We live in a world where we are forced to pay for services that are unreliable, corrupt and brutal. We are taught from a young age that you pick up the phone and dial 911 at the first sign of trouble.

But sadly, we increasingly see the responders to our pleas for help showing up and making matters worse.

I’ve been there a number of times myself. I see something bad that is  too much for me to handle. I pull out my phone to dial 911 and then stop, thinking police will just make matters worse, something we all should think about before he make that call.

I could not live with myself if I made the call for help that ended in tragedy for a loved one.

So what are we to do?

One solution is an app called CELL 411 developed by an activist developer. In this simple but powerful app, you are able to alert all of your friends in your area of a problem, giving them instant access to your location and status (ie. broken down, fight in progress, copwatching ect).  You can also watch what is happening live at your friend’s location with the live streaming feature.

Why call 911 for a problem and wait 12 to 20 minutes for a response when you can simply alert all your neighbors and get instant assistance? The app even saves the videos you stream, allowing you or any of your friends to access to download it.

So the big question is how much is it? Well the app started out at the insanely reasonable price of 99 cents, but after a few months, its creators decided it was important the app gets used by as many people as possible, so they made it free.

There are endless ways this can help you and your loved ones. No longer do you need to dial the phone dreading who will show up.

Now you can control whom you alert. You can even set the app to “patrol mode,” meaning any public alert sent out in your area will get pushed to your phone.

I try here not to sound too much like a salesman but I really do use this app all of the time. Its a way to watch your friends’ backs even if you are not there physically.

Just yesterday I even was able to find my wife’s exact location when she broke down on the highway. Knowing that she has Cell411 on her phone makes me feel so much safer.

Below are a list of resources as well as download links for Google Play and Apple as well as a YouTube video explaining more.

Cell411 webpage:  http://getcell411.com

By Severin Johnson

Colorado ruled Monday that police officers in the state be required to undergo full psychological evaluations. The checks would occur before an officer is hired, and every time an officer changes jobs or jurisdictions in the state thereafter, the Denver Post reported.

According to the Post, state law already requires psychological evaluations but such checks are rarely carried out in practice. The new rules were affirmed during a meeting of the Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.

The loose protocols have largely benefited problem officers who can shuffle between departments when they have committed violations. In many cases, they end up in more impoverished rural areas which typically have difficulty finding qualified candidates.

“What the public is concerned about is that police departments don’t pass off someone that is a problem in one department to another department,” Grand Junction, Colorado police chief and POST vice chairman, John S. Camper, told Mic. Camper disputed the Post‘s claim that the primary screenings were not being enforced. “I haven’t heard of that,” he said. “I can tell you in the departments I’ve been in … we do psych tests on everyone.”

The problem of under-qualified officers being given the power of deadly force has had consequences far beyond the state of Colorado. Earlier this year, Robert Bates, a septuagenarian and an Oklahoma Sheriff’s deputy, shot and killed a fleeing suspect. Bates, who was not a career officer, reportedly fired his weapon by mistake when he intended to reach for his Taser. It is unclear whether Bates submitted to a psychological exam before being given a weapon. The Oklahoma Sheriff’s deputy program, however, came under considerable scrutiny for lax security protocols after the incident.

The call for stricter mental health inspection comes as instances of police brutality have been documented with increasing regularity across the country. Videos like those of the shooting of Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald and the 50-year-old Walter Scott in South Carolina show officers gunning down suspects as they moved away from them.

While the new Colorado regulation won’t be codified in state law, failure to adhere to the tightened policy could come with severe consequences. Said Camper, “If a person doesn’t comply with this, then they’ve got the potential to not be allowed to be certified as a police officer.”

By Jon Levine

“Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history’s fingers, down it goes.” – V for Vendetta

Empires and tyrants have fallen down over much less than technical challenges, and this is what the creators of Cell 411 are trying to do, challenge the status quo and take the power out of the hands of government employees and put it back in the hands of people.

This activist-oriented and emergency tracking app has now been released for free to anyone and everyone willing to take action and participate in events like Cop Blocking, recording police activities or just simply help out people in need without assistance from government employees.

