When they don’t want you to watch, you’d better watch closely.
Meet Alameda County Sheriff’s Sergeant David Shelby. He tried using a new cop trick for preventing transparency, and it backfired. Badly.
Another person off camera says, “Are you playing pop music to drown out the conversation?”
Shelby tells the protesters, “You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted on YouTube.”
Moments later, a different person off camera says, “You’d only do that if you knew you were being an a——, dude.”
When Burch asks, “Is this procedure for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department?,” Shelby responds, “It’s not specifically outlined.”
Later, Shelby says, “I’m playing my music so that you can’t post it on YouTube.”
Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song During Confrontation to Keep Footage off YouTube | PEOPLE.com, July 2, 2021
Sgt. Shelby heard of a cute little meme floating around in American cop culture. It seems that cops believe that they can prevent recordings of them from being uploaded to YouTube and social media if they play copyrighted music while they’re acting out. So this tube, Sgt. Shelby, tried to use YouTube against you and me, and it went viral. Like, worldwide.
Never mind that it’s legal for the public to record cops on the job.
Never mind that Sgt. TubeHead’s little trick just furthers the public perception that cops hate transparency. That they don’t believe in the public’s right to know about their activities, misdeeds and misconduct.
Never mind that this little trick makes all cops look like they’re always trying to hide something. (Which, after all, so many of them are.)
Well, the “good” Sgt. Shelby was too clever for his own good. More importantly, he was too clever for the good of his colleagues, his department, and all of law enforcement. He made them all look like fools and worse: he made cops everywhere look like they’re always trying to hide something, again.
Shelby thought of himself and his clever union buddies, instead of his profession and his oath to the Public. Not to mention the Public’s trust.
In one moment of premeditated stupidity, another of “Our Finest” fell from being a cop to being a pig.
How the mighty do fall.
But that’s cop culture for you. Instead of trying to earn and deserve the respect and trust they demand from the public, they spend their time thinking up new ways to circumvent, deny, hide, lie, cover up, obfuscate, and otherwise reinforce what we already know:
Too many cops can’t be trusted.
From The Washington Post, July 2, 2021:
An officer played a Taylor Swift song to keep his recording off YouTube. Instead it went viral.
An Alameda County sheriff’s sergeant in Oakland appeared to play music on his phone on June 29 in an effort to avoid having footage of him uploaded on YouTube. (APTP Sacramento)
By Julian MarkJuly 2, 2021 at 4:40 a.m. PDT319
When James Burch and several activists began filming a sheriff’s deputy during a confrontation on the Alameda County courthouse steps in Oakland, Calif., this week, the officer caught the group by surprise. He pulled out his phone and started blaring Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit single “Blank Space.”
Confused, Burch asked: “Are we having a dance party?”
After he and the other activists pressed the officer about what he was doing, the deputy — identified by local media as Sgt. David Shelby — said, “You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted on YouTube.”
He was referring to YouTube’s automated copyright system, which detects and removes unauthorized protected material — such as a popular song — from being uploaded to the Internet.
The officer’s plan, however, appears to have been a misfire. The video captured by Burch and his organization — the Oakland-based Anti Police-Terror Project, which seeks to hold local police departments accountable — ended up amassing more than 680,000 views on Twitter by Friday morning. A version uploaded to YouTube was still there Friday morning as well, with more than 110,000 views.Advertisement
The irony was not lost on the Alameda County sheriff’s office.
“The officer was trying to be a little smart, and it kind of backfired,” Sgt. Ray Kelly, a sheriff’s office spokesman, told The Washington Post. “Instead of censoring it, it made it go viral.”
Kelly said that, although the deputy is still at work, the matter has been referred to the office’s internal affairs department and is being investigated. There is no policy barring an officer from doing what’s shown in the video, but “there is a code of conduct on how we should carry ourselves in public,” Kelly said, adding that the sheriff’s office does not “condone” the deputy’s behavior.
“This is not a good look for law enforcement,” he said. There is a “serious lesson learned here.”
