshine Week Report

Which state do you think has the most categories of public records available online? One of the liberal bastions, right? New York, Minnesota, California.

Wrong. It's Texas.

New York is fourth-highest and as usual Mississippi is dead last. Kentucky is a pleasant surprise at 26th.

Find out which categories of public information are available online in your state here.

And celebrate Sunshine Week by exercising your right to know what your government is doing - file a Freedom of Information Act request and demand your state, local or federal government put that information online.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....