Up until now the app cost 99 cents however the creators and developers of the app decided to make it free on a permanent basis in order to encourage adoption but also put police on notice about the fact that new disruptive technologies are now available to everyone who owns a smart phone and is willing to keep them accountable. Turns out that November 5th is a great day to make the app free! (Note: the iOS version of the app is still pending review in the Apple store and will be free immediately upon approval)

The app has a plethora of features and enabled users to notify friends, family and other contacts of emergencies in real time, with exact GPS coordinates and turn-by-turn directions to their location. Users can stream live video of encounters and also send other types of alerts to contacts.  Users can create neighborhood watch groups and use the app to police their own neighborhood, or family groups to alert each other of car troubles for example.

Better yet, the app has a “Dispatch Mode” which allows for the dispatching of alerts from other locations, which allows for a fully decentralized method of managing emergencies without using government resources. A “Patrol Mode” option also allows users in need of help to engage others in the same geographic area without previously knowing or meeting these individuals or establishing prior relationships.

It is important to note that the app has only been out for a little over 4 months and has received attention from international newspapers and activist organizations.

Cell 411 already has very good reviews in both Apple and Google app stores.

Visit getcell411.com to download it.

Twice in recent days, FBI Director James B. Comey has stepped to a podium here and asserted that police across the nation are reluctant to aggressively enforce the law in the post-Ferguson era of smartphones and YouTube.

And twice his comments have drawn disagreement and derision from a host of sources, including civil rights activists, law enforcement officials and, on Monday, the White House.

“The available evidence at this point does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from fulfilling their responsibilities,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday at a news briefing in Washington. “The evidence that we’ve seen so far doesn’t support the contention that law enforcement officials are somehow shirking their responsibility.”

Comey, nonetheless, stayed the course, telling thousands of police officials gathered here for a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that a violent crime wave is gripping the nation’s major cities. And he suggested that police officers themselves are in part to blame, made gun shy by the prospect of getting caught on the next video of alleged police brutality.

The “age of viral videos” has fundamentally altered U.S. policing, Comey said Monday in a speech virtually identical to one he delivered last week at the University of Chicago Law School.

His comments have been interpreted as giving credence to the notion of a “Ferguson effect” — the theory that riots and racial unrest in places such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where police killed civilians, has prompted police officers to become more restrained. That, in turn, has theoretically resulted in an uptick in violent crime as criminals become emboldened.

Comey acknowledged Monday that he has little evidence to support the theory.

“The question is, are these kinds of things changing police behavior around the country? The honest answer is: I don’t know for sure whether that’s the case,” he said, but he added that “I do have a strong sense” it’s true.

It’s “the one theory that to my mind and to my common sense does explain” rising rates of urban violence in 2015.

Coming from the nation’s top law enforcement official, the remarks have landed like a bombshell in criminal-justice circles, offending people across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and activists have taken deep exception to the idea that crime rates might be linked to protests against police brutality.

Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven Hawkins called Comey’s comments “outrageous” and “unsubstantiated.”

Policing groups, meanwhile, have been equally infuriated by the assertion that their officers have been somehow derelict in their duties, frightened by teenagers with cellphone cameras.

“Time and time again [Comey] generalizes about a segment of the population that he knows nothing about,” said James O. Pasco Jr., executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “He has never been a police officer.”

Comey is “like the scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Pasco said. “He wanders around pretending to be smart and then at the end they give him a diploma and he thinks he’s a genius. They swear him in as the director of the FBI and all of a sudden he’s an expert on what police officers are thinking.”

The speeches also have put Comey at odds with the White House, as President Obama is eager to take credit for lowering the crime rate.

As Comey was preparing to deliver his address Friday, Obama was hosting a criminal-justice forum at the White House, where he celebrated “incredible, historic reductions in crime over the last 20 years.”

“I know that there’s been some talk in the press about spikes that are happening this year relative to last year. I’ve asked my team to look very carefully at it — Attorney General [Loretta E.] Lynch has pulled together a task force — and it does look like there are a handful of cities where we’re seeing higher-than-normal spikes,” Obama said at the time. However, he added, “across the 93 or 95 top cities, it’s very hard to distinguish anything statistically meaningful.”

In his speech Monday, Comey also urged law enforcement leaders to stop engaging in an us-vs.- them tug of war with protesters from Black Lives Matter, the group that sprung up in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson.

Instead, Comey said, police chiefs should use the budding protest movement as a window into the minds of those they are charged with protecting.

“There is a line of law enforcement and a line of communities we serve, especially communities of color,” Comey said. “Each time somebody interprets ‘hashtag Black Lives Matter’ as anti-law-enforcement, one line moves away. And each time someone interprets ‘hashtag Police Lives Matter’ as anti-black, the other line moves away.”

