International Law

Hiding misconduct from YouTube

Techdirt is unimpressed by a proposed Utah law:

It's really fairly amazing to see how people react when bad activities are brought to light. A few times now, we've seen stories of students who were able to film inappropriate activity from teachers or principals with their mobile phones. Rather than recognizing the activity as whistleblowing, the schools in question responded by banning mobile phones. In other words, rather than fix the problem, the schools chose to cover it up so future problems wouldn't get exposed. It appears something along those lines may be happening on a larger scale in the state of Utah. After a video showing questionable police activity involving a taser showed up on YouTube, state senator Chris Buttars has introduced legislation that would allow police to withhold any reports concerning police misconduct from the public (found via Digg). That's because the whole reason the taser video made it to YouTube was because the victim filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it. So now, rather than deal with stopping police misconduct, it appears supporters of this legislation would simply prefer that no one knows about it. It might be worth noting that this comes at about the same time as new reports of a police officer suspended for inappropriate activity -- which was brought to light via YouTube.

Read it here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 16, 2008 (boomark / email).