The DEA is now abandoning body cameras

https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-enforcement-administration-ends-body-camera-program-trump

81•bookofjoe•2h ago

Comments

ty6853•1h ago

Body cams can be removed at light speed but somehow the process of rescheduling marijuana moves at the speed of molasses.

vjulian•1h ago

I genuinely don’t understand why people, even intelligent people, take the US political and governance structure seriously.

delichon•1h ago

It incarcerates around 1.9 million people and has another 3.6 million on probation or parole. It seizes and consumes more than a third of all production. It demands compliance with about 120 million words of federal rules. It's the greatest military power on earth. It's unserious to not to take that kind of power over our lives seriously.

mullingitover•1h ago

> For another it consumes more than a third of all production

This is often a positive.

In times of financial panic, which free markets always come around to, the government is a spender of last resort that helps to kickstart production and demand when the free market is in absolute shambles, stashing gold in holes in its backyard.

Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace where the revenue can actually deliver value instead of sitting in a vault somewhere.

yellowapple•1h ago

> Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace

Rarely, and many orders of magnitude less than what we're owed.

theoreticalmal•9m ago

What makes you think you’re owed the money of another?

IG_Semmelweiss•14m ago

>>> For another it consumes more than a third of all production >This is often a positive. >In times of financial panic

Do you mean, for example, the credit crisis of 2008 ? That crisis that was actively encouraged by the US govt, that poured the gasoline with govt loan guarantees, insane macroeconomic policy and low interest rates ?

Are we saying we want to pay for arsonists, to work as firefighters ?

eth0up•1h ago

I thoroughly sympathize with even more callously cynical views, but what all good people should remember, daily if able, are the unsung work horses that have ploughed through endless, self healing bureaucratic rot mires and festering heaps of wriggling legalese to preserve the creaking vestiges of liberty and dignity that we take for granted. If not for those who take such initiative and toils, we'd be in an alternate reality. A terrible one.

Maintaining a semblance of justice and fairness is an overtime job. The ravenous hovering ghouls of corruption make alpha vultures seem blind and sessile.

yellowapple•1h ago

Probably because the removal of thousands of dollars from my paychecks over the course of every year is a serious matter, as are many of the functions which those involuntarily-paid dollars support.

SlightlyLeftPad•1h ago

So while we’re talking about government overspending, this money was already spent. What is going to happen with these cameras that are now going to be unused?

rolph•17m ago

now they can be carried at option rather than at mandate, thus self serving functions for cams now on the table.

qingcharles•14m ago

Aren't a lot of these bodycams provided for free, and in exchange you have to use their cloud to store all the footage until the end of time?

(give the razor, sell the blades...)

JohnMakin•1h ago

These can only be a positive to help police absolve themselves from wrongdoing - until such point wrongdoing is so pervasive that it becomes a net negative for them. then the cameras are a liability.

to quote a line ive often been delivered by police -

“if you didnt do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

tmpz22•1h ago

Their counter argument will be "the privacy of the people we interact with" i.e. a SWAT team storming a house when a young child is in the bathroom.

stuaxo•1h ago

Can't see them traumatising children.

theoreticalmal•11m ago

Other than the “sorry, we raided the wrong house” situations (which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail) a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason. The responsibility for the kids being traumatized lies with their parents, committing crimes in the house.

macintux•8m ago

Committing crimes like registering to vote and being told they could vote?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...

JumpCrisscross•6m ago

> a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason

We’re arresting and irrevocably detaining folks not only without a warrant, but in violation of court orders.

dghlsakjg•1h ago

Having the recording, viewing the recording internally, and releasing the recording to the public are all separate things.

These are solved problems. Hundreds of agencies use body cams now, and this has been dealt with.

bee_rider•1h ago

I basically agree with you, but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society (it always leaks).

clipsy•53m ago

> but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society

I think a good starting point for squaring this is to examine it in the context of what else the administration is doing (or not doing) to protect the privacy of citizens. This move has an enormous deleterious effect on police accountability in exchange for a fairly small increase in citizen privacy, so if the administration is ignoring more effective ways to improve the citizenry's privacy you can safely infer what really motivated their decision to back away from body cams.

sjsdaiuasgdia•1h ago

This administration is allergic to accountability, so this tracks.

mountainriver•1h ago

The DEA has been caught doing some incredibly sketchy things in the past. Considering most drugs should be legalized or at least decriminalized, they provide little benefit and are now allowed even more freedom to exert their unnecessary power.

I didn’t know Biden had issued an executive order on this. That’s exactly what we needed.

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