Comey’s comments come weeks after he held a session with 100 city leaders and law enforcement officials from across the nation. At that meeting, many — including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) — reported that police morale was sinking in their towns amid ongoing scrutiny.

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Emanuel said during the meeting. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict. . . . They don’t want to be a news story themselves. They don’t want their career ended early. And it’s having an impact.”

Comey said such feedback has served as inspiration for his recent speeches, in which he declared that violent-crime rates are being inflated by “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.”

“That wind is surely changing behavior,” Comey said, later adding: “We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now. I refuse to wait. . . . These aren’t data points — these are lives.”

In his speech, Comey also contradicted what has been the administration’s stance on the incarceration of thousands of men and women in the 1980s and 1990s related to the national drug war.

“Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer and each felon with a gun had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury, his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other post-sentencing review,” Comey said. “There were thousands and thousands of those individual cases, but to speak of ‘mass incarceration,’ I believe, is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.”

The Obama administration has worked to undo many of the policies that are credited with spurring a period of “mass incarceration,” and has boasted that 2014 was the first year in modern history that both the crime rate and number of federal prisoners declined.

“I can’t speak to the range of Director Comey’s views on this topic,” Earnest said when asked about Comey’s remarks on mass incarceration. “The president certainly does believe that there are certain elements of the criminal-justice system that are not serving the country in communities all across the country very well.”

COLUMBUS, OH – Less than three months after the announcement of Cell 411, the version 2 of the app was just released with major improvements aimed at creating a broader, de-centralized means for world-wide users to manage and respond to all kinds of emergencies, using small trust-based networks of friends and family members. When alerted for help, the responders will receive turn by turn directions to the location where one needs help, an estimated time of arrival and distance to their location.

While the app was born out of activists’ need to maintain police accountability, track events with GPS accuracy and send out real-time alerts, the Cell 411 platform now includes other default alerts aimed at helping school kids when they are being bullied, and a “general alert” which can be customized to alert the trusted network of any particular emergency or event taking place.

In the past, various mobile applications have attempted to bridge the gap between citizens and the State when dealing with various emergency situations, but Cell 411 has now gone above and beyond any previous generation app, especially with the new Patrol Mode, a feature the developers hope to be widely adopted by activists, neighborhood watches and other groups of citizens who wish to participate in improving their communities without help from police or government employees.

“Patrol Mode allows every citizen to become a ‘private helper’ of sorts. Think ‘Uber’ for emergencies or other urgent needs,” says the creator of the Cell Platform, Virgil Vaduva. “It’s a revolutionary approach to calling out for help and reaching out to help those people when they call on you. In my mind, this is all about our society peacefully evolving to a place where the State’s monopoly on violence is no longer needed and government employees such as police and others will have competition from concerned and voluntary members of the community,” he said.

When enabled in the app, Patrol Mode allows users to respond to global alerts sent by others within a specific radius, up to 50 miles. This feature could be particularly useful in case of large civil unrests, car problems, or other situations where someone could be far from home without ability to call on immediate friends for help.

If those new features were not enough, in Version 2, the creators introduced the most striking feature, the Live Video alerting. When triggered, a live video feed will be streamed and recorded to the user’s trusted network, giving them the ability to maintain visual awareness and knowledge of the situation. Furthermore, the recorded video may not be erased by police, thieves, criminals or other malicious users if they steal or confiscate the smart phone, making the destruction of evidence impossible.

“We have volunteer firefighters using this tool as their dispatch tool, and neighborhood watch groups using it to provide self-security services to their communities. Your imagination is really the only limit to how you can use the app to improve your safety and security,” said Vaduva.

The app can currently be purchased for $0.99 in both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

From top left to right, Philadelphia Police officers Thomas Liciardello, Perry Betts, Linwood Norman; from bottom left to right, officers Brian Reynolds, John Speiser and Michael Spicer

PHILADELPHIA — A report from The Philadelphia Inquirer claims six police officers who were acquitted after being accused of corruption have now been reinstated to the police force.

According to the report:

Mark McDonald, the mayor’s press secretary, said the former narcotics officers – Michael Spicer, Thomas Liciardello, Brian Reynolds, Perry Betts, Linwood Norman, and John Speiser – will get $90,000 in back pay and have their original badges returned.

McDonald said five of the officers would be assigned to districts and would not return to the Narcotics Field Unit. Norman will be assigned to the impound lot.

