Interesting article for two reasons, how the practice originated and what it implies.<p>The practice seems to be somewhat wide spread (in the distance between departments case). That might be because it came from a Facebook group or forum where Law Enforcement officers exchange tips. The second is the choice of artist (Swift) who has been in a pretty visible battle with ownership of her music. I suspect that if the officers who use this technique thought about it, they might find that using Disney tunes would be more effective in terms of triggering DMCA takedowns.<p>What it implies, and is explicitly stated in the referenced video, is that a law enforcement officer is <i>explicitly</i> attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right (as adjudicated by the courts). While the doctrine of qualified
immunity would likely shield them from prosecution, it is still a violation of your civil rights and should certainly merit disciplinary action on the part of the police department.
30 Rock was ahead of the curve on this one!<p>Some of the episode Operation Righteous Cowboy Lightning[1] has the central characters singing an argument to each other to the tune of 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel, to stop a reality tv show that's following them from being able to air the footage, due to the copyright burden it would cause on them.<p>Of course reality is far more tragic.<p>1 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lightning" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lig...</a>
The actual video is available on YouTube if you want to watch for yourself, Taylor Swift music included: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmZmo81Cdcc</a><p>Apparently the strategy doesn't work.
Perhaps a work around would be to post without audio and add text captions, fully accepting that if the people in the video are wearing masks, the captions could turn into <i>bad lipreading</i> memes.
Is there some kind of centralized review system for police departments in the US? I try to be cognizant of confirmation bias, but the amount of news I read about this particular force makes me think it's particularly bad even among US forces.<p>As a Canadian the most prominent in my memory is when the Alameda county sheriff's office outright lied about circumstances involving Masai Ujiri (president of the Toronto Raptors) and one of their deputies at the 2019 NBA Final.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_incident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masai_Ujiri#2019_NBA_Finals_in...</a>
Would be simpler to simply play 4’33” on a continuous loop.<p>For those who’d not know the song: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″</a>
In my job I would be warned if I listened to music whilst I am supposed to be working, and if I failed to heed the warnings I would eventually be dismissed. Why do police offers in the USA get given so much leeway when they are supposed to be the pinnacle of upstanding members of society?
IIRC, a while back that the MPAA was pushing for a law that would require video cameras to stop recording if they detected a specific trigger. The intent was to prevent people from filming in movie theaters, similar to the EURion watermarking constellation found on most bank notes. I can't imagine how things would have turned out if that technology had become standard and inevitably abused.
Very upsetting the mindset of a police officer (sergeant!) who will harass someone while listening to a pre trial hearing for an officer who murdered a man having a mental breakdown, and then upon being recorded will attempt to interfere with that recording. Police officers are given extraordinary powers by society and yet they can act like spoiled brats (or worse). Not cool!
This particular police officer should unequivocally be fired and barred from any law enforcement work for the rest of their lives…<p>Corrupt and destructive individuals should just simply not be admitted into positions of authority. Any position where they can enact their hate and evil onto people, is a disgrace to all of us.
I've been seeing videos on TikTok and such of cops using tape to cover up people's security cameras <i>at their homes</i> when approaching the front door. I don't care why the cop is there, that should be at least a firable offense <i>on the first occurance</i>.
> keep video off YouTube<p>That, and it also trips up algorithms that scan live feeds (e.g. Facebook Live, Instagram Live) to make live streaming the encounter more difficult.<p>(citation: my virtual fitness instructor who gets booted off of Facebook Live mid-workout when certain songs are playing)
Quite funny that this ends up making the video more popular because of the Streisand effect. Would be scary if police always had this technique though when recording as maybe it would end up becoming more normalised so the Streisand effect wouldn't happen.
Would adding some other instrument (shittyflute?) playing while the cop doesn't talk qualify as creative work, or render the video different enough for their algorithms, so that it has more chances not to be flagged?<p>Anyway, a possible solution would be to swap the audio with a fsk encoding of a timecode plus decentralized hard to take down p2p address in which the users can find the original audio. A browser plugin could automate everything by finding the audio track then play it in sync with no apparent difference from the original.
I'm not aware of a specific ml model for this, but I know there is some adjacent ones that pull just the lyrics. Perhaps someone needs to publicly release one to counter this type of behaviour.
Calm down people. A while back the headline was music weaponized to prevent broadcast.<p>It’s not a weapon. The officer is using music to prevent videos from being put online. I really don’t see the problem in this.
I do wonder if there could be some nifty filtering tech that would allow the two voices to be isolated and the higher-pitch one (Taylor Swift) and music be removed.
Maybe the officer will have a great YC application answer for the time he hacked a system.<p>Lots of people here upset with the officer’s tactic, but he didn’t interfere with any right to record. If anyone is at fault it is YouTube for preemptively taking down videos containing copyright that fall within the Fair Use Doctrine…of course that is YouTube’s legal right also, they don’t have to host anything.<p>If it were my video, and if it were actually important to share online for one reason or another, I would look at it like an opportunity to request a limited license from the copyright holder to post the video…then they would have a great YC application also.
Keep psychologically abusing police (getting in their face and antagonizing them) instead of holding legislators and officials accountable and see if society gets better or worse.
That's pretty clever, they know that an individual with a video can be dealt with a lot easier than a viral video where the whole public gets to see the behavior.<p>I'm glad some precincts burned down last summer. I'm glad a bunch of cops quit, and the ones remaining are all on edge, maybe negative reinforcement works on them too xD
To some degree I understand the cop's position. The internet is an insanely dangerous echo chamber. The vast, VAST majority of police interactions are not that. The vast majority of police interactions are well-meaning officers maintaining public order. This doesn't excuse the interactions which <i>are</i> unrighteous and deserve to be exposed, possibly including the interaction that these people were protesting.<p>The officer here was, to my view, the more sane one. He said you could record. If something happened bad enough to justify publishing the video to expose the interaction, a little Taylor Swift music shouldn't stop that dissemination of information. What it can do is dampen Ambient Outrage; a citizen surveillance state of uploading every police interaction out there to social media for Internet Crazies to get angry about because Cops Are Just Evil, where there is no nuance, no context, just outrage and ad dollars for the protestors behind the uploads.<p>Its memey and sad that this is the lengths officers have to go to. That's it. But if it works, especially in a situation when the officer flat-out says "yeah you can record, that's fine" (good on him!); I think their underlying rationale is perfectly sound.