The tactic used by Shelby is one law enforcement personnel have tried before. But some of the attempts seem to amount to prime cases of the “Streisand Effect,” a term used to describe an attempt to hide or censor information that actually makes it more widespread.
In February, a police officer in Beverly Hills, Calif., reportedly turned on Sublime’s “Santeria” in an attempt to prevent a video from being uploaded to Instagram, according to Vice News. The video, however, remains on the social media site.
Another Beverly Hills officer used a similar tactic weeks earlier when he played “In My Life” by the Beatles, Vice reported. The video, filmed by the same activist, was not posted online.
Regardless of how effective the tactic is, observers say it signals concerning behavior from law enforcement personnel at a time when the public is demanding more accountability from police.
For a second year, most U.S. police departments decline to share information on their use of force
“This does seem to be a trend right now,” Chessie Thacher, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Northern California, told The Post. “People have the right to film the police, and efforts by the police to infringe on this right are unconstitutional.”Advertisement
Thacher added: “So if they’re using copyright laws to prevent people from exercising their right — and amplifying what they’re seeing — then that’s a real problem.”
On Tuesday morning, Burch and a coalition of several dozen activists went to the Alameda County courthouse to observe a pretrial hearing for Jason Fletcher, a former San Leandro, Calif., police officer who faces a charge of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing Steven Taylor, a man wielding a baseball bat inside Walmart, in April 2020.
Because of coronavirus limitations, Burch told The Post, the activists stood on the courthouse steps and watched a live stream being broadcast from inside the courtroom. They had also set up banners on a courthouse retaining wall. Four Alameda County sheriff’s deputies later told them to remove the banners, so Burch said his group displayed the banners on the steps.
“We didn’t think anything of it until the four law enforcement officers came back and told us that the banners could not be on the stairs because they were a tripping hazard,” Burch said. “So that’s where the video picks up.”
As Burch quibbles with Shelby about the banners in the video, the deputy takes out his phone and turns on the Taylor Swift song.
After the deputy admits it was an attempt to prevent the video from being posted to YouTube, Burch asks him: “Is there an administrative regulation for this right now?”
“Not that I know of,” Shelby says.
“Is that procedure?” Burch asks.
“I’m just listening to music, sir,” Shelby says.
Reflecting on the incident, Burch agreed that the officer’s action backfired. Still, he said, he remains troubled.
“Any tactic by law enforcement to attempt to either prevent activists from recording or chill our attempts to do so is incredibly concerning. After the murder of George Floyd, everyone understands why organizers and activists record our interactions with law enforcement.”
Read more:
America is awash in cameras, a double-edged sword for protesters and police
Body cam captured police saying they wanted to ‘gas’ and ‘stomp on’ BLM protesters319 Comments
By Julian Mark Julian Mark is a reporter on The Washington Post’s Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, he covered housing and policing for Mission Local in San Francisco. Twitter
From The Tumalo Lookout:
The big picture here is that cops have thought up yet another way to try to prevent their critics from presenting documentation of police conduct to the public.
Whether or not LEOs have policies that prohibit this kind of conduct isn’t relevant and shouldn’t be an issue: every cop should recognize and respect the public’s right to view and record police conduct, including incomplete information, misinformation, and disinformation. Even if cops feel that they themselves are disrespected by that public.
Oinker Shelby’s activity merely reinforces the criticisms that cops are always hiding their misconduct; that cops are dishonest; and that cops can’t be trusted.
Check out these examples of the news coverage on this story, and notice the sources at the end of each link:
Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song During Confrontation to Keep Footage off YouTube | PEOPLE.com
Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song to Block BLM Protest Video From YouTube – Variety
East Bay Cop Hides Behind T-Swift – SF Weekly
Note to good cops:
Instead of trying to be clever, just try to uphold your oaths and our trust.
No matter how you cut it, half of all cops are below average. And probably another 35 percent are iffy enough that you can’t count on ’em. Or trust ’em.
Think I’m wrong? Then prove it. Let the sunshine in, baby. Mandatory reporting, nation-wide. Meaningful stats. On use-of-force, disciplinary actions, and on and on.
The Tumalo Lookout 