James J. Binns, who represented Spicer in the federal case, initially said his client and another officer, who was not charged, would receive promotions under the arbitrator’s ruling. Binns said later Friday that he was wrong and that promotions were not part of the arrangement.

When Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey fired the six officers, he called the case “one of the worst cases of corruption I have ever heard.” He told reporters that the officers’ badges would be destroyed.

Spicer’s trial in particular sparked public outrage, as Spicer was accused repeatedly over the years of intimidation and misconduct. In 2008, Spicer was suspected of stealing drug money and planting evidence, and in 2010, Spicer was accused of throwing a suspect from the third story of an apartment building. He was acquitted of all charges.

The report goes on to explain some of the far-reaching consequences of the accusations the officers faced:

Prosecutors alleged the men routinely beat and robbed drug suspects. The allegations prompted dozens of civil rights lawsuits, causing the reversal of nearly 450 drug convictions.

Philadelphia’s decision to reinstate the officers comes amid more accusations and an internal investigation into police misconduct and use of excessive force. TruthVoice reported Friday about an internal investigation prompted by a video of an April incident that shows nearly two dozen police officers repeatedly hitting and applying electric shocks to Tyree Carroll, who was restrained and unarmed. The report and video have since garnered national attention. (Video available below:)

In addition to the legal troubles it has faced recently, the Philadelphia Police Department has been widely criticized throughout the year following findings that its officers have shot someone roughly once a week for the past eight years. Over 390 people were shot, many of whom were reportedly unarmed.

The officer, alert but cautious, pounds on the suspect’s door. “Polizei!” he says forcefully, in his native German. A man thrusts open the door and walks out. His hands are at his side, but the policeman notices a gun tucked into the man’s belt. He pulls out his own firearm in response. He then moves briskly backward, coaxing the man to place his weapon on the ground.

The cop is commended for his actions.

The next officer up bangs on the same door. “Polizei!,” he says. This time the person walks out carrying a baton, not a gun. So the cop doesn’t pull out his pistol. He brandishes instead a can of pepper spray – a reflex response that also garners praise afterward.

The scene here in what looks like an outdoor movie set seems as if it would be basic enough training at almost any police academy in the world. But today’s course for the new recruits in the Ruhr Valley in western Germany represents just one small part of an educational process that will last for three years, during which the officers will be drilled in alternatives to pulling a trigger. Today’s shooting training is subtitled, tellingly, “Don’t shoot.” And it’s far from the only lesson they’ll receive in restraint. Each recruit earns a bachelor’s degree as part of basic police training – a requisite before getting a badge and a beat.

Those in charge of this vast complex in Selm, in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, say the rigorous education standards help to widen an officer’s vision when stress narrows it – when he or she has only seconds to consider how to confront a menacing suspect.

“In every head of every policeman there is the aim not to shoot,” says Col. Uwe Thieme, the four-star senior police director at the state’s office for education, training, and human resources. “We try to make all police officers recognize that you are not a good guy if you are shooting. You are a good guy if you are not shooting.”

Their message is sinking in. In a nation grappling with neo-Nazism, new displays of intolerance against immigrants, and the threat of Islamic terrorism, German police rarely pull their guns. So far this year researchers have tallied four fatal shots fired by police. In the United States, there have been more than 400.

Nor is Germany alone. Around the world, police shootings are a rarity in many industrialized nations – even some with serious crime problems. For instance:

• Canada recorded an average of 12 fatal police shootings a year between 1999 and 2009.
• British police fired their weapons on just 51 occasions between 2003 and 2013.
• In Japan, the last time a suspect was shot by a police officer was in 2012.

Now, as a handful of highly publicized police shootings fray already taut relations between police and black communities in the US, experts and law enforcement authorities are searching for ways to solve a pressing social problem – and wondering whether other nations might hold lessons in how to do it.

The US, to be sure, is a different country. Some argue that the ubiquity of guns in America is a major reason that many seemingly innocuous incidents escalate into fatal shootings. At the same time, racial tensions in the US are more pronounced than in many other countries. Yet analysts believe that other nations have adopted a number of practices that contribute to less-contentious relations between police and residents – and might make a difference on US streets. These range from more-rigorous police training, to changing the way officers interact with residents, to requiring more education for cops.

“In Germany, a gun is not sexy; it is not part of [a police officer’s] masculinity…,” says Joachim Kersten, a professor at the German Police University in Muenster, noting that knowledge is the key to defusing tense situations. “If [police] have to be dominant in a situation, they don’t need a gun for that.”

•     •     •

To this day, one of the most curious spectacles in all of policing is the sight of a British bobby, sans weapon.

In the 1990s, as American cities were adopting the “broken windows” theory of crime-fighting – the idea that clamping down on minor infractions will help stamp out major ones – Britain began debating more-aggressive methods of policing, too. Yet, with few exceptions, a “zero tolerance” approach didn’t prove popular with British police, who viewed it as heavy-handed and indiscriminate. In fact, police in London were taught from the beginning to be anything but aggressive.

The bobbies – the name given to the Metropolitan Police – were created in 1829 by Home Secretary Robert Peel at a time when the military was feared. The police force, at its core, was, and still is, seen to serve the community and fight crime by consent, rather than to serve the state. That’s why bobbies were given a smart blue uniform, not red, the color of the militia’s. Even today, they can be seen in Prussian helmets carrying, notably, batons not guns.

The threat of terrorism, not to mention the number of guns flourishing on the black market, has sparked a recurring national debate about whether Britain’s police should begin to carry firearms. But the police themselves have been the first to oppose such a move, even in the heat of the London bombings in 2005. A survey by the Police Federation in 2006, the latest available, found that 82 percent of its 47,238 members did not want officers to be routinely armed on duty, despite almost half saying their lives had been “in serious jeopardy” during the previous three years.

“Having police officers patrolling neighborhoods and being routinely armed could be seen as a more military type of police service, which is unlikely to be supported by either the police or the public,” says Steve White, a former firearms officer and chair of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers.

Nevertheless, the image of the cheerful bobby in Britain has taken a hit in recent years – as the force has been accused of discrimination and acting with impunity. Police killings in Britain are extremely rare, but when they happen, they’ve sparked riots on the scale of what America has seen in Ferguson, Mo., and in Baltimore. The slaying of gang member Mark Duggan in 2011 led to protests in North London that spread across the country.

But such incidents only tend to reinforce the belief among many British residents that guns are not the solution. “Violence breeds violence,” says Patsy McKie, a mother of three whose youngest son, Dorrie, was killed in August 1999 during a spate of shootings in Manchester, and “criminals and drug dealers would want to defend themselves if they thought policemen were always carrying guns.”

So Britain has worked out a solution that is largely viewed as the right balance between keeping policing community-oriented and keeping the nation safe, says Peter Squires, professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton. While most “bobbies on the beat” do not carry guns, armed police are never far away. Armed response teams and vehicles often patrol or are on standby. It’s the classic “British compromise,” he says.

•     •     •

Yet even where guns are routinely carried, use of them is far rarer in Europe and some other English-speaking countries than in the US. Many experts link that partly to education and pay, which have turned policing into a well-respected career with prestige and perks. In the US, police training lasts on average 19 weeks. In much of Europe that would be unthinkable, says Mr. Kersten. German police, for example, train for at least 130 weeks.

In fact, since 2008 in North Rhine-Westphalia, becoming a police officer means a stint at a university, sitting in law classes, learning about the cultural customs of Muslims, and debating ethics.

Outside the classroom, during training activities such as target practice, recruits are surrounded by messages urging prudence. “Super shooting, I hope you never need it in real life,” reads one poster at the facility in Selm. Another lists the number of times police fired their guns each year up to 2010. In that year, there were 9,450 shootings. Of those, 9,342 involved animals.

The lengthy training regimen in Germany doesn’t seem to discourage people from wanting to become cops, either. Some 8,000 candidates competed to join North Rhine-Westphalia’s 40,000-strong force. Only 1,640 spots were available.

North Rhine-Westphalia’s emphasis on higher education was identified as a “best practice” that could be applied to police departments in the US by the RAND Corp., a think tank, and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, an arm of the US Department of Justice, in 2012. “It’s in everyone’s interest for police out there to have bachelor’s degrees,” says Rob Davis, the chief social scientist at the Police Foundation in Washington, who co-wrote the report.

•     •     •

Money is another factor that many experts believe could help improve the quality and professionalism of police forces. In few places is that strategy more apparent than in Canada, where police command some of the best law enforcement salaries in the world. Pay there often tops six figures a year.

Figures from Statistics Canada, a government agency, show that police officers are paid on average more than many well-respected white-collar professionals, including elementary school teachers, registered nurses, and social workers – all of whom must have college degrees, unlike police. A government list of public employees earning more than $100,000 in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, revealed that more than half of the Toronto Police Service earns six figures when counting overtime pay.

That has drawn men like Sgt. Peter Leon to its ranks. He joined the Toronto police force 27 years ago, the summer after graduating from a university with a degree in history and political science. He says police officers view their work as a career rather than a job, with good benefits and opportunities to advance. “Everybody comes on as a frontline uniform patrol officer, and there’s opportunities to specialize in different things,” he says.

The force here, like elsewhere, is not without its controversies. Some high-profile accusations of abuse in Canada in recent years have sparked calls for increased accountability and led the Toronto Police Service to launch a pilot program in May that entails 100 officers wearing body cameras, just like many of their US counterparts.

But higher salaries might be just as effective in curbing police misconduct as a video lens. Money can attract recruits with “soft skills” and postsecondary education, says Irwin Cohen, Royal Canadian Mounted Police research chair at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. Departments want officers with these qualities because they are better able to deal with confrontation and the public.

“Now police are recruiting people with great communication skills and empathy skills and [who] have a good understanding of psychology and sociology because we’re realizing more and more that that’s the more effective kind of police officer,” he says. “Your most important tools as a police officer are usually not the ones that are on your belt anymore, but that are in your brain.”

•     •     •

One of the main recommendations to come out of a commission appointed by the Obama administration in the wake of the latest law enforcement crisis is a revival of “community policing.” In many ways, Japan has been perfecting this concept since 1874. Proof of this sits off a main street in Sakura, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

There the koban, a mini police station, is located near the railway station, a bank, a bakery, and a bento shop. It is nothing special. It’s even a bit drab. But like the 6,000 other kobans across Japan, its doors are transparent, so visitors can peer in and police peer out.

Locals in Sakura say they are accustomed to seeing one or two officers constantly manning it. And even in an age of GPS and Google Maps, visitors often come in asking for directions, helping to build “relations of trust between police and a community,” says Akihiro Onagi, a professor of criminal law at Hokkaido University. Police officers and members of neighborhood associations “are acquainted with each other,” Mr. Onagi says. It’s a main reason, he says, Japan’s cops hardly ever fire their guns. In fact, they did so on only six occasions last year – none deadly.

Japanese police officers won’t even reach for their guns if they get hurt, says Hidehiko Sato, a former commissioner general of the National Police Agency. When they do, it is only because “they have absolutely no other means.”

It doesn’t hurt that Japanese police rarely find themselves in threatening situations to begin with. They are working in one of the least violent societies in the world, not to mention one of the most homogeneous. Japan has the globe’s second lowest homicide rate after Singapore, according to United Nations figures, with 370 homicides in 2013, compared with 16,121 in the US.

Community-police relations are also more peaceful because, in Japanese society, citizens defer to the authority of law enforcement officers. “Many Japanese people tend to believe what authorities say,” notes Koji Harada, a former police chief at the Kushiro branch of the Hokkaido Prefectural Police. “I strongly believe that is a legacy of the centralized feudalism in the Edo Period [1603 to 1868].”

But a society still fixated on hierarchies also helps keep police power in check. A police officer involved in an unjustified shooting would be automatically demoted, Onagi says. The officer and even the person’s bosses “would feel an invisible pressure and be often relegated to a lower position,” he adds.

•     •     •

Still, policing by nature is always going to involve some tension between cops and residents. In many Latin American countries, such as Brazil, where standards are often low and the consequences for misconduct nonexistent, police kill far more suspects than their American counterparts. Even in countries with relatively few shootings, authorities face challenges.

In France, for instance, many Muslims harbor little trust in the police. This is particularly true among the poorer immigrants living in the banlieues, or outer suburbs, of major cities.

On a recent evening, as thick rain clouds menaced the sky, a group of protesters gathered in a Parisian banlieue to protest a judge’s acquittal of the police in an infamous case from 2005: Several teenagers fleeing police ran into a utility substation and two of them were electrocuted. Their families wanted the police to be held responsible for their deaths. “There is no accountability,” argues Moroccan-born Farid El Yamni, an engineer, who says that his brother was killed in 2012 by French police.

Studies show the French trust their police less than people in some other European countries, including Britain and Germany, trust their own police forces. “The French police are not predominantly preoccupied with their relationship to the people but their relationship to the state,” says René Lévy, the director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research, who wrote the book “History of the French Police.”

As a rush of asylum seekers and economic migrants arrive in Europe, fleeing war and poverty in their own countries, many believe the police-citizen strains will only increase. In Germany, a recent case of police abuse against migrants in Hanover generated national scrutiny.

Yet even the German police’s toughest critics say this case is an exception. Alexander Bosch, who heads the policing and human rights section for Amnesty International in Berlin and trains police throughout Germany, says that, even though racial profiling is a common problem, the “German police are quite good.” They regularly rank in surveys as the nation’s most trusted institution.

In a gritty section of Dortmund, a major city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Abir Hichem, who is Moroccan, walks down a street lined with teahouses and Internet cafes. As a minority, he says he trusts the police. If he had a problem, he’d turn to them.

Lawyer Norbert Zohn is complimentary of cops, too. In fact, he says something that would surely be envied in many American cities. “The presence of police officers does lead to calm,” he says. “It makes you feel safer.”

Contributing to this report were Ian Evans in London, Valentina Jovanovski in Toronto, and Takehiko Kambayashi in Sakura, Japan.

by Virgil Vaduva

Police accountability advocates often discuss the importance of body cameras being used and worn by police officers. The argument would be that body cam use will lower violence and keep cops accountable, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that body cameras worn by police will do much to help the general public.

Here are five reasons why I believe the mass implementation and usage of body cameras for police are a terrible idea.

1. Facial recognition and expanded surveillance

There is a rich irony present in the statements of police-accountability folks advocating for the use of body cams by police officers. Why? Because they are the same people opposing the expansion of CCTV cameras throughout America’s cities. I am unsure how body cams are not in essence anything more than mobile spy-cams. While a permanently mounted surveillance camera cannot be moved or relocated easily, a body cam worn by a cop at all times is clearly nothing short of a glorified and even better version of a surveillance camera.

Duluth, Minn., police officer Dan Merseth demonstrates the docking procedure for police body cameras at police headquarters. Duluth initially received 84 cameras and charging bays for less than $5,000 from camera maker Taser International, but its three-year contract and licensing agreement for data storage cost about $78,000.

While the body cam technology is still largely in its infancy, it is expanding very fast with high-end cameras having many advanced capabilities such as GPS tagging of footage, fast dock recharging and automatic download and storage of footage on a central police-owned server.

These capabilities can be easily expanded to be integrated into NSA’s PRISM program or another FBI program where all footage collected by any cop in America throughout his or her shift could be automatically scanned and tagged by facial recognition software.

Some body cams will also soon have high-bandwidth real-time video streaming capabilities. Such capabilities would allow central governments to easily track activists and persons of interests in real time!

This would be a huge step back in maintaining the civil liberties of activists and Americans involved in street protests. Cops would have the ability to immediately recognize and pull up files on unknown individuals encountered on the street, individuals whom they may have never met before.

2. Real-time tracking of individuals

Pairing the capabilities outlined above with the ability to tag video with GPS coordinates, police will easily be able to locate and track in real time to actual location of individuals of interest, especially during street protests or activities involving opposition to government activities.

Imagine a large anti-tax or anti-police protest taking place in a large metropolitan area where thousands of cops are live streaming video of participants’ faces as they move through the city.  Some protesters may not even live there, yet their privacy is still being violated by government agents simply through the use of advanced surveillance technology and video processing.

The FBI has been sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for access to its biometrics database, arguing that the US agency has failed to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests and is gathering face-recognition data, among other things, with no external governance.

Worse yet, as a result of participating in such protests and being easily identified, the participants could possibly be harassed in the future by police or other government agents.  We have seen this happen on a small scale, but body cameras will expand the possibility of abuse.  The attempts to track and identify Americans on a large scale were exposed when the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the FBI for the use of tracking and facial recognition records and databases implemented without any congressional oversight.

3. Footage integrity

Another issue of concern with the current generation of body cameras is the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of the footage recorded. Whether the footage is streamed or stored on the device, to my knowledge none of the current devices on the market have the ability to prevent a police officer from turning the device off or erasing and modifying the footage.

These features have not been introduced due to the cost, but also due to the backlash from police unions, who have largely been speaking against the use of body cams as a method to promote accountability.

A well-designed body camera would integrate features that will maintain the integrity and availability of the video by not allowing a cop to turn the camera off and by containing software that automatically provides a cryptographic hash for all the footage recorded.  Detailed access logs to the device should be a requirement, and also alerts should be issued when a user attempts to disable the device, open or modify software on the device.  These features currently do not exist and it is unlikely they will ever be implemented.

Ideally, if body cameras are truly about keeping our public servants accountable, all video from police officers should be available publicly in real time to anyone wishing to watch what a cop is doing during his employment.

4. Exoneration of police actions

Another problem with video footage is that we have observed many times throughout the years that video footage, no matter how damning it is, will often exonerate cops involved in wrong doing.  I have seen footage of cops involved in theft, lying, beatings, rape and even outright murder.  In many of these cases the video was largely ignored by prosecutors (who are often former police officers themselves) or by jurors who believe police can do no wrong.

With the nation-wide cost of body cameras running into hundreds of millions of dollars, the question on everyone’s lips should be, “why should we even bother with them if the footage is largely ignored?”

5. They empower crony corporate camera manufacturers at the expense of taxpayers

One of the largest corporations catering to police departments throughout the world is Taser International.  The company is mostly known for the manufacturing of their electrocution “stun-gun” devices often known as Tasers which have caused hundreds of deaths in America.

In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015, Rick Smith, chief executive officer and founder of Taser International, center, talks with Brant Garrick left, and Kenny Park of the Vallejo Police Department who attended the Taser tech summit at the California Highway Patrol Headquarters in Sacramento, Calif.

The company has now seen the dollar signs in the body cam market and is pulling all the strings it can to further extort money from the American taxpayers. With revenues of almost $200 million per year, the company is growing very fast due to crony and in some cases, criminal agreements with local police departments, union leaders and police chiefs.

Taser International has quickly become the world’s largest manufacturer and supplier of body cams for police departments. But they have not become leaders in the market through fair competition. Instead the company has carefully cultivated financial relationships and ties with police chiefs throughout the country.

An expose published by CBS news in March 2015 covered questionable practices involving Taser International, including hiring retired police chiefs as consultants and sending them on luxury trips overseas to promote and sell company products.

CBS wrote, “As the police chief in Fort Worth, Texas, successfully pushed for the signing of a major contract with Taser before a company quarterly sales deadline, he wrote a Taser representative in an email, “Someone should give me a raise.”

The police chief in Albuquerque also pushed for a no-bid contract with Taser International, which caused backlash in the community and prompted and investigation by the inspector general.  The Albuquerque-Taser contract was worth $1.9 million dollars.

Police chiefs from Salt Lake City, Fort Worth, New Orleans and other cities have all been involved in highly questionable and likely unethical or illegal contract negotiations and signing with Taser International. New Orleans agreed to a $1.4 million contract with Taser for 420 cameras and storage. A year after the contract was signed, the New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas went to work for Taser as a consultant.

The Fort Worth contract for 400 body cams was worth $2.7 million and Jeffrey Halstead, the police chief openly discussed how he would like to also become a consultant for Taser International.

It is clear that the body camera market is not intended to promote fair competitive market where the best product wins and the customer (the American taxpayer) benefits from the product.  Instead it is a crony arrangement between police chiefs, union members and corporate executives who are colluding to rip-off the American taxpayers while doing very little to promote true police accountability.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

From Ferguson, Missouri, to North Charleston, South Carolina, and Madison, officer-involved deaths have gotten national attention recently.While officer-involved deaths are nothing new, how the public and officials view them is.

With the saturation of cellphone photos and video, confrontations involving police officers are increasingly being viewed by the public.

The impact those images have on the public is much greater than written accounts.

“People are visual creatures. You know when they say that a picture is worth a 1,000 words, I think they undersell that expression. A picture is worth 10,000 words. Pictures bring out emotions that the printed word doesn’t,” said Steve Noll, a marketing professor at Madison College.

Cellphone video of deadly confrontations between police and individuals in Staten Island, New York, North Charleston and Baltimore has touched off nationwide protests. The wide-ranging response was driven by social media.

“In the past when an incident like this would happen it would be a local tragedy and only people in a set geographic region would be exposed to a story. Now with things like Facebook and Twitter you don’t have a set geography, you have a set likeness. They call it the hive collective,” Noll said.

Noll said the speed with which images and information can spread on social media is also a double-edged sword. The speed makes it challenging to vet images and information to assure accuracy and context.

In the case of something as emotional as an officer-involved shooting, accuracy and proper context are essential.

“When you think about that, you have a really provocative or emotional picture that can be out and be shown thousands of times in less than a half hour without people understanding what that is,” Noll said. “You have to make sure that they are directing that in the proper way and not trying to explode a story just because they have nothing to do but click and share pictures. That’s the dark side of